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The Son of Hippy was arrested for being happy by jealous envious guardians of the public morals – with his sweetheart since childhood tiny Lorraine – on the main street of Haight Ashbury, near San Francisco and Oakland, upper California.

Both were giggling high on hash as they were trundled into a hot and claustrophobic police van by four Ku Klux Klan officers of “the law”. Joe and Lorraine each carried a hardback and thick copy of the I Ching “to stop bullets” as American capitalism in 1968 reached its apogee or paroxysm. Oakland knew them as ne’er-do-wells but they had a famous penpal – William S. Burroughs – who when he heard of their capture immediately bailed them out.

His house at Malibu had as guests Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan – both on the verge of superstardom as iconoclastic musicians.

Joe hugged Lorraine as they were handcuffed. Stop that love shit growled a Klansman – a travesty of mysticism said the blue uniformed driver. Nihilism said another Klansman. Almost like maniacs or sex-mad demons said a fourth. Lechery breathed the driver. Joe peered into the future saying Barack Obama will get you Wall Street trash!

Joe Reston, half-caste son of a migrant worker, knew that he and Lorraine were harmless scapegoats of a racist political conspiracy.

The police van driver raged and fumed that he (a megabucks rancher from Sacramento) had not had sex for four months due to the taciturn foibles of his beauty queen spouse. Yet these vagrant street people copulated openly in Haight Park and also seemed harmonious. Chained together, Joe and Lorraine sang “I Got You Babe” as they were transported by angry all-white Klansmen to Oakland gaol. Another Klan officer confiscated their leather bags and there found incriminating resin and grass. The lawyer-cum-bondsman waiting at the entrance to the precinct (station) guessed as soon as the mixed party arrived that the two hippies would desperately need his professional services.

“Get us out on bail! Ring William S Burroughs in Malibu for a surety” demanded Joe as Lorraine was separated from him and shunted into the topsecurity holding cells beneath the ominous courthouse. Lorraine and Joe (unmarried due to the great expense of that undertaking) were charged with vagrancy, lewd behaviour and sedition. Sedition carried a maximum sentence of twenty years’ imprisonment.

While Lorraine (who was a Cherokee) and Joe sweated it out in separate cells, a state official drugs expert looked at the narcotics found in their bags. He had heard of their outsider lifestyle from Maurice Morris the elderly desk-sergeant who worshipped J Edgar Hoover as God. Both men knew that the latest intake of thralls were two harmless political scapegoats. Their predicament was precisely that they were defenceless and beautiful: sex symbols of an erotic community whose drugs were probably aphrodisiacs. A moneyless anti-war erotic community still growing. Within an hour the call came through from beatnik and hippy writer William S Burroughs who promised the Oakland police $10,000 bail, so the two lascivious wanderers were sprung. Likewise the oppressive and suffocating gloom and dismay infusing the building evanesced just like magic.

The dope was confiscated but Joe went for a whisky binge – two bottles each of Jack Daniels for himself and his wryly smiling but glad companion. Lorraine adored him because of his handsome features, his toughness, his agility and his general liveliness – love was their constant and sole consolation. They discussed the danger they had been in and decided to report their implicit victimisation to City Lights newspaper over the Lawrence Ferlinghetti-owned bookshop. F (another beat poet) was away in Mexico on holiday scoring tequila and peyotl but his editorial assistant took their story down.

By midnight they had got their grievances off their chests and went to sleep together in wild Haight Park up the hill. The weather was gloriously warm.

California’s Christian community was business-orientated of course, and a few religious leaders feared the new money of sexually-enticing stars of song and novel (such as Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and J.D. Salinger who all saw angst and anomie and alienation as the American climate). David Moses Berg, a vicar in Sacramento, on his radio station even said – perhaps to shock people – that satanism was free sexuality. He said also that Chinese communism was satanic and that that was why the population of mainland China doubled every forty years.

But who really had had Reston and Lorraine persecuted? It remains a mystery to this day, but neither democrats nor republicans ever intervened to save people on sex charges. Reston never married Lorraine but also neither became communists nor fundamentalists.