Sunny: The Hippie Chick

By Dawn Natelle

Reviewed and Edited by Eric

Chapter 11 – She loves you, ya, ya, ya

Sunny and I walked into the courthouse at about 9:30 the next morning and stopped just inside the main entrance. Neither of us knew where to go, or what to do to find out where Ben was, or where and when his bail hearing would be held. Just then we saw an attractive young black woman coming straight towards us.

“Are you Mitch and Sunny?” she asked as she neared.

“Yes, how do we know you?” I asked.

“Ben told me to look for a thin blonde girl with hip-length blonde hair,” she said, “I am Mary Lincoln and I will be representing Ben this morning.”

“His lawyer,” I said. She looked awfully young to be a lawyer.

“Not quite,” she said. “I finished law school last year, but I haven’t been able to find a position yet. There were four women in the class that graduated, and none of us have broken through the sex barrier yet. And I am black, to boot, so that just makes it harder for me to find a position. I’ve been working with the ACLU clinic doing pro bono work while waiting for a spot to open up. I heard of Ben’s case last night after they brought him in, and I was eager to work on his case. Luckily, he had no lawyer, or even legal aid yet. He seems to be a nice guy.”

“He is. Will they bail him out today?” Sunny asked anxiously.

“Probably,” she said. “If he was white with a rich father he would probably get off on his own recognizance. But the color of his skin, and his apparent poverty, means they will probably set a bail of $300 to $1000.”

Sunny deflated. “We only were able to scrape together $600.” She had emptied her bank account, and I was able to add $100 to it.”

“Don’t worry honey,” Mary patted her arm. “I’ll arrange a bail bondsman for him if it is more. Your money will help, even though they are only able to charge 10% for the bail money. Are you his girlfriend?”

“No,” Sunny said quickly. Mitch here is my guy. But Ben lives in our apartment. I don’t think Ben has a girlfriend.”

“Interesting,” Mary replied. “Ben thinks that he was set up by the cops.”

“He was,” I said, relating how I saw the cop pull the drugs from his pocket before searching the apartment.

“I thought so,” Mary said. “I have been studying these two guys for a few months now, and they had sent six different guys to jail on similar flimsy cases. There has been something fishy going on with them.”

“You might be interested in this then,” I told Mary, handing over the undeveloped film. “I don’t know what is on this, but I turned on a camera while they were there pummeling Ben, who didn’t resist.”

The young lawyer’s eyes widened as she took the film. “I want to get this developed as soon as possible. We won’t be able to use it in the bail hearing, but it might make all the difference at trial. Speaking of the hearing, Ben will be called at about 10:45 in courtroom seven. Get in as soon after 10 as you can to get good seats.”

There were 9 other bail hearings before Ben’s, and most of them went through in a shotgun fashion, with a bored looking assistant district attorney reading from a court record, then making a recommendation on bail or recognizance. As Mary had said, the color of the skin of the accused was definitely a factor, with three white boys released and the other six, five of whom were blacks and one Latino, getting bails from $500 to $800 set.

Finally, Ben came up, wearing the same clothes he had on when he had come back to the apartment yesterday, which fortunately were in good condition. The black eye he had received at some point didn’t make him look less dangerous, and the judge set his bail at $500. Then it was over, and he was taken back to the holding cells after giving a thankful smile to Mary. There was another lawyer at the table, who apparently Mary had brought from the ACLU since she couldn't represent Ben without having passed the bar.

She headed off somewhere and came back an hour later with Ben trailing behind. “It is nearly lunch,” Mary noted. “Do you three want to go to a restaurant? Or there is a cafeteria here in the facility? It is cheaper, but you get what you pay for.”

“I brought sandwiches,” Sunny said. “Big ones. Do you want to share with us?”

So we headed to the cafeteria and only bought coffee or drinks and helped themselves to Sunny’s roast beef sandwiches. Ben was famished, not getting a breakfast. Mary took one bite into the sourdough bread and her eyes widened. “This is wonderful,” she said. “Ben said you were a good cook. I foresee a lot of our meetings to discuss the case will be at your apartment. Around the dinner hour.”

“What comes next?” I asked.

“Well, there is appearance set in three weeks for plea, and then a jury selection process is normal just prior to the trial. But I am leaning towards a bench trial, with only a judge. Right now the public is pretty negative towards drug use. There is no way Ben will get a fair trial of his peers. It will be a panel of twelve old white rich guys. The actual trial will take place in about four months, longer if either I or the DA ask for more time to prepare. I don’t have anything else going on, so I won’t be the cause of any delay. The actual court date won’t be set until the plea is registered.”

We parted ways, with Ben and Mary going off to discuss the case, and Sunny and I heading off to the Haight. I had to catch my afternoon classes, and Sunny felt a need to go to the hospital and see her kids.

“I think Ben and Mary would make a cute couple,” Sunny said as we walked down the steps of the courthouse.

“A couple?” I nearly choked. “She is his lawyer. I suspect that is a conflict of interest. But I guess they will be spending a lot of time together. Who knows what might happen?”

“Well, I think there is a lot of interest on both sides, and not the conflicting kind.”

I had missed a morning class and had to go to the professor to find out what I missed. He merely told me to read a part of a chapter and I had already read that. There was to be a quiz the following week, so I had to study for that. I made it to both my afternoon classes, and kept up with both of them, getting home after seven.

Sunny was ready for us. Ben came in shortly after me, having spent the whole day with Mary.

“You should have brought her along,” Sunny said. “There is enough for four, when one of them is a tiny little thing like Mary.”

“I should have,” Ben said. “Apparently she is as broke as we are. They don’t pay her for the work she does. She says that the two cops that busted in are pretty notorious and most of the people they had put away have claimed that they planted the dope on them. But the courts always assume police would not lie, so the accused winds up in jail. It’s always just over an ounce of weed they ‘confiscate’. Mary is planning to do some research into those cases.”

Later the next week Ben found out just how bad his position was. When he had reported his absence was due to a court hearing he was expelled from his college, which apparently did not believe in the principle of innocent until proven guilty. And when he went to the grocery store where he bagged groceries to see if he could get more hours, he was told that he was fired. His job at the wharf was not in peril. Half the men there were ex-cons. But they couldn’t offer him any more hours. He was a Sunday fill in, which was supported by the union, but working on other days was not allowed.

As a result, he sold his textbooks and on Tuesday slept until 10, then got up and ate the cold breakfast that Sunny had left him when she went to the hospital. He cursed himself -- if he had crawled out of bed an hour earlier, he would have been able to eat with her. He turned on the television and discovered the level of pap that ran during the day.

After making a sandwich at noon, not because he was hungry, but because it felt like ‘eating time’, he wandered out of the apartment. He wandered aimlessly, looking at the growing number of hippies on the street.

The apartment was a Georgian house. Many people called the style Victorian, but all the true Victorians had been destroyed by the fire/earthquake of 1906 along with the rest of the city. Seven nearly identical replacement houses were built along Haight Street before 1910, and all but one still stood. The other had a kitchen fire in 1958 and was condemned later that year and torn down three years later. It was now an empty lot, enclosed by a chain link fence. It was directly next to our apartment.

All six of the other houses, although built as single-family homes now had been converted to apartments. Most were owned by management companies, the sole exception being Mrs. Horley, who I paid rent to. She lived on the ground floor of the house with three small apartments upstairs. Sunny, Ben and I lived in the tiny one-bedroom. The other two were a bachelor suites, one rented by a Miss Sullivan and the other by an unknown group of hippies that tended to have people going up and down the stairs all night long.

There was a shed behind the house and a small backyard. Ben went to the downstairs apartment and asked Mrs. Horley for the key to the shed. The elderly woman had been a bit afraid of having a black man living in her house at first, but Ben had always been polite to her, nodding and speaking in the rare times he saw her so her anxiety about him was now much lower. When he explained that he was out of work and would like to clean up the wilderness that the back yard had become, free, she gave him the key to the shed.

Inside Ben found a surprisingly well-equipped tool collection. The lawnmower was one of those old rotary push mowers, and even Ben could not push it through the weeds that had grown up. There was not much new growth this early in the spring, but the lawn had not been cut in the last two years. But there was a scythe and Ben started with that, slowly clearing the yard. After he finished raking it up, he pulled out the old mower, and found it took an hour to oil, sharpen and clean it up so it could be used, after bagging the materials cut by the scythe. Soon he had mowed the lawn, and had it looking pretty for spring.

Mrs. Horley had come out and was sitting on the back porch, watching the big black man work. She went in and returned a minute later with two glasses of ice lemonade. Ben didn’t hesitate when she offered him a glass and drained it quickly.

“That is a wonderful job,” the old lady told him. “I wish I could hire you as a gardener, but I barely have enough money to keep the house. The hippie apartment upstairs hasn’t paid rent for the past four months, and I need that $20 a month.”

“They haven’t?” Ben said in surprise. “Would you like for me to look into it?”

“Would you dear?” the woman said. “I don’t think the boy I rented it to even lives there anymore. I should get them all out and someone who pays in, but I am afraid to go up there myself now. You and Mitch are nice boys, and I would like to meet the girl living there too. But those other people are … scary.”

“That girl is Sunny, and you would love her,” Ben said. “After I finish up here, I would like to dig up a vegetable garden in the sunny part of the lot. I’ll bet Sunny would love to plant a garden there. She seems the type that would like doing that.”

“A garden! Oh, that would be so nice. It has been years since I have had a garden. Not since Hugh died. I can still taste the tomatoes we used to get out of it.”

“Well, if Sunny does plant some things, I’m sure she will share with you,” Ben said. “Now I better get back to work.”

He dug up a garden, as well as a garden area near the back porch for flowers. Working with his muscles was an aching reward after months as a lazy student five days a week. After he finished, earning a second lemonade, he tried to give the shed key back to Mrs. Horley but the old lady refused, saying that Ben could keep it. That settled his next two days of the week. Tomorrow he would clean up the messy shed, and the following day he would work on the tools, sharpening and cleaning the rust off of them. As a mechanic, Ben could not abide by tools that had been misused and allowed to rust.

Sunny came home from the hospital at 3:30, and Ben introduced her to Mrs. Horley, and as he expected the two women paired off as he finished up in the yard. They sketched out rough plans for the gardens, both vegetable and flower.

That night, after dinner, Ben and I went over to the hippie apartment. The door was not even locked, and they found the place a mess, littered with garbage both physical and human. Ben asked for the person who had signed the lease and was told he moved out more than a year ago, passing the place onto a friend, who did the same months later.

Ben shouted. “Everyone out. This place is officially vacant. There are four months back rent owing, and I want everyone to pay $5 when they go.” This threat got people moving, and quickly people left. A free crash pad was okay, but they were not interested in spending money here. Only two paid any money, with others skipping around Ben or claiming that they had to go get the money. Of course, none came back.

Two fairly big guys came out, and stood face to face with Ben, hoping to intimidate him.

“Are you gonna make us leave, nigger?” the bigger of the two said, cracking his knuckles.

“I am,” Ben said, taking a step forward. The big guys thought they might be able to take down Ben. Mitch would be no problem. But the black guy: he looked like he could inflict some pain on the two, even if they could eventually prevail. They backed down and said they would come back with their money ‘later’. The suite was empty. Of people. The place was still a mess. Ben decided to delay his work on the shed until next week and spend the rest of this week cleaning the place up. There was graffiti on the walls, and filth everywhere. The bathroom was disgusting, and Sunny nearly vomited when she saw it. She told Ben she would do a finishing cleanup on it if he took off the first few layers of filth.

My task was to find new tenants for the place. Mrs. Horley wanted female students, either one or two. The rent of $20 a month would appeal to students, along with the nearness to the Medical Center.

Ben went down and told Mrs. Horley the offending students were evicted and asked if there was a key to keep the riffraff out. There was. The original key was long gone, and the door was now never locked. She told Ben to look after getting a new lock installed for the new tenant. He also told her that he would need a few dollars for cleaning supplies and paint, although he planned to use hot water and elbow grease for most of the cleaning. He gave her the $10 he had received from the fleeing hippies, which should buy a few gallons of paint. She handed the money back for cleaning supplies and perhaps paint.

Sunny went to the other studio and went with a plate of cookies to visit Miss Sullivan and tell her that the apartments would be quieter this night and from then on.

Ben didn’t sleep much that night. People were coming up to the ‘crash pad’ and often were angry to find that they couldn’t sleep there. He finally got a blanket and started napping on the floor outside the apartments, getting up when he could hear steps coming up the stairs. It took five nights before the nocturnal visits stopped, and he could come back into the sofa-bed.

My luck was good too. I found a pair of girls studying to be nurses. They came by and I showed them the apartment, which was still dirty, but now showed signs of becoming habitable. I told them that they could even choose the paint color for their walls, which Ben now had covered with a base coat of white over the grafitti. I promised that the suite would be spotless in a week, and Sunny met them and made friends with them instantly in that way she has.

The girls paid $40 for the first month’s rent and a damage deposit. I handed the money to Ben to buy paint. He had done much of the work in cleaning the bathroom, with Sunny doing the rest, and had rehabilitated the kitchen, fixing both the broken stove and fridge (after removing the green things growing within it). All told, it was in sufficiently clean shape for the two girls, who started planning to furnish it, since everything originally in it had been trashed. Sunny told them about the local flea market, and even volunteered to accompany them to it.

That weekend was a party. Mary was invited for Saturday dinner, along with Judy and Sue, the nursing students. Sunny spent the day cooking. I wanted to help but had a four-hour shift at the health clinic, which limited my input. The nurses came early and Sunny took them to the flea market to buy some furniture. Thus, Ben alone carried the bulk of the weight of an old double bed to the house, with Sunny and the nurses holding corners for balance. The girls were thrilled at how much cleaner the place now looked and were able to pick the actual colors for the rooms using paper chips of color Ben had gotten from the hardware store.

Mary got to the house just a few minutes after me and wanted to meet with Ben in private. He refused, saying everyone there could hear about the progress on the case. Mary pulled a little unit out of a bag and set it on the table. It had two movie reels on it, and apparently was used for editing movies. But as she cranked it along, she showed the movie I had taken of the arrest, and at one point you could clearly see the bigger cop pull something out of his pocket. Soon after that he moved out of the frame, not returning until near the end when you could see him holding up the drugs as if he had just found them. Mary said it was unlikely the cops would be able to make the charges against Ben stick, and they might well be cited themselves, depending on which judge was trying the case.

“I have to send a copy of the film to the DA office as evidence,” Mary said. “But the assistant DA working on the case is lazy as sin, and probably won’t pay much attention to it. He’s happy just coasting along on his job, worried more about big profile cases that could move his career forward and not small drug cases. I just have one other area to work through and I’ll be ready for trial. I want a bench trial, with no jury, and the ADA has already agreed to that.”

As Sunny’s wonderful roast beef dinner was served Ben and Mary chatted about the case, while the nurses giggled about their new apartment. I admit that I took over a bit of the conversation talking about my shift at the clinic. Nothing big happened, only a few bad acid trips, cut feet and other routine things. I was learning so much though. You can read books forever about the anatomy of a foot, but when you have to open one up to clean out glass fragments and then sew it back together you really learn.

Sunny’s big excitement was the garden in the backyard. Both the nurses wanted to help, and score some of the fresh vegetables it produced later in the year. The result was that the sketches Sunny had drawn up had to be revised, and Ben would have to dig up another ten feet of depth to make more room.