1

She would see them in the twilight when the wind was right, rolypoly shapes propelled by ocean breezes, turning endover-end along the beach or down the alley behind her house like errant beach balls granted a moment’s freedom. Sometimes they would get caught up against a building or stuck on a curb and then spindly little arms and legs would unfold from their fat bodies until they could push themselves free and go rolling with the wind again. Like flotsam in a river, like tumbleweeds, only brightly colored in primary reds and yellows and blues.

They seemed very solid until the wind died down. Then she would watch them come apart the way morning mist will when the sun burns it away, the bright colors turning to ragged ribbons that tattered smokelike until they were completely gone.

Those were special nights, the evenings that the Balloon Men came.

In the late sixties in HaightAshbury, she talked about them once. Incense lay thick in the air—two cones of jasmine burning on a battered windowsill. There was an old iron bed in the room, up on the third floor of a house that no one lived in except for runaways and street people. The mattress had rustcolored stains on it. The incense covered the room’s musty smell. She’d lived in a form of selfimposed poverty back then, but it was all a part of the Summer of Love.

“I know what you mean, man,” Greg Longman told her. “I’ve seen them.”

He was wearing a dirty white Tshirt with a simple peace symbol on it and scuffed plastic thongs.

Sticking up from the waist of his bellbottomed jeans at a fortyfive degree angle was a descant recorder. His long blonde hair was tied back with an elastic. His features were thin—an asceticlooking face, thin and drawnout from too much time on the streets with too little to eat, or from too much dope.