 Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin overdosed that winter (Jim Morrison would follow by July), while I agonized in my personal life over where it was heading. I attended group therapy at the Marin County Hospital, which got me nowhere except a crush on the male therapist. While I was busy crashing and burning, my mother in Oregon was receiving honors and awards for being a "woman of achievement" and "citizen of the year" in her community where she was the children's librarian. As for the war,18-year-olds who were dying in Vietnam were finally given the right to vote in the spring of 1971. And within a few miles of me, the ferocious and beautiful Angela Davis was being held in the county jail as a civil rights political prisoner.We made a final Marin County move that summer, when I was 32, to San Rafael where we inhabited the bottom floor of a big house with a large front yard space and a small back yard. Our first upstairs neighbors were a couple of guys, one of whom was the photographer who took this photo by a front window and used our pantry space for a darkroom. I got a job at a rehab center helping clients find employment as they left treatment. For a short time, two of them rented our front room and through them I began to take amphetamines, eventually going alone to a dealer's house for the first and only time in my life to buy some. |