The Dark Hippies of Haight Street

1989 at Haight/Ashbury

There were two kinds of old hippies on Haight Street: the ones who said they knew Jerry and they ones who said they knew Charlie. Back in 1989, we were only two decades past Woodstock and Altamont—the two events most agreed, after which, it “all went downhill from there”—so any weirdo over 35 could easily claim to have been at either. In my mind, I categorized them into one of two groups: the rainbow hippies and the dark hippies. I talked to them all since I worked at the corner of Haight and Ashbury when I was 20 years old, at a six-foot wide retail spot that sold magazines and cigarettes called The Kiosk.

This screenshot from Google Maps is the best I could do. The door and the window. That’s all there was. With a magazine rack on the two walls, there was barely room to walk by someone else in there. It’s now a place that repairs jewelry and watches.

There are many in the “rainbow” category who are close to my heart. Ron Turner, the founder of Last Gasp, gave me jobs twice when I needed them desperately and was importantly supportive of my creativity and later recovery. Diamond Dave Whitaker, notorious for a jacket that read “Beatniks, Punks, Hippies & Skins Unite”, was pervasive at poetry readings and punk shows, and told me the best stories about both worlds. And there were a bunch of others who ran record stores, bookstores, comic shops, and other retail businesses that kept my punk friends employed when they couldn’t get jobs elsewhere. But this isn’t about them.

Nor is it about the common phenomena of “temporary hippies” who went square, but had a few years of long hair and smoked some dirt weed before settling in to their normal life. I don’t care about this anymore, as I saw most of my old punk friends do the same. But I did harbor resentments back in the day, as these guys were Financial District yuppies with that tiny ponytail, the trendy vestige of days gone by, and they would always corner me somewhere and lecture me about The Beatles and how Bob Dylan was a great poet¹.

Hell, this isn’t even about hippie cultures in any post-Sixties neighborhood in the world. Berkeley, only being one train ride away, had its own set of street politics. I’m sure every town’s protocols evolved slightly differently, and was not the same as what I saw.

This is about the Dark Hippies of Haight Street, a counterculture of mistrust and anonymity. That corner was a gravity point to draw in the broken-minded acid casualties and the no-ID tie-dye outlaws. Everyone had a psychedelic street name and seemed to be running from something, whether it be child support payments or a bench warrant. And let me tell you, these guys smoked a lot of crack.

My old pal Razor told me once², “show me a hippie, and I’ll show you a crackhead.” When he said that to me, it was like the final scene in The Usual Suspects when you get what the whole movie was really about.

During the day, Dark Hippies played to the tourists, telling generic and vague stories about hanging with Janis, going to the Fillmore, and how much acid they took one day. They offered to show people around, on walking tours where they randomly pointed at houses and said “That’s where Grace Slick wrote ‘White Rabbit,’” and the visitors would click a picture. They offered assistance to out-of-towners trying to figure out directions and bus lines, and told them, “No, Berkeley is not a street, it’s on the other side of the Bay.” There was a guy who bet tourists he could magically make a bison appear to them, and then took them to see the actual bison in Golden Gate Park. During the day, it was hard to tell who was a happy hippie and who was pretending— they were all hustling and helping and spare changing, putting on their happiest faces until the sun went down and the tourists went back to their hotels. That’s when their true selves emerged.

When the moon came out, so did the crack pipes. For the first hour or so, everything was calm, until they ran out and needed more. That’s when they hit the streets looking for a quick score—anything to get ten bucks for another rock. Stealing jackets and purses from the backs of seats in Club Deluxe, breaking into cars, and selling bogus drugs. You should never buy drugs from a hippie on Haight Street—if the drugs were real, he would be doing them himself.

The Evening Shift

There were two reasons I was scheduled in the evening shifts at The Kiosk: I wouldn’t let the Dark Hippies rob me and I sold a lot of porn mags.

Let me touch on the porn mags quickly, because it’s not the point, but it is relevant: men wouldn’t buy porn from women, and they only bought it late at night, and they usually bought big stacks, always with a mainstream rag like Time or Newsweek on top. For the more ashamed, they would buy five or six regular titles with only one deviant on the bottom, almost like, “Oh how did that get in there?” Regardless, anyone buying porn usually bought five magazines. The fare was a 10 percent veer off the vanilla, titles that were still somewhat tame but focused on a vibe: Juggs, Leg Show, Over 40, et al. They were nudie mags, just naked women, no dicks anywhere. There were places downtown with imported lurid publications that came sealed in opaque black plastic, connoting that they were selling actual trash in 11 by 17 trash bags, but my spot was a place that also sold Cat Fancy and Soldier of Fortune.

The only robbery I allowed was stealing copies of High Times. Guys (and it was always men) would act like they were reading it, and the moment I looked away, slip it into the front of their pants and pull their shirt over it, and walk out. I saw this repeatedly, but my inner policy was if you could stuff it into your pants, I’m not going to ask for it back. It would have been easier for everyone if they would just stroll in not wearing pants and wipe their ballsack on what they wanted. But San Francisco was too cold at night for that.

And maybe I should call the attempted robberies “bullying,” because they were the most impotent criminals I’ve ever met. A former timid employee caved to a screamed threat for a free pack of smokes, and soon, the word got out, and the Dark Hippies knew they could touch him for free packs, and they all took their turns.

Back then I was a gangly lad of 165 pounds, two inches shorter than I am now, but I was deep in the punk scene, and the hippies were a little afraid of the punks. The front counter was on a raised platform by about six inches as well, which made me look bigger when I stood up off my stool. And by the time darkness fell, I was well into the half pint of vodka I usually brought to a shift, which made angry hippies very funny to me.

“Empty the register, NOW,” came a voice one evening, interrupting my reading of the Forced Exposure interview with The Swans. I looked up and saw a Dark Hippie holding a branch. It was not a gnarled, oaken cudgel-weapon, though, it was a green branch, freshly broken off a tree with the leaves still on it. This was the silliest weapon I’ve ever seen.

“Fuck you!” I replied. “I will literally stick that branch up your ass.”

“I mean it, man!”

“So do I!”

And it just stumped him. He just stopped talking and left.

I was regularly threatened by guys with names like Dream Wolf and Shadow Rider about what would happen to me when I got off work, how I would “get mine,” and that they could get the Hell’s Angels to “take care of the problem.” But listen: the street violence I’ve been a part of has never come with a warning, and no one who said they would “come back later” ever did. But I’m not one to let empty threats go unanswered, and I had plenty of time to construct lies of my own. My standard: I knew a crew of Satanic skinheads who sold kidneys on the black market—fuck with me, and you’ll wake up in a bathtub full of ice in a cheap hotel in the Tenderloin with some parts missing.

One night, during a rant of give-me-what-I-want-or, I reached for the lighter fluid we used to refill customers’ Zippos—complimentary, of course, they always ended up buying smokes right away—and squirted the front of a Dark Hippie’s dancing bear shirt.

“What the hell, man?” he squealed.

I picked up a pack of matches and tore one out.

“You’re fucking psycho!” he said, and left.

Word got out about this one. When I got any attitude, I’d just hold the can up like showing a dog a punitive spray bottle.

Sorry, there’s not a good ending for this post

I don’t remember what happened to this job. At one point, I remember I got taken off the schedule but the other employees were still calling me to cover shifts—so I had been fired, but was still covering for other people. I think I quit. Shortly after this, I was working at a café down the street, but I don’t think I quit one for another. Keep a journal, kids. These moments in your life won’t stay in your brains forever.

The perks of this five-dollar-an-hour job were the best—I got cool points, socially. I got a “merchant discount” all up and down the street, which was as small as a free coke with a pizza slice from Escape From New York Pizza to a hefty 30% discount on Doc Martens at Daljeets. And without getting too deep into the business of magazines, when we got a new issue, we tore off the cover of the old one and sent it back to the distributor for credit—I had an endless supply of coverless magazines to take home with me and read everything from science mags to news to music.

1. I hated this conversation so much. I hate Bob Dylan’s lyrics. They’re awful. I’ve been told that I don’t understand them. I do. They suck.

2. Follow the hyperlink to Razor’s Substack. There’s so much there! Poetry, stories, written rambles…