And Then There Was Elizabeth

 And then there was Elizabeth.  She was part of a San Francisco State poetry group that would meet at our little house on Geary Street back in 1969.  I was 22 and she was 30.  I was smitten almost immediately.  And somehow, we ended up together.  I had only lost my virginity about a month previous, and was feeling sexually inept but she was pretty and pretty patient with me and not at all aggressive.  She hung out with a fascinating group of people, all of them nearly a decade older than me, and some of them holdovers from the beat generation.  Most of them were into poetry and music.

 Barbara was kind of frumpy, short, wore glasses, and was married to Larry, an intense black man who played the flute.  Dorothy was the real beauty of the group with high cheek bones, perfect skin and a patrician air about her.  She was married to Donald, another black man who sported a huge Afro and was very outgoing.  There were several others as well whose names I no longer remember, although I do remember the couple that decided to name their child Amadeus, and remember thinking “Oh, he’s gonna love that when he gets older!”

 Most of them lived either in Berkeley or Oakland.  Elizabeth worked over there as a bank teller.  She liked my poetry, and apparently liked me as well because we spent quite a bit of time together, and I had no money and no vehicle.  She pretty much schlepped me all around in her old sedan.  Elizabeth was from southern California originally and had a thing for Bob’s Big Boy burgers, so one night we drove all the way down the peninsula to Mountain View so that I could have a Bob’s Big Boy Burger, which I had never had before.

 Another time I joined her and her friends for a day at the beach, somewhere down near Santa Cruz.  It was a pretty intimidating group, and I mostly just hung out with them and smoked dope, and listened to their conversation, much of it political.

 In November of that year, we all joined in a huge anti-war march through the streets of San Francisco.  There were an estimated half a million people who began the march downtown and ended up in Golden Gate Park.  There we were serenaded by the Youngbloods and other local bands.  I really felt like I was part of something so much bigger than me and that, despite my poverty and reliance upon others, I would get by.  In December she and I went to the ill-fated rock concert at Altamont, took mescaline, and sat way on the edge of the crowd.  The vibes were just too creepy and we left before the Stones took the stage. Back at the Geary Street house, things were turning ugly between myself and my room mates.  I was spending more time at Elizabeth’s place in Oakland, a two-story Victorian in a rundown section of town near the freeway.

 In spite of the rather bohemian group she hung out with, Elizabeth played it straight pretty well.  After all, she was a bank teller.  I liked going places with her but sometimes felt the age disparity between us.  As it happened, I abandoned the Geary Street house the following January and ended up moving down to Santa Cruz where I would spend the next year living on mescaline, unemployment, and the kindness of strangers.  Although we continued to see each other, the divide between us grew.  When I took up with a local girl that pretty much ended it.

 Eventually I got a job with the National Park Service.  And over the years, Elizabeth and I would see each other occasionally.  Some times we would sleep together, other times we’d just pass each other on the same road.  Ironically she ended up working for the Park Service as well.  We finally lost touch all together.  But I’ve been thinking about her lately, wondering if she is still around.  If she ever thinks back to those tumultuous times in the bay area when we shared in the energy, the uncertainty, the passion and the pain of a decade’s end. In light of what is happening now in 2020, it seems so distant and almost quaint by comparison.  But she got me through an equally difficult time way back when, and for that I will always be grateful.