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Slouching Toward Bethlehem 184kxww
Slouching Toward Bethlehem 184kxww
Number Sixty-one
Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1967)
by Joan Didion
Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to Otto is feeling better because he discovered it wasn’t the cocaine-and-
see what it’s all about & gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer wheat that made him sick. It was the chicken pox, which he caught
who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then baby-sitting for Big Brother and the Holding Company one night when
feeds her 3,000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed they were playing. I go over to see him and meet Vicki, who sings now
body for the biggest Haight Street gangbang since the night before and then with a group called the Jook Savages and lives at Otto’s place.
last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy. Rape is as common as bullshit Vicki dropped out of Laguna High “because I had mono,” followed the
on Haight Street. Kids are starving on the Street. Minds and bodies Grateful Dead up to San Francisco one time and has been here “for a
are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam. while.” Her mother and father are divorced, and she does not see her
father, who works for a network in New York. A few months ago he
Somebody other than Jane Lisch gave me an address for Chester came out to do a documentary on the District and tried to find her, but
Anderson, 443 Arguello, but 443 Arguello does not exist. I telephone couldn’t. Later he wrote her a letter in care of her mother urging her to
the wife of the man who gave me 443 Arguello and she says it’s 742 go back to school. Vicki guesses maybe she will sometime but she doesn’t
Arguello. see much point in it right now.
“But don’t go up there,” she says.
I say I’ll telephone. ***
“There’s no number,” she says. “I can’t give it to you.”
“742 Arguello,” I say. We are eating a little tempura in Japantown, Chet Helms and I,
“No,” she says. “I don’t know. And don’t go there. And don’t use and he is sharing some of his insights with me. Until a couple of years
either my name or my husband’s name if you do.” ago Chet Helms never did much besides hitchhiking, but now he runs
She is the wife of a full professor of English at San Francisco the Avalon Ballroom and flies over the Pole to check out the London
State College. I decide to lie low on the question of Chester Anderson scene and says things like “Just for the sake of clarity I’d like to categorize
for awhile.