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hard against the steady upward slope of the boulevard. He
hears chaotic noise in the distance, the rumble of a crowd. He smells a
barnyard odor, like what you’d smell passing near a zoo.
    Someone
shrieks in the night.
    Ahead,
around the bend, rises the flat roof of the De Young Museum. A large stone sphinx
crouches in the darkness.
    Adrenaline
shoots through Chi’s blood. Could demons be invading here and now? For that is
his skipfather’s theory about why the Summer of Love is a Hot Dim Spot. It’s a
gateway for demons.
    People
gather on the boulevard.
    Wary,
Chi joins them.
    A young
teen lies writhing on the asphalt. Cropped black hair plasters her tearstained
face. A teenage boy tries to hold her, but her frantic, flailing strength
nearly overpowers him.
    “My
heart!” she screams. “Jesus Christ, my heart!”
    “What
is it?” Chi asks quietly, jumping at the sound of his own voice.
    “Her
heart, dincha hear?” says the struggling boy. “Some dude in the band wouldn’t
look at her, an’ her heart is broke.”
    “She’s
trippin’ on Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace,” says the boy’s companion,
another teen in a bush hat who glances anxiously over his shoulder. He digs a
capsule out of his shirt pocket. “Hey, Bobby, get this red down her fuckin’
throat, and let’s split, man.”
    “Stop,”
Chi starts to say. “Don’t do it. You need to--”
    The
teen in the bush hat whips around, thrusts his face in Chi’s. He must be all of
seventeen, but his face is as gaunt as an old man’s. “Need to do what? ”
His hard eyes flick over Chi’s hair and clothes.
    Chi
backs away. Is his costume wrong? “Leave her alone.”
    “Yeah?
You a narc, man?”
    “I’m
havin’ a heart attack! Jesus Christ, Bobby, I’m dyin’!”
    “You
need to be cool,” Chi says. This girl cannot be the one he’s searching for. Her
hair is all wrong: too short, too dark. “Just be cool.”
    The
teen in the bush hat hands the capsule to Bobby, who tries to push it in the
girl’s mouth. She clamps her lips shut. Bobby pinches her nostrils. When she
gulps for air, he jams in the capsule, forcing her to swallow.
    “Jesus,
you’re tryin’ to kill me!”
    “Shut
up, Penny Lane,” Bobby says.
    “Somebody
help me! Help me, please!”
    Bobby
slaps Penny Lane’s face. “I said shut up!”
    “He.
. . .he’s trying to kill me!”
    Chi
jogs away.

    Gossip, Innuendo
& All The News That Fits
    Psychotomimetic
amphetamines are seen in the Haight-Ashbury in June, 1967. Stanley Owsley III,
the famed underground LSD chemist, allegedly named STP after Scientifically
Treated Petroleum, the popular oil additive, “because it makes your motor run
smoother and lubricates your head.” Dealers claim STP produces three days of
Serenity, Tranquility and Peace.
    Five
thousand hits of STP were passed out free during the Celebration of the Summer
Solstice in Golden Gate Park. Users experienced, over a period of twenty-four
hours, heart palpitations, muscle tremors, hallucinations eighty times more
potent than mescaline, acute anxiety, and, in certain cases, paranoid
psychosis. Barbiturates typically used to calm a bad LSD trip intensify STP’s
adverse symptoms and should be strictly avoided.
    Love Needs Care by David E. Smith,
M.D. and John Luce
    (Little Brown and
Co., 1968)
    It’s
not like Chi to jog away from a lass in distress, but he’s got to get on with
the SOL Project. No mistakes. The girl will probably go the
Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic and receive treatment there in the days
following the Celebration of the Summer Solstice. She may be the girl who will
be admitted under one of her street names to the Psychiatric Aid and Referral
Service and diagnosed as psychotic, but return to the street. Not long after,
she will die from a rape-beating in Golden Gate Park. Her alias is recorded in
the Archives, but her legal name has long disappeared. She is an a.k.a., then a
Jane Doe.
    Hair
plastered over her face, screaming, “Help