For all its precious boutiques and pricey clothes shops and restaurants, and its good-willed hyper-liberalism, Haight-Ashbury has a faintly menacing quality. Punk drifters sitting on the curb staring us down as I backed in the car, as though to say this parking space is ours. Hordes of pierced-face, purple-haired youth walking three or four abreast, owning the sidewalks too, everything under the white sky.

We split up and I wandered listlessly, eventually hanging out in an empty radical bookstore and flipping through little stapled and Xeroxed lesbian art mags and tracts by tired revolutionaries.