BY ALAN KAUFMAN | I was 37 and a half years old, raised in the Bronx, penniless, prideful, a paranoid schizophrenic, overeducated transplanted New Yorker, with 22 years of severe alcoholism under my belt, newly arrived in San Francisco off a Greyhound Bus with $67 in my pocket. Carl Little Crow was half African-American, half Native American; a former back-alley drunk from Chicago with 18 years of sobriety to his name. He was half my size and had a face like an alert animal. He wore an embroidered West African shaman's cap, a cowskin vest, baggy corduroys and scuffed black shoes, and he carried a befeathered Native American tom-tom drum, which he beat as he walked down Haight Street. The things we did 1. Healing ceremonies atop Buena Vista Park in Haight Ashbury. Carl claimed that a satanic sacrificial cult was operating in the area, abducting and murdering people, and that as spiritual human beings we must "cleanse" the area with our souls. For this ceremony, Carl's mentor, Rolland, drove in from Arizona in a rusted brown station wagon. Also in attendance was Mike, sober 10 years, known thereabouts as the Captain of Haight Street. With only two months booze-free, I was the novice and appointed to carry the healing plant. The healing plant: a ratty-looking lobby shrub with withered leaves that Carl had salvaged from the trash outside a Tenderloin hotel. Carl took the plant home and fed it plant food, sunshine, Native American chants, water and whispers of love until it was able to lift its head again. It still looked like a shitty plant from a flop hotel but vibrantly alive. And as I carried it, huffing, Carl led the way, chanting in a trance, beating the drum, walking in a slow procession up the slope to the top of the hill. Deadheads and crack dealers watched us with interest. According to Carl, the devil worshippers were spying on us but chances were excellent that we wouldn't see them. It was strange, I thought, I'd shown up in S.F. paranoid and delusional, clinging to my sobriety by bloody fingernails, gibbering about being pursued across the continent by devil worshippers, and suddenly Carl, who'd been 18 years without booze, was declaring that yes, they do exist, are a definite danger and now once and for all we will rid the world of them. I felt both terrified and reassured. Bringing up the rear was Mike, the Captain of Haight Street -- tall, bone-lean, with a mean-looking handlebar mustache and a combative black beret set at a jaunty angle on his old gray skull. He had cold blue eyes and a big key ring jangled from his belt. He was scanning the turf with sweeping looks, warning off anyone with the wrong idea. There's lots of such people around and they know Mike. While he may not beat you one-on-one the first time around, Mike will make it his religion to get even, even if it takes 20 years, and will not cease until you are effaced from the earth. His other hobbies are amateur photography, of which he is a very fine practitioner, and archiving local historical information and artifacts. For instance, he can show you, hidden near a drainage ditch covered over with dead leaves, a row of little white tombstones embedded like teeth into the cement that belong to a party of gold miner 49ers killed in a drunken brawl "'round these parts nigh a hunnert and fifty years ago," as Mike would say. Only the accent was an affectation, he was really a marvelously bright and well-educated man whom alcohol had laid low, like the rest of us. Behind him, at a remove of 10 paces, Rolland, Carl's mentor, walked and I was surprised at how average-looking he seemed. Like any road dog you might come across in the Arizona desert. That hermit smile and blue eyes bleached kind by extreme loneliness. He wore just a plain old black T-shirt, stone-scrubbed blue jeans and embossed leather cowboy boots. He was more a dude than a hierarchically royal medicine man of the Black Foot tribe. But I figured what the hell do I know about it anyway. My job was to carry and I did. My arms grew heavy. I wanted to drop the damned plant. But I held on as we inched our way up led by Carl's mournful voice and the boom-boom-boom of the tom-tom, and soon we were at the top, where we proceeded briskly to a ravine and slid down the slope to a wide shelf, which Carl declared to be our healing ground. It was a godforsaken place of dead trees and amputated branches. We sat in a circle and Carl Little Crow said something in Native American tongue, and Rolland nodded and smiled. Then they all looked at me. "What's your spirit animal?" Carl asked. Surprised, I shrugged. "I dunno," I said. Carl's eyes burned into mine. "Name it!" I couldn't think of any. We don't have animals in the Bronx. What should I say: cockroach? Rat? This is how I knew that I was really in California now. Someone named Carl Little Crow asking me to name my spirit animal. "I dunno," I said again. Once more he burned into me with his eyes and said: "Name it! Name it now!" Suddenly the word "hawk" popped into my brain, so I blurted out, "Hawk!" and Carl hissed: "Look up!" and I looked up and O, my God, O my ever loving fucking God, right there, over us, circling, two of them, enormous, right here in Haight Ashbury, what are hawks doing here anyhow? And right at this moment no less?! Now I felt the presence of what he called the Great Spirit, others call God, or whatever they call it. I felt it. And it freaked the living daylights out of me. In a good way. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF CROSBY |