As soon as the money exchanged hands, the deputy arrested the clerk for selling obscene material. The officers then confiscated copies of the book, detained and frisked customers, and put out a warrant for the store owner, who was jailed the next day.
But Kandel was the victim of bad timing. On top of that, her belief in sex as a spiritual act and a form of worship further menaced traditional values. Kandel was born in New York in Kandel was often alone as a child, writing poems and reading books on Buddhism and Eastern philosophy.
As a teen-ager, she called herself a juvenile delinquent, joining a gang in Hollywood and getting arrested for shoplifting. In , she returned to California, visited San Francisco, and resolved to stay. Kandel cut a dramatic figure among the Beats. Tall, with a joyful, rubbery face, she favored vivid colors and wore her brown hair in two long braids.
She had excellent posture and a grounded bearing that suggested physical confidence. Kandel carved out a place for her writing in the masculine Beat-poetry scene. After joining the Diggers, a group of activists and street performers, Kandel met Bill Sweet William Fritsch, a Brooklyn-born poet, dockworker, and member of the biker gang the Hells Angels, whom she later married.
When he met Kandel, Fritsch immediately left his wife and child to be with her. On the cover was an image of a Shiva-like figure embracing a naked woman. Her words are steeped in romanticism and hallucinatory images. The obscenity trial began in April, , and ran for five weeks.
