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Growin' Our Own (page 5)

Yellow Dot Acid and Being at Gun Point in Haight Ashbury

By: Tripping

Back in the flower child days of Haight-Ashbury people came from all over the world to visit the Haight. It was probably the best known place in the world relating to hippie life and drug culture. It was wide open with drug vendors lined up along the sidewalks of Haight Street, offering LSD, grass, hashish and other chemicals, which were at that time all legal and unregulated. This was the barefooted hippie, flowers in your hair hangout, which also had some bad, gun carrying, rip off artists too. SFPD drove down Haight Street in their black and whites, and watched the dealers who congested mostly the north sidewalk of Haight Street. Occasionally they would get on a loud speaker and chastize a dealer, and slowly keep driving in the heavy traffic, but I never saw a cop get out of a car. Bags of weed were sold openly in front of these cops. It was just all tolerated in the open. Maybe there were too many dealers, but the cops left the Haight alone. Young people lined up from the curb to storefront and block to block, selling their wares of cannabis, hash, opium, LSD, and other smoke and pills. It was a colorful site, with the flower children in tie dyes, mixed in with other folks wearing heavy coats and army jackets. The shops and sidewalks smelled of incense, and the strong aroma of pachouli oil was everywhere. The tourists and people looking to score would wander down the sidewalk and through this choking crowd of vendors waiting to see what was offered to them. You never bought the first thing offered in this bizarre place, and you had to shop it all. After you saw what was available, you could always go back to the vendor who would still be in the same place, and negotiate the deal you wanted. You would meet ladies from New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Germany, etc.

I had a friend, Randy, who had moved to the Haight from L.A., and when I visited I stayed with him on Cole Street in his 3rd floor apartment. He really got into acid and was wide eyed all the time, wearing his hippie beads with a young man's starter beard and his now long red hair. Formerly from the surf and now on the turf, that was Randy. I had met Randy through his sister who was my girlfriend in Straight Line, a string of lakes in the mountains east of L.A. I was already a young smoker at the time, and Randy was a surfer. When we got some smoke in the mountains it was only $5.00 an ounce, but soon jumped to $10. Anyway Randy decided L.A. and the surf wasn't for him anymore, and he went hog wild moving right up into the Haight and its associated drug dealing hippie lifestyle. Randy had no job, just drug sales to his friends.

LSD was not illegal until about 1969, so there was a lot of preferred Owsley acid, and other types of acid available, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area where it was made. Mr. Owsley was the LSD chemist in the Bay Area and Owsley was the brand name. His acid was the standard for acid. If the acid was Owsley acid it was the seal of approval for the times. I never tried acid, and as I waded through the vendors shopping for something to smoke, a guy who was trippin' just handed me 2 hits of what he called "yellow dot"acid. I was skeptical as I looked at the aspirins he dropped into my open palm. They were a brand name aspirin and it looked like somebody painted dried up yellow mustard across the top of one side of these aspirin. I thanked the wide eyed space cadet for his generosity and thought I would throw these away after I got out of his sight, but instead I dropped them in my coat pocket. I finally found some ounces of opium, which I'd never tried and the two black dudes said: "We're real hot with the cops. Let's go around the corner." I had never had any problems in the Haight so I followed them around a corner and down to a corner across the street from the Panhandle. I was handed a small tinfoil wrapped package smaller than a brownie, which I started to open. As I opened the foil the black goo which was stuck to it spread apart like when you pull your shoe off some old gum you mistakenly stepped on. The shit looked like white sugary cobwebs, all stuck to the foil. I'd had lots of hashish, and never expected opium to look this funky. My observation was just in a matter of seconds, when one guy pulled out a big revolver from inside his pea jacket and said: "Hurry up." I then realized I was being robbed in the Haight. Although they were telling me they had opium, it was some phoney shit and according to them I was buying it in a hurry and at gun point. I didn't expect that they would shoot me on a busy street corner, so I threw the shit at the guy with the gun and ran across the street in front of cars, nearly getting myself killed. I heard no shots from behind me, but as I looked over my shoulder I saw the other guy running after me. Fortunately for me he didn't dodge a car, and got hit. His startled partner in this ripoff robbery scheme stopped to get him off the street, and I kept running for about 5 blocks. I know I was stupid, but I'd never encountered anybody pulling a gun on me before and freedom from these guys looked like my best option. Later I returned to Randy's apartment and told him what had happened. He said: "That's what's happening all over the Haight. It's not the same place as when I moved here. Most of the righteous people are moving up north of the Golden Gate Bridge, and even as far as Humboldt. I'll be getting out of here someday. Soon." I left back for Straight Line thanking my blessings in not losing my life and money.

Some other friends down south had a hang out in the mountains in an old secluded cabin with no neighbors. They kept the shutters over the windows 24/7, so it appeared nobody was ever there. One night after Tom and I scored a few bricks of Mexican reg from a small time smuggler in Redlands, we went to the cabin to break them up in an ice chest. We smoked the grass, drank some beers, separated seeds, and started rolling joints, non-stop. We wanted to see how wide the old oak table was in joints. Our conclusion the next morning was that the table was 154 side by side joints wide.

My girlfriend was at the beach and we were really bored, as you might suspect, when I reached into my coat pocket and found the 2 forgotten "Yellow Dot" acid aspirins. Since I didn't believe this was acid and I was bored, I told my friend Tom about being in the Haight, and how some space cadet had just laid these on me. They still looked like they had the dried out yellow mustard on one side. Then stupidly I popped one into my mouth and chased it down with some cold beer. Tom said, "Hey why are you trippin' without me? Let me have the other one." So I did, and he popped it. I started getting worried that maybe it was really acid, but nothing happened so we just talked on about this and that and kept rolling joints. After a while things started getting strange, and looked out of reality. The old wood stove seemed to have eyes, a smile and a real happy face. It developed a personality which Tom also recognized as I discussed it. Then things looked like an old home movie with streaks from top to bottom, and then fireworks of colors. It looked like the molecules were expanding and separating from everything. It seemed as if we were seeing into another dimension and I could not stop laughing and smiling. I still remember saying that my smile hurt. This is probably nonsense to you, but I'm just sharing the experience with you. Tom looked into the next room and thought he saw himself looking back from the doorway. That really upset him. I looked and then I assured him that it wasn't him looking back and that nobody else was around for miles. He finally got over it. Paranoia I guess. Like the song says: "Paranoia strikes deep, into your heart it will creep." That's how it was for Tom.

I wanted to draw Tom's picture while I was on LSD to see what it would look like when we were straight. I drew paisleys for his eyes, one of which was closed, and the sketch was a real trip when we got straight. However that night Tom again freaked out when I showed him my drawing, and said: "Do I really look like that?" I told him I didn't think so, and that it was his psychedelic self as seen by me on acid. He calmed down. I remember that my skin looked a bit blue-green, and I kept wondering what purpose the hair on my hands and arms served. We discussed the hair issue for quite awhile, and we were up laughing all night. We came up with a strange scenario that perhaps it was really winter and we were snowed in with no help for miles. We couldn't see outside due to the shutters over the windows, so we speculated about this possibility. Finally we decided that we had the option of opening a door and looking outside to see if we were snowed in or not. Of course when we checked outside there was no snow and we were alright.

The mustard painted aspirin wasn't just aspirin after all. The space cadet back in the Haight knew his stuff and although I didn't want this trip it worked out O.K. I don't think Owsley was the chemist and I never heard of Yellow Dot before or after that day in the Haight. After my early experience with this yellow dot, I later ran into Sunshine, Purple Haze, and some others. One time my cousin was backstage with Jimmy Hendrix and Owsley gave him a handful of purple haze. He took it and got arrested for walking naked on El Camino Real near Millbrae. He said he lost his inhibitions and just let loose. You know, he wanted to feel free so he took his clothes off. I don't recommend this to you but it was part of the legal unrestricted culture at the time.