72 Anyplace left to go

We weren't sure yet our destination. Just kept walking further into the city. The hills were impressive. I'll never forget that we ended up walking down Broadway. I've been through some of the seediest parts of New York at the time, but the red light area of San Francisco was more "colorful." In New York they had a few people handing out leaflets or whatever, but they left you alone. You wanted to go in, you went in. You wanted to walk down the street, you walked down the street. San Francisco had aggressive hawkers. Leave us alone. We're just walking here. Do what the hell you want but leave me alone when I'm walking down the street. I told them too.

We wanted to find Haight-Ashbury. Of course. C'mon. It was a couple more miles of walking from Pacific Heights. I couldn't believe how much I loved the sight of old Victorian houses all clumped together up and down the hills. The people that built those must have had an appreciation of craftsmanship and imaginations to fit the beauty of looking out at the western ocean.

I knew it wasn't going to be what it was a few years earlier, but even still I was pretty disappointed. There wasn't much going on there that day. Not too much to see. A few storefront clinics. A few panhandlers. Maybe it was just that moment. We ended up talking to a fellow on the street and he said lots of people started heading out other ways. Up north or Berkeley. Yeah Berkeley. Just right across another bridge. They named the Free Speech movement after it.

We needed to settle in a little and nothing was happening there. I'm not even sure how we got to Berkeley. It might have been by bus. Jesus. We just wanted to find a place to plop down and that can be difficult in cities. We ended up on Shattuck Avenue and saw a place called the Shattuck Arms. Weekly rooms. We had some money. Not a lot. So we rented a room there for a week. We really didn't have too much money left after that. The room was in the front of the building and if you opened the window and looked to the left, there was a giant movie theater marquee. I've read it's all gone now.

The room was painted that sea green color. The hallways too. We had a sink in the room but we had to share the bathroom down the hall with everyone else on the floor. An old metal frame bed. A lot happened that week we were in that room, but we just needed to eat. We ate a lot of peanut butter but had to have something different every so often. We had a can opener. Went to a little market and picked up a couple cans of things. No real way to cook anything but we already knew the trick of running hot water over the can. We had a couple of forks and spoons besides our peanut butter knife. The bed squeaked and the blankets were itchy, but who cared. It wasn't too dirty.

We decided to go back to San Francisco the next day to look around again. After that we needed to think about money for food and where the hell else we might be able to live.