Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The essay begins with Didion’s description of a nation in moral crisis, particularly with regard to young people who are caught up in the psychedelic drug scene in the late spring of 1967. She decides to go to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, though she doesn’t yet know what she intends to find out.

From here, the essay unfolds as a series of vignettes that document Didion’s experiences in the city. She sees a sign on the street saying that a woman is looking for her lost “Christopher Robin” (85). While waiting for an acquaintance named Deadeye, Didion speaks to a man on crystal meth who is looking for a ride to New York. When she encounters him later, he has decided New York is a bummer. When she finally tracks down Deadeye, he offers her some marijuana and says he’s trying to set up a religious group.

Didion goes to dinner with her friends Don and Max. Max is a long-time drug user who takes LSD every week, and he tells her about his life. He wants to go to a commune in the Malakoff Diggings of Nevada, and they go to see his friend Otto about wanting to tag along. Otto tells Didion the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who was arrested in the park while on acid. When Didion tries to reach out to her, she’s too busy with a middle-school play.

After a brief scene of the Grateful Dead rehearsing while young women hang around, Didion buys some hamburgers for a group of runaways in the park. When she asks why they ran away, they talk about not wanting to do chores and other fairly standard inconveniences of teenage life. Later, when Didion goes to talk to a local police officer who has become notorious in the neighborhood, he tells her the problem is drugs and juveniles before she is barred from speaking to him—or any other member of the police—further.

Don, Max, and Max’s girlfriend Sharon take Didion to the Warehouse, a condemned garage that houses a number of people, including Sue Ann and her three-year-old son Michael; Michael spends most of his time playing by himself with joss sticks and a tambourine. The adults all get high on marijuana, and Sharon talks about going to get her younger brother to give him drugs and bring him into the community. They move to Max and Sharon’s house, and a man named Steve joins them. Steve tells Didion about taking thirty acid trips while he was in design school, most of them bad experiences. Later, she catches up with him and he talks about heading back to the East Coast, because “at least there [he] had a target” (98).

Didion goes to visit Arthur Lisch, who is an unofficial leader of a group called the Diggers, who are committed to helping people out in Golden Gate Park. The scene at Lisch’s house is chaotic and includes a young man coming down from a bad trip, a crying baby, and people preparing a meal for the people living in the park. When Didion follows up with them later, Arthur’s wife tells him they’re too busy with the people they’re caring for and directs her to Chester Anderson.

Chester Anderson is a holdover from the Beat generation who prints up communiques and leaves them around the neighborhood. Some are specific bits of neighborhood news, and others are more general, such as the one Didion describes that depicts a scene of a woman being drugged and raped. When she tries to track down Anderson, she is warned away by several people.

After a few days that Didion documents in small scenes, she meets Max, Tom, Sharon, and Barbara, who all intend to take acid. Beforehand, they all bicker and negotiate, and Max tells Didion that there’s always a nervous energy beforehand. All but Barbara take it, and they listen to a record without moving for four hours, which Didion documents by noticing what’s going on outside.

Didion runs into Deadeye, and he says he wants to start helping more people. It seems, however, that he’s going to be dealing drugs. She accompanies him to the home he has with his partner, Gerry. Gerry and Deadeye tell Didion that Gerry used to write poetry; while the two of them talk about drugs, Didion reads some of Gerry’s work, noticing that they are the poems of a young, hopeful woman. They go to check on a woman who is asleep on the floor, who ends up in the hospital the next day with pneumonia.

Didion checks in on the people she’s met. Max and Sharon talk about their first meeting and how acid brought them together; Deadeye and Gerry are planning to get married; Barbara tells Didion about how she’s invested in the “woman’s trip” of domesticity; after trying with Arthur Lisch, she runs into a kid who knows Chester Anderson, who gives her a hard time for being a journalist but takes her number. She meets with a police officer who agrees to talk to her in an unofficial capacity who says that nobody knows how to spot an undercover cop even though they all claim to.

Didion and her photographer look for more stories and agree to meet a man named Sandy who will take them to a Zen temple. When that’s a bust, Didion visits Michael Grant, who is a Krishna leader. He tells her about the success of the movement, but the Swami is in New York, so she isn’t able to meet him.

Didion moves away from vignettes to posit a theory about the hippie movement in Haight-Ashbury. It is not what the movement that has been described by the media thus far, which is based on a naïve desire to drop out of the political realities of the Vietnam era. Rather, Didion says it is a “desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum” (122). The political trappings that are ascribed to the movement are really the markers of a group of people who have not been given the tools to understand and live within traditional society.

Didion goes to the park on a Sunday when Janis Joplin is playing, and she sees Peter Berg, who is part of the Diggers and the Artist’s Liberation Front. He is there with a mime troupe in blackface, and they are harassing Black people in the park, telling them that the white hippies have freedom that the Black people don’t and jabbing them with fake nightsticks. Berg claims that it’s “street theater” (126). Didion wants to leave but is waiting for her acquaintance, Otto. When Otto arrives, he says there’s something she has to see. He takes her to meet a five-year-old who has taken acid. She claims she’s in “High Kindergarten” (127). The essay closes with Didion relating a story of Michael, the young boy living at the warehouse, starting a fire one morning. He is mildly injured, but the adults are more concerned with some hash that had fallen through a floorboard.