With much thanks to Trish, the perfect high school best friend, who reminded me of this wacky outing not long ago. It was typical of our behavior back then. Surprisingly, we both turned out all right. 

I have never been jealous of other girls, which is good. If I were, I would have been miserable in high school. My best friend, Trish, was a hippie goddess – long blond hair which she allowed to curl in contravention of the current fashion, big blue eyes, bee-stung lips that, if you saw them today, would make you suspect collagen. We fell in love with the same boys, and they fell in love with her. Didn’t make me like her any less. She remembers that I took care of her, one of those surprising differences in perspective that you only realize years later. I remember that she gave me courage. Courage to be as bad as I wanted. 

Our parents were right. We were a bad influence. In the self-protective way of parents, her parents blamed me and my mom blamed her. But it was really both of us. One of us would say, “Have you ever thought about...” and we’d do it. We cut school a lot, until, as punishment, we were thrown out, first me, then her. (Makes a lot of sense to throw kids out of school for cutting.) We would use our free time to explore the city, going to the Haight-Ashbury and Golden Gate Park.

Sometimes we went downtown, especially if we wanted clothes, which we acquired on the five-finger discount. We were never high when we shoplifted. I, in particular, considered myself a professional. It was not a lark. Unlike my high school colleagues, I was not affluent, and not having the talent to make real hippie clothes myself (which would have been better) stealing cute mini-dresses from Macy’s Juniors department was a way to make myself fit in. 

Trish and I belonged to two distinct teenage social groups. Our friend Michael (her boyfriend, my heartthrob) knew a kid who had gone to his Catholic junior high. Now, Michael was with us at Lowell, the all-city academic public high school, for which you had to qualify, and his friend was at Polytechnic, one of the toughest schools in the city, known for its population of ghetto kids but also right there in the Haight. Michael took us along to hang out with his friend’s new crowd, a collection of street toughs and drinkers, 16-year-olds who looked so mean, no one dared refuse to sell them beer. 

The Mob, as they called themselves, was a racially diverse group--whites, Latinos, a black kid, an Indian, a Filipino girl. Trish and I became part of that set as well as our druggier but tamer hippie crowd from school. It was a socially flexible time, the Haight was a melting pot, and middle class kids hanging out with thugs wasn’t as improbable as it would be today. Me, I’ve always been a misfit who fit in anywhere and nowhere, the child of Central American immigrants growing up in an Asian neighborhood, and now attending school with the children of rich whites. Luckily for us, this was before every teenager had a gun. Our new friends fought with their fists, which now seems quaint. 

Across the bay from San Francisco, in Marin County, there is a lovely state park on Mt. Tamalpais. Campsites, hiking trails, woods and solitude. It was considered by us hippies the perfect place to get high. As teenagers, our main problem was transportation, as it was an hour’s drive from the city. The boys from the Mob had cars occasionally--some bought, some stolen--but Trish and I depended on our thumbs to get us places. Worked pretty well, too. 

Michael and Jack had conceived the notion of going camping on Mt. Tam. Not something we did a lot of back then, but I remember one or two Mob camping trips, generally provisioned with a lot of beer. This time, however, Michael and Jack went up on their own, using what vehicle I no longer remember other than it was temporary, which probably meant stolen. Trish and I promised to come up mid-week and bring supplies. To that end, we cut school on Wednesday, went to the Haight and scored some acid, and got a wino to buy us a gallon jug of cheap wine. Then we went to the 101 and stuck our thumbs out.

We scored with our first ride. Two Mexican men in an old Chevy, laborers, not cholos, cheerfully offered us a ride in broken English. Trish and I hopped in the back seat of their beater with their other hitchhiker, a bearded, bulky Hell’s Angel, whom the Mexicans in their innocence had picked up. This was so incongruous, I almost forgot to glare at him. Unlike the other members of the Mob, who idolized the outlaw bikers, I hated the Angels. Bad as I was, I was never a fan of bullies, and there were enough Hell’s Angels in the Haight that I had formed an unfavorable impression of them. I almost got my boyfriend’s ass kicked once, saying funny things to an Angel in a hamburger joint late one night when I was high. He thought I was insulting him. It never occurred to me that the guy would threaten my boyfriend instead of firing back his own witticisms at me. A culture I don’t understand. 

But today’s Hell’s Angel seemed to be some sort of exception. He was real, no doubt. He had the colors. Anyone who knew enough to impersonate an Angel would also know that it was instant death to do so. I assume his bike had broken down, though I wasn’t imprudent enough to ask questions. Accustomed as I was to the vagaries of hitchhiking, the combination of the Mexicans and the Hell’s Angel was damn weird. But the guy was not only pleasant, he pulled out a joint and passed it around. We rode companionably for the next hour, the guys from Mexico, the Hell’s Angel, my white blond beauty best friend, and me, the errant Latina smart mouth. Out of politeness, and because we had lots, we took out our wine and shared it, explaining that we had to save enough for our friends. 

Our plan with Michael and Jack was quite clear. We were to meet in the final parking lot at the end of the road up to the peak of Mt. Tam. The Mexicans were enjoying themselves and decided they would go that way just for fun. We yelled at them to stop when we saw the parking lot where we expected to meet our friends, and climbed out of the Chevy nicely buzzed. We said good bye to our amiable new friends and looked around. Michael and Jack were not there. We sat down to wait. 

Time stretched out. Doubt set in. Were we supposed to be at the parking lot or the amphitheater? Perhaps we should walk over and check, only which way was it? Thinking it was getting to be about time if we wanted to come down before evening, we dropped our share of the acid. Might as well trip while we waited. 

It was not your usual Mt. Tam day, the kind of day that dawns clear and warm, and you think, how about the beach, or no, wait, how about Mt. Tam? The views will be great. No, it was not a Mt. Tam sort of day at all. It was foggy. There were no views. Everything looked mysterious and even spooky. Things bulked indistinctly in the fog. Boulders moved behind a curtain of fog, and trees watched you.

The acid was not that good old windowpane from earlier days. By then, acid you scored in the Haight was cut with some nasty stuff. Strychnine was said to amplify the effect, and speed was a common ingredient. I had a tendency to hallucinate, which Trish was envious of. Why I saw things and she didn’t, I have no idea. But I was hallucinating now, and feeling restless and jumpy. What if something had happened to Michael and Jack? We decided to go look for our friends. 

We walked down the paths shouting, “Jack! Michael! Jack! Michael!”at the top of our voices and passing the jug of wine back and forth. Between the drinking in the car and the drinking in the park, the jug was down to a quarter full. We’d better find our friends soon if they were to get any at all. The scene was increasingly surreal--out in the woods on our own, disappointed at missing our friends, at a loss, the day shrouded in fog, high as tie-died kites. No one was on the paths. It was mid-week and not a Mt. Tam day at all.

But someone heard us shouting and he intercepted us. It was the first and last time in my life I have run into a park ranger at Tam. I didn’t even know they bothered with them in the state parks. Certainly, that one did not have a lot to do that day, other than try to decipher the puzzle of the two stoned teenage hippie chicks shouting their heads off in the fog-bathed woods. 

“What are you girls doing here?”

Trish was momentarily the more verbal of us. “We’re looking for our friends. We were supposed to meet them.”

“Where are you meeting them?” 

“Well, we think it’s the last parking lot, which is the one back there, but it might have been the amphitheater...”

The ranger shook his head. “That’s not the last parking lot. It’s about two miles further up.” 

Damn. We had a poor idea of the layout of the park. It never occurred to us to consult a map. 

“What’s that you got there?

“Just some wine.

“Well, you can’t have it here."

I found my tongue. “It’s for our friends.” 

“Well, you can’t have it here. You have to pour it out or I’ll have to take it.” 

“Ok, we’ll leave.” 

“Pour it out!” 

Trish reached for the wine in my hands to obey the ranger. But I needed that wine! This acid was too freaky not to have some wine to go along with it, plus what would Michael and Jack say? I pulled the bottle back toward me. Trish pulled the bottle to her. We struggled over the bottle for a moment, neither saying anything, and then it slipped from our hands and broke on the path. “Now look what you did!” Trish exclaimed. 

Wine and glass splashed everywhere in slow motion, flashing and glinting in sprays of crystals. Drops of wine floated in the air, turning into bottomless jewels. 

“Rubies!” I breathed. I was mesmerized. I stared at the colorful disaster of our wine bottle, entranced by the wreckage embellished by my hallucinations.

Trish looked apologetically at the ranger. “We’ll clean it up,” she promised.

The ranger shook his head. “Wine. Drugs. Kids,” he said in disgust. Then he shrugged and walked away. Only later did it occur to me that he could have arrested us. To this day, I have no idea why he didn’t, except I must have seemed like too much trouble. 

Without wine, we moved a little faster. We must have hiked several miles, though it might have been the same quarter mile again and again. Finally, we began to feel cold, and realizing that it was getting late and we were coming down, we decided to head for home. We found our way back to the main Tam road and stuck our thumbs out.

A few minutes later, an old Chevy beater pulled over. It was our old friends, the Mexicans, without the Hell’s Angel, heading back to the city. What are the odds? They drove us back to San Francisco and home to our long-suffering families. Later Michael and Jack explained where we were supposed to have met them, and it was indeed a parking lot further up the road. But we tried, and no harm done. We survived, didn’t we, and we didn’t even get arrested.