New World a-Coming, Ch. 16

October 1967 - There's a riot goin' on...

I was with the Band for most of the rest of the summer, and I was there for various gigs by a lot of the other bands, and I was actually working more and more for the Oracle and some of the other papers: it was hard for editors to keep staff for long, because the competent ones tried to score gigs in the straight world and the incompetent ones couldn't get stories and couldn't write copy and couldn't make deadlines.

I wouldn’t say that I fell out of love with Etsy, exactly, but maybe it was just that some time elapsed, and I realized I could still be close to him, and the Band, even if he wasn’t going to sleep with me or love me that way. Cong was good to me—she could be pretty sarcastic, especially when I told her, after that first time, that we shouldn’t sleep together again, and she told me “I don’t intend to, so go ahead and make other plans, enfant”—but it was almost a relief to have slept with her, and got that out of the way. We spent more time together, the three of us, and it started to feel kind of OK—like I had accepted the friendships for what they were, rather than what I wanted them to be.

Looking back, everybody talks about ‘68 as being the year the shit really hit the fan, with Martin and Bobby and the escalation at Chicago and all the rest of that bullshit. But the roots of some of that got laid the year before. LIFE magazine wanted to talk about the “Summer of Love” and put the quaint hippie freaks on display, but--talking with some of the older Oracle office in San Fran, and talking to Etsy's Panther friends in Oakland, you could see shit. Panthers had their long gun protest in Sacramento at the capital, and they knew damn well that scumbag Reagan wouldn't be into to letting brothers carry guns, and we knew that legislation to contain it would happen quick when it was black folks. They made their point, but the tension went up, and there were even more cops in black neighborhoods, and young men kept getting shot.

But we saw how it was going with Johnson’s war, and the escalation that was sure to come, and I remember how, when somebody tried to sink the Forrestal in the Tonkin Gulf, or tried to make us think they had, I had learned enough from Yezget-Bey and from Etsy himself to know that the war mongers in Washington would just use that as another excuse to escalate further. There were a shit ton of young white guys like me supposedly “going to college” in the Bay Area, so they could stay out of the draft, but Etsy said to me: “You white boys just watch. Way things are going, when they run out of us broke-ass n***** and s**** to send, they'll be coming for you white college boys too.” I was pretty sure he was right.

That was a side of him that was pretty bleak—like that first time, when I saw him break the arm of the hippie dude who hit La Danseur on Haight St. I thought of it again when we were reading and hearing about the uprisings in black neighborhoods through that whole long hot summer. I even saw it when we were watching the TV news one night, when Cronkite came on and said that George Lincoln Rockwell had been shot to death by some young guy he’d just kicked out of the American Nazi party. Cronkite showed some footage of Rockwell's car with the windshield shot out and blood on the driver's seat, and Etsy said, “Works for me”. He was grinning, but it didn't touch his eyes.

I saw that look one more time, before I lost track of him altogether. In October, there was a big protest planned in the Haight, against the war and the draft and asking the cops to do a better job of policing, to where they actually busted the crooks and the stickup artists, and left the hippies and the street people alone. But that fell apart too. I remember we were walking up Ashbury with some signs, chanting “The streets belong to people!” and I was talking to this young blond guy, Eric, who had just got to town, short back and sides and all, and had come into the Oracle offices wanting to hear about the local activists. He was smart, and well spoken, and pretty good looking, so I invited him to join us on the March because that way I could introduce him to pretty much everybody I knew in the movement.

But what wound up happening was that the cops converged from one side and the Hell’s Angels from another, and just began beating on everybody. The crowd panicked, people scattering in all directions, and just as I grabbed Eric's arm to try to steer him away, a cop stepped into the street and just randomly hit him across the head with a billy club: the kid dropped like a stone. Yelling, I stepped over him to try to shield him, and the cop wound up to hit him again—or maybe me.

But before he could swing, Etsy appeared, and trapped the cop’s arm and twisted it back, and I heard the crack as the cop’s elbow broke and he fell to the ground. Even in the midst of that scrum, with people running and screaming all around us, and cops swinging and shouting, and sirens going off, Etsy turned and looked me straight in the eye, and said quietly, “Get the fuck out of here as fast as you can.” I saw him look up and over my shoulder, and he grimaced and hunched his head and pushed me in the chest.

“Cops coming. Get fucking going. And don’t look back.”

I turned and ran, through the shrieking jostling crowd.

Behind me, I heard a fusillade of gunshots.

END OF PART ONE