Preface:
Renaissance
In Cyberspace

The Tip
of the Hook

WildCare

Twisted

The Prince,
As The King
His Father
Lies Dying

A Ghost
Among
The Ghosts

   When I was young, I always carried a paperback book called Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre in the back pocket of my dungarees, with the title showing, and I self-consciously filled notebook after notebook. I never let ignorance interfere with my pretentiousness in those days, and it's mostly from embarrassment that I haven't looked at those notebooks in years -- decades, in fact.
   But one morning a half-remembered dream leaves me scrambling for some half-remembered pages in a tattered notebook labeled "Summer of Love -- Golden Gate Park Vignettes." Hands trembling, I find the title "You and Me Are Not Necessarily We," and I read aloud:

   I'm tripping in the park because, after all, it's been three days and the last trip has worn off, and I need to test the purple wedges that Superfreak wants to front me. It's late afternoon, the fog is thickening, I'm alone for a change because the clan jammed into Gary's panel truck and went to Big Sur while I stayed in the city to turn a deal that fell through, and Jeanie is at a bread-baking class at the Episcopalian church that's trying to reach out to the 100,000 starving teen-age hippies who've mysteriously materialized in the Haight-Ashbury.
   An old beatnik approaches my bench. Not a tourist -- thick wool navy blue sweater against the summer fog. Shaggy beard and pony tail shot with gray. Steel-rimmed glasses, weathered Greek fisherman's cap with a rakish tilt, jeans and some strange sneaker-type footgear -- like hightops, but gray leather alternating with canvas bits, and thick gnarled soles that leave footprints with a texture Išve never seen before in the fog-damp dirt around the bench.
   When he sits, I give him a smile and a nod -- even when the saucers are landing, I try to maintain the civility that greases the wheels of society -- but he stares straight into my eyes. I stare back. I'm not trying to fool anybody, and despite his years, or perhaps because of them, he knows why my pupils are the size of ebony nickels.
   "You remind me of my old photographs of the Sixties," he says with an easy grin.
   I think he means my old-fashioned beard, although his is even bigger. "Ulysses S. Grant?" I ask. "Walt Whitman?"
   "No, the Nineteen-sixties."
   "That would be... now."
   He looks shocked for a moment, then asks tentatively, "Are you from Worcester?"
   "Damn. I thought I lost the accent even before I lost the town."
   "Wild guess. Do you live at 1907 Page Street? Is this the Summer of Love?"
   "That's what the newspapers call it," I say, ignoring the address question. If he's some kind of supercop, he should know without asking. "Is that a wild guess too?"
   "My name is Bobby Bradford," he says abruptly. I'm beyond responding. He looks down at his hands. "Ah. Of course. I'm dreaming about myself, 35 years ago. This is a dream."
   "Maybe for you, pal. I'm totally conscious, myself."
   "You don't believe me,"he says, starting to relax again now that he's found a category for this experience. "Let's see. You're a Virgo with your moon in Libra and Cancer rising. Your wife, excuse me, not yet, your girlfriend, your old lady, is a Virgo with her moon in Cancer and Libra rising, and your best friend Billy Joe is a Cancer with his moon in Libra and Virgo rising, and once you saw him climb up that tree, that one right there, and disappear for three days. You're playing the soothsayer in 'Julius Caesar'at the Straight Theater, and you did the dress rehearsal on acid and decided you don't want a career in the theater because you got tired of telling people how magnificent they look. You've hitched across the country three times. You think the Berkeley political radicals are counterproductive, but you consider yourself a guerrilla in the psychedelic revolution. Do you believe me yet?"
   "You're just part of my trip," I shrug.
   "Oh yes," he says. "I'm very much a part of your trip. You might even say that at one point I will be your trip."
   "Are you trying to freak me out?" I ask, because I am half-seriously considering that he might be an old weirdo who wanders around the park looking for tripped out hippies of his own approximate size and shape and complexion -- we do look alike, although he's thicker and grayer, but we are hardly an uncommon type -- and gets his kicks by trying to blow their minds. Sort of a rapist of the mind-fuck variety.
   But he just shrugs back. "I can't freak you out. You've never had a bum trip, and you never will. At least not in the next 35 years. After that, I can't say."
   He retreats into silent thought. This is good, because my mind isn't exactly in a word-space; I mean, the foghorns a mile away are resonating in the base of my spine, the fog is wisping in one ear and emerging unimpeded out the other, the writhing trees and my body are melting and re-forming under a relentless wind massage.
   Nonetheless, under the circumstances I try to achieve a few moments of linear thought. I don't know if dreams can be real, but I strongly believe that trips are. Meta-real, even. So I determine to suspend my disbelief and see what he (I? we?) has for me. Advice? A clue, a warning, a blessing?
   "If you're dreaming this," I begin, "35 years from now..." hesitant, hopeful... "then we must have saved the world after all."
   Shrug. "It's still here. I don't know how much of the credit we can take. It's still pretty shaky."
   "So... if my future is to be you-I, are you-I trying to strip me-you of my-your pretensions of free will?Are you-I inevitable?"
   Shrug. "Maybe you face a jillion real choices and there are a jillion parallel universes and you can range freely through any of them. And I'm just a coincidental random you who happened to be the one to dream you. But I wouldn't bet on it."
   "You're not going to tell me some shit, are you?" There is no malice in his vibe, but my equanimity is fluxing nonetheless. "Trick me out as a prophet? Plant self-fulfilling prophecies?"
   Shrug. The old bastard shrugs a lot. Shit. So do I.
   "I don't have an agenda. I'm just dreaming,"he says. "I thought maybe you'd tell me something."
   "Let's trade," I suggest, mollified. "One message apiece."
   "All right. You first."
   "No, you. You have the benefit of 35 years of hindsight. Go ahead. Set the tone."
   "All right, here it is. Don't just screw around all the time. Work hard at your art, whatever it is."
   "That's two messages."
   "Not really. Your turn."
   For a dizzying moment I feel his thoughts, from the inside, and I blurt out, "You've never made it, have you?"
   "What do you mean, 'made it?'" Evasive.
   "No hit record, no best-seller, no juicy pivotal roles, no canvas in a museum collection."
   "No. Not one. Disappointed?"
   "Hell no," I say bravely. "Success would ruin me. It would be unnatural. My art would be warped. Compromised."
   "Good. Now you tell me something."
   "What can I tell you that you don't already know?"
   "Tell me something I've forgotten."
   "But I don't know what you remember." I think. Hard. "Okay. Here's what I give you: I agree."
   "To what?"
   "To take your advice. To not just screw around all the time. And to work at my art."
   "Thank you," the old beatnik says, smoothly standing -- "I have to pee" -- and gliding away as the fog thickens, dissolving before he rounds the first tree.
   I start toward home to find a pencil.