Memories of

DROP CITY

The First Hippie Commune of the 1960s and the Summer of Love

A Memoir

by John Curl


Part 1: CURLY'S EXPERIMENT

Part 2: THE ROAD TO DROP CITY

Part 3: THE SUMMER BEFORE LOVE

Part 4: BACK TO DROP CITY

Part 5: GETTING THE WORD OUT

Part 6: THE JOY FESTIVAL

Part 7: LIVING THE REVOLUTION

Part 8: THE COUNTERCULTURE

 © Copyright 2008 by John Curl. All rights reserved.

PART 3



CHAPTER 7

THE SUMMER BEFORE LOVE



I opened my eyes to huge logs, the sound of sawing, and the smells of cooking. It took me a moment to realize I was in Luke Bear’s adobe. The logs were vigas stretching thirty feet across the high ceiling, and Lard was snoring curled up in his sleeping bag nearby. The room seemed vast, after a couple of weeks in a little dome. Sunbeams sliced through narrow windows set two feet deep into the thick adobe walls, and fell upon a huge fireplace centered in one side.

I staggered over to a window and looked out at the sun just clearing the crest of a distant mountain. There were a few trees in the yard, desert beyond. Tucked to one side was a curious red and white structure that I recognized from the photos Bear had shown at Drop City.

I followed savory odors into the kitchen, where Bear and his wife Melody, tall and willowy, were scattering spices into an oversized cast iron pan bubbling with eggs and potatoes.

“Sleep well?” Melody asked.

“Your rug is a lot softer than the Drop City floor, but my joints are still a little stiff. That dome in the yard looks really interesting.”

Bear perked up. “It’s not a dome. It’s a zome. C’mon!” He dropped a head of garlic and ran out the back door. His enthusiasm was infectious. I forgot my hunger and followed him around the house to the strange looking structure, about nine feet high at one end and six at the other, the metal panels painted red and white, openings for a window and a door.

“Cartops, all cartops! This is the prototype! It can stretch and expand in any direction. You can cluster them. You can do anything with them. I’ve got a million ideas. Come into my studio. I’ll show you my drawings.” He ran off.

It was like a long crystal, beautiful in its own way. The panels had bent edges inside, screwed together. It had no internal stud structure like the Drop City domes.

He bombarded me with stacks of wild sketches. After a half hour I asked, “Do you make a living doing this?”

He laughed. “Melody and my mom are leaning on me real hard to get a job.”

Later Lard gave me a tour of Albuquerque on the scooter. We wound up at the main gate to the university, where a rally was demanding that Army ROTC be kicked off campus. Though Lard claimed that student sentiment against the war here was pretty strong, most people ignored the demo and just lounged on the lawn, studying, eating, throwing frisbees, necking.

A few days later, on June 16, 1966, he rode me out to where Route 66 fed onto Interstate 40 West. I stood on the side of the road, desert all around me except for a few Indian jewelry shops, trying to hitch a ride.



* * *



Four days later my last ride let me off on Haight Street. The sidewalks were teeming with young people, the girls so beautiful, everybody dressed in colorful rags, smiling, greeting everybody else. I walked in and out of marijuana clouds. The community was much more concentrated and intense than the New York scene.

A long-haired guy leaning against a building grunted, “M? L? Marijuana? LSD?”

“Do you know where I can find a room?”

“Try the bulletin board at the Head Shop.”

In the window was a big hookah surrounded by a variety of pipes and packs of Zig-Zag rolling papers. Inside on the bulletin board I saw a notice, “Rooms $50-$75 mo. Greta Garbo Home For Girls (Boys Also).” The same place that Marigold had mentioned.

The Greta Garbo was a big Victorian rooming house taken over by young people. The lobby was a grand place painted in crazy psychedelic colors, filled with dope smoke and swarming with action. Promising to pay tomorrow, I took a little room near the end of a hallway, overlooking a side street. I’d left my sleeping bag in the trunk of one of my rides when I’d made a fast getaway at a gas station, deciding that the two drivers were in flight and had given me a ride because they thought they might need a hostage. My clothes were filthy. I had only a few dollars. After sitting on the bare floor for a while, I decided to try to borrow some clothes so I could wash the ones I had on. I knocked on the adjoining door.

“Who is it?”

“Your next door neighbor.”

A red eye behind wire-framed glasses peeked out. “You’re new?” Blond hair fell straight down from his thinning pate, meeting a long mustache curling around the sides of his lips down to his chin.

“I just got here. Do you have some clothes and maybe a sleeping bag I could borrow? Just for the night?”

“Come in.” As he opened the door, a blast of dope smoke hit me in the face. A group sat on pillows around a tall hookah; some of them were naked. A pile of yellow hash was spread on a newspaper on the floor. Someone took a hit from one of the hoses. Bubbles streamed up through the water to the glass jar thick with smoke beneath the smoldering hash bowl.

“Sit down. Take off your clothes if you want. No modesty. We’re all friends here.” He was dressed in multi-colored striped trousers, almost clown’s pants. “Have a hit. Afghani. They call me Winston Warlock.”

“Warlock?”

“Right. That’s Dawnrider. This is our room.” She was wearing a sari.

“Dawnrider. You’re Marigold’s friend!”

“How do you know Marigold?” She had olive complexion, and looked a little East Indian, but not quite.

“I met her at Drop City.”

She turned to Winston. “I told you it was real.”

“Drop City?” he exclaimed. “The hippie commune? Great! Fantastic! It’s a real place! I thought it was a myth. So you were really there!”

“Right.”

“Marigold wrote me long letters about Drop City,” Dawnrider cut in. “But Winston didn’t believe it.”

“Marigold’s delusional. Too much LSD, etc, etc. So there really is a Drop City!”

“She’s not crazy,” Dawnrider chided. “Winston only met her once when she came to visit us last winter. She was depressed. She had a hard family life. She pretended to try to kill herself a couple of times, but only just to get away from them. She keeps getting involved with creepy guys. Acid just flips her out, but she won’t stop dropping. It’s a vicious cycle. We tried to get her into dream travel, but she was having awful nightmares and was too afraid.”

“Dream travel?”

“We do dream traveling,” Winston said. “Slip into your dream body when you fall asleep. It’s really easy. If you know how to remember you’re sleeping while you’re dreaming, you can wake up in your dream. Go anywhere you want. Control your dreams.”

“Make your fantasies come true,” Dawnrider said.

“Dangerous if you don’t know how. If you want to learn, join our group.”

I picked up a hose to the hookah. “I’ll think about it.”

“Tell me about Drop City! Can anybody really go live there?”

The smoke rose from the pit of my lungs to behind my eyes, where it exploded in a million colored fragments. “Anybody. It’s an open commune.” I got excited and told them all about my trip.

“A lot of communal groups have been forming here in the Haight,” Winston said, “taking over old houses. Lots of cheap apartments. But moving out of the city is the next step.”

“You always say the farm you grew up on was asphyxiating,” Dawnrider parried.

“That was different. Rural Idaho. Very uptight. Oppressive assholes. But an open commune! Everybody a head! Everybody tripping! Everybody conscious! Terrestrial Paradise!” Winston took a deep hit from the hookah, then lay his head in her lap.

Dawnrider stroked his hair. “We spent a couple of days last week at Wheeler Ranch, and he hasn’t recovered.”

“Over in Marin. Fantastic scene,” Winston muttered. “Also Morningstar. And Tolstoy Farm, up in Washington. Open land. Hundred acres or so each. Loose. Everybody helps each other, shares stuff. Or you can just go off by yourself. Very anarchistic. But a commune, a real open commune like Drop City, that’s advanced, staggering!”



* * *



The Greta Garbo Home for Girls was a party without beginning or end. I wheedled a job as a part-time janitor in exchange for the rent and a very little coin. Winston Warlock was a dealer, and there was a constant stream in and out of his room. I became a regular visitor.

I kept thinking about Patt, who was due to arrive in a few days. I went back and forth between longing to see her and wanting to never see her again. I wished that things weren’t so muddled between us. There wasn’t much difference between fuzzy limits and no limits at all.

Why was I getting so worked up about Patt anyway? If I thought about all the things that annoyed me about her, I just wanted to get away from her. But I also felt a crazy instinctive pull toward her, as if there was some unfinished business we had together, some drama that we had to play out. Almost in spite of myself I kept looking forward to seeing her.

Typically, her bus was late. Finally we hugged and kissed, made small talk about her trip and mine.

But when she saw the scene around the Haight, she said, “This is a lot crazier than two years ago.” And when I led her into the lobby of the Greta Garbo Home For Girls, she turned around and walked out. “I’m not staying here. We’ll get busted.”

“The cops leave it alone. They don’t bother people for dope here, as long as you’re cool.”

“This isn’t cool.”

She didn’t like the room either. I’d furnished it with stuff that had been left in a storage room, a table, couple of chairs, an old mattress, a paisley curtain on the window. I was proud of it; the room had begun to look homey to me.

Patt wrinkled her nose. “It’s small, dark, and dirty.”

I was upset, but wrenched myself together. “As soon as I find a real job and get some money, we can look for another place.”

That appeased her. Afterward we lay on the bare mattress quietly side by side.

“Did you get together with any of the girls at Drop City?”

“I washed the dishes with them, if that’s what you mean.”

“Did you sleep in a big pile?”

“No. How about you? Go out with any guys?”

“Would you care if I did?”

“It depends. What about that guy Bob? Did you get together with him?”

“He’s just an old friend. It was not a big deal.”

“What did you do?”

“What did you do with the girls you met at Drop City?”

“Don’t interrogate me. How about Kugo? Was there ever something between you and Kugo?”

“That’s crazy. There’s never been anything between him and me. And don’t interrogate me.” She touched my cheek. “I want it to work between us.”

“I want it to too.”

For a while it was as if our every contact was touching raw wounds. There were things she wasn’t telling me, and I didn’t tell her about Marigold. We were both not quite being truthful and not quite lying. The air never entirely cleared, but as the days passed we drew gradually closer again.



* * *



We decided to hitch to Berkeley. Patt had visited there when she was in the Bay Area a few years earlier with her student group. Almost as soon as we got to the highway entrance, a car pulled over. I could see blue tattoos on the driver’s arm.

The passenger lifted her sunglasses. “Hi, strangers!” It was Odessa, in a red T-shirt with a black United Farmworkers eagle.

“What a surprise!” I exclaimed. “Is Ernesto here too?”

“No. We broke up. Get in.”

Patt and I slid into the back.

The driver looked us over. “Didn’t I meet you two in the Apple last winter?”

“Sure, I remember you.” It was Jake, the Viet Nam veteran we’d met at Ernesto’s party.

“Where are you going?” Odessa asked.

“To Berkeley.”

“To the big demo?”

“We haven’t heard about it.”

Jake took off with a jolt and swerved onto the freeway. “It’s in support of the blockade at Port Chicago. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it. Posters are up everywhere. We’re on our way to the blockade.”

“That’s where all the munitions funnel through the Bay Area to Southeast Asia. Past Berkeley. Not far. Trains from munitions factories all over the country arrive there every day to transfer their cargo onto ships headed for ‘Nam. I’m going to get arrested for civil disobedience.”

“Come with us,” Odessa said. “I’m driving back. You can keep me company. We’ll stop in Berkeley afterwards.”

We crossed the bay, followed the shoreline north past the Berkeley turnoff, up to the delta. Near Vallejo we left the freeway, cut down some back roads, and finally pulled off into a dirt field where dozens of cars were parked. People with signs and banners were funneling down past a small cafe, following railroad tracks to the water, where a fleet of gray ships were docked. A crowd of several hundred people were marching in a large ellipse up and down the pier, singing and carrying anti-war signs. A high, wire fence capped with barbed wire separated us from the ships, and a squadron of naval police lined both sides of the fence. The railroad tracks continued through a large wire gate on metal wheels. The gate was open, but the passage was blocked by police. Beyond was a loading area where the ordnance was transferred from the rail cars to the ships.

We joined the marchers, chanted for an hour, while the crowd continued to swell. Finally everyone gathered at the gate, where they had set up a makeshift platform on some 55-gallon drums. The speeches were hard to hear, the only sound system being a megaphone, which distorted their voices.

Finally, we heard a train whistle. The crowd murmured.

“HERE IT COMES,” the speaker cried.

The long train inched down the hill toward us.

“Everyone who is planning on getting arrested for civil disobedience, step forward to this line.”

A white line was painted on the dock about six feet in front of the gate, naval police massed just beyond.

“I’m going to get arrested now,” Jake muttered.

Odessa grasped his arm. “I’m going to get arrested with you.”

“How will we get back?

Odessa handed me the car key. “We’ll pick it up tomorrow or the day after.”

“They’ll bail us out in the morning,” Jake explained.

Odessa gave me a hug. “Next time come get arrested with us. Everyone should see what it’s like inside. It’s enlightening. The holding cells are quite social.”

They joined the group of about fifty people at the line, while the rest of the crowd backed away to give them room.

The train was almost upon us. Two by two, the demonstrators crossed the line, blocking the tracks, and were dragged away, Odessa and Jake among them. The rest of us shouted and jeered as the naval police threw the last of them into vans and the train passed through the gate to the waiting ships.

People drifted back toward the cars. However, now lining the path back were about a hundred guys, a lot of dirty white undershirts and brimmed caps, rednecks, a few of them carrying baseball bats. We had to file past them. There were no police around. Patt grabbed my hand. They cursed at us, called us traitors and commies. One guy spit a big glob in my face. Behind us a scuffle broke out. It was getting chaotic. Patt dragged me hurriedly to the car.

On the drive back to San Francisco, we cut through Berkeley, up Ashby then along Telegraph Avenue to campus, where a large crowd was gathered on Sproul Plaza. A speaker who had been at Port Chicago was reporting on the blockade. Vans of campus police drove up, jumped out, ordered everybody to disperse, and began bulling their way through the crowd. We decided we’d seen enough action for the day, and slipped away.



* * *



They were hiring at the Post Office. They needed extra workers because all of the mail to Viet Nam went through San Francisco, and the war kept heating up. We both jumped at it. Patt got assigned to sorting letters at the main Post Office, where you really had to work. I was sent to the Army station, Rincon Annex, where everything passed through to Viet Nam. It was a lark there. Nobody did much. They’d leave a few of us all day on an upper floor filled with boxes, telling us to restack them. We just moved them around. If we got too productive, our supervisor, who was a head, told us to work slower. Sometimes we’d build a high fort of boxes around us and snooze inside. At lunch we’d go to somebody’s car and smoke dope.

Patt got used to the Greta Garbo Home For Girls and stopped insisting that we move, though she always disliked it. Sometimes I hung out in the lobby and in various people’s rooms, but she stayed away from the scenes. Winston and Dawnrider kept inviting me to their dream workshops. I was intrigued, but I never went, although I regularly dropped in at their pad. Patt kept her distance from them because of all the dope and because they seemed to draw no line between fantasy and reality. I was just as glad, because I was wary that Dawnrider might say something to her about my connection with Marigold. Dawnrider and Marigold corresponded.

Odessa and Jake were a sometimes couple. They lived in a flat near the Haight with a group of anti-war activists and kept us informed of upcoming actions. We went to other demos with them.

Patt and I put our differences behind us and had a great time that summer. How could you not, with all that incredible music and dancing going on at the Filmore and the Avalon Ballroom. Patt contacted people she knew from the last time she was in San Francisco, and I called my various contacts too. Over the weeks we made many friends.

The Haight community had started a few years previously and had grown rapidly. People poured in from all around the country, most of them under thirty, looking for a community based on values outside the dominant system. It was happening in Berkeley too. Communal households were widespread in both places. People went back and forth between the two communities. A new underground paper was everywhere, the San Francisco Oracle, the most beautiful newspaper I’d ever seen. Its split-font rainbow color backgrounds and picture overlays made the text hard to read sometimes, but it was like music that you had to listen to carefully in order to understand the lyrics. The very stretch made it all the more worthwhile. The Berkeley Barb was more conventional in format, but just as radical. A group calling themselves the Diggers began free food giveaways in Golden Gate Park. They said they were trying to organize a whole survival system outside of the old society, removing necessities from the money economy, trying to channel the enormous energy that was exploding into visionary revolutionary directions. The counterculture was being born. The basic idea was to withdraw energy from the old system and use it to reshape the world.

Large numbers of young people felt, like I did, that there was no place for them in American society. The communities where we grew up were too rigid and oppressive. And now the country was hurtling ever deeper into the war in Viet Nam, with kids as cannon fodder. We felt only condemnation and misunderstanding from most people our parents’ age. With nowhere else to turn, we turned to each other. The mutual aid and support that we found there seemed like a new consciousness, an embryo of a new society where the promises of America might at last become reality.

I exchanged letters with both Curly and Rabbit, confirming that I’d be back in Drop City in the fall, with Patt. They both said that everything was going great out there. But I had to really sell Patt on going there. She agonized over it.

We were dancing crazy at the Fillmore. The huge room was packed and wild, the music screaming, the colored lights and drugs flashing, the music reverberating so loud the walls pulsated.

“I CAN’T HEAR YOU,” I shouted.

Patt brought her lips to my ear and almost yelled, “I’M NOT GOING.”

“WHERE?”

“TO DROP CITY,” she yelled. “I’M GOING BACK TO SCHOOL.”

My head felt about to explode. “I thought you wanted to be with me.”

“There’s nothing out there. There’s no future in Drop City. Come back to New York with me.”

“School’s just a waste of time.”

“You’ll wind up a bum.”

“I’m already a bum.

“I want a career. I want to sing.”

“You can sing at Drop City.”

“You can’t solve anything by running away.”

“Drop City isn’t running away.”

“For me it is.”

“Then we might as well break up right now.”

“I just want us to have a life we can feel good about.”

“I don’t feel good about New York.”

“Well, I don’t feel good about Drop City.”

“Give it a try. If Drop City doesn’t work out, we’ll figure out something else.”

“Together?”

“Yes. Together.”

Reluctantly she agreed. However, Patt still wanted to return to New York first to visit her family and get some of her things. We made a plan that while she was doing that, I’d go to Drop City and build a dome for us to live in.



* * *

 

San Francisco was a great place that summer of 1966, but there were also bummers, mostly connected with drugs, that confirmed my wanting to get back to the country.

I dropped psychedelics a couple of times that summer.

My first trip in San Francisco was on some airy stuff that Winston laid on me. I stretched on his floor watching visions of ecstatic flowers for a long time, then went to see Patt. When I told her I was tripping she got disgusted and left. I started to feel bummed out, and descended to the lobby, where this huge four-hundred pound black guy known at the Garbo as Tiny, was snoring on his back in the middle of the floor while this loony white guy called Crusader, who always wore an old striped beach towel tied around his neck like a cape and horn-rimmed dark sunglasses held together between his eyes with duct tape, kept skipping in circles around the room and leaping over Tiny, towel flying behind him, until he tripped on Tiny’s stomach and went sailing into a pillar, glasses breaking again, then sat there laughing for a half hour, muttering, “Far fucking out,” while Tiny rolled over and puked.

The next time I tripped, I waited until I had a day off when Patt had to work, so I didn’t have to deal with her disapproval. As soon as I dropped, I began to feel claustrophobic and realized I had to get outside, to some natural place, the park. I walked through the Panhandle, but there were too many people. I decided to go deep into Golden Gate Park, where I wouldn’t be bothered, but didn’t have the energy to walk, so I hopped the Fell Street bus. It was crowded; I couldn’t find a seat and hung on a bar, squeezed by two guys who smelled weird. As we continued along the park toward the ocean, I felt the acid coming on. Suddenly I realized I was not human but some kind of wild cat, trapped in this horrible machine of my enemies. My eyes began to roll, I felt panicky. No one around me seemed to realized what was wrong. I had to get out, and saw an open window. We were stopped at a long red light. It took all my will power to keep from breaking for the window and leaping to freedom. When we finally reached the stop I squeezed down the exit as casually as I could manage. As soon as I was outside I loosed a cry of joy, ran across the street through swerving traffic, leaped the stone wall and frolicked in the trees.

After that I decided I didn’t want to take any more city trips; they were too metallic. As the summer wore on, there wasn’t just grass and psychedelics around, but speed and other hard-edge stuff. Sometimes methamphetamines and whoknowswhat were sold as acid. You didn’t know what it was until it was too late. I never got into the heavy drugs, and Patt wasn’t into anything at all. We heard that Wheeler Ranch was busted.

One night toward the end of the summer, fire inspectors broke into our room while we were sleeping, unapologetically shined a flashlight in our eyes and told us they were looking for fire code violations.

We came home one day shortly after and found our door broken into. Nothing was touched, but the window was open. Someone had used our room to get into Winston Warlock’s through the fire escape, and stole some of his dope. Winston soon knew who did it: our friend Crusader. We found him in his usual haunt, running around the lobby. Crusader explained that it was an emergency, so what else could he do? He’d pay as soon as he got the bread that somebody owed him.

Another day when we got home we were met with police cars, an ambulance and a fire truck in front of the Greta Garbo, lights flashing. We cautiously walked upstairs; our entire floor was cordoned off by the police. The huge guy known as Tiny had OD’d and died in front of our door. It took six attendants to get his body downstairs. We split. When we came back late that night, the police were finally gone and Winston Warlock’s apartment was empty. Someone told me that Winston and Dawnrider had hightailed it to Morningstar. Crusader disappeared that night too. I heard he’d gone out swinging from fire escapes and the psycho squad canned him.

Patt finally took off for New York, leaving me with a week alone to mull things over before I was due to return to Drop City. I kept trying to figure out how in the world I’d gotten to where I was, and where I’d go from here. To ease my mind, I tripped one last time at a Love Rally in the Panhandle, half-way between a party and a demonstration, with great bands.



* * *



Next: Part 4: BACK TO DROP CITY

Return to Red Coral

 


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