About The Kids on Shakedown Street by Matthew Mitchell
Jerry’s Dead. Now What?
In August 1995, twenty-one-year-old music fan Matt is bored with life in small-town Connecticut. He’s ready to follow the Grateful Dead tour and see where that takes him – and then the news breaks that Jerry Garcia, lead singer of the Grateful Dead, has died.
With the tour called off, Matt looks for an alternative adventure. He decides to go to the place where the counterculture was born: the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.
After a bus journey across the United States to California, Matt finds like-minded friends living in Golden Gate Park and keeping alive the spirit of the hippie culture of the 1960s. Out there, Matt becomes “Bones,” and new friends Wolf, Sage, Autumn, and Fievel show him the ropes and teach him the art of living homeless in the park and on the streets.
Life is blissful at first. There’s no alarm clock and no responsibility, just friends sharing whatever they have. Needs are met through polite panhandling and occasional street performances. And there is music everywhere, dancing in the sun on the grass of the park, and beautiful young women who still believe in the free love philosophy of the sixties.
But there is a dark side. Matt encounters young teens living on the streets who have no choice about being there. There are shady characters from dangerous places bringing in all those drugs. And living on alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, LSD, and scraps of leftover food takes its toll.
Eventually, Matt must make a choice between saving his own life or that of a friend who desperately needs him. The decision he makes will change him forever.
Relive a lost piece of American culture in this true story of The Kids on Shakedown Street.
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Author Bio:
I am a new and aspiring author. At the age of fifty, I recently self-published my first book. Even though I am getting a late start, I still aspire to be a full-time writer. I am inspired by contemporary American literature that exposes and examines the human condition.
Every day we walk through so many lives and microcosms and rarely give them any real consideration or a second glance. And we rarely recognize how fascinating our own lives are. I know people read to escape their reality, and I am no different. I just like to slip into somebody else’s. In addition to a reprieve from my own life, I feel it also helps me be more understanding and empathetic, and I hope to inspire the same in others with my writing.
Fifty years under my belt gives me a myriad of occupations, locations, and relations to draw from. My first novel, The Kids on Shakedown Street: A Life and Mind-Altering Trip to ‘90s Haight-Ashbury, is about the time in my twenties when I was deliberately homeless in San Francisco in 1995. I wanted to provide a glimpse of the nomadic sub-culture and counterculture movement in America that existed back then and still endures in some form today.
Currently, I live the work-a-day lifestyle and write on the side. I have accidentally become the cliché aspiring writer living on a small piece of land in a tiny log-sided cabin in Maine with three cats.