THE RAVER

While prostitution, drug addiction and chronic homelessness follow many runaways, not all the kids who flock to live on Haight Street get stuck in a dead end life.

Raquel, now a 24-year old woman who works in a store on the street, first came to the Haight when she was 13, a runaway from the North Bay. Her parents were just a county away so she would generally only stay a couple weeks at a time.

At first, to get by, her and her friends made duct tape wallets, selling them for a couple bucks each. They then would pool their proceeds together for a hotel room and alcohol. By the mid-90s, the hippie look was long gone and she was part of a new element moving in. "By the time I got there, there was mostly all rave kids that were out there," she recalled. "I was a brat, a little punk rock goth kid. Started raving when I was 14 years old."

It was not long before she landed in the Haight that she got involved in drugs herself. Within a couple years, she had fallen into a good ecstasy connection, buying single hits for 20 cents, which she would sell at raves. "Basically we would just kick down for a couple hundred pills and we would sell those in the hallways for $20 each, and that would turn into us buying our own thousand order of pills. The next thing you know you are 16 years old with a helluva drug habit but with at least 40 to 50 grand cash on you at all times. There were points throughout the night where our backpacks would be so full of money that we'd have to leave the party because we were like, 'fuck we're going to get jacked.'"

Too young to rent, she would couch surf at friends or stay at houses of boys she would meet. "We were party girls, out of control party girls," she recalled.

Later she fell into a bad cocaine habit as well. "I was totally tweaked out of my head for like a good year, year and a half and went to the bottom of the barrel pretty quick," she said. Though she still drinks hard, she has kicked the white powder, even claiming to walk away from a major drug deal that would have made her rich for some time after waking up one day and deciding enough was enough.

Though no longer a street kid, she still has a bad-ass look, a belt made of bullets holding together her urban guerilla clothing, her red hair in dreadlocks. Despite a petite, though busty, build, she boasts she can still kick ass and she has a natural strength that gives her an energy even speed freaks can't match, it being far more consistent than any drug or caffeine buzz.

She spends part of her year working for growers in the Northern California regions where marijuana is the prime cash crop. Still possessing an entrepreneurial spirit, she has staked out a parcel where she will grow her own plants next year, the harvest expected to raise several hundred thousand dollars from a $25,000 investment. The profit she will then put into an ambitious theater project.

"If you do 99 plants and they are outdoor plants, you usually yield about one to five pounds per plant," she explains. "At one pound per plant - $3,000 a pound - that's $270,000, and that's your lowest minimum."

Ninety-nine plants is a key figure in the marijuana world. Not only is 100 plants the threshold for triggering federal mandatory minimum sentences, but it is the figure that Northern California counties like Sonoma allow for personal use for those with medical marijuana prescriptions. When California legalized pot for medicinal use, it left such regulations up to individual counties. In San Francisco, the figure allowed is six plants but in areas where marijuana money buys influence like Sonoma and Humboldt, the figure is as high as it can be without interfering with the feds. While the U.S. government regularly runs helicopters over marijuana plantations in those counties, sometimes to the disdain of local sheriffs who would rather handle the matter internally, medical marijuana has still left prosecution difficult. A person with 99 or less plants not only stays clear of a certain jail sentence but also can claim what they are doing is within state and local laws making it that much more difficult for a judge to impose any jail time at all. Sometimes it happens but sometimes people with more than 99 plants still get off clean too.

Luck avoiding authorities, hard work and avoiding falling into harder drugs again is all that keeps Raquel's theater dream from becoming a reality. She says she has been told by a few people - witches and clairvoyants - that in one of her past lives she died from alcoholism and another from a drug overdose. "I've worked out that karma this time," she believes.
 

SWINGING SAN FRANCISCO

In mid-summer, San Francisco was voted as the top city for singles in the U.S. by Forbes Magazine. While one has to wonder what makes Forbes magazine an expert on that subject there certainly is a good case to be made. It is a city where families are scarce, statistics showing there are in fact more dogs than children within its boundaries. According to some studies, it is women that are the greater beneficiary as straight single men are said to outnumber straight single women by 5 to 1. But it is not hard for a guy to get a date or three in a given week either, although he may have to tolerate that his date has several options as well.

San Francisco is also one known for being one of most decadent cities in the world. Referred to as the American Amsterdam to some, it can be much rowdier when it wants to, perhaps at times topped in the U.S. only by New Orleans during Mardis Gras. In September, for instance, when the annual Love Parade ends with a giant rave in front of City Hall, it seems only routine.

Though old-fashioned morals that were loosened in the 1960s seem to have remained unbounded since, there is also a Wild West mentality that predates the sexual revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century, it is estimated white women in the city who were prostitutes outnumbered those who were not. Prostitution is still common today, perhaps more so with the spike in rent that occurred in the late 1990s, although the more politically correct term is now "sex worker." Today, the city is also home to the Exotic Erotic Ball, education centers that offer orgasm retreats, a large BDSM scene and a seemingly successful collection of strip clubs, a tradition that dates to the Gold Rush though they are not nearly as colorful now. In the 1970s, San Francisco was a center for the porn industry and today it is home to Kink.com, which is accepted as a respectable business by many city dwellers. In early 2007, the BDSM Website purchased a city landmark, a centrally located former armory, for $20 million to turn into a dungeon for its shoots. Its former site - known as the Porn Palace - still holds Saturday night parties. Live in San Francisco for any length of time and you will meet a stripper, a hooker, a bondage model or a dominatrix in an everyday setting at some point. Adding to the lustiness is that Californians, men and women, are basically a horny lot.

***

I joke to several of my friends about my rectangle. On most days I don't leave my general neighborhood and being a writer working from home, I don't have to. The rectangle essentially stretches from Fillmore Street to the east and the approximately 50 blocks through Golden Gate Park to the ocean on the west. At times, I can go for a couple weeks traveling no further south than Waller, one block parallel to Haight Street, and no further north than Fulton, the street at which the Airplane mansion is located.

I will leave the neighborhood to see the occasional band though. On one Saturday, my first choice of entertainment was closer to home. I wanted to go to the Red Vic to see Jack Nicholson play a Haight Street hippie in the movie Psych Out, part of the theater's 40th Summer of Love series, but my Mediterranean beauty called me and invited me to see a punk band in the Mission. It was something else she described, however, that caught my attention more. Beforehand, she was going to meet a couple friends who were hosting a swingers party, something I can't say I'd ever seriously considered before, at least not when I've already been paired up with someone. Once Storm and John had joined us, the punk band plan stood little chance. As soon as Storm, being an avid nudist, heard there was a place she could take her clothes off, we were on our way.