“I Am Looking For A Guy Named Deadeye”

I’ve never been as big a fan of Joan Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays as some are, but I love her non-fiction, especially her must-read collections about the ‘6os and its aftermath, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.

The title essay in the former collection, a first-person account of the so-called Summer of Love, is brilliant street-level reportage and a ugly riposte to depictions of the time and place as paradisiacal.

Didion had descended into a personal torpor previous to heading to the Bay Area, but she emerged with a clear-eyed portrait, which was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post. An excerpt:

“I am looking for a guy named Deadeye and I hear he is on the Street this afternoon doing a little business, so I keep an eye our for him and pretend to read the signs in the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street when a kid, sixteen, seventeen, comes in and sits on the floor beside me.

‘What are you looking for?’ he says.

I say nothing much.

‘I been out of my mind for three days,’ he says. He tells me he’s been shooting crystal, which I pretty much already know because he does not bother to keep his sleeves rolled down over the needle tracks. He came up from Los Angeles some number of weeks ago, but he does not remember the number, and now he’ll take off for New York, if he can find a ride. I show him a sign offering a ride to Chicago. He wonders where Chicago is. I ask where comes from. ‘Here,’ he says. I mean before here. ‘San Jose, Chula Vista, I dunno. My mother’s in Chula Vista.’

A few days later I run into him in Golden Gate Park when the Grateful Dead are playing. I ask if he found a ride to New York. ‘I hear New York’s a bummer,’ he says.”

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