Chapter36: Where the hippies are
Visions of Los Angeles from a distance just didn’t stack up
to what I encountered when I stepped back out my door.
Downtown with its single skyscraper loomed in the distance
while the rest of it was lay flat, a large expanse that had been carved out of
the landscape into a predetermined gridwork, somehow struggling to deal with
the odd shape of land nearer the rising hills that surrounded it.
Movies had colored my perceptions, as had Disneyland, a
mecca for white people everywhere when in reality there were more brown, yellow
and black faces here than white, living their lives the way poor and working
people did elsewhere, struggling to get through the day and the backbreaking
labor they had to endure just to feed and clothe themselves.
But even the white people who lived here were from here but
had come from other places with the same foolish vision I had, looking for
something here that like an onion once stripped of all its layers, didn’t
exist.
I called a cab from the corner bodega, and had it drop me
off downtown again, the only other place I knew in this strange city.
At the center of this city, Downtown is bounded by First
Street on the north and Olympic Boulevard on the south, as loaded with unsavory
characters as Times Square back east. There was even a whole block dedicated to
the building that housed the Los Angeles Times, and other tourist attractions
such as a music hall, a children’s museum, a pavilion for performance of
orchestral music – none of which interested me in the least, and less so, its
version of Wall Street and Pacific Stock Exchange.
I walked through the garment district, and passed the
classic library on Fifth Street, searching for something I could not put my
finger on.
It was a world full of sloppily clothed men, sex ciminas,
erotic books stores, pawnshops, 25 cent pciture machines, alleyways that
smelled of urine, shoe shine shops, banks, bus terminals, bars, leathershop,
and $2 burleque.
Something was missing, and then it occurred to men, there
seemed to be no enclave here like that of Greenwich Village back east, no place
where I might meet up with my kind of people.
So, after walking around downtown for a while, I flagged
down a cab and told its driver to "take me to where the hippies are."
The cabbie eyed me in the rearview mirror and then said,
“You mean you want to go to Hollywood.”
Then in a rush of speed and reckless steering that would
have allowed him to compete with New York's worst, that cabbie gunned his car
west towards the famed location.
The taxi dumped me out on Hollywood and Vine.
Any illusion I might have had about the Walk of Fame
evaporated in that instant, the stars inserted into the sidewalks with the
names of Hollywood legends, stained by the bare and sandaled feet that marched
over them, a parade of hippies and other deadbeats making a travesty out of the
dream machine. Even the famous drug store where so many wannabe movies stars
had been discovered had changed its name, and it sign, a tourist trap full of
advertising bus trips to some other local where the real movie stars lived.
This hip section, I learned later, was a ten-block stretch
between Vine and Highway, that included not only the drug store, but a plaster
statue shop, perpetual going out of business stores, a waterbed store
(previously a wig shop), headshops selling incense, black light posters even
dildoes, Fredricks of Hollywood, selling cutaway panties, used book stores, the
London Shop, a Greyhound bus station, a store selling Lebanese pizza, and, of
course, the main attraction at the Highland end, Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
I passed the Golden Cup Tavern on the corner of Cherokee
with its parade of transvestites and gays, so similar to the scene I had seen
outside the Stonewall in Manhattan that I unconsciously looked around to see if
I could find my gay friend, Max, who had given me guided tours of the West
Village, realizing, of course, Max and his world was 3,000 miles to the east.
But like the Stonewall Inn, this place was a gay meat
market, where the gayest of gay met up, not a place for the uninitiated or the
unwary. Some of the charters eyed me as I went by, some even whispered at me,
seemingly admiring how shapely I had become during my time in the military,
much in the way the transvestites on 11th Avenue had during my weekend passes
six months earlier.
The Boulevard – as some called it (although it was Wilshire,
not Hollywood that was the Boulevard because that road ran from downtown
straight to the Ocean in Santa Monica) – had plenty of other characters, such
as the old woman with purple toe nail polish who pushed a stolen shopping cart
up and down from Vine to Highland and back with the routine of a jail guard.
One guy dressed up with a skipper’s cap straight out of
Gilligan’s Island carried around a backpack full of books on sailing and made
frequent stops at the book and magazine shop on Cherokee asking for more, which
they said they were all sold out.
One guy constantly slept on the bus stop bench at Hollywood
and Vine, not at all interested in being discovered for the movies.
A graffiti artist a number of people called Captain Max
walked around town with cans of dayglow paint stuck into his pants pockets like
a gunfighter – he was constantly protesting this or that issue.
Buffalo Bill – complete with the outfit straight from the
old news reels – hung out in front of Grauman’s, making his daily bread by
posing for pictures with the tourists.
Hippies were everywhere, proliferating the way cockroaches
did in my apartment, yet not wise enough to only come out after dark, instead
strutting up and down these ten blocks the way their kind did back east in
Washington Square Park, without David Peel as musical accompaniment, having
lout speakers broadcasting canned music from the various headshops instead. On
every corner were clusters of other hippies, many of whom were selling an
underground newspaper called the LA Free Press or “freep” for short, some
others were selling dope, some selling freep and dope at the same time, despite
the constant police patrol cars roving the streets like sharks. Dirty old men
in cars also prowled the streets, ogling the hippie girls, often casting out
offers of money in exchange for sex. Some girls took up the offers, most did
not, trying their best to ignore the harassment by the old men and the cops.
In the midst of all this, Jesus freaks and other religious
quacks paraded those same ten blocks, relentless souls preaching at perfect
strangers while handing out pamphlets about saving our souls.
“Jesus loves you,” they told me as they blocked my way.
I tried to ignore them, but they often barred my path,
forcing me to tell them to get the fuck away from me.
They pissed me off because they focused on me and others
like me and not on the people puking in the gutters who really needed them, the
starving masses Hank’s Marxist friends back east tended to forget on their way
to achieving their glorious revolution.
The dope peddlers seemed more honest and friendlier, taking
my refusal with a shrug and a “maybe next time,” as they went on to some other
sucker.
Hollywood Boulevard so reminded me of the West Village back
east, with buses loaded with tourists and all the silly hoopla already two
years out of date from The Summer of Love, I realized there must be another
place, something akin to the cooler East Village Hank eventually settled down
into, where the really cool people fled to escape the “plastic hip” being sold
here.
It didn’t take long for people to tell me about Sunset
Strip.
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