Hippie Kid
Growing up in a place where other people come to find out who they are
– the Haight Ashbury
BIG_54 San Francisco
Winter 2005
by Malaika Costello-Dougherty
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When I think back on my hippie childhood, I remember walking
down to Golden Gate Park with my uncle, hearing the music of
The Grateful Dead coming closer and closer. Suddenly, he lifted
me up and started swinging me around by my hands, my legs
trailing in the wind. We were a blur of green and blue, high on
each other.
Someone had left a jukebox on the field full of dandelions, near
where the Dead had often played live a decade earlier. It was now
the early eighties, Reagan was in office, but in the Haight we were
still dancing.
My birth certificate says that my father's career was "social
change," which also meant "unemployed." My parents had driven
across the country in a green Datsun, bringing, as they like to put
it, something like $500 and their educations. They found in San
Francisco a community of hippies who were always shedding
another way of being. For the old radicals, their revolution
became a religion, but afterwards, when they realized a new world
wasn't coming to pass, after all, they left their kids struggling with
this radical spirit devoted to freedom – unleashed but ultimately
homeless. We witnessed it all.
Child-raising itself was being refashioned at the time in the Haight-
Ashbury. We had almost no rules at all. I was a free child. I could,
and did, swim naked in public fountains, yell "Fuck the Queen!"
when her majesty visited and approach a circle of adults and ask
for a puff of their pot. Most people coming to San Francisco, then
and now, are looking for something, often themselves – a canvas
to paint another self-portrait. I'm from their destination.
There's a friction between the way I was raised and the way I now
live my life. I'm more of a yuppie than a yippie. The closest I came
to the summer of love was watching them shoot the movie some
20 years later, down in the Panhandle, with lots of naked extras
standing around. By the eighties, as AIDS emerged, the free love
movement had burned itself out, leaving neighborhood people
with that lost but sinister look like they'd done way too many
drugs.
>>
The feminist Betty Friedan said in an interview in the August, 1976
issue of Playboy that the women's movement was changing the
concept of motherhood. "American women, except for the most
bitter of them, still see motherhood as a real value in their lives,"
Friedan said, as opposed to the "rhetoric that says 'down with
men' or 'to be liberated you must repudiate motherhood… Most
young parents today are trying to bring up their children free from
sex stereotypes." That month I was born. When I was a few
months old, I wore a shirt that said "BABY
WOMAN."
>>
I learned a lot about right and wrong from my parents' politics. As I
understood it, there was good and bad and then there was
Reagan. He was evil. When I heard he had been shot, I danced in
my living room, catching glimpses of myself in the mirrors. I didn't
understand when my parents tried to explain that killing was never
good.
I would hang out some nights at the union office as they prepared
picket signs. They brainstormed slogans and I suggested
"Reagan-busters." We drew signs with Reagan's head in a red
circle with a slash through it, like Ghostbusters.
In those days my dad would drive to the suburbs to avoid seeing a
movie in a boycotted theater. We couldn't eat grapes on account
of solidarity with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers. We would
always honk and give the V sign, two fingers up, to striking
workers. "The people united will never be divided" and the rest of
it.
>>
Being a hippie meant saying phrases like "consciousness raising"
and meaning it, as in raising other people's consciousness. It was
a moment in time, a self-righteousness that knew no boundaries.
Today it's a gleam in some people's eyes that things could have
been different. It was a rebirth, and a childhood for them. They
hoped for a new beginning. Their children, like me, should have
been the legacy of that movement.
Do I believe in "power to the people" and the coming age of
Aquarius. Not really. The dark corners of my childhood gather the
dust of some of that promise. As Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for
the Doors, said to me last year, the Age of Aquarius never did
dawn.
>>
A terrible beauty was born many times over in San Francisco. The
movement my family made from bohemia to gentrification
happened to the city. The Haight really got a facelift. The new
residents were undeniably yuppie, some college friends of mine,
who moved to San Francisco looking to be hip in a wealthy kind of
way.
When I lived on Clayton Street as a child, there was a young
professional family who moved into the two-story Victorian house
and painted it a muted yellow orange. The man had short blond
hair and was clean shaven. They were not our kind. The yuppie
infiltration was seen as an end to our way of life. They had sold
their souls for a Volvo. There goes the neighborhood.
>>
The Haight community became worried about the
commercialization of the neighborhood in the eighties. A Gap
came in and people would throw rocks through the window and
hang signs: "Don't Let Haight Street Become another Union
Street," referring to the most gentrified of San Francisco's
neighborhoods at that time. On an empty lot, a construction crew
erected the wooden skeleton for a new Thrifty store.
Backlash!
Overnight, it was burned to the ground. People laughed openly,
as rumors spread that a radical group was behind it. But some of
the neighbors whose places were damaged in the fire didn't have
renter's insurance. They were out of luck. "What really upsets me
is that someone would want to burn down the Thrifty to 'save' our
neighborhood," one resident told the San Francisco Examiner on
September 22, 1988. "Now we don't have a neighborhood."
But her viewpoint was the exception. In general, there was
celebration that the Haight had given corporate America the finger.
Meanwhile, no one seemed to notice that the largest
commercialization going on was marketing the concept of the
Haight itself. There were stores opening all over the neighborhood
to sell bongs, incense, tie-die shirts, anything that tourists would
buy. It became clear to me as I grew up: "hippie" sells, just like
McDonald's, on Haight Street.
>>
Last time I was in San Francisco, I drove back to my old
neighborhood. I drove up the hill I was born on, down a small
street, past the sign that reminded me: "Today is the first day of
the rest of your life." After the road ducks under a canopy of
trees, it winds up to the top of Buena Vista Park.
Circles of dirty people still gathered there playing hacky sack as I
drove by in my dads' new car with a moon roof and leather
interior. I felt the cashmere against my skin and checked out my
brand-new short, red hairdo in the mirror – the one I hoped made
me look professional.
I also silently cursed the gentrification that I now personify.
And as I drove slowly past the street corners that know my oldest
secrets, I felt nostalgic, as in the Greek meaning – that bittersweet
pain of returning home.
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© 2005, Malaika Costello-Dougherty
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