were with getting high instead of what was happening at home. My mom started relying on me more and more to take care of my brother and sister. She seemed very preoccupied with when my father would be coming home so they could indulge in their new hobby together. They would also often disappear into their bedroom before we were asleep and close the door. I knew not to bother them, so I would have the task of getting my sister bathed and ready for bed and seeing that my brother had finished his homework and brushed his teeth. On the one hand, I was so happy that they seemed to be in love with each other again, but on the other hand, it was lonely. I could feel them slipping away from me.
Some nights my parents would sit on the couch smoking a joint together and my mother joined in with my father discussing things like Beat poetry. I don’t know how much my mother was really interested or if she understood the poetry, but they seemed to be on the same wavelength. They became much less physically active when they smoked. They would often just sit together not talking or doing anything that I could see.
One weekend, my father was sitting on the couch smoking a joint and I was reading one of my teen magazines. He held in the smoke as he spoke to me, breathing it in between words.
“You want to try some of this?” He held out the hand-rolled joint to me. I always felt my father thought I was a square. I was a good kid and didn’t talk back. I liked school, and at the school dances we had at the beginning of the year, I was clearly a wallflower. When he offered me a puff, I took it as a bit of a challenge.
“This is not like a cigarette, Dianne.” He showed me how to hold the joint between my fingers. I had already secretly tried smoking cigarettes with my friends after school by stealing some half-smoked butts we found in my backyard. Since my father was still a chain-smoker, that was easy. But I hated smoking cigarettes; in fact, it made me feel sick. I took the joint and hoped that I wouldn’t get queasy. Then my father would know for certain how square I was.
“You want to inhale the smoke deeply into your lungs and hold it there if you can. It might burn at first, so try not to cough.” I inhaled the marijuana and held it in my lungs as long as I could. Then I let out the smoke with a cough, just like he’d warned.
“Good job for your first time,” my father exclaimed. I was surprised by his praise. I didn’t feel anything from the pot, so I took another drag. This time I held it in longer. He told me I might not feel anything the first time. I thanked him and walked outside with my magazine and sat on a lawn chair. After a while I opened the magazine and all the words looked like they were in little trains on the page. I closed the magazine and opened it again. No change. The words were still in little trains moving on the page. I then closed my eyes and waited for the pot to wear off.
My mother had been out shopping with my brother and sister. When they got home, my sister ran out to see me. I opened my eyes and she was looking right at me.
“What were you saying?” she asked. I guess I had been mumbling something that I couldn’t remember. I know I wasn’t sleeping.
By this time, the pot had worn off, but my mouth was dry.
“I thought you might get some cotton mouth,” my father said, offering me a cold soda. The soda felt great on my parched throat. I looked at my family sitting in the backyard and was content with everything. My mother stood by him smiling at me. He had obviously told her that I was now turned on to the pot. We grilled hamburgers that night, and I ate two of them. The picture seemed perfect, but I was completely unaware of how quickly my life was going to change. It was only a small marijuana cigarette, but it opened the door to a new way of thinking and a new way of life. When we stepped through, there would be no turning back for us and especially for me.
Our family wasn’t the only thing changing in 1967. Almost overnight we embraced the happenings around Los Angeles. The counterculture was in full swing in San Francisco and was moving down the coast to our neighborhood. In 1967 over thirty head shops cropped up to support the growing demand for pot-smoking paraphernalia. The sale of pipes, hookahs, and fancy roach clips became part of the local economy. We were in the center of the hippie movement, with all its lofty goals of love and freedom to believe in whatever you wished. At the first Human Be-In at Griffith Park on January 14, 1967, people were encouraged to bring incense, pictures of their own gurus, flowers, and anything the color of gold as gifts of the magi. Like those the wise men presented at the birth of Christ, these gifts were to represent the birth of a movement where people could be brought together in bonds of love.
There was a small crowd at that first gathering, about six hundred people, and my family blended right in. There was no central organizer. People simply created a makeshift bandstand to the north side of the Greek theater in the park and did their own thing. Attendees played acoustic guitars, banged on drums, and plunked out tunes on African thumb pianos. I had never seen anything like this. People were scantily dressed, but there was no full nudity—not that I would have been surprised. Everyone was caught up in the same fever and no one was a stranger.
For this be-in, my father shirked his typical work clothes—slicked back hair and shoes—for a fringed suede vest, blue jeans, and sandals. Freed from the greasy pomade styling of the workweek, his hair stuck up in tufts as if it had been waiting for the right opportunity to express itself. My mother adapted to the dress code of the fashion free by wearing a long, flowing skirt with a cotton peasant blouse. She also wore a beaded headband across her forehead and made one to match for Kathy. I wore plain shorts and sneakers, but when someone handed me some beads I gladly wore them around my neck.
This was a be-in in which everyone was encouraged to just “be” themselves. Most people were older teenagers and people in their twenties. While there were little children running around with their faces painted, they fit into the scene as naturally as the beads and feathers. My parents were probably older than others there, but they looked the part, so no one made them feel unwelcome.
Meanwhile I felt like one of the few awkward young teens barely through puberty, but people were passing around joints and tangerines and no one questioned my age or asked me where my parents were. When I was offered a joint, I looked over to see if my father would approve of me smoking with strangers, but he wasn’t even watching what I was doing.
By early spring that year, after I turned fourteen, it was obvious things were changing at home, and it wasn’t just because my parents had started smoking pot. The agitation in my father was coming back, first in smaller ways and eventually in bigger ones. One day I walked into the dining room to find my father sawing the legs off our dining room table, one that he had made from a solid core door.
“Dad, what are you doing?” I asked. He was so focused he didn’t see me watching him.
“Check it out! The table wanted to be shorter. It told me so. Shhh, I have to be careful so I do it right.” His eyes were glassy and dilated, staring intently at the table. “There, isn’t that better?”
I wasn’t sure if he was addressing me or the table. He walked around the table admiring his work. Then he looked at the barrel chairs, which were now towering over what used to be our dinette. One by one he sawed the legs off the chairs until they matched the height of what now resembled a Japanese chabudai. When he took the chair legs off, each chair was tipped back. Somehow this seemed to work with the new design.
When Jan and Joan saw what my dad had done to our table, they thought it was hysterical, but not for the same reasons I did.
“Holy shit, Dianne,” Joan said. “Either your father has lost his mind or he was totally tripping.”
“What do you mean he was tripping?” I asked.
“LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide,” she replied.
“What
