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.