June 5th, 1967

Move into my new flat in the Fillmore, mostly black neighborhood. Actually discriminated against by colored landlords the first day we looked. New feeling.

The flat's amazingly filthy, rugs threadbare, floors caked with dirt. Two wall beds, one in living room, one in dining room, sliding doors between. Roaches in the kitchen.

Grace & Tom, the managers, give me a Chesterfield couch. Both in their sixties. Grace sits drinking on the couch all day, screaming at Tom whenever he comes in to help me clean.

Tom tells me this only happens once or twice a year, her stumbling around in her bathrobe & little black booties.

Grace’s eyes are milky blue, cheeks bloated, straggly hair. She carries a chair across the room & sits down, claiming she's helping me out.

Tom: patches of hair on his head, Vaseline covering his ears, scaly eyelids; his eyes remote behind the thick glasses. Deep wrinkles drop down the sides of his face. He mumbles so much that I rarely understand anything he says.

Most of the people in the building are living on Social Security.

Joe from the flat above comes down. Wounded in World War II & can't sleep very well. Very nervous. Has 5 radios, 4 record players & 2 TV sets. Wants to know if the noise is bothering us.

Hippie girl from #9 comes to the door twice, borrows knife, returns it. Stands there with yearning look, pimply, dirty, homeless, only 15. Wearing one moccasin, other foot in sock.

Girl leaves a flat down the hall with all her belongings wrapped in sheet & hurries down the stairs.

Chuck & I invite kids sitting on front steps in for wine. Girl is 16. Kid dropped out of Boston University just before finals.

They share great joint. Kid keeps telling me how stoned he is, like drunk kid bragging about how loaded he is. Friendly, but cut off from us.

We start reading the Haight-Ashbury Tribune article on how to take a good acid trip. Psychedelic ads on the radio. Drugs virtually legal here.

I wonder what all this self-knowledge can lead to. No solutions. The hippies offer other possibilities, but no solutions.

But I also see them as a bunch of kids not so different from myself except that they’re carrying out their rebellion much more intensely.

Eating nothing but hamburgers since I arrived. Poverty’s fun for a while. Writing more in spite of poor lighting, noise, etc. I plan to make the short story I sold into a novel.

Go to San Francisco State, get more money for the fall. Go to City Lights. Story still not in Transatlantic Review.

Chuck leaves for Philly—classified 1A—must teach to stay out of Army.

Feeney leaves for Fort Ord. Very attached, afraid I'll never see him again. Off to Vietnam.

War breaks out between Israel & Egypt. Russian ship bombed in North Vietnam.

73 Marines killed near Da Nang.

» June 7th, 1967 : Sad-Eyed Denise