New World a-Coming, Ch. 3

Summer of "Love" 1967

From the San Francisco reminiscences of Robert W Greene Jr , also known as “Sun Bear,” circa 1965-1971.

I spent some time with Etsy after that, because he was this very charismatic man who—honestly—I wanted to be close to, but also because he seemed to have a certain perspective on this whole new dawn that was arising in San Fran in Sixty-Six and -Seven that I was trying to get a handle on myself. I mean, I wrote for the Oracle and for others of the Underground papers, and I was a little different from the high school students who came to the Bay because they had heard you could be a hippie there. I was a year or two older, and I had arrived in San Fran at a time when you could still hear readings by the North Beach poets from the Fifties: that's the place I met Rexroth.

So I was maybe 25 when I started meeting all these kids who came from Bosie and Fayetteville and Corpus Christi and those kinds of toxic shitty places they had abandoned, or which had abandoned them. And so I had this sense that Etsy might also bring this kind of longer perspective. A lot of the writers around the Oracle offices treated me as if I was already over the hill, but they weren't that different than the high school kids from Boise or Fayetteville or Corpus Christi.

I didn’t get to know Yezget-Bey so well. Partly that’s because he was a little older, and because Etsy—even though he’d spent a lot of times overseas—was still born in North America like me. And I was also a little intimidated by Yezget: not that he was forbidding or unfriendly, but he was just so erudite. And he was in and out of town a lot, I thought—Etsy would never say where, but I got the sense that his mentor was big into politics in the Old Country.

Etsy was different. He was a very, very charismatic man, and not just because of his beautiful face and hands and that mane of white hair that made him look like a dark-skinned lion. But it was also because not too many things seem to set him off; he only ever smoked his own weed with people he thought would appreciate it, and he would turn out all that other garbage that was already showing up in the Haight like MDA and benzedrine and darker stuff that made people get sick or change their personalities. I'm not even talking about acid, which lots of people had and lots of people used and then some of them found out things they might never have gotten to otherwise—sometimes bad things. But Etsy just had his pipe, and his herb, and he'd leave it at that.

I don't mean to make him out as any kind of saint or either. He definitely had a temper, and I saw him get mad, and that could actually be kind of terrifying: when Etsy threw a punch, you had a pretty good sense he'd done it before and had a pretty good sense of what kind of damage he could inflict. I never knew him to throw a punch that missed. Paradoxically, that was actually kind of comforting: you knew that if Etsy swung at somebody, t he was doing it for a reason, and doing it so that he could head off some other bad thing. I almost always felt safe around him.

But there were other times when he terrified me. In the street sometimes, even as early as the fall of ‘66, you'd see some kids who were strung out, were already hurt and who weren't going to get better without help. When I spent time with him, between rehearsals or the stores or the book shops or just hanging out, I always got the sense that he saw those kids on the street, and he usually managed to find a way to give somebody a dollar, or at the fairest minimum, a smile and a handshake, no matter how distracted he was or how beat we both were. But there were a couple kinds of things that would always bring it out of him, and I was kind of scared of that Etsy. One time a dope hustler wearing a surplus field jacket slapped a girl on the corner of Ashbury and Haight: gave her a bloody nose, and then Etsy broke the dude’s right arm and left knee…

But that means you need to know about the girl…