Dan was now living in San Francisco and had a job as a late night DJ at a small radio station. We hung out together while he worked. Afterwards, we landed at his place in the Fillmore, although we never landed in bed with passionate love-making. He was reluctant. Unavailable. And I, still a virgin and having just turned 18, was too naïve to understand why.

Later, Dan's first band was called Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. They played his folk, blues and rock music and lived in a house on Downy just down from my old apartment. Like all musicians, and most young people of the psychedelic hippie generation, they lived in the Haight and the acid didn’t drop too far from their pad.

Our brief affair ended badly while he was on a music gig in Virginia City. I hitched rides from Sacramento to Virginia City to be with him only to discover he didn’t want me there. After just one night, he gave me half a sugar cube and left me to my own delusions and paranoia. Alone, abandoned, I stood outside the old Virginia City hotel eating an ice-cream cone. The world turned upside down, things around me swirled in wild color and I was unbalanced. I could not find my mouth. I was smearing ice-cream all over my face and hair. Paranoia set in. People appeared to be looking oddly at this beautiful girl lost in a distorted world.

The next day Dan deposited me in a red convertible full of fast hip cool drug addicts who drove 100 miles an hour back to SF, all the while smoking pot, dropping acid and passing a beer bottle. They dropped me off at my place and I felt lucky to be alive. Dan was out of my life; his had become a red smear of anger and hurt in my psyche.

A few years later he formed the band Dan Hicks and His Acoustic Warriors and became known for the “501” jeans jingle and a wonderful song called I Scare Myself.

It took years to forgive him for abandoning me to the distortions of acid. I scare myself when I remember how upset I was. Sending him a nasty postcard every day for a month served to sooth my tender heart but it was the shameful act of a crazy and fanatical person. I ferried him across the Acheron to Hades with my evil postcards.

There was something about Dan, the accursed warrior, that was emotionally unavailable; that was cruel and cowardly. Or perhaps it was something about me.