the AIDS crisis<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\t\u201c<\/em>The Royal We is a personal and jarring memoir of fable and prose, a nostalgic tribute to a city and a time that no longer exist,\u201d Bottum tells<\/em> Rolling Stone. \u201cIt celebrates my coming out and coming up with Faith No More in the unhinged backdrop of San Francisco in the 1980s, before the Internet, a time of bicycle messengers, peace punks, hippies, heroin, wheatgrass, music, witchcraft and children reaching and aspiring to unfathomable heights.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\tIn the excerpt below, Bottum writes about finding his way in a city and arts scene that had been greatly shaped by the generation of hippies who\u2019d come before. Bottum admits he and his friends often took an adversarial stance towards their tuned-in and dropped-out forebears, but it stemmed from a perennial desire characteristic of young, creative people everywhere.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\t\u201cAt our age,\u201d he writes, \u201cwe were looking for something of our own. It felt more real to criticize and complain, to point out holes and flaws, to champion ourselves. What they\u2019d done before us we saw as a reason to get up and scream.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\tThe rest of the excerpt depicts the wild happenings at More Plastic Bags, a warehouse space where the city\u2019s many \u201cweirdoes\u201d met: \u201cFilmmakers, fashion people, queers, strippers, painted faces, bearded men in habits, couples wrapped in chains, masks, exotic gowns, wigs, the mix of San Francisco was a circus, vibrant, deafening and spiritual unto itself.\u201d Bottum and his friends eat goldfish, pop pills, and go on the hunt for a legend of the hippie era, Timothy Leary.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n
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\n\tThere was the same number of us in San Francisco, five or six. We worked as a crew like grubby fingers interlocked. We were fueled by a rush of desire to keep up, to make a mark, to claim a place for ourselves in the changing landscape. The places we went in our heads and the things that we did were encouraged by the friends we met and the past that the village had been. Butting our heads against the hippies and what they\u2019d done and made for themselves, that was our own antiestablishment stance. It didn\u2019t make a lot of sense and it wasn\u2019t really fair. It was disrespectful, honestly, but that\u2019s what we did. The hippies had invented that stance. Nobly. They\u2019d created a community and a movement specific to where they\u2019d been, where we were now. The Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love and all that, that\u2019s what came before us. The hippies had resonated and made an impact, they\u2019d changed the world. At our age, though, we were looking for something of our own. It felt more real to criticize and complain, to point out holes and flaws, to champion ourselves. What they\u2019d done before us we saw as a reason to get up and scream.<\/p>\n
\n\tMore Plastic Bags was a warehouse space, tucked enough away to not attract attention. There were kids like us and hippies much older. It was a massive building of brick, floor after floor of flashing lights and sound removed from the street through a huge crumbled archway. We\u2019d wait in a line for our turn to get in and see people we knew and meet pockets and clutches of weirdos we hadn\u2019t. Filmmakers, fashion people, queers, strippers, painted faces, bearded men in habits, couples wrapped in chains, masks, exotic gowns, wigs, the mix of San Francisco was a circus, vibrant, deafening and spiritual unto itself. Drugs were everywhere, pot smoke, meth on mirrors, tabs of acid on tongues of fucked-up dancers swaying into each other, obliterated, twirling and moving in throngs on the different dance floors, overstuffed couches on the edges of it all with crashed-out young people in crumples of costumes.<\/p>\n\n\n
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\n\tWe\u2019d run up and down from floor to floor, dancing and drinking and screaming over the noise of the party. There was a huge bowl filled with goldfish on a window ledge in the staircase, more like a party decoration, not an aquarium. It was situated in an alcove, positioned in the shine of a colored light. We crowded around the bowl and one of us said, \u201cEveryone eat a fish,\u201d and we did. We ate the goldfish. We put our hands in the bowl one by one and scooped out goldfish and ate them. Live little fish on our tongues and swallowing them. No one judged, hippies looked on surprised and complacently amused at what the kids would do. Us eating the goldfish was just one of so many scenarios going on in the space.<\/p>\n
\n\tWe rummaged through the coat room and put on other people\u2019s clothes and tromped up and down the different floors of the party, wearing big floppy trench coats not our own, chasing each other through the crowds. Someone would approach us, not territorial or angry, honestly just wanting to understand.<\/p>\n