I arrived in the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love in 1967. I was nineteen, alone, and didn't have the slightest clue who I was or what I was doing.

Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane started here, but I never met them. I was just a long haired punk kid with a perpetual hard-on, looking for someone to fuck.

The first thing I did was buy some amazing original fish and chips, wrapped up in a newspaper, and ate it in the middle of the Park.

Then I met a guy who sold me some pure meth, which back in those days was the real deal. I was wired nonstop for three days and finally crashed in the Park. Somehow I had found a blanket and just wrapped myself up in it.

That's when my older brother Dana found me, and took me back over the bridge to his place in Oakland. He checked me into Napa State hospital, a mental institution, for a week, where I detoxed.

He saved my life, and in the end I wasn't able to save his. He died in a nursing home for the mentally ill, while I was living in Idaho. I had tried to get him into a home in Victor, ID, a place where I worked with daily, transporting some good old boys as a Paratransit driver for the Valley.

My family didn't want him there, and it's the reason I bailed and moved to Tennessee. I found out he died in that home, a month after he passed.

He saved me, but I had failed my brother.