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The day MLK was killed, I was arrested the one time in my life, for giving weed to a narc at a love in at Griffith Park. I was in the brand spanking new Sybil Brand women's jail downtown LA when I heard the announcement that MLK had been shot. Then I got bailed out, got a misdemeanor and probation and my record expunged bk I was under 21. I went on from there to volunteer and then become paid staff for the Peace and Freedom Party.
(going to edit this 1st draft)
At this time I lived in Echo Park in a studio with a full kitchen and bath for which I paid $20 a month to the county of Los Angeles, because there were so many vacant houses in central L.A. they were practically giving them away to people.
Sigh.
There were two entrances to the house. From the back you could drive or walk up from Sunset and park, then walk down into the duplex.
Or
You could come up about ninety steps from Echo Park Boulevard right across from the little lake, and enter the little apartment’s front door.
It was shabby and dark, kind of dreary and shadowy and it had been vacant for months after after the old woman who lived there died and weeks later her body had been found. After that nobody in the Hispanic neighborhood wanted to rent the apartment, until I heard about it on my job as a waitress in a coffee shop, graveyard shift.
I went downtown to a county office and signed a lease, I think I even got several months of rent free, then I only paid $20 a month for the apartment. As a result I did not have to work much to ocme up with rent, I could act in showcase play productions, work on my guitar playing and songwriting. It was a wonderful life, I have to admit.
During this time my sister and I went halves on a pound of Acapulco Gold marijuana from Mexico. At the time of the Love-In at Griffith Park, I was down to about an ounce of the wonderful golden weed left, had been smoking it for months, along with these strange bennie type speed pills** that I popped all the time. I was real thin and danced a lot.
I don't know who I went to the love-in with or what the occasion was, it may have been spontaneous, it may have been a movie shoot. I did not need to dress up in costumes as I was the real thing, and as music played and people connected I was twirling around and found myself face-to-face with these two guys in suits.
I have always had a weakness for men in suits, uniforms, guys with a sense of power, I'm sure it has to do with being molested by a Catholic priest at age five, the way I respond to men…
Anyone should have known they were narcs, no one was talking to these two guys.
I wanted to Turn them On, get them to loosen up, take off their jacket and ties and turn on tune in and have fun.
Honest, I was that naïve.
I took them back to my little studio on Echo Park Boulevard and pulled out what was left of my Acapulco Gold and they took me to Sybil Brand where I had no idea what was going on, but thought it was funny that you had to eat peas with a spoon at dinner.
I met thieves and hookers and dancers and street women who had actually gotten arrested on purpose because Sybil Brand was this beautiful clean sparkling “women’s institute” where you could get medical care and check into rehab. Honest, I met women there my one night who told me they got arrested on purpose to see a doctor. In 1968.
If you google Sybil Brand Institute you will see how it degenerated over the years, but the jail had that grand mission at the start. LBJ's America.
But I digress.
As I was falling asleep, women streamed out of a TV room saying, "Martin Luther King has been shot," and a wailing and moaning sound went through the jail, echoing on the smooth steel walls and concrete. The words, "Martin Luther King has been shot," echoed and echoed as woman after woman repeated them and many more cried. I sat up listening.
Without my knowledge, my sister called my parents and I ended up getting bailed out that night, when I really wanted to stay and have the experience of being in jail.
A few weeks later I was a regular at the Peace and Freedom Party headquarters on Western Avenue, volunteering so enthusiastically that they hired me. Ten years later I had a journalism degree from The University of Texas at Austin, and a lot more happened in between.
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Kay Ebeling
More to come.
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