Back when The Bird really was The Word.
Many people in the hip community made cash by selling the Bird. The Bird deal made it so you couldn’t lose money and could, by selling regularly, make a decent living by hippie standards.
Birds were mailed to me at Oxford College and I sold them in the cafeteria evenings. It was considered uncool to not pay over the stated price and magnanimously say, “Keep the change!”
Fridays I would race in my slow but steady Celestial Omnibus VW in I-20, up I-75 to the Birdhouse on 14th, to start. If I had money, I’d buy Birds. If not, they would front a few to sell, return and repeat until you had cash to buy Birds to carry wherever to sell.
Weekends I’d try to get 14th and Peachtree where the Uniform company had a lawn shaded by huge trees. People would hang out and talk to you or nap in the shade. The job was to barker Birds. You could walk along the edge of the street holding the latest cover up for all to see and try to catch the eye of each driver. Acting a bit for the tourists always got money.
It was always a a trip. Friday and Saturday nights young, rich hipsters headed to the park would pay not 25 cents, but $5 to the “real” hippie selling Birds. Determined to be wild suburban middle aged couples where the woman wanted to “kiss a real hippie”, you’d let the husband show off by leeringly asking for marijuana by some cool, unknown nickname he had heard who knows where, and ask if it was true it was an aphrodisiac. Or pass you party favors of one style or another to be hidden under the tree until you were ready to leave. You also met a lot of good friendly folks.
Cops would come by and stop. Some decently friendly. Some on power trip staring and trying to make you nervous enough to step in the street and be arrested for “impeding traffic” even if the street was empty.
My worst experience came on my second day selling at that corner. A really fat young crewcut cop on a tricycle pulled up stopping just inches from my feet. he took his time standing up on the trike and swinging over one ham leg and stepping down. A moment to work that gunbelt around and up to where there should have been a waist. straighten his cap. Then suddenly pull his gun and crouch pointing it at my face a few inches away. I had grown up in a small town and until that very minute I had thought all cops were peace officers just making everyone safe. This cop changed my mind when he said a word aloud I had only seen in print before, and rarely then. “Step off the curb, MotherF—–!”.