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Love, Haight, and Tie Dye
A lasting legacy from the ‘60s
“The heepies lived here.” My Russian landlord paused to make sure I understood.
“What? Oh, the hippies.”
“Yes, the heepies. Crazy colors on everything when we bought this. Psychedelic. My brothers and my father and I had to paint it all.”
The Russians had done a good job of returning the San Francisco Victorian to its original elegance. Three-stories high, the Haight Street apartment building opened to views of Buena Vista Park on the north. The views from the south, where my dining room bay window was, looked out over the city, Golden Gate Park, and on toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Fog horns sounded, a comfort during the night.
My landlord’s twin brother also lived on the top floor with a high school buddy. Another brother lived on the second floor with his wife, a histologist. Born in China, the family fled to Brazil where they picked up a love of samba before joining San Francisco’s robust Russian community. Hard workers, managing the apartment building was their second job. We became good friends.
It was 1978 when I moved to Haight Street, just over a decade after the Summer of Love flooded the neighborhood with young people. The suburban kids in ethnic and Native American-influenced hippie outfits had moved on or morphed into the panhandlers now lurking in front of the hand laundry and the Free Clinic. My apartment mate, Charlie, and I dressed down when we went out into the Haight in an attempt to minimize their pestering. We were both interns at a nearby hospital and had little time for street talk about the ashram, Zen, the zodiac, and such. Charlie kept an Army surplus jacket to wear as street camouflage. I lacked a regular disguise.
One morning I decided to shop after a night on call rather than go straight to bed. I figured I looked disreputable enough to dodge the beggars. Still in my scrubs, my hair unwashed, my gaze blurry, I walked several blocks to the grocery. I put my few items on the conveyor belt and the clerk totted them up. I filled out the Wells Fargo check, the checks I had — for the first and last time —…
