Volume CXXXI, Number 20 April 5, 2002 f

Next door to Alice
LUDWIG RANG
COLUMNIST

The studio apartment I took over from Gilbert was on the second floor of a two-story building on Elm Street, off California Avenue, just below the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill.

A long narrow corridor with the bathroom on the left as one entered led to the living room facing the street and a small kitchen at the side overlooking a parking lot.

Next door to me (as in the famous sixties hit) lived a girl called Alice. She seemed a hippie and a collective girlfriend to a group of four hip musicians from St. Louis, no doubt hoping to make it big on the West Coast, as well as with her.

But having gotten myself a job with the San Francisco Post Office, at the sorting office near the airport, I at first didn't see much of Alice. Working the early shift from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., I'd get up 4:30 a.m., to catch the first bus at 5 to the airport. Since the cable cars didn't run that early I walked down Powell to the bus depot just off Market Street. The ride to the airport took about 45 minutes.

Sorting letters was easy work but also boring. So I volunteered to help load sacks of mail onto vans backed up to platforms on the outside, glad of the exercise and fresh air. Working with four groovy types whistling hit tunes I used to fantasize about us five being a pop group, naturally called The Postmen.

Back downtown about 3 p.m. I'd head for one of the bars on Market Street for a beer and a scotch egg, my lunch, while putting what change there was left from a dollar bill into the juke box. It was here that I for the first time heard Jim Morrison of the Doors singing "Light my Fire" and Otis Redding's "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay."

These two hits to me still are the musical distillation of hippie life on the West Coast in the late sixties. People used to cluster round parked cars with the windows down and someone inside listening to Light my Fire on the car radio. I never heard Jim Morrison sing it in person, but did hear and see Jimmy Hendrix, another doomed pop star destined to be a cult figure, maltreat and obscenely lick his guitar, with Chuck Berry on the same bill doing his famous duck walk.

Back at my pad an our or so later I would shower, light up a joint, listen to some more music, and later go to Chinatown, just five minutes from Elm Street, on the other side of Sacramento. Here I would have the main meal of the day at a cheap Chinese restaurant, with the family sitting at a round table in the back, single customers like myself at a counter. A big plate of beef and tomato on rice, my favorite dish apart from sweet-and-sour pork, would set me back all of 95 cents.

One day when getting home I found a basket with fruit and bread outside my door, the latter baked by herself, the accompanying note from Alice said. I was flabbergasted, but also pleased, and above all intrigued.

So when getting back from Chinatown I knocked on Alice's door to thank her, she asked me in for coffee and a chat. None of her four boyfriends were there. They played at a club in North Beach she explained, sharing a place nearby. Only one of them was her boyfriend, and didn't come very often, she smiled.

Encouraged by that smile and the baskets outside my door I started going over to Alice's almost every evening. We'd drink coffee, talk, share a joint, listen to music, dance together.

I know it sounds trite, but one thing led to another. Just how, in view of my lack of experience, I can no longer say. But I think getting high in my case was the equivalent of Dutch courage concerning the opposite sex. One couldn't think of a better argument for legalizing pot, could one.

And I loved it. Sleeping with a young girl, or rather woman (Alice was 20, I believe) beat everything I'd ever experienced before. But I'm afraid I didn't make her very happy, at least not at first. Being high I lost all inhibitions and selfishly concentrated on my own pleasure. Touch me, please touch me, she kept saying.

Still, I must have learned my lesson in the end. For suddenly, incredibly enough, there were wedding bells in the air. She'd asked her mother to fly out to San Francisco, Alice told me. Her Dad had a construction business, she said, in Providence, Rhode Island.

When I told Nellie about Alice and me she too was Feuer und Flamme, as we say, literally 'fire and flame', that is all for the idea. Why didn't I bring Alice and her mother down to Carmel for the weekend, they could sleep in the guest room, I downstairs in the apartment next the garage.

It was an extraordinary weekend. While old Nellie sat talking to my prospective mother-in-law on the patio overlooking Carmel Bay, with Kumi the Japanese help (married to a black Army cook at Fort Ord) getting lunch ready for all of us, Alice and I had sex downstairs.

By this time it was getting so good it was all I could think about.

So once again, as with Helga, I got cold feet as far as marriage was concerned. Naturally Alice's Mum and Nellie too were terribly disappointed. But Alice I don't think really minded. A true hippie, she believed in free love.