"You get all these high school kids who let their hair grow and don't wash and then in September hurry back to mommy," Stinger said.

A FEW DAYS ago an attractive woman with bleached hair and teary eyes had been walking up and down Charles St., looking for her 14-year-old daughter. "Please help me," she begged. "Have you seen her? I promise, if you help me find her, I won't get you in trouble for anything you've done to her." Avery went to help her look.

"This is a terrible place for runaways," Stinger said. "They find some guy to take them in, and they think he's being really nice, but they get screwed and turned on before they're ready to handle it."

"It's dangerous," said Bonnie, a cute, sweet-looking college sophomore and a friend of Janet's. "The other night by the Common this guy offered to lay some acid on me, free. I thought he was being really nice. Then he said, 'Hey, how old are you anyway, 15?' God1 He could have ruined some 15-year-old kid." Charles Street life can be free, but not necessarily warm, and not necessarily safe.

Things are very different among the Avatar people, the Fort Hill community. "We were once where they are now," said Liz O'Melveny, Avatar's communicator, of the Charles St. hippies. "Why do you want to write about them for?"

"We are considered a very unique community," said Liz, "but that is only because we are a community, and conceived in the mind of God. All of us are really one person."

The Fort Hill community is seven or eight Victorian, shabby buildings in Roxbury, across from a Revolutionary war monument, "our monolithic symbol." It is made up of about 150 people, "all living in all the houses at once." The community, Liz said, which includes Jim Kweskin of the jug band and Mel Lyman, who considers himself to be a second Jesus Christ, is connected with United Illuminating, which, besides Avatar, makes films, cuts records, and runs building projects in the South End.

United Illuminating, which stands for you and I, was founded about 2000 years ago in the Piscean Age of Christianity, Liz said. "It has existed since before there was light." More prosaically, it is about two years old.

Avatar, a hippie-oriented newspaper based on a belief in Mel Lyman and in astrology, was founded in June 1967. "We were appealing to the people who could listen at the time," Liz said, 'the drug people. Now we appeal to everybody; businessmen, church people."

"We've grown from just people coming together to people working together as one person," she said. "Our people have gotten out of being hippies into something else."

The Charles St. hippies read Avatar, she said, but that's their only connection with Fort Hill. "They're on a lower level. Still doing their own thing."

Last year there was a split among Avatar people, and most of the real Fort Hill community went to New York in January to publish American Avatar, but the Boston paper was having trouble, Liz said. "We were back in September. Now Avatar, although called American Avatar, is a Fort Hill enterprise again."

Liz, a former telephone operator from Washington, D.C., believes that "astrology as a language is a basic tool for understanding people, and reveals all that can be revealed." Drugs, too, can be useful, but "only if used to share consciousness. Using them for the self, for kicks, is a misuse."

She handed me a printed list of drugs, kept in a desk drawer in Avatar's Rutland St. office in Roxbury. The drug list, ranging from "caapi, extract of banisteria caapi or seeds of wild rue," to sominex, had only LSD, marijuana, hashish, mescaline, and psilocybin marked as useful.

The conversation with Liz confirms the idea that there is fairly strong class consciousness among the hippies. Summer hippies talk only with the Charles Street regulars, the regulars talk only to Fort Hill people, and the Fort Hill people talk only to Mel Lyman, who is God.

This division into classes, together with the possible violence which makes dealers keep knives, the possible exploitation that can ruin the naive, and the lack of hospitality from Boston police, is probably causing the dwindling of Boston's hippie population, evident after the riots on the Common, before the summer season should have ended. Right now, in the fall, people still gather outside on the Charles St. sidewalks to talk and sell, but the winter will come soon, and the hippies will largely vanish. You wonder if they will come back.