"Jeff Long - Elmo Hash And The Groovy Summer Of Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Long Jeff)

Elmo Hash and The Groovy Summer Of Love
by Jeff Long


Chapter One
Hookers and johns. Preachers and pagans. Capitalists and communists.

Here's the thing about corpses: They all stink the same, no matter what
they'd been in life. That's true on the hard streets of San Francisco, or in the
soaking rice paddies of the Ia Drang Valley.

My name's Hash. Elmo Hash. I cover the cops for the Frisco Foil. And the
Frisco cops usually cover me.

I'd spent a week on the kind of story that always makes me want to crawl
inside a bottle and never come out: Slogging through the San Francisco muck
on the trail of a one-legged whore's killer.

I found the bad guy, and what was left of the whore's good leg. Page One
copy and a byline. It pays the rent, with enough left over to drown the stink.

I told my editor that I quit -- with the usual understanding that I'd be back on
the beat after a headfirst dive into the sauce. A three-day bender at the
Chinaman's Tooth was my typical comp time for a job like that. I've been
bent longer for less.

The whole world outside the Tooth had gone crazy, and I needed time to
think. Or not to think.

More than a hundred thousand kids came to the Haight during the Summer
of Love, seeking bliss and some kind of pattern in the tapestry of life.

Now one of them was gruesomely dead. The story stung me for reasons I
can't really explain.

I didn't have much use for the hippie scene. To be honest, it gave me the
creeps. But we foilers have a natural affinity for the fringe. I'd hung with the
bohemians a dozen years before, following Keorovac and devouring
Burroughs. I could reach, if I tried.

I'd grown up enough, though, to know that a children's crusade would not
save the world from itself.

Neither would a bottle. Or a newspaper. But what the hell. We all got our
illusions.

The Tooth's owner, a Chinaman named Woo, is about four years older than
Moses. He keeps the lights dim, and makes sure no one rolls me while I'm
passed out at the bar. He doesn't mind if I drool, either.