The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current, January 14, 1988, Page 12, Image 11

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    Now the Grim Reaper wears flowers in San Francisco
By Charles Lieurance
Senior Editor
"There has been a crystals renais
sance in the rediscovery of these tools
in what can be called ‘sacred technol
ogy.’ Translated, this means that crys
tals facilitate alignment with your
spiritual evolution, helping you on the
path to healing. Come find out how to
apply the use of these crystals in at
taining your 'Highest Good.’”
—San Francisco “New
Age” classified advertisement
// w ast year we closed this street
** I off, no problem. There were
hundreds of us partying in
the streets. Where is everybody?”
“They’re dead.”
It was a flat, lifeless, resigned re
sponse to a naive question, a response
offered by the old gay guard on Castro
Street, San Francisco, New Year’s
Eve 1987.
True, last year the gay population
of the city’s Castro district had created
a throng of color, feather boas and
screeching noisemakers, but since
then thousands had died of AIDS. At
a quarter till midnight, in the final
moments of a lethal year, about a
hundred people, maybe less, tried to
create enough noise to raise the dead
and close the street. They skipped
frantically across the streets on green
lights and were easily halted by one
police officer on the red ones. They
tried to hold hands and make a circle
to block the intersection, but the dis
play of unity never happened. One gay
man with long black hair turned his
face to the cold northern California
sky at midnight and shouted, “We
made it through another year!”
Two lesbians tried to TP a police
car, but lost interest
Caught in the skipping feet was one
of the city’s numerous free newspa
pers. This particular one advertised
plans to turn Alcatraz into a “New
Age” Eden, a holistic, karmically
sound, pyramid-energized, crystal
line paradise where Paul Winter’s
hymns to harp seals and whales would
float listlessly out to sea — where
tourists stood at the rails of tour boats
trying to imagine what the great,
unencroachable prison once looked
like. People come to the West for
decadence, for the brine smell and
unscrupulous undertrimmings of the
Barbary Coast, for glimpses into the
often sanguinary mythology of those
denizens of America packed next to
the jagged cliffs that become sharper
and fiercer as one travels north along
the coast highway from L.A.
Since a tourist can’t see the prison
where A1 Capone sat imprisoned but
still enthroned, they head for the
remarkable cavernous bars of China
town, with ornate Fu Manchu door
ways. They rarely get as far back into
the smoky recesses as they’d like, but
they sit at the bar and imagine bar
gains whose negotiations began in
some primordial dynasty that culmi
nate with incense and ritual some
where beyond the bar and well before
the back alleys.
Acid. It has remained. It’s the
cleanest and best acid you can get in
this country. It’s not as monstrous as
Greek acid, but its subtlety is its glory.
The lysergic imagination still creates
mostof the images in Haight Ashbury,
where hippie debutantes buy novelty
hookahs and step into the Neighbor
hood Gap outlet for a pair of stone
washed jeans.
On New Year’s Eve they crowd
into Oakland Coliseum for the ritual
called The Grateful Dead, which is an
inherently lysergic ritual. And here
the Dead arc at their populist best,
piping epic space jams into the lobby
where hundreds without tickets recre
ate the concert via substance abuse,
whirling in hypnotic wheelsof tiedye,
which begins to mat against them like
colored crepe paper from the high
school proms these misfits never at
tended. Inside there arc rows of tape
machines and pictures are taken
freely. Jerry Garcia sings in a fragile
voice, “I will survive ...”
Just like on Castro Street, where
the police arc swatting the celebrants
off the street with little effort, where
they arc turning down the throb of
Bronski Beat and searching for a lull
aby to rock them slowly into insensate
forgetfulness.
The year-end news in San Fran
cisco says that this year more people
than live in all of Omaha crammed
onto the Golden Gate Bridge to cele
brate its 50th anniversary. No one at
the start of 1988 could say which
meant more, closing the bridge or not
closing the street.
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_MRIORCLk^
“ ' HOIC w
leadership FjreUenre Starts Herr