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the street, the morning sun behind her, long legs set like a gunslinger’s. Really a beautiful woman, like a star. She had on jeans and an orange tank top and there was a sort of snake bracelet clasped to her upper arm. Her long hair was crisp and spiky like straw and in the sun it was the color of gold. She had high cheekbones and the eyes of a cat, and though she was certainly looking our way, she didn’t seem to see us.
    “Who’s that?” I said, and caught myself whispering.
    “That’s Eerie.” Laurel linked her arm through mine to turn us away. “She’s on her own trip. Don’t think about her.”

When we met at the tar pits wasn’t the first time D—— and I had occupied the same space. Maybe the first time we saw each other truly. But our paths had crossed before, and not only in the Haight … where D—— had been quite a visible figure, with his garlands and his maidens. But he knew the Tenderloin as well as the Haight, and so did I.
    I’d walked by the house on Cole Street a time or two. Seen an auburn-haired girl in a macramé vest leaning out the bay window on the second floor, dangling a chain of clover blossoms that nearly grazed the top step below. I might even have been inside the place for a party, once or twice, but my memory of that time’s a little unclear, though certainly the parties were better with the Airplane and the Dead. I don’t think I went to D——’s classes on Cole Street, though it seems that I knew they were happening, through word of mouth, or maybe there were posters. The same kind of rap we would hear on the ranch. At the peak of the Haight scene, D—— couldn’t really compete with the rock stars, not when they were all just over the next block. To get the People to pay proper attention, he had to lead them into the desert.
    Not that I was paying much attention at the time, but I could see the nucleus of the People forming then. The group around D—— had its own queer vibe already, the hum of everyone thinking the same tight gnarly set of thoughts. I’d feel it when I passed their house, or when they sometimes used to take over the Calm Center of the Psychedelic Shop, and even at free concerts in the Panhandle, though in those circumstances their clustered knot of energy tended to get broken up and rearranged by the movements of much bigger crowds and everything the music let loose.
    I wasn’t hearing the voices then, or they weren’t saying much to me. Only my name sometimes. Mae. Mae … I hadn’t yet been seized by the notion that the voices Laurel and I both heard were coming from D——, or through him. They gave me no more than half-formed syllables, sighing on the wind …
    I didn’t really live anywhere then. None of us did, or hardly anyone. We washed in and out of the crash pads like surf, or slept in the parks on the warm summer nights. A night in jail was always a possibility, but they didn’t have cells enough to keep anybody too long. And there was a crib down in the Tenderloin that Louie let me use, if I was working.
    There’s a picture in my mind of D—— in the Panhandle, a bandanna knotted around his neck, his hair and his expression soft, his eyes half shut, blissed out on the music. A girl or two draped over him, surely—Creamy and Crunchy were already there, or maybe one of them was Stitch. It must have been O——’s big free show in the park, when O—— was in the prime of his glory, those brilliant days before Eerie was lost, and the sunset gilded his half-breed skin, and he raised the guitar and tilted it to the sun so the strings flowed away in red rivers of light …
    Seeing D—— in a different context was like seeing a different guy—he had that chameleon quality to him, though I did know he was the same. I was leaving the Ellis Street crib at first light and saw him there with Louie on the corner of Hyde. Louie had probably been up all night, was still tricked out in his velvet bell-bottoms and the tall felt