Day Thirteen (Friday, July 9 1971)

He and I reposed much longer than in Sacramento. This turned into the mellow camping experience I was denied yesterday. Otto and I were hidden snugly under a grove of exotic Japanese trees with
winding limbs and multitudes of small leaves. The compost was soft and cushiony. The air smelled of herbs. Mental bombardment was kept at bay.

Charming rows of houses with large bay windows sat serenely down the street as we rode the bus back downtown. “Queen Anne,” I was told when I asked about the style. We were now in the Richmond “District” (that’s what they call their neighborhoods). The air was either prickly- misty or perfectly clear—take your pick—depending on those shifting clouds. Cars kept their wheels turned sharply into the curbs. Those hills were no joke. Only those with strong lungs need attempt.

He and I found activity as soon as we heard the clanging bells of the San Francisco cable cars. The system became our base of operation for the whole day. The Hyde-Powell line was 25 cents. You don’t sit—it’s cooler to swing off the poles. A bearded brakeman in a red uniform used a brass bell to communicate with the conductor at the front end of the car.

“Nine and a half miles an hour,” he answered my question. “There’s a moving cable under the street. We tighten or loosen a pincer to control when we start and stop. Invented by a guy a hundred years ago who didn’t like to see the horses get injured on the steep streets.”

Back on foot, we zigzagged up Lombard Street—“the Crookedest Street in the World,” as autos ventured down. We hiked to the top of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, caught a nice view of the water, and looked at artwork. Nob Hill was good for poking around, eyeing babes at sidewalk restaurants.

Otto pilfered six cinnamon donuts from a cafeteria. He split them with me in front of an Oriental massage parlor, daring each other to try “deep tissue ecstasy.”

The only hassle was our possessions. If there was a place to stash them, believe me, done deal. But it’s hard when you don’t know what you’ll be doing ten minutes into the future.

“All territory is virgin,” Otto said.

“Virgin mirth, glorious age, sweet as nectar,” I said. “How’s that for an instant poem?”

“My pack’s too heavy to listen, Roger.”

He and I washed our clothes in Chinatown. It was an old, humid laundromat, actually quite charming with its high tin ceiling and old- fashioned ceramic washers. Everyone in there was Chinese except us.
Otto dug out his soiled underpants from his pack and held them between his fingers. “Makes you wanna know the sense in wearin’ these rags.”

“I’ve abstained ever since the Great Salt Lake. They get mangy.” To expedite my point, I snatched the dirty pair from Otto’s fingers and whipped them in a trash can.

“Hey! Whaddiya doin’?” He marched to the can and plucked them out.

“I thought I’d help you out, Otto the Organized. You said you didn’t want them.”

I reached into my red bag and pulled out my own three briefs—in no better condition than Otto’s. One, two, three, they all flew into the trash can. “You need to act on your own good ideas, man. Why do you suggest and then wait for me to act?”

Otto washed his underpants along with his other clothes, but made a second inspection when they came out of the dryer. He tossed five out of his six pairs into the trash can. “I get it. What you don’t need, don’t carry.”

“That’s what you taught me—the principle of traveling light. The philosophy of less. Except you brought way more stuff. I’m a better student of your ideas than you are yourself.”

The cable cars took us to a place called Fisherman’s Wharf. It was on the north shore, supposedly where seafood is unloaded off boats and taken right into the kitchens of restaurants. Otto and I stashed our gear in a crawlspace. We chomped down a meal at one of the less-elegant venues (I ate a stuffed baked potato with broccoli and cheddar cheese, with a Coke, since I didn’t like seafood). I stole eight postcards and collected a few packs of matches. We goofed around on the concrete fishing pier that wound around into the bay. Not such a far swim away was Alcatraz Island, a former prison.

It took several hours to go through every shop in the neighborhood. We examined art posters, movie props, driftwood furniture, photographs of the Old West, plants, glassware, rugs, and San Francisco trinkets. One store sold water beds, and the employees didn’t care how many you tested.

“Now I know where all the hippies went,” Otto said. “They went shoppin’.”

The main building, the one labeled “Ghirardelli” in huge letters, was a former chocolate factory. It was transformed into a rustic complex of boutiques and bistros. We checked that out, too, from top to bottom.

We hung around the whole night. After the sun dipped away a number of authentic hippies filtered into the central square. There was group singing, chants of “all you need is love,” and people registering others to vote. It was good to see the era of peace ’n love holding steady in San Francisco. In New York the freaks were too jaded, or too cynical. Here, they hadn’t given up hope yet that the world could change for the better.

It wasn’t until after midnight that Otto and I realized something— we didn’t have a place to sleep. You never dwell on it when you don’t have it, yet it presents itself so starkly when the knell tolls.

He and I scanned the grounds, testing any suitable bush, billboard, ditch, cubby hole—anything that might afford semi-privacy. The blackening of Ghirardelli’s lights was startling. The last cable car left for downtown. I stepped upon a two-foot high retainer wall and surveyed the darkness—exhausted, frustrated, confused. Otto sat nondescriptly; barely breathing. “Not again.”

“The legend of Roger and Otto.”

“You choose,” he said. “I gave up givin’ it the old college try.”

My mind was a fuzzy blank, I chose the easiest spot, the space below our feet, on the cobblestones; in the damp, narrow aperture behind a wooden park bench, snuggled against a retainer wall. Come what may with the cops. I’d take my chances for the promise of a quick escape into sleep.

“I’m cramped,” Otto’s muffled voice sounded from ahead, after we rooted ourselves across the ruts.

“Don’t talk, man, just go to bed,” I said from my stomach. “I’ve got some sleeping to do before the cops haul us down to the station.”