Tripping on the Strip, 1967

- Rupert Fike

Even though we knew the real hippies were far away,

on Haight Street, we took comfort in at least being freaks

to the white-bread gawkers who cruised the Strip

every weekend, whole families pointing from station wagons,

and then later came the worse-off cars with drunks leaning out -

Hey . . . Commie! You a boy or a girl?

(look out for that beer can!)

We knew we weren’t Commies either

because, for one thing, Communists didn’t take acid,

which was pretty much our job along with faking

the Southern accent of local winos

(Midtown at that time was very much poor-white),

so yeah we got high, we paraded,

we crashed,

we woke up groggy and started it all again . . .

taking to these city blocks when our cat-box stinky rooms

became suffocating, when the need for milk or bread or papers

propelled us out into danger, onto the Strip

where we exposed ourselves for hassles

and sometimes violence, not to mention the occasional

arrests for “violation of pedestrian duties”

if we so much as put one foot off the curb while selling the Bird.

Then came Jail. Where you sat . . . until somebody

tracked down Alley Pat Patrick, the one Decatur Street

bondsman who bailed out protestors and hippies.

For spiritual guidance we had two choices –

Mother David of the Catacombs with his pagan,

maternalistic embrace of all mixed-up hippie waifs . . .

Mother David, queer of course,

but in those pre-gaydar days he was simply

the matriarch of our hard-core 14^th street scene.

Meanwhile . . . over on 10^th St. was Jesus and Bruce Donneley

with his suburb-friendly 12^th Gate coffee house -

paisley evangelicals offering tea, cider, the blues,

and an upstairs poster shop which was a great place

to hit on weekend hippie-chicks

who might possibly agree to come check out

your collection of black-light posters.

Midway between the Catacombs and the 12^th Gate

was Henry and Sue Bass’s Workshop in Non-Violence,

the politics of peace working hard to sprout

in this backwater of a great confused country torn by war,

Henry and Sue, who tried to guide us toward activism,

who helped find us a room at 174 13^th Street –

home to an unlikely collective of street-theatre types,

SCLC workers and fellow freaks who lived

to stick their heads between Iron Butterfly speakers

in the basement of that craftsman house

where politicos and lotus-eaters had been thrown together

by necessity . . . unlike Cambridge and Berkeley where

activists and hippies kept their distance . . . what was

not an option in Atlanta at that time.

So some of us who had grown up in Georgia were now

breaking bread each night with the very people

our fathers had called, Outside Agitators! -

horn-rimmed civil-rights workers like Jim Gehres

who came south from Oberlin College to register voters,

but who instead became Dr. King’s chauffer

because the great man felt safe with Jim.

And really, we shouldn’t have given Jim that acid . . .

but we did, we did

(what rendered him incapable of driving the next day),

and we got into trouble with some SCLC types

who said that we had become

part of the problem not part of the solution

(the unkindest cut of all).

But, No, it hadn’t been our fault - the real problem was

those orange double domes cut with truck-stop speed

that were out on the Strip – That was what had messed

us up so bad, That was what had kept

our tribe of wannabe Buddhists

wandering the early morning Atlanta streets

like Sadhus, Indian holy men with no home,

only a vision, and yeah,

we had a vision all right,

but after six hours we just wanted our vision gone . . .

enough already with the oneness thing!

And as we walked the side streets of the Strip that night,

all we could see was concrete, a paved-over planet,

humankind’s connection to the Earth cut off

by aggregate, same as our mental pathways were cut off.

Around 2 am we saw a redneck drag queen hailing a cab,

her accent revealing her Appalachian roots,

Y’all are some fucked-up flower-children.

Y’all’s eyeballs are fixing to pop!

And when a Blue and Grey cab stopped,

we saw that the taxi was being driven

by a coyote in a sports shirt, so we started running,

running down 12^th Street into the park,

but it was scary there, too full of cop cars

and cruising high school jocks looking to gay-bash.

Yet we so needed some neutral dirt,

a place we could root our butts to

and allow this terrible energy to go back to ground . . .

we walked deeper into the city night to a corner

on Juniper with grass, bushes, a place to sit,

and as dawn brought up its stage lights we saw

we’d grouped around a Georgia historical marker,

James Andrews -

(some of us could now read)

for it was on or near this spot in June 1862

that he and five others were hung

by the neck until dead (and we thought we had troubles) –

Andrews Raiders . . . the Great Locomotive Chase . .

the Congressional Medal of Honor created

for the men marched here,

likely to muffled drumbeats,

and the scaffolding - it must have been on that little rise,

its trap door waiting . . . .waiting to spring,

and when it sprang what were the noises . . .

squeaks then crowd gasps, that’s how it goes isn’t it,

what was much worse than our little

chemically-induced spiritual crisis.

Gradually it became fully light.

People were going to work in cars.

It had made sense that we were All One a few hours ago.

But now it didn’t.

We were tired. We were confused.

We so wanted to come down.

Rupert Fike’s poems and short fiction have appeared in Rosebud (Pushcart nominee), The Georgetown Review, Snake Nation Review (winner 2006 single poem competition), The Atlanta Review (forthcoming), Natural Bridge, FutureCycle, Borderlands, storySouth, The Cumberland Poetry Review, and others. A poem of his has been inscribed in a downtown Atlanta plaza, and his non-fiction work, Voices From The Farm, accounts of life on a spiritual community in the 1970s, is now available in paperback.