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Actually apparently some people thought I had money. Met a guy who lived up the hill somewhere on Elsie Street. I invited him into my Winfield house. It was an apartment but we called it a house, for a goodly visit. I was nice. He was nice. We had a good time. So some little time later I am sitting at a table with the Professor in North Beach having coffee, and this same guy walks up to the table, stares down at me and says: "Nothing I hate more than a rich hippie", and walks off never to be seen again. I think now that maybe he was one of those people, who a complete stranger in your house, goes to your refrigerator uninvited and looks in to see how much and of what food one has. We would get this sometimes and Ford and I discussed it. Apparently how much food in the refrigerator was the big tip-off to the truth of one's character. Was this guy the hippie police ? I said to the Professor, "What's with him? I am not rich". What a complete betrayal of my hospitality. I was staggered. A disgust with rich hippies was a refrain with certain of the lower middle class types and I heard it more than once, although not necessarily directed at me.
I played the role of hippie with gusto and I lived in a house on a hill. Met a guy once in a cafe at Mission and twenty-fourth. Never went there more than a few times. It was crowded and he sat at the same table. I recognized him from the Mission Clinic where there was some discussion between him and the receptionist about his glasses, and he made a crack about some meaning of his octagon shaped spectacles. He was old, in his sixties probably with longish hair and a cane. We did some intellectual sparring. Out of the blue he wanted to take me on as a student. Said he could teach me things. Said he was from a family of preachers who had immigrated to California in the late eighteen hundreds. Said he was somewhat famous and he had people watching out for him, all up and down Mission Street. So now I was thinking he is a schizophrenic, which this being after my epiphanic episode, I could by a few intellectually directed probes, check him out. I told him I was not interested, especially after he asked me where I lived, and I told up the hill in Bernal Heights. This he disapproved of. A man of the people must live in the flatlands. It was incompatible for a political radical to be living on a hill.
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