Early Teaching

8.

It isn’t quite true what I said earlier, that I had never thought of becoming a teacher. There was a moment when William and I were hanging out in Colorado on a break in our undergraduate programs that he turned me on to Summerhill. The idea was that if you gave students enough freedom and enough choices, they would eventually figure out what they wanted to do and take charge of their own education. This concept resonated with my – and a lot of other peoples’ – sixties’ sensibility.

By the time I entered the credential program at Berkeley, these ideas had spread to the mainstream, with numerous elaborations from Jonathan Kozol, John Holt, Herb Kohl and others. The credential program assigned these texts, yet in our visitations to Berkeley schools, it was clear few teachers were implementing the ideas. The classrooms we observed were pretty traditional.

That winter, I started student teaching with a teacher who was trying to implement some choices in his classroom. But when I found myself in front of the class, a horrific anxiety overcame me, a foreshadowing of my future career as a teacher. How do you “control” a class when you don’t believe in controlling a class?
For one of my seminal evaluations, one of my professors came to the class to videotape a lesson. I had planned what I thought was an innovative approach to cooperative learning, using Cuisennaire rods, these color coded wooden sticks with different lengths representing different numbers, so if you put the blue “2” next to the red “4,” the length matched the green “6.” I grouped the class into 5 groups of 5 and gave them each multiple sets of rods. The idea was for them on their own to figure out the relationships between the rods and explain their findings. The students, however, were more interested in their relationships with each other, and began throwing the rods around the classroom. I froze, clueless as how to deal with the situation. Finally, the professor decided that was enough videotaping and the teacher bailed me out by taking over the class. I was steeped in shame.

A footnote: I got a C in the class that oversaw my student teaching, a bad grade in graduate school. I protested, but got nowhere. However, just then the School of Education decided to reduce competition by eliminating grades and utilizing a Pass/Fail system. The great irony was that on my transcript, the “C” was crossed out and replaced by a “P.” But you could still clearly see the “C.” This is a small example of the ambivalence with which the education establishment treated “progressive” reforms. The school system is expert at implementing changes which in reality change nothing at all.

Because of my weak performance in this more liberal class, in the spring, the dean of the ed school assigned me to a very traditional class with a strict black teacher not averse to using the occasional bop on the head to keep things under control. She was a good teacher though, and I thrived in this environment when discipline wasn’t a factor, even when I took over the class for 3 days. I began to find my sea-legs as a teacher, having the class make crystal sets, read Langston Hughes plays, and debate the merits of the contending positions in the Civil Rights movement between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. My proudest moment, was when white boy (Berkeley was fairly well integrated at the time) from the hills staunchly defended Malcolm’s commitment to self-defense by any means necessary.

I didn’t realize that this would be the only full realization of my potential as an elementary school teacher. Subsequent events prevented me from ever really having a successful experience in my own elementary class.

I got a teaching job in the San Francisco public schools, McKinley Elementary, across Market Street on Castro. 32 students, 5th grade. I was so nervous that first day, and the first month, and the first semester, I couldn’t think. In the first ten minutes of standing in front of the class, I tried to come on tough. A kid made a funny noise. I sent him to the principal’s office, a gross overreaction. Soon many kids were making funny noises. I couldn’t send them all to the office. Soon enough, I lost control. I was totally conflicted and confused about my role, wanting to offer them freedom in the Kohl-Holt-Kozol tradition, also wanting to please Mr. Susoyeff, a stern, bald-headed Russian, a former military officer in command of the school.

It was a mixed class, but it was the black kids that gave me the most grief. I kept them after school, but then in an effort to bond with them I took them to the Jr. Museum up the hill, rewarding their misbehavior, showing myself as a push-over. I tried to set up an individualized reading program as I’d been taught to do in my credential program but it took weeks for me to meet with students one-on-one, and most of them slipped through the cracks.

The children were out of control. Throwing crayons was the one activity the students were into. There were fights. When I tried to make Eddie Johnson sit down, he came at me with a broken bottle. I had to suspend him, violating my principles. I couldn’t do this job, and on a minute by minute basis, I faced my failure.
Yet Sasha was there for me, rubbing my head with sympathy, offering advice, soothing my frazzled nerves.

One day I was so nervous that I got to school and noticed that I had on two different shoes. Luckily I was early, so I raced home and changed, and returned to school before the bell.

I met an intern at the school, a black man who had been involved in the San Francisco State Strike, Jeremiah Jackson. We became friends; he became my first black friend. We had dinner with him and his wife Bliss, a quiet white woman, powerful in her own way.

“The racism at that school is tough to take,” he said. “You look around in the classrooms and all the black boys are isolated at the back of the class and given busy work. Even in the class I’m working in, the teacher professes to be liberal and all that, it’s the same story, black boys in the back.”

“The teacher across the hall from me?” I said. “In the lunchroom, she talks about shoving the black kid’s heads into the pencil sharpener.”“We got to do something, man.”

I wasn’t eager to take this on, I had enough problems. But I took one of his posters, a picture of Malcolm X, and put it on my bulletin board.

The principal hauled me into the office. “You of all people, Mr. Hitz, should know that we don’t need to encourage rebellion among these people. They get enough of that stuff at home. You need to calm them down, get them to work within the system.”

I took the poster down.

A few days later, I was working late in the classroom. At around 5 PM, after all the other teachers had gone, I started to leave myself. Jeremiah was in the hallway on a ladder, plastering posters all over the walls: Huey P. Newton in his classical chieftain’s chair, the Panthers with guns on the steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento, Geronimo, Malcolm, Pancho Villa.

It was January by now, and my class was more or less functioning. The students and I had gotten used to each other. At the principal’s urging, I established three levels of reading groups, also against my principles, but it seemed to be working.

The principal called me in the office. “We won’t be renewing your contract for the spring, Mr. Hitz.”

“How come? I know it’s taken awhile, but my class in finally under control.”

“Really? I was observing the class the other day and Ollie had his feet up on the desk.”

I called Jeremiah. “The same thing happened to me, man! They’re transferring me to another school.”

I spoke with my Party study group leader, a teacher herself, Ann, an earnest woman, nervous herself. “It’s not because of the discipline. They don’t care about the discipline. All new teachers have those problems. It’s because you’re friends with Jeremiah.”

Jeremiah and I decided to fight. We called a meeting of all the parents we knew at one of the parents’ houses. About 10 parents showed up, along Ann and another Party member. We decided to have a picket line at the school on Monday morning and call a community meeting that evening.

Arriving at school that morning seeing the signs, “Rehire Jackson and Hitz,” brought tears to my eyes. No one had ever fought for me like this. Here were black people fighting for me. And Sasha was with me all the way, at my side, whispering little encouragements.

Over a hundred parents showed up at the meeting that night. The beleaguered principal attempted to field outraged comments from the parents. “You want a class where children throw paper airplanes?” he said, referring to my class.

“We don’t care about that,” one of the parents defended me, “We want teachers who can relate to the students, young teachers like Jackson and Blatz.”

Jeremiah and I were called downtown the next day. “I hear you had fun last night,” the Director of Personnel said.

“That wasn’t fun,” Jeremiah said. ”That was serious.”

The upshot was that Jeremiah got his job back at the school and I didn’t. But the Party had been there for me. I moved closer to their bosom. The experience at McKinley had changed me. I got a glimpse of your potential power, of the power of the working class. Just as important, the experience unleashed a power within myself that enabled me to treat students as an ally to their parents, so in many more cases – not all – I was able to stand up to their nonsense.

San Francisco

7.

I returned to Berkeley with Betty in the green Econoline van that I bought on the way out of New York. We visited some shrines along the way. We snuck into Walden Pond after hours and slept by its shores in sleeping bags. We drove through Hibbing, Minnesota, where Bob Dylan grew up. We drive up to Jasper National Park in Canada.

In Jasper, we went on a 7 mile hike deep into the wilderness and made love in a stream bed under the watchful eye of a moose. This is as far away from civilization as we had ever been, but on the way down, we ran into a group of people on horseback, one of whom Betty knew from New York. This incident plunged us into a prescient despair about the shrinking of the wilderness.

We finally reached the Bay Area and drove directly to a little town called Canyon behind the Berkeley hills, dropped acid, and crawled to the cabin nestled in the redwoods, where my childhood friend William squatted with his wife Katherine and wildchild Miklos. Betty and I stayed in the downstairs room, the closest to communal living I would get. I was constructing a novel about being on the bum with William in New Orleans, a cosmic egg of a book which couldn’t seem to lay itself, while William endlessly practiced the sitar and Katherine collected welfare, though William’s father was a millionaire.

A few weeks into our stay at Canyon, I double dated with my friend Mark in his old Renault, me with Betty, him with a revelation of a woman, Sasha, with Frida Khalo eyebrows and a mind like a waterfall, gushing with intellectual clarity. I’d met her briefly in New York when she was a junky, adding to her allure.

The next day I asked Mark’s permission to ask her out. He said “Sure.” The same shrill cynicism that turned me on, turned him off. We went out, who remembers where. We made love, sweet love, our bodies fitting together just so. Next day I inelegantly sent Betty packing, “She’s a real woman,” I told her, adding injury to insult.

I loved how her brown hair with peroxided tips hung way down her back, I loved the passion with which she invoked Chairman Mao, I loved her op-art miniskirt. I loved her even as she stood up to William, who bristled at her commitment to violence.
“Do you know how many people died in the Chinese revolution?”

“Fewer than would have without it,” she said, closing debate.

At one point in her Bernal Heights studio apartment, I mustered the courage to express my own doubts about the Communist thing. I’d been a committed pacifist myself, a conscientious objector, probably the only Zen Buddhist in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where my draft board resided. “Love me, love my dog,” she said. I didn’t know how to argue with her, she was smarter than me, and I did love her. So I loved her dogma, too. I read “On Contradiction” and noticed how similar the dialectic sounded to that of the “I Ching.”

I swapped my apathetic anarchism for revolutionary communism. I stood in awe of her as she developed the “Slumlord of the Month” campaign to present the Chatty Ratty award to such San Francisco liberal icons as Jeramy Ets-Hokins, street theater that the press adored. I took great pride in being known as Sasha’s boyfriend.

She trashed my writing: “What are you writing this FOR? You need to write for the movement.” The novel was foundering anyway, so I just stopped.

The daughter of a famous psychoanalyst, a breakaway disciple of Freud’s, she taught me about feelings, about how to express them. She pulled them out of me in a visceral tug-of-war, as if she were pulling my small intestine out of my mouth. It took me years to discover that she rarely expressed her own.

I loved the fact that she was Jewish, as had been most of my girl friends, six out of nine. It seemed to me perhaps stereotypically that Jewish girls were less puritanical about sex than the wasps and Catholic girls I’d grown up with. My father would reiterate certainly stereotypically how smart they were, the Jews, and Sasha did have all 800 college boards. There was the rebellious piece too, the need to reject my family’s Midwestern conservative values. More importantly, I was drawn to the tragedy of the Holocaust as someone who hated injustice of any kind, drawn irresistibly to look at this horror of skeletal bodies lying in heaps, this irreversible stain on my German heritage. Not that there needs to be a competition between the evilness of horrific crimes against humanity, but this genocide stands apart in its cold, calculated deliberateness.

It was Mark, small and curly-headed, also Jewish, who softened me up for Sasha’s Marxism. He was a red diaper baby like Sasha; his father had edited the West Coast Communist Party newspaper before he died. Mark had left the ideology behind, harshly critical of his parents for sticking with Stalin for so long, yet the sensibility remained.

I had plans to go to Mexico with him the summer that my friend William followed me to California and I was torn apart between my two best friends. I couldn’t tell Mark I didn’t want to go to Mexico because I wanted to hang with my friend William. So my unconscious did the dirty work. On an LSD trip with Mark in Golden Gate Park we strolled together through the Japanese Tea Garden in an uneasy silence, marveling at the veins on the leaves of the cherry trees or the musical swish of the carp between the lily pads in the ponds. Finally, just to break the silence, I said the first thing on my mind, which was: “I’m wondering if they will put that guy in the oven.”
Mark responded thoughtfully., “Hmmm. Could be the Ginger Bread Boy. Could be Hansel and Gretel.” Pause. “Could be a Jew…”

And then he looked at me with that ultimate victim look the hurt of this difference between us zapping off his being like a tiny full-body lightning storm and I crumpled at the abject shame that my consummately evil Hitler-nature had spewed out of me so blatantly and cruelly. An icy distance came between us. We headed back to our shared apartment in the Haight. I tried to apologize. “So much hatred. I don’t know where it came from.” But our friendship had been damaged. Soon Mark left for Europe and around the world. It wasn’t until he was on his way back years later that I wrote him apologizing again and explaining as I only then understood that it was the homoerotic jealousy that came between us, that I wanted to be with William rather than going with him to Mexico.

But, Sasha. She introduced me to Derrick, a party leader, a tall, muscular Jew with a defiant chin. He impressed me with his practical cynicism. “We need to organize the working class because we need an army,” he would say. “Can you imagine an army made up of college students?”

I couldn’t.

Nor did I know what to do with the rest of my life, now that my writing had run aground on Sasha’s criticism.

Derrick said, “You know, Henry, we need teachers. We want to build a parent-teacher alliance, kind a parallel to the worker-student alliance.”

“Really?” A teacher was about the last thing I had thought of as a career, because by and large I had hated school even when I was good at it, which was only part of the time. But building a revolutionary movement inside the schools, the belly of the beast? There was a challenging, potentially exciting thing to do.

So I did it, I signed up for the teacher training course at Berkeley.

Derrick became a leader of the student strike at San Francisco State where Sasha was enrolled as a student, studying the history of science and other arcane subjects.
I’d been in a lot of demonstrations, against the war, for civil rights. But I’d never seen anything like this: black students, Latino students, and white students all swarming over the campus dodging the clubs of policemen on horseback, day after day.

I flushed with pride when Derrick chose our house to hide out in from the cops and make stink bombs to plant in the classes that weren’t honoring the strike.

Fissures developed between Derrick and Sasha over the strike. Her class wanted to meet off campus, and she wanted to meet with them, but the Party leaders said that was tantamount to capitulation. If classes were meeting, there was not a strike.
“It’s not like the teachers would be paid,” she argued.

“Still, it’s business as usual, fewer people will come to the rallies.” Derrick countered.

By this time, I was all gung ho for the revolution. “The revolution is not a dinner party,” I said, “or an intellectual discussion in a nonstriking venue.”

She ended up not going to class, but in her pout I refused to see trouble ahead.

We were married on the Winter Solstice among the redwoods again – the redwoods drew I toward them as inexorably as gravity – in Hero’s Grove in Golden Gate Park. The day was cool but sunny, we’d lucked out. We had no contingency plans for rain. I dressed in a suede sport jacket, a purple mod shirt with a huge collar, a wide purple and yellow tie. Sasha wore a wool dress she made herself, orange with purple paisley swirls. In the car driving over to the park, terror washed over me, a typical groom at a nontypical wedding. But once we reached the park and saw my friends and family huddled in the woods, I allowed the happiness to embrace me. Some excerpts from our vows:

Friends: We are here this morning to marry this man and this woman. In the midst of defeatism, we affirm our willingness to contine; in the midst of despair, we affirm our determination; in the midst of fear, we affirm our courage. In the midst of the terror and corruption of the past and present, we have come together to plant the flag of the future.

Consider marriage as a continuous process of unity and contradiction – not static, but dynamic and organic -- an ever-changing, ever-growing relationship. Change and growth come about through struggle – a struggle between two persons and the unity that is their marriage; a struggle between the needs of their family and the needs of the people to which they belong.

The law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe. Between opposities in a contradiction there is at once unity and struggle, and it is this that impels things to move and change. Contradiction is universal and absolute; it is present in the process of development and permeates every process from beginning to end. …

Within the family, the basis of unity between the opposites in a contradiction is love, or spontaneous affection. For the union of male and female is the origin of of the whole of nature….

Oh
I am thinking
Oh
I am thinking
I have found my lover
I think it is so

Thus were our vows an odd synthesis between the I Ching and Chairman Mao’s On Contradiction. The idea of contradiction did indeed set the tone.

Our wedding day was the best day of my life so far. The day after our wedding was the worst. My sister Nicki, three years older than me and not yet married, convinced me to postpone our honeymoon for a day and hang out with her and her boyfriend who would become her husband 6 months later. She fed us hashish brownies and I went to paranoid city, to some realm of terror that stopped my voice in my throat so I couldn’t speak. I lay on our waterbed, all atremble, with Sasha at my side, but she wasn’t. She was in her own universe. Forcing out the words, I tried to impart to her my vision of our family – me and her – at the center of concentric circles, the party, the movement, the working class, and something about what I said set Sasha off. She attacked me in the harshest terms, with a voice most shrill:

“First off, I want no party mucking up our family. If you equate loyalty to the family to loyalty to the party in any way, the party will eat you alive, eat us alive. You have to choose. It’s me or the party. And you already made your choice in marrying me. You can forget the party You need to promise me now that you’ll never join the party.”

I wanted to say: But you were the one who got me involved, love me love my dogma, and I did fall in love with both and now I’m way to deep into the party to back off now, I’ve pinned all my hopes on them, I’m convinced that only the strictest discipline and boundless commitment can keep the capitalists from destroying the world.

But the hash had destroyed the connection between my brain and my vocal chords and all I could hear was the sound of my dreams shattering on the bedroom floor, the dawn of our marriage holding within it its own doom. All I could do is cry.
We finally made it to the redwoods, those of Big Sur this time, for a short honeymoon, but the bruises still smarted and hope, that sputtering flame of hope that both Sasha and the party had ignited in me smoldered on its way to extinction.

Berkeley

6.

My sister Nicki, who was 22 by then, was living in San Francisco with a roommate in a Victorian carriage house of the type made famous in Armistad De Maupin’s Tales of the City, in North Beach at the top of Telegraph Hill.

On my first night in town, I borrowed my sister’s blue Volkswagen bug and attempted to drive over to the flat in the Fillmore where Mark was living with his mother. I was following a cable car on Powell Street just as it reached Market Street, the diagonal main drag. I watched astounded while the people jumped out of the rickety wooden cable car, and turned it around on the manual turnstile. I scratched my head as the cable car rolled forward and crumpled the fender of my sister’s car. Worldly as I was by then, I was naive as well. I gave the driver my name and contact information, but never heard from the bus company. I’ve been an enemy of the cutesy cable cars ever since.

Mark showed me the town. He showed me how to go down the crookedest street in the world Lombard Street in his Renault without touching the brakes. He took me to his family’s favorite haunts in Chinatown, to City Lights Books, Golden Gate Park, and Playland at the Beach. I started to feel human again after New Orleans.

Mark and I with his friend Allen Tobias got an apartment on Telegraph Avenue in North Oakland near the Berkeley line in a duplex with fake brick siding. Allen had gone to Columbia as well. He was tall, Jewish, with thinning hair at age 20. He was proudly neurotic, a trait I admired. He was brilliant, and funny, and whined a lot.

Once we had settled into the apartment, Allen took us over to his friend’s house above a Chinese restaurant further up on Telegraph toward the UC campus in Berkeley. His friend was a short bearded fellow named Lee Glickman, but who called himself Count Olaf Bolansky. He always had his clocks set 6 hours ahead. And, he knew where to get marijuana. The first night we smoked it sitting around Olaf’s living room, listening to Charlie Mingus, I didn’t feel a thing.

“You feel anything, Mark?” I asked.

“No, not really.”

Then I started to growl like a lion. Mark started barking like a dog. Allen made pig noises, Olaf hissed like a snake.

“I guess we are high,” I said, and we all laughed and laughed.

With a tip from Allen, who had worked there for awhile a few months back before he got fired, I got a job as a copyboy at the Oakland Tribune. My first duty was to bring coffee with two lumps to ex-Senator William R. Knowland, the paper’s owner. He was known as an extreme right-winger, the “ex-Senator from Formosa,” Allen called him, referring to his advocacy of invading China to protect Chain-Kai-Shek’s government now in exile on Formosa and Taiwan from Mao’s victorious Communists. Allen suggested I spit in Knowland’s coffee before serving him, but wasn’t sufficiently radicalized to do such a thing…yet.

Although I was little more than and errand boy, I liked the job. I liked being at the center of breaking news. I liked being paged by one of the columnists and rushing to his office to ferry his overdue copy to the city desk. The high point of the job was on Sunday, November 24, 1963, when I was manning the city room entirely by myself, monitoring the newswires as they clicked away. At about 11 AM, the following message clacked through on the AP wire

Lee Harvey Oswald has just been shot by Jack Ruby as he was being transferred from the Dallas City Jail to the federal authorities…

Suddenly self-important, I swung into action and called the City Editor at his home. “Lee Harvey Oswald has been shot! Will you be coming in to put together an extra?”

“We know already, Henry. It was on television. Everybody in the country watched. I don’t think we need an extra.”

“Oh.” For a minute there, I thought I was one of the first in the country to scoop this news.

By that time, I was bored enough with working that I realized that going to college was actually more fun. So, I applied to Berkeley as a California resident and got in for the Spring semester. I rolled my Tribune job back to part-time.

***

I loved the anonymity of Berkeley, the fact that going to class wasn’t really required, that you could buy notes for all the major classes at a reasonable cost. To satisfy my parents, I signed up for pre-med classes, thinking maybe I would be a psychiatrist. I already had a sense of myself as a little crazy, and the mind fascinated me. But the class I liked was Martin Halpern’s Creative Writing class. Mark audited the class with me.

Allen had gone back to New York, and Mark and I found our own place on Ashby above Telegraph. We smoked a lot of pot and enjoyed our first peyote trip with Olaf, who blended the buttons into a disgusting strawberry concoction.

I wrote a story about riding the bus back from New Orleans, “my own terrified image reflected back at me through the window from the night speeding by.” The Teaching Assistant, liked that image. She wrote sweet things on my paper. Her looks made my stomach flutter. She had black hair and helmet-like bangs. White, soft skin. Big, sad eyes. She had a Honda 50 motor scooter. There was a childlike quality to her that moved me. I was smitten right away. Roberta Feldman, aka Rivvy. She’d written a story that won a prize for the best college story about a girl like her who makes love to a cat.

I invited to her to the house for dinner and asked Mark to disappear for the night. I cooked her steak and artichoke, baked potato with sour cream. She called me Barney, after my autobiographical character in my story. After dinner, I was all over her, and she didn’t resist. Finally, I carried her back to the bedroom, and we made love oh so sweetly. She wrote on the back of my hand with her finger, “I love you.” Finally, I thought to myself. Finally. Finally. Finally.

The next morning, she told me that she was engaged to a Stanford student and they planned to get married next summer. But I was in love.

Two days later, Mark and I went over to Olaf’s, where he had six sugar cubes soaked with LSD. I knew a fair amount about LSD. My sister Lisi had given me a subscription the Psychedelic Review the previous summer. I knew I wanted it.

The first part ot the trip was beyond terrifying. I sat in a big overstuffed chair, watching my mind, the world dissolve before me. Colors, smells, all sensation became impossibly vivid as words lost their meaning and raw fear enveloped my body. Hours seemed to pass as I or something resembling I was buffeted about on a sea of chaotic sensation, a part of me continuously reminding another part of me, remember, you took a drug, this is the drug working, it will pass, let go, let go, but I’m dying, it’s supposed to feel like dying, looking over at Mark and Olaf no reassurance there they looked at least as scared as I was, you have to do this on your own because you aren’t connected to anyone anymore there are no words the music was all that kept it together, Miles Davis, Some Day My Prince Will Come, Kind of Blue, those sounds the only unity it’s like you could attach your mind to the music and let it play you from one extreme to the other a bone chattering chill a psychic roller coaster ride the experience is beyond metaphor like nothing you’d ever experienced before but there is something you know is real yet the fear just builds and builds you are totally lost and totally alone and you are going to die and there’s nothing you can do about it the fear builds to a crescendo a now the music is Mingus again the Black Saint and the Sinner Lady wowing from one end of a chaotic scale to the others and finally it’s all you can do to just die and you do.

And then it’s quiet. Something has died, but it isn’t you. As you look out now yes you see that clear blue light they talk about in the psychedelic books and it reflects back to you the you that Rivvy loved, that Barney, that sweet kind of hayseed boy you never imagined that you could love anyone like you loved Rivvy but also yourself it is the first time you have ever truly loved yourself and by extension everyone and everything in the fabulous universe and out of your minds as you were you had no trouble riding with Mark in the car winding up and up and up into the Berkeley hills finally coming to Grizzly Peak and you stop the car and get out and below you the entire bay area with its universe of dazzling twinkling scintillating lights with the luminescent bay connecting them all and above a silently wise full moon beaming upon you good will and all was right with the world and always would be you are so fully into that peace which passeth understanding.
The experience was unbelievably profound; no question it had changed you unutterably, that nothing would ever be the same, except, equally unbelievably, the next day things were the same. You had to get up in the morning, go to some boring class, not listen to the lecture, and lament how fleeting could be enlightenment, as fleeting as your love for Rivvy, which too was receding in her efforts to distance herself.

Mark, who was so happy for you about Rivvy, and saw that thanks to her you had mastered art of the LSD trip – “I can see this is your drug, Henry,” he said – he advised you, “Don’t let her go. Keep after her. Let her know how you feel.”
So I pursued the hell out of her, calling her, going to her apartment, harassing her. Remarkably, she let me love her. She kept her distance but she didn’t cut me off. Still, I knew I couldn’t have her, and on my next LSD trip I got so scared I scared Mark and Olaf and begged them to take me to Rivvy’s where I spent the night, she did take care of me, she talked me down from my fear, but when I tried to make love to her she said no.

I spent the next few months in tragic mode, and to make absolutely sure I had done everything I possibly could to claim this woman, I hitchhiked across the country to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she was staying with her family in preparation for the wedding. She walked with me on the beach, she was full of love for me and sympathy, but she was going to go through with the wedding. At least I had tried as hard as I possibly could, I could respect myself for that.

I kept in touch with her over the years. Sometime in the middle of my second marriage to Earldean – this would have been 14 years later – I wrote her a poem.

YEARNING FOR RIVVY

(for the Winter Solstice after 14 years)

She said her soul was in her bangs,
Squarely framing her dark eyes,
her purplish black velvet eyes
reflecting no light
Deep black eyes like black holes in the midnight sky
drawing everything into them
Black holes with all the sadness
of dying stars
of stars dying alone
collapsing in on themselves and
pulling everything toward them.

She kissed me where it hurt,

(and it hurt so bad!)
She kissed me on the black-and-blue
ulcerous festering sore
crawling with maggots
the minute poems of my nether being
(and how she hated maggots.

So did she wake me
So did she awaken in me
my sleeping beauty
So did she arouse in me the yearning
as only Miles blue:

Someday my prince will come

***

I’d also tried to continue working at the Tribune that summer, but one day I had come in without shaving and the City Editor said he had to let me go.

Late that summer, after I returned from my fruitless trek back east, the Civil Rights Movement held a picket line at the Tribune, accusing it of discrimination against Blacks in hiring. I joined that picket, and got a rush of joy when confronted by my old boss.

Mark moved back to San Francisco to drive a cab and attend San Francisco State. I found a small Victorian flat in South Berkeley on Adeline. The living room and bedroom were painted an awful coral reminiscent of the Burcon Hotel, and the kitchen a sickening green, it was old and grungy, but it was my home. I got an orange tiger kitten named Wow. It was my first time truly on my own.

The fall semester of 1964 started with an editorial in the Tribune, sharply reminding the University of California at Berkeley, that it’s campus was private property and it had no business allowing such organizations as SNCC and CORE to raise money for their dubiously legal activities in the South, or in the Bay Area, that in fact such activities violated school rules banning advocacy of political causes or candidates, outside political speakers, recruitment of members, and fundraising by student organizations at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues.

The university’s response was to announce that the regulations restricting political activity would be strictly enforced.

I was much more into drugs than politics when this issue arose. I thought politics was boring. But I was on campus the day that Jack Wienberg set up his table on Bancroft and Telegraph and began soliciting donations. The campus police approached him and asked him for identification. He refused. He refused to dismantle the table. They brought a police car to the middle of the Sproul Plaza, and arrested him. The police car was immediately surrounded by students, including myself, and the roof of the car became a platform for student speakers. The sit-in lasted 32 hours before Mario Savio announced that an agreement to negotiate the rules had been reached and we could go home for now. But I was hooked. The injustice was just so obvious. The anti-Civil Rights Movement held the levers of power throughout the South, supported by the US Government, but student activists weren’t allowed to raise money on their own public campus. Not only was it egregiously unfair, to say so, to take a stand, was personally exhilarating. I was back on my mound of dirt, becoming the “robber” that I had wanted to be 15 years before.

The movement became a daily obsession. There were mass meetings every night, and I went to all of them. By myself. An odd contradiction: here I was front and center in the largest collective action in recent memory, isolated as hell. I followed all the arguments. It was significant that even the campus Republicans supported the movement.

My anti-ideological rebelliousness infected my school work. I was taking a Dramatic Arts class with a terrible teacher who gave an assignment like “Trace the development of Naturalism from Ibsen to O’neill.”

My response was to write a paper on “Ismism,” prefaced with a comment that I found the question repugnant and in the spirit of the FSM I refused to answer it. The teacher wrote “Tough!” in the margin, not long on humor or tolerance.

For two months, there was back and forth movement between the administration, the students, and the faculty. The Academic Senate came out in full support of the FSM demands, but the Regents held firm and upheld the campus ban on political activities and the suspensions of Savio and the other leaders of the struggle.

By December, as Joan Baez sang “We Shall Overcome” and led 800 of us inside Sproul Hall, I was totally persuaded that:

There's a time when the operations of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machines will be prevented from working at all.

as Mario described what we were doing.

The sit-in itself was festive, with groups singing Christmas carols with lyrics mangled to fit the struggle and students convening classes like “The nature of God and the Logarithmic Spiral.” I was still on my own, probably didn’t say a word all evening. At about two in the morning, the cops came, hundreds of them, Campus cops, Berkeley City cops, Highway Patrol, and went through the tortured process of dragging each of us who had gone limp into the waiting school buses. The buses took us to Santa Rita, the county jail south of Hayward. Santa Rita was an array of wooden barracks originally built, appropriately enough, as a concentration camp to house Japanese-Americans during World War II.

A self-appointed leader, dynamic and charismatic, called a meeting of our dormitory. “I think we should go on a hunger strike,” he said. “Call the press, let everyone know we weren’t yielding in our fight.”

It was 4 AM, and I was really hungry. I thought a hunger strike would be fruitless. I groaned. I spoke, something I rarely did: “I don’t think that would do any good.”

The leader turned to the others, “Who is this guy? Does anyone know him? Where did he come from?” I cowered in shame. He was implying I was some kind of police agent. His motion carried, though the point was moot because the authorities never even attempted to feed us. They let us go at about 11 the next morning. I was proud of my first arrest.

My family reacted with some dismay, but they respected my standing up for my principles.

A significant lesson for many of us in the FSM generation was that liberalism was bankrupt. While most everyone recognized that Knowland was a right-wing maniac, the ultimate decision-makers, the folks who called the cops, were University President Clark Kerr, and Governor Edmond G. Brown, both men with impeccable liberal credentials. The bankruptcy of liberalism would of course come to full fruition with Johnson and the Vietnam War, but for those of us who experienced the FSM, it was already clear that the “right” wasn’t the enemy: capitalism itself was revealing itself to be on the wrong side of history.

My next big discovery on the education front was speed. All my life, what I really wanted was to be a writer of fiction. I wrote my first story when I was eight. The story disappeared soon after I showed it to my parents, but here is a reconstruction:

FATE AND PEARL HARBOR

Once there was a boy who was playing with his mommy and daddy on the beach in Hawaii.

All of the sudden there were big explosions. BOOM! BANG! CRASH!

The boy ran down the beach all by himself.

THE END

Did my parents, with their zeitgeist understanding of Freud, recognize a death wish when they saw it? I don’t know why the story disappeared. But in my later attempts to write fiction or even non-fiction, something always seemed to be missing.

Not on speed. The first time I shot the methamphetamine that I got from Olaf into my vein with an eye dropper, I wrote up a storm. I figured out my whole novel, titled it: “Come Over the Mandalan Freeway,” and wrote the first chapter about a boy who escapes from his mother and sister at Disneyland and spends the night there, riding all the rides.

On speed, I wrote a short story as a paper for my Child Development class, my favorite class, about a black boy who ran with dogs. I modeled the boy on one of the neighbor kids who I’d gotten to know. The boy in the story was given a strong dose of behaviorist aversion therapy – a shot to make him throw up when he encountered dogs – but he kept on running with this pack of wild dogs, where he felt right at home.

For that same class, I wrote a rambling, convoluted paper on the nature of laughter (called “The Last Laugh”) that earned me an A+.

For my Asian Comp Lit class, I wrote a paper on the I Ching, which used the casting of the oracle to write the paper.

School hadn’t been so much fun since nursery school.

Two things happened to curtail my career as a speed freak. One was that I got really sick. I shivered in bed with fever for three whole days, and made a decision to cut way back on my speed use.

Then one day I went with Olaf to score some more speed. He took me over to his friend Alex,s house. Alex was a serious freak, over 6 feet tall weighing about 100 pounds, scraggly beard, eyes popping out of his head. While we were at his apartment, the police came. They tried to arrest Alex, but he resisted. They finally did subdue him, and my last view of him was standing on the front lawn of his house, his hands cuffed behind his back, bug-eyed, foaming at the mouth.

Meanwhile, I was so nervous I could barely speak, but Olaf was way cool. He told the cops that we had come over to view Alex’ art work – he made bad heavy metal sculptures using found objects. Since we hadn’t scored anything yet, fortunately, and were clean, the cops let us go. But it was too close a call. I knew I didn’t want to call my parents and tell them I’d been busted for drugs. Oddly, it never occurred to me not to tell them.

Having learned to write on speed, I spent years attempting to mimic the experience by swearing off coffee during the week and then on Saturday morning quaffing a large quantity of triple espresso. Only recently have I reclaimed enough confidence to write without being high.

***

The competition of men for sex, for women in particular is especially hurtful to both men and women. From the age of 15 onward, I never felt like a real man unless I was sleeping with someone. This attitude is mostly about what other men or boys would think of me, part of the need for status. So between bouts of being in love, I would find stop-gap girls who would sleep with me even if I didn’t love them.

Christina had been the first of these, the first woman who slept with me without me having to pay. Romy was the next, an accomplished cellist, a dark, sweet woman, shyer than me. But my friends made fun of me, implying she wasn’t good-looking enough.

Faye came after Romy, a summer romance in New York when I returned to Columbia for summer school. She was sprightly and fun, but had an odd odor, a floral scent of a carnation that had gone rotten.

Ann was a concert pianist with a penchant for horses, a virgin who came to me when I was camping one summer near Nevada City in the Sierra foothills. I met her through my friend William from Pine Lake who had dropped out of college again to move in with his wife Katherine across the street from me in North Berkeley. He was staying with Ron L. and working as a carpenter. Ann was Ron’s sister.
This one ended in the worst possible way. When I moved back to Berkeley at the end of the summer, I figured it was over. Of course I didn’t bother communicating this to Ann. I was hip. It was just a thing. Meanwhile, her father died. But a friend of William and Katherine, a blonde named Cynthia, was visiting them. So, I made a date with her and went to pick her up on my motorcycle. As we were leaving, there was Ann, sitting on the front steps, crying about her father. She gave me a look like I was killing her. I was so embarrassed I just pretended it didn’t happen, took Cynthia back to my new place in West Berkeley, and made love to her. It took me six months to get another girlfriend after that, I felt so guilty.

And that next one would have been Nora, Mark’s sister, who got me briefly in the restaurant business in New York in my year after college. The Phoenix Restaurant, on East 10th Street, across from Thompkin’s Square Park. We had a working beatnik clientele, as the Lower East Side sputtered toward becoming the East Village. Nora was smart, but extremely difficult.

We did everything, from cooking to cleaning to waiting tables, seven ten hour days per week. I’d never worked so hard in my life. The hardest thing about the business was the clientele. The regular customers were our bread and butter, but the reason they were our regular customers was that they had no friends – we were their best friends. This could be draining.

As capitalists in New York City, we competed okay. But to make real money, we needed a beer and wine license. We contacted our local mafia guy, the one who lent us the money to install the jukebox. He wanted $5000 to bribe the appropriate officials. We balked. When our partner Jerry hired a gay Jamaican cook in the country illegally at below minimum wage, I drew the line. I told them I wanted out.

We sold the restaurant the Purple Intergalactic somethingorother. I broke
even after six months. But it was clear, capitalism was not for me. I split up with Nora and went over to Betty, a girl I had known as a friend in Berkeley.

Betty helped create my hippy van and rode with me in it back to California.

I want to honor them, these stop-gap girls, because they made life bearable to me. For some of them, I was doubtlessly a stop-gap guy, but I don’t think women have the same competitive need to be sleeping with someone even if they know they have no future with this person, that the chemistry just isn’t there.

I have a sense of what this “chemistry” is. “Love is how people naturally feel about each other if no distress gets in the way,” says Harvey Jackins, the founder of co-counseling, about whom, more later. So that person we “fall in love with” somehow gives us a glimpse of what it might be like to get beyond distress, beyond our perpetual feeling bad about ourselves. It’s also an intuitive thing, our being matching us up with another being that we think will make a good co-parent – this is an evolutionary drive that kicks in regardless of our intent or lack thereof to have children.

There was one other love like this between Rivvy and my first wife: Nina. Nina’s finest attribute was her ability to listen with apparent interest to my long, speed-driven rants about Wilhelm Reich, who was my hero for a number of years. Reich believed that the orgasm put us in touch with the creative life force (orgone) of the universe. As a recovering sex-starved refugee from boarding school, the concept of sex/orgasm as the Answer resonated. Reich was brought to the Soviet Union to design sexuality policy for Lenin in the early days, but he went too far in encouraging sex among prepubescent children and got kicked out. In the US, he was hounded by the FDA for making claims that his “orgone box” could cure cancer, and went insane. My kind of guy.

Nina broke up with me after about 3 months without explanation. I was devastated. I went into a funk that lasted about as long as the relationship. It was like that for me in those days, either ecstasy or abject misery, with nothing in between. Bipolar is what they call that now, but even though I’d been seeing a shrink since I arrived in California, I didn’t have the luxury of a diagnosis.
However, 20 years later, Nina and I met up again when I was between marriages. She wanted me back! How sweet that was. Even sweeter: I told her no. It was thrilling to so get even with her.