Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene by Stuart Palmer Read Free Book Online Page B

to yesterday, wallows in today, and reaches for tomorrow. Nursed on gold and weaned on silver, it cherishes the cultural flowering of a ribald tradition. People who live there are sorry for people who don’t.
    San Franciscans are sophisticated. They practice, on the whole, a remarkable tolerance. Perhaps the heirs of Emperor Norton can do no less. The Italian fisherman from the waterfront condescends to rub elbows with the nabob in tails at the Opera House, and the substantial citizen, trapped in his gig from nine to five, accepts with something like resignation, if not indulgence, the beats of North Beach and the hippies of the Hashberry. The uninhibited climate of the city by the bay seems to collect, indeed, more than its fair share of extravagant and entertaining kooks, the gifted oddballs from all over. It hatches, moreover, a considerable quota of mavericks among the natives.
    Jack London slept here. Ken Kesey still does. The arts flourish, and some of the artists even profit. Quondam madams of the tenderloin devote themselves in retirement to the production of literature or the management of sanctioned enterprises. The high priest of the Satanic Church holds weekly Sabbats for his converts and lives in a black house with a full-grown Numidian lion that sleeps at night at the foot of his bed. Where undercover cops leave off—the beatnik-busters who achieve local flame by infiltrating North Beach pot parties—the narcs take over as boyish government agents in search of addicts and pushers. Meanwhile, chemistry majors are working their way through school by making LSD and desoxyephedrine in college labs, and amateur gardeners are growing marijuana among their pretty flowers.
    The sun rises east of Berkeley and sets in the Pacific just west of the Golden Gate. If the average square sits down tonight to dinner at home, and if Mr. Cleveland Amory prepares to dine in style in the Garden Court of the Palace-Sheraton, you will also find the Diggers passing out free food in the Panhandle. San Francisco is inured to extremes and in-betweens. Variety is the spice of life. It has been called a city of perennial renaissance, and it has also been called a whacky city where almost anything can happen and generally does. It is seldom shocked, which would be naïve, and it never points, which would be rude. It is, in brief, a city in which hardly an eye was batted and nary a double-take was taken when Miss Hildegarde Withers was swept up to the entrance of the Canterbury Hotel at 750 Sutter Street in the sidecar of a Harley Hog.
    Miss Withers had chosen the Canterbury, at which she had entered a reservation by telephone the night before, because its rates were more compatible with her income than were those of more lavish hostelries on Nob Hill, and because, so she understood, the management was inclined to be partial to elderly ladies. She removed her crash helmet and donned her hat, and passed hatbox and traveling bag to an impervious doorman who stood by.
    “Al,” she said to her chauffeur, “I shall expect you back here in an hour.”
    “As near as may be,” said Al.
    “Are you sure you can find accommodations with your friend at SFU?”
    “No sweat, Miss Withers. I called him last night and gave him warning. I can’t say that he was exactly enthusiastic at the prospect of my visit, but he agreed to put me up.”
    “Someone,” said Miss Withers, “is always crashing someone’s pad.”
    She turned and swept into the lobby. Her bag and box, which had been transferred to the custody of a bellboy, were waiting for her side by side at the desk. The clerk, although sharing a vague posture of superiority with hotel clerks everywhere, was accommodating under a veneer of courtesy. Miss Withers’ reservation was checked and found in order. Miss Withers signed the register. Joining her bag and box in the custody of the bellboy, Miss Withers was lofted to her room, deposited, and left.
    Alone, beginning with a bath, she set about