On my third day in the Haight, I was in a café, eating a banana split. It was my second. The kick of my new freedom was wearing off. Gorging on sweets didn’t chase away the blues as it had a week earlier.

“Spare some change?”

I looked up. Slouching beside my small marble-topped table was a type I knew well. It was one of the underpass kids, the scroungy runaways I kept my distance from. The hood of his sweatshirt was up, framing a flushed face, ripe with pimples.

“Sorry,” I said.

The boy bent over, his face getting closer to mine. “Spare some change?” he said again.

His persistence annoyed me. So I glowered at him and said, “I should ask you the same question.”

“I’m not the one pigging out on a sundae.”

“I told you I don’t have any spare change.”

He glanced behind me and asked more affably, “How come you’re carrying that humongous suitcase around?”

“That’s my business.”

“I saw you yesterday with that thing.”

“I have enough money for this ice cream but that’s it.”

“Don’t you have any place to stay?”

“I’ve got tons of places.”

“You buy me a burger I’ll show you a good place.”

“I said I’ve got tons.”

“I know a good place in the park.”

“I can go into the park myself. Anyone can go into the park.”

“Not if they don’t want to get rolled they can’t. You don’t know what’s up, man. There’s places in the Gate that are safe and places that aren’t. Me and my friends got a nice place. Real secluded. The cops don’t even know about it, so we can just party all the time. Might let you stay there but first I need that double cheese.”

“It was a hamburger a minute ago.”

“You snooze, you lose. Price is going up all the time. How old are you, anyway?”

“Eighteen.”

“Yeah, right, like I’ll believe that. You ain’t no eighteen. I’m sixteen and you’re not any older than me. You from Marin?”

I shook my head. It had been a while since I had spoken to anyone my age. It felt good. It made me less lonely. But I still had my guard up.

“You’re a rich kid, though, right? Mr. Alligator?”

I didn’t say anything. And suddenly he was all appeal, full of kid hungers, his knees shaking. “Come on, man. I’m hungry. Okay, forget the double cheese. Just a burger.”

“All right.”

“Cool. A burger. And fries. You said fries, right? You won’t believe this, man, but I got rich parents, too.”

So began my time in Golden Gate Park. It turned out my new friend, Matt, wasn’t lying about his parents. He was from the Main Line. His father was a divorce lawyer in Philadelphia. Matt was the fourth child, the youngest. Stocky, with a lug’s jaw, a throaty, smoke-roughened voice, he had left home to follow the Grateful Dead the summer before but had never stopped. He sold tie-dyed T-shirts at their concerts, and dope or acid when he could. Deep in the park, where he led me, I found his cohorts.

“This is Cal,” Matt told them. “He’s going to crash here for a while.”

“That’s cool.”

“You an undertaker, man?”

“I thought it was Abe Lincoln at first.”

“Nah, these are just Cal’s traveling clothes,” Matt said. “He’s got some others in that suitcase. Right?”

I nodded.

“You want to buy a shirt? I got some shirts.”

“All right.”

The camp was located in a grove of mimosa trees. The fuzzy red flowers on the branches were like pipe cleaners. Stretching over the dunes were huge evergreen bushes that formed natural huts. They were hollow inside, the soil dry underneath. The bushes kept the wind out and, most of the time, the rain. Inside, there was enough room to sit up. Each bush contained a few sleeping bags; you chose whichever one happened to be empty when you wanted to sleep. Communal ethics applied. Kids were always leaving the camp or showing up. It was equipped with all the stuff they abandoned: a camping stove, a pasta pot, miscellaneous silverware, jelly jar glasses, bedding, and a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee the guys tossed around, sometimes enlisting me to even out the sides. (“Jesus, Gator, you throw like a girl, man.”) They were well stocked with gorp, bongs, pipes, vials of amyl nitrate, but understocked on towels, underwear, toothpaste. There was a ditch thirty or so yards distant that we employed as a latrine. The fountain by the aquarium was good for washing oneself, but you had to do it at night to avoid the police.

If one of the guys had a girlfriend there would be a girl around for a while. I stayed away from them, feeling they might guess my secret. I was like an immigrant, putting on airs, who runs into someone from the old country. I didn’t want to be found out, so remained tight-lipped. But I would have been laconic in that company in any case. They were all Deadheads, and that was what the talk was. Who saw Jerry on which night. Who had a bootleg of which concert. Matt had flunked out of high school but had an impressive mind when it came to cataloguing Dead trivia. He carried the dates and cities of their tour in his head. He knew the lyrics of every song, when and where the Dead had played it, how many times, and what songs they had played only once. He lived in expectation of certain songs being performed as the faithful await the Messiah. Someday the Dead were going to play “Cosmic Charlie” and Matt Larson wanted to be there to see creation redeemed. He had once met Mountain Girl, Jerry’s wife. “She was so fucking cool,” he said. “I would fucking love a woman like that. If I found a lady as cool as Mountain Girl, I’d marry her and have kids and all that shit like that.”

“Get a job, too?”

“We could follow the tour. Keep our babies in little sacks. Papoose style. And sell weed.”

We weren’t the only ones living in the park. Occupying some dunes on the other side of the field were homeless guys, with long beards, their faces brown from sun and dirt. They were known to ransack other people’s camps, so we never left ours unattended. That was pretty much the only rule we had. Someone always had to stand guard.

I hung around the Deadheads because I was scared alone. My time on the road made me see the benefits of being in a pack. We had left home for different reasons. They weren’t kids I would ever have been friends with in normal circumstances, but for that brief time I made do, because I had nowhere else to go. I was never at ease around them. But they weren’t especially cruel. Fights broke out when kids had been drinking, but the ethos was nonviolent. Everyone was reading Siddhartha. An old paperback got passed around the camp. I read it, too. It’s one of the things I remember most about that time: Cal, sitting on a rock, reading Hermann Hesse and learning about the Buddha.

“I heard the Buddha dropped acid,” said one Head. “That’s what his enlightenment was.”

“They didn’t have acid back then, man.”

“No, it was like, you know, a ‘shroom.”

“I think Jerry’s the Buddha, man.”

“Yeah!”

“Like when I fucking saw Jerry play that forty-five-minute space jam on ‘Truckin’ in Santa Fe,’ I knew he was the Buddha.”

In all these conversations I took no part. See Cal in the far underhang of the bushes, as all the Deadheads drift off to sleep.

I had run away without thinking what my life would be like. I had fled without having anywhere to run to. Now I was dirty, I was running out of money. Sooner or later I would have to call my parents. But for the first time in my life, I knew that there was nothing they could do to help me. Nothing anyone could do.

Every day I took the band to Ali Baba’s and bought them veggie burgers for seventy-five cents each. I opted out on the begging and the dope dealing. Mostly I hung around the mimosa grove, in growing despair. A few times I walked out to the beach to sit by the sea, but after a while I stopped doing that, too. Nature brought no relief. Outside had ended. There was nowhere to go that wouldn’t be me.