After the Tall Timber by RENATA ADLER

bells), who lives with the family of another girl, “because my mother and I don’t get along”; and Len, a seventeen-year-old waiter and boarder at the Fifth Estate, who had left his home in New Jersey early in October with a friend (who got homesick and hitchhiked back after a week). There was also another longhair, obviously much older than the rest, whose vest was covered with buttons reading “Jesus Pleases,” “Come to Middle Earth,” and “At Least George Murphy Could Dance,” among other things, and who was reading a copy of the Free Press .
    Len, who said he planned to return home “as soon as they don’t need my help out here anymore,” expressed sorrow that he had forgotten to write to his eleven-year-old sister on her birthday.
    “I never know what to write home,” Zak said, scuffing one of his boots on the stones. “What am I going to write? Hello, I’m here, you’re there, hello? What else is there to say? It’s always a hassle.”
    Dot said she would be returning to her own house for a few days, to babysit with her younger brother and sister while her parents went on a holiday to Las Vegas. (The frequency with which California teen-agers are asked to care for their younger siblings, or their friends’ siblings, creates a thriving nomad-baby-sitter economy.) She asked Zak and Marie whether they would pick her up the following evening—to go first to the studio of a sculptor named Vito, and later on (from 2 to 6 A.M.) to a rock session called the After Hours at the Hullabaloo.
    Zak said he couldn’t afford it. He had invested all his money in applying for a license to open a coffeehouse—which, since the name “The Trip” was already taken, he hoped to call The Travel Agency. His application had made no progress at all, and he was waiting for Al Mitchell, who had promised to let him call his coffeehouse, for a time, the Fifth Estate Annex. Marie said she would hitch a ride to Dot’s place, without Zak, and she and Dot could hitch a ride to Vito’s place together.
    A young man, fairly conventionally dressed and coiffed, crossed the patio toward the group. “Has the Man been here tonight?” he asked, speaking low and rapidly.
    “No,” Zak said.
    The young man immediately removed his jacket and tie, and brushed what proved to be an astonishing amount of hair forward from behind his ears. “Out there, I have to think of my job,” he said, and slouched against a wall to wait around with the rest.
    The Free Press recently opened a bookstore on Fairfax Avenue, which intersects Sunset Boulevard a few yards from the eastern end of the Strip. The store is right across the street from Canter’s Restaurant, a large delicatessen, inside and in front of which, for some months now, the longhairs—old and young, and of every persuasion—have been gathering at two every morning. The reaction of the restaurant’s manager to the types who now frequent his place is less than hospitable; he comments, as they pass to their tables, “What a sight!” and “Why don’t they wash?” and he stands, vigilant, at the cash register to block the entrance of anyone who is not wearing shoes. (A policeman outside tries to keep the crowd there from blocking the sidewalk and from engaging in traffic in marijuana or drugs.) The Free Press bookstore, called the Kazoo, is open from ten in the morning until 2 A.M. In addition to a very wide and good selection of paperbacks, it sells many books and pamphlets about the assassination of President Kennedy, innumerable little magazines and obscure works (including a six-page poem, “The Love Book,” by Lenore Kandel, which was recently confiscated on grounds of obscenity in San Francisco), many works on drugs and hallucinogens, and some works on religions of the East (including one called Practical Mysticism ). There is also a counter at which the shop sells objets d’art, buttons (“Ronald Reagan for Fuehrer,” “Be Creative, Invent a Sexual Perversion,”