Usually when I get a call from someone I haven’t heard from in over fifteen years, it’s because they are in need of money, or they want me to read their manuscript. In this case, it was the latter.
When “Bird” called me from his perch in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, it reminded me of days gone by, living with my hippie first wife on Belvedere Street, and walking a fine line between what is arguably the most hippie neighborhood in the world, and my job in the downtown financial district.
Those old-school hippies always have nicknames. There was a fellow somewhere in the Haight who I never met face-to-face but apparently looked like me, and his name was “Tree,” and I was often mistaken for him. Though while downtown I tied my hair back and wore a suit, while in the neighborhood, I wore my hair down, sported a large earring in one ear and sometimes wore tie-die shirts.
Wife number one was “Lotus,” a name she received some time in the late ‘60s in the French Quarter of New Orleans while she was part of an obscure religious group that pulled their philosophy from a curious and random mix of Hinduism, Theosophy and ‘60s hippie sensibility.
“Bird” didn’t get his name from anything quite so exotic, it came merely from his birth name, which was William Birdwood.
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“Bird” didn’t get his name from anything quite so exotic, it came merely from his birth name, which was William Birdwood. I met him one day as I came home from work, in my suit and tie, and he was on the corner of Haight and Ashbury selling copies of the Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal. He lived in a broken-down van on Stanyan Street, and had lived a simple and Bohemian life off and on in that exotic neighborhood ever since coming back from the war in ’72.
We would often spend long hours parked in one coffeehouse or another in the neighborhood, where we would order a single cup of coffee and take up a table for an entire afternoon and read poetry and prose at each other, and at anyone else who wanted to come by and listen. During such sessions, the businessperson in me would come out and I would wonder how those coffeehouses stayed afloat, as most patrons were just like us. I came to the conclusion that most of them were launched by hippies with inheritances and an idealistic concept of what to do with their money, and they would run them, invite people to poetry readings, and hang art on the wall until their money ran out and the doors closed for good. Poets, you see, are not very good customers, and idealistic hippies are not very good at creating profitable businesses.
Bird had written a book.
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He asked me to take a look at it and help him publish it on Amazon, and I reluctantly agreed. When he said he would send it to me, I expected him to email me a digital copy, but alas, true to his Bohemian nature, it was hand-written and would have to be sent via US Mail. Thankfully, since I would have to type it myself, it wasn’t all that long.
As a street philosopher with some local notoriety, he had plenty of time to come up with Great Ideas, and this one was for a Constitutional Amendment that set out what is a reasonable approach to the sticky subject of abortion which takes both pro-life and pro-choice arguments into account. I won’t go into the politics of it in this space, but if we ever manage to get people to take it seriously, it may well have some legs. The book is simply titled, “The Amendment: Revised, Corrected and Refined.”
Bird is not a politician, lobbyist, or Washington DC insider, but perhaps that is a good thing when it comes to making Constitutional amendments.
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The book itself covers the politics and emotions of the abortion argument, but it is not a political manifesto – rather, the politics are contained in a history of the man himself, his journey through life and the story of how he came to his political conclusion.
Those who have lived in the Haight for any length of have probably seen him on the street corner at one time or another, chanting, “Poetry for sale, poetry for sale.” You may see him reading from the Journal to a group of enchanted tourists who have never met a real live hippie before. His bio, which is on the back page of the book, reads: “The author is a crazy old hippie; a mutilated entity found writing amidst the human flotsam and jetsam of the American urban landscape. Ignore him. Everyone does.”
Bird is not a politician, lobbyist, or Washington DC insider, but perhaps that is a good thing when it comes to making Constitutional amendments. We sometimes lose sight of the true spirit of the Great Experiment in leaving everything up to career politicians, thinking they know better, when in reality, the best ideas may just come from crazy old hippies in the Haight-Ashbury. Regardless of which side of the abortion argument you may fall, it’s worth a read. It may just change the future of American politics.
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Every once in awhile, as an Editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal , I look up the Journal on the internet. Over the years, I’ve found several articles etc. about meeting Bird. I probably don’t share a lot of his opinions but he’s a really good poetry salesman (is that an oxymoron?)