Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene Read Online Free PDF Page A

she rode forth each day on her mechanical Rosinante, Don Quixote to Al Fister’s Sancho Panza, she became increasingly aware that her quest did not take her simply from one town to another, or from one part of town to another part, but into another world, if not another dimension—the twilight world of the hippies, who lived by rules she did not know and spoke a language she could only imperfectly understand.
    It was a strange world, as she came to know it, a world where pot and peyote replaced the dry martini, where LSD and desoxyephedrine enlarged the vision of pale ghosts of real people who dreamed and drifted but did not dance to the music of the sitar played by Ravi Shankar. Like others who lived outside this world, she had fallen into the common error of thinking of the hippies as rebels, but now she began to understand that they weren’t rebels at all. They were secessionists. Unable to accept or change the system, they had simply split, flaked off, voluntarily got lost. And lost, she thought, they were. Going nowhere, they had lost their way. The beat generation. When she was young, more years ago than she cared to count, it had been the lost generation. The years of the expatriates. Now, doing her legwork on Sunset Strip, riding the Hog in a helmet to Laguna Beach or wherever the hippies were and the Lost Lenore might be, making her inquiries and watching the contemporary breed on the bright beaches or in psychedelic joints or community pads smelling of pot, she kept remembering a phrase, a title used long ago by Scott Fitzgerald for one of his books: All the Sad Young Men . And all the sad young women. That was the adjective. That was the mot juste . These young people were sad. Sitting with folded hands in limbo. Contemplating a kind of universal navel in a chemical nirvana. Negative. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. Even their sex, which permeated their haunts, was a kind of negation. Sex is so convenient when it’s too much trouble to love. The nothing world. Nada. But it isn’t, Mr. Hemingway, a clean, well-lighted place.
    Miss Withers on the hippie scene stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. In all of hippiedom no one was less a hippie than she. When she started out on her excursions, she faithfully wore, pushed over her bun as a concession to the law, the crash helmet that the law prescribed; but carefully preserved in a box at her feet in the sidecar was her current selection from the inventory of astonishing hats that had invariably incited the derision of Inspector Oscar Piper. When the Hog was deserted and the excursion pursued afoot, she abandoned the helmet and donned the hat, feeling fully dressed for the first time since leaving home. In bars and coffee shops and even appearing suddenly to the gaping vision of a startled initiate in the open doorway of some shabby pad to which she had gone on a false scent, she was a stern apparition who probably caused more than one runaway disciple to remember uneasily the days of rapped knuckles and home arrest.
    On one occasion, informed of the event and the date by Al Fister, who read the Los Angeles Free Press and otherwise kept tuned to the grapevine, she wandered among the incomprehensible, and to her indescribably dull, happenings of a Griffith Park love-in. She had gone with Al as escort with more than a little trepidation, expecting a kind of unwashed public orgy. Nothing of the sort. Indeed, she observed no liberties exercised between the sexes to exceed, or even equal, those she had been aware of (by hearsay, or course) between young men and young women driven to indiscretion by the scent of honeysuckle and red clover on the picnics of her youth. She could not possibly understand, to begin with, how any one of the motley assemblage could have been incited to the slightest intimacy with any other one. They were unkempt and uncombed and frequently unwashed, as unprepossessing a lot as she had ever seen assembled in number, and about them, real or