Life / My Generation
Exile and Exploration
Off to California
So across the country we rolled, thirty-six hours on the first long stretch without stopping except for gas and road-food. Catnaps along the way were brief, jolting flirtations with sleep, cramped as we were in John's yellow VW beetle. He was taller than I - we both had to get out and stretch long legs at every stop, before folding them under the dash for the next leg of the trip. John's bushy blond curls bobbed as he talked, his large round eyes gentle and clear. He was a Californian, a high school football star, quarterback turned college freak. A year left to go in an uninspiring stint as a psych major, and he'd called it quits. He planned to check in with his family in Long Beach, then head up the coast in search of land. He knew some hip folks near Fresno with a small walnut farm - maybe that'd be the thing. I had no fixed plans; I thought I might head north myself to Berkeley to check in with Brian Lawton, who'd transferred to the university there, if I couldn't catch on with something in the L.A. area. The thirty dollars in my pocket, already dwindling on hamburgers and coffee, gave me precious little margin to play with. It felt like walking into a casino, with about that much stake. If I got wiped out, well . . .
I almost cut us off short of discovering the outcome, when I fell asleep at the wheel in the middle of the night crossing the three-mile-long Mississippi River bridge into Missouri. It was one of those cases where you suddenly wake up to the fact that you've been driving for God knows how long blind, unconscious, on automatic pilot. That shook me awake, for awhile, until we could get to the next Husky station for a large black coffee to go.
By noon we cruised into Oklahoma, celebrating my first glimpse of the real West with a big bowl of fine Afghani hash. Redneck country, this was for sure - you could tell just by the number of pickup trucks, with their cab-mounted rifles behind the seats, the drivers wearing baseball caps and spitting tobacco juice out the windows. We cupped the hash pipe discreetly in our palms.
First stop in the mythical state of California was Barstow, that dusty strip of a desert road that typified the new style of town in the far West: the main drag of neon signs and glinting parking lots, signs for gas, food and cars, motels and more of the same, on and on for miles until petering out in the empty desert again.
We arrived in Long Beach around nine, ten o'clock at night. John had phoned ahead and his mother was waiting up for us. First thing, she offered me a burrito. I asked what it was and she laughed - this eastern dude's never heard of a burrito - ? It was great, the pasty white tortilla over thick bean filling, warmed in the Toast-r-Oven. Then John's father appeared, just home after working late. Fat, bald, looking us up and down with circumspection, he was, John had told me, a professional psychologist, and I felt like I was under inspection now for mental integrity. I played it cool, polite, low-key . . .
What am I saying? That's me, anyway! I wasn't then, never would be, a whacko, weirdo, zoned-out space-case; no flaming freak. This father, the successful professional, looked stranger than me with his loud, flowery silken shirt and gray goatee. I lived closer than he to the coat-and-tie department.
So this, I thought to myself, swallowing the last of the bland burrito, this is California.
First thing next day, I started in on the want ads in the L.A. paper. That was a big job, and nothing struck my fancy. John made some phone calls; we drove around a bit calling on a few of his old buddies. One guy told me about a job he knew of, driving a glass truck. Hmm, I thought, am I ready for this? I had thought that since I like to drive, I might well look for a job as a truck-driver. But in L.A.? New to the city? With no experience? I'd never even driven a pickup truck. And glass, no less . . . It paid, he said, $6.50 an hour. Tempting, tempting. But I couldn't go through with it.
Besides, the vibes didn't feel right. The whole environment, the whole scene was too artificial, too plastic. The manicured lawns and shrubs, the pastel stucco bungalows, the people all fat and wearing those ubiquitous Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses, the insidious haze of smog under the unreal, unbroken clarity of blue sky, it just didn't suit me. Sure, it wasn't raining. But I thought maybe I'd head up to Berkeley before settling in at the first random stop.
John was heading north himself in any case, so I hopped in with him and kept my eyes open as we wound along the Coast Highway, past increasingly wild seaside terrain. A stopover in Santa Barbara showed me a more compatible lifestyle than I'd seen further south. This town seemed to be a student or ex-student enclave, with every sort of experiment in cheap and easy living - plastic domes, lean-to's on the beach, communal houses. Vegetarians were everywhere. Everyone I saw was young; males long-haired and bearded, females barefoot and gypsy-clad. Their eyes had the open gaze, their walking the gentle gait of drugs, meditation and tofu. But again, it was not quite for me. Again, it was all too unreal.
We drove on further north past Big Sur and Santa Cruz, through the sprawling glitter of San Jose and the hilly housing tracts of south San Francisco, over the Bay Bridge and finally into the tree-lined streets of Berkeley. I had Brian Lawton's address from letters he'd written since his transfer the year before - an apartment on Dwight Way.
A modern, tasteless apartment building: but I was impressed that Brian, still a student, was out on his own in an apartment just like any normal "real life" person. Well, not quite on his own. He shared the two-bedroom suite with five other students: Alex, a pampered, stuck-up son of an oil executive; Eli, who looked thirty or more, spoke with a heavy Austrian accent, and was crude and jovial; Ed, the straight, stalwart, flat-footed sophomore; a quiet serious Japanese student named Richie; and another Richard, a swarthy Israeli tennis buff. All were crammed into the kitchen at suppertime when John and I came on the scene - cooking, eating, drinking Coors, joking at one another’s expense.
"Hey, Burgie!" Brian exclaimed. "Good to see you." (I never knew why he called me that - maybe from the German "burgher"?) We shook hands in the new, thumbs-up style. "Come in, come in. Hey, John, how's it goin', man? Come on in, you're just in time for supper. Want some chicken?"
The older man chimed in: "Yeah, get these guys some chicken, huh - come on. Ed, whatsa matter, those thighs are cooked enough! Ed, save some o' those thighs for Richie. Richie likes thighs, don't ya, Richie - heh-heh-heh-heh! Come on, siddown, siddown. Hi, glad to meetcha. Name's Eli." Over a broad, bearded smile, his seasoned eyes twinkled infectiously.
We sat down to a scrumptious dinner of barbecued chicken, rice and salad, and dawdled at the table long after with a constant supply of beer. John spoke of his plans to get on to Salinas the next day to check out the walnut farm; I said I had cast my fate to the winds and was hoping to find work and a place to stay - could I crash there for a few days, at least, while trying my luck?
Alex looked at me, his mouth tight.
"Sure, sure," said Brian right away. "You can sleep on the floor in the living room, if you like. We already got four in one bedroom, Richard and Ed in the other - two more than we're supposed to in this apartment, but what the hell. School will be over in another week and some of these clowns'll be moving out. Right, Alex? And Eli's got a new girlfriend, so who knows . . ."
Alex said nothing, drew at his beer. Eli looked mock-indignant. "Hey, Brian, now I just met the lady. It's not like that. She's a good Jewish girl. And good Jewish girls take - how long do they take to spread, Richard?"
"For you, Eli, the sky's the limit," said Richard, dryly.
"What's that supposed to mean, you ball buster?"
"Richard plays tennis," Brian explained.
"Hey, wanna play tomorrow?" Richie piped in.
"Naw, got an exam," complained Richard. "Math. Gonna be a ball-buster, that one is."
Eli turned serious. "Yeah, I got my Geogs tomorrow, too. Fuckin' course - why do they want you to take that stuff for business admin, is beyond me."
"Environmental consciousness, Eli. It's the coming thing. Get with it," said Brian.
"You still going for environmental law, after this year?" I asked.
"Yeah, I guess so."
"Not Kaiser Steel, huh?" I remembered his father worked in the upper levels of that corporation.
"Naw. I could walk right in it if I wanted to, like Alex here, with his dad the vice-president of Exxon."
"A vice president," corrected Alex soberly.
"Whatever." Brian looked thoughtful, suddenly mature, with his clipped black mustache, neat black hair. He was small in stature but possessed of an intelligent, straightforward and manly intensity. I realized now how much I'd missed his presence the last two years at Dartmouth, after rooming beside him in Bissell sophomore year. I'd always admired his fine taste in music and literature: John Mayall and Herbie Mann, Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann. There was a European, cosmopolitan flavor to his bearing; he'd gone to a boarding school in Switzerland, had actually been to the Black Forest. We'd shared a mutual, mad kind of humor, along with our supplies of hash: the kind of humor that would lead us to collaborate on the stuffing of a dummy to lay at the end of the hall, propped up as if drugged-out or drunk, toothpaste-snot on its mask-face, to frighten poor Maurice, the French-Canadian dorm janitor when he next arrived on his rounds. This was "Little Fitchie," our arch-degenerate anti-hero, whom we saddled with all our worst habits, our honest potentials. Leaving Little Fitchie behind us, that wretched creature of the forest, we could move on to our more respectable destinies - lawyer, teacher, men of the world.
My first day in Berkeley, I toured famous Telegraph Avenue, the main street leading to the heart of the University of California campus. This setting, I knew, was the scene of epic battles early on in the student protest movement. Later I would hear first-hand tales of birdshot fired at onlookers, near-riots in these streets. A block away was People's Park - a desolate, vacant lot that some gnomes lived in, dug into the earth, sheltered with tattered canvas and plastic tarps, unmolested by police. The park, I would find out, had been the recent scene of a pitched battle between occupying hippies and club-wielding police, as the park was slated for university building expansion, and "the people" held out for open space, free access, and, evidently now, a squalid squatting-ground.
All along "the Ave," gypsy peddlers hawked their wares from blankets, stools, makeshift stalls. The sidewalk was jammed with them, and thick with the smells of patchouli incense and Middle-Eastern food. This long, linear bazaar offered trinkets and baubles of every description; hand-crafted jewelry, candles, leatherwork, cards, incense, smoking paraphernalia, Indian cloths, scarves and sashes, carpets, shoes, hot food, and, on the sly, dope of all kinds. On every step lurked a serial squadron of panhandlers, aggressive as they had to be to survive the competition: looking ragged, bedraggled and beaten, snaggle-toothed and shoeless, shoulders draped with the blankets that served as their street-beds, sweating in the morning sun under the Sally Ann suitcoats that at night had kept them pajama-warm. I could wave off their protestations in good conscience, as I had all too few coins to my name. I was, like them, "out on the streets," as Dylan had prophesied of my generation, "like a complete unknown / like a rolling stone."
I'd never made it to Haight-Ashbury, the original hippie-mecca. By 1972, Berkeley too was a fading stage for freak-culture. It had become evident, even with the class of '73 pledges at Sigma Nu, that the golden age of campus revolution was already past, that a new generation of serious academic weenies was replacing us. Was a generation really as narrow as one-year's crop of baby-boomers? From my bias inside the class of '72, ne 1950, it seemed so. I guess it depends on where you are, when things are poppin'. "On the Road" with the beats in '57, sitting-in in '60, marching in '63 or rioting in '64 or '65 or '66, in the Haight in '67 . . . or in '69, grooving in the mud at Woodstock - or standing in the snow outside Parkhurst Hall surrounded by the National Guard, being interviewed on the radio. If you happen to be where the action is, in the midst of history happening, your generation seems the one singled out by fate - especially, as in my case, when the revolution itself was so age-linked, so identifiable with "the generation gap."
At the end of Telegraph Avenue lies the concrete concourse of the University, the concrete benches, the concrete steps, the concrete buildings all around. On one of those benches looking straight down the street sat a hulking black man with a sinister air. His shoulders were hunched; his hands hung between his dangling legs. He stared fixedly, vacantly ahead, and as I approached near enough to see the yellows of his bleary eyes, I saw them look right through me. Heroin, I said to myself. This guy's smacked right out. Could be - but I couldn't dismiss him quite so easily. He sat there as if in judgment of the whole avenue, his gaze burning through me to sear the entire street with a biblical fire of retribution. He was a goner, his posture proclaimed; but his stare condemned all of us, all the world as with an existential guilt.
I shuddered and walked past him, flesh creeping, to listen more closely to the soapbox preachers drowning each other out on the benches and steps beyond. Freaky fundamentalists, enraged and enraptured, vied for audience attention - the audience consisting of students passing by, and bored academic functionaries out on their lunch breaks in the otherwise fresh air. A troupe of Hari Krishna devotees pranced into earshot from the side, clinging finger bells, bouncing like pogo sticks, bobbing hairlocks from shaven heads, swirling their orange robes.
I walked on. I entered one of the buildings and asked for an entrance application for graduate school in English. Not that I was particularly keen on reverting to the academic womb, after so brief a taste of freedom . . . I was just hedging my meager bets; feeling my own addiction.
Prospects for "real" work seemed slim. I checked out some token leads from the newspaper each morning, then spent afternoons cruising the less-populated sidewalks in search of sunny parks, where I could lay out on the grass, read about Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism, and write the so-called poetry of my inner yearnings. I had access to the swimming pool in the courtyard of the Dwight Way apartment, so in the late afternoon after sweating out in the sun all day, I could take a refreshing dip to cool off before supper with the gang.
Eli wasn't doing well at school. He looked more and more harried as the exam days built up. He had to hold down, all the while, a part-time job managing a chain of valet-parking lots, and the pressure was hurting. When one of his crews called in one night, saying they were a man short, I had my chance.
"Burgie," he said to me, holding a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, "you wanna go to work tonight?"
"Tonight? You mean - "
"Right now. There's a crew over at Lordship's needs another guy. Stupid fuckin' Larry dildo didn't show. You want it?"
"Uh - sure. Okay. But . . ."
"You got a white shirt?"
I shook my head.
"Take one of mine." He looked at my legs under the cut-off shorts, my sandalled feet. "I got some black pants, dress shoes - size ten?"
"No, eleven. Sometimes ten and a half."
"Close enough. You're on." He spoke back into the phone.
I was all set, on my way. And driving - I could do that, just fine.
Running up to cars at Lordship's Restaurant in my little red valet jacket and black bow tie, bowing to the bejeweled and polished gentry that patronized such a place, was somewhat demeaning. But behind the wheels of their sporty Triumphs, their plush Mercedes and BMW's, now that was another matter. You got to tap into that wealth and power - to ride it, guide it - if only for the few fleeting instants it took to glide to the nearest parking spot. For that, when they walked out later, flushed and merrily sated, you got a fifty-cent tip, more or less, and a smile or two if you were lucky. A base rate of a dollar-ten covered your time, and at midnight or one o'clock the workday was over - till five again the next day.
It was okay - it was a job. It was a foothold. I could use it to secure my stay in California till something better came along. Alex had a better-sounding prospect. Through his father's connections he was bound for Alaska where he'd been promised work on a fishing boat for a thousand dollars a month. Big money, that was. I sounded him out but Alex was vague. He said he'd see when he got there, would write and let me know if there was any more such work available.
"Could you call, if there is?" I pressed.
"Yeah. I guess so. " He frowned in his snooty, condescending way.
As it turned out, Alex went all the way up there only to find that the job was already filled. He spent two weeks looking around for more work, and then hitched a ride home on an Exxon freighter.
I made enough of a little nest egg, parking cars, that when Brian finished exams and invited me along on a vacation trip to Glacier National Park in Montana, I jumped at the chance. I had to feel out Eli, though, to see how he felt about me jumping ship for awhile.
He looked hurt, in his sad-eyed way. "Ah, the crews are always like that. Easy come, easy go. I'll find someone to cover for you, no problem."
"How about when I get back? Will there be any more work for me then?"
He sucked on his mustache with his lower lip. "Hard to say. Likely, sooner or later. We got a new contract over in Frisco coming up, maybe in the fall, or after. Italian restaurant - Veleggio's. The manager's a prick, though. Won't give us enough, yet. Dan, my boss, is working on him, though. It'll come through. Sure, you wanna work over there? I'll keep you in mind."
I could see I'd have to take my chances. But a trip to the mountains, out of this stinking bazaar and into the real West - it was worth it. Brian had fishing gear lined up, his father's International Harvester four-wheel drive jeep, a big cooler for beer. I took some of my cash down to the army surplus store and invested in the cheapest, most basic equipment: a plastic "tube tent" for six dollars, a sleeping bag for fifteen, ensolite pad for four, hiking boots on sale forty percent off, another fifteen.
So much for my advance pay from Eli. After food, I'd have to depend on Brian's generosity for gas and beer until I could pay him later from future earnings. No problem, he assured me.
The trip to the mountains convinced me as never before, and forever after, that the west was my true spiritual home. Especially, but not only, the mountains. The trip through the volcanic scrublands of Idaho, the winding Snake River country to the foot of the Grand Teton range, the trip back through Oregon's vast southeastern desert and dry Ponderosa pine forests, sent frame after frame of the same message into my heart. And when we reached the primary destination of the trip, the mountains of Glacier National Park on Montana's northern edge, I felt bonded to the mountains forever. Not just any mountains, either - but the real mountains of the west. They called the hills of New Hampshire mountains, the tired old Appalachian chain all the way down to Georgia. I'd hiked them, lived in them, and they weren't bad; but compared to these western Rockies, they were as nothing. Even the names of these massifs spoke of their wild beauty. Rising Wolf, reaching up dark and ominous, sharp-fanged into the roiling gray sky, guarded the gateway to the park; and the highway to its lofty heart was called "Going-to-the-Sun." This was spirit country, indeed.
There was still snow in some of the campgrounds, but Brian and I found bare ground enough to pitch our tents. We then settled down to a fine vacation of fishing, hiking, and exploring by jeep . . . drinking beer and smoking cigars like the true sportsmen we thought we were. The cloudy skies continued, as clouds poured into the craggy bowl of the park and couldn't get out. When it got too rough we did loads of laundry at the visitor's center, sat in the jeep with our beer and the latest (two days old) sports pages. First-place Detroit, I unhappily conceded, was having one of those years in which all the bounces go the right way. But who cared, this far from civilization? . . . Well, I did. And at night I dreamed of cities.
When I got back to Berkeley, Eli had filled my spot with the valet parking service and I had to hunt for work again. Both Richie Wong and Richard Temple had moved out at the end of the school term. Ed Bell was working for Eli already. Brian had a regular summer job with Hunt's cannery coming up. I hung around the apartment for a few days, despondent and without initiative or sense of direction. I could wait for a valet spot to appear again; I could also apply for a position at Hunt's. But, Brian informed me, at $6.85 and up, the few job openings there drew stiff competition, in the form of long lineups at application time every August. And I had to pay my way until then; I couldn't continue to sponge off Brian.
Then, a glimmer of light. Richard Temple dropped by for a visit one day, before Brian had started work. Eli was also home, during slack time in the early afternoon. Richard asked me how things were going; I told him I was hard up for work.
"Oh," he said, "well then you'd probably be interested to know about this employment agency in Oakland, uh, Simpson Personnel, I think it is. They approached our fraternity house in May looking for gas jockeys for this car wash down on North Avenue - you know the Texaco there?"
"No - "
"Anyway, it' a 24-hour station. They go through lots of help, I guess - high turnover. They wanted less hippies, I guess, and more clean-cut college kids, fraternity boys like me."
I smiled at his frankness. His curly hair was cropped short; he wore white crew sox and tennis shoes, and real, not cut-off, shorts.
"Are you working there?"
"Nah. Got a couple other irons in the fire. But you might try going down there. Tell him you heard about it from the guys in Kappa Sig. Or even that you're a member."
"Oh, I don't think so. Too easy to check up on me. But I'll tell them I belonged to a fraternity at Dartmouth. That should do it."
"Yeah, and they'll ask you what you're doing out here, and you'll tell them - "
" - that you came out to try the good dope, the loose women and the high-paying jobs," Brian broke in.
Eli howled with laughter, and then slapped me on the shoulders. "You'll bowl 'em over, Burgie. No problem. And like I say, if it don't work out, look me up again."
"Thanks, Eli."
The agency interviewer looked me over again, took my application form and said he'd call if they needed me. Yes, he said, they were hiring at the Texaco station in Berkeley, but there were several applicants on file who were eligible for the job. There were no guarantees. I came out onto the street with hopes in neutral. I still had fairly short hair, not even shoulder-length, and a trim mustache. I felt clean-cut enough to sway the guy at the agency, or the gas-station boss, a Gerald somebody, no problem. But I didn't yet have anything.
Just then, as I stepped out into the busy Oakland intersection, a black dude coming toward me rapidly from the other corner stopped for an instant, flashing a watch from his pocket: "Hey, man, wanna cop a good watch, cheap?"
"Naw," I waved him off and walked on.
I’d still heard nothing by July 13, my twenty-second birthday. Brian had not yet started at Hunt's. He slept late by custom, and now also to get in shape for his upcoming night shift. This morning he woke up with a bright idea.
"Hey, Burgie, how about let's go sailing today, to celebrate your birthday?"
"Sailing? Where, out on the Bay?"
"No, no. Lake Merritt, down in Oakland. It's very tame, actually, but it can be fun, if there's any wind at all." He looked out the window, where tree branches rustled in a slight morning breeze.
"Well, yeah, sounds great. Something different for a birthday. Might as well enjoy life while I'm still not working."
But wouldn't you know it, at eleven-thirty, before we could get ready and walk out the door, Mr. Simpson from the agency called.
"Mr. Gray, do you still want that job we talked about?"
A lump caught in my throat. "Uh, uh - excuse me . . . yes, yes, I mean - the job at the Texaco."
"That's right, you can start this afternoon."
"This afternoon."
"Yes. Are you ready to go to work, or should I try somebody else?"
"Um, yes, I'm ready. Uh, the thing is . . . could I start tomorrow instead?"
"No. They need somebody today. If you don't want the job - "
"Uh, Mr. Simpson, sir, the thing is, today's my birthday, you see, and I'd planned to go sailing. If I could start a job tomorrow, say - it would be my only chance to go. Are you sure - "
"I'm truly sorry about the birthday. Tell you what. You go down there, tell Gerald I sent you and you can start work this afternoon, and I'll buy you a beer. Otherwise, I'll just get - "
"Okay, okay. I guess if I have to do it that way, that's okay. And thanks for the offer of a beer. Sure, I'll take it."
I never saw the beer.
It took about ten minutes to learn the job at the gas station / car wash. Running the gas pump, checking oil, washing windshields, punching credit cards through; lining up wheels on the car wash track, motioning the driver forward, pushing the extra hot-wax button. I had to learn more gradually to accept the permeating stink of gasoline, through the gold-yellow smock to my own clothes and through them to my skin; the swoon-like headache from all the gas fumes by the end of a shift; the lonely slack periods, standing on the pump islands gazing out at the incessant traffic below the university and a higher, purer, always cloudless blue sky; the rush periods where the mind gives way to the routine filling of tanks and exchange of cash; the welcome lunch breaks, squeezed into the office or garage in alternation with the two-to-five other poor souls held captive there for the same paltry $1.95 per hour. After six months, you got a nickel raise.
I made a good new friend pumping gas there. Kevin Beaumont had just graduated and, like me, he was just making money while killing time, thinking of something better to come. Like me, he had no idea of what that something might be. He even looked like me: same height, build, facial appearance. People thought we were brothers. He smoked a little dope, drank a little, played some guitar and tennis. We hit it off right away and, when a month had gone by and it was time to vacate the apartment on Dwight, I went in with Kevin on the job of apartment hunting. Eli and Ed were also on the lookout for a new place to live. The four of us settled on a three-bedroom apartment on Oxford Street, four blocks away from the gas station. It was ideal. The new school year would find Brian living at his parents' house in Oakland, working on with Hunts so as to save for law school.
I still had academic ambitions myself, already with cold feet in the workingman's deadening world. But I still held hopes of finding a higher-paying job somewhere, by which perhaps to finance further schooling. I knew my parents had had their fill of so-called higher education, that I would have to pay for my own pipe-dreams from now on. My current fantasy had something to do with environmental education. I was researching some of Brian's textbooks I'd remembered from geography class, some of the new perspectives like Paul Shepard's The Subversive Science. At the same time I was increasingly drawn to poetic, intuitive expression of sentiments for nature - what would later be called the "right-brain" approach. Brian Lawton's environmental law career would have been the left-brain counterpart of what I wanted to do. I'd moved too far off the rigorous mental regimen for that - a more humanistic approach was more to my taste.
I knew, however, that there were these heavy dues yet to pay in "the real world." So I kept my nose down to the oil-grimed grindstone, looking up only far enough to consider more lucrative trades. I'd already come within a whisker of becoming a cabbie, driving the all-night shuttle between the Oakland Airport and the San Francisco naval base. Now that, I knew, would have supplied a store of tales for a later novel - if I survived without a knife in my back. But it was not to be. I went so far as to get my mug shot taken at the Oakland cop shop, required for the plastic I.D. card - but that was on July 12, and the next day I took the turn down this more benign fork in the road.
Now I considered the whole range of apprenticeship programs in the construction trades; as the formal route seemed the only way into that tightly-controlled, union-scale industry. I had some tidbits of experience that gave me incentive to list the trades of bricklayer, painter, carpenter, cement mason, roofer, taper, glazier, and hod carrier among the options. To these I added photoengraver, operating engineer, chief of party (whatever that was) and, to take the fantasy way back, fireman. The starting wages ranged from $2.50 to $4.93. I considered a career as an iron worker, a machinist; inquired if my parents could help me out with the thousand-dollar tuition for a truck driver's school (advertised on a matchbook cover). That, they agreed to. But I balked in the end, partly because the matchbook come-on promised no guaranteed job even with the resulting ticket. I still had hopes for getting on at Hunt's, or saving enough to get to Alaska to try my luck there. I was making precious little headway still trying to learn chords on Kevin’s guitar, but I thought I might go back to the trumpet; I could take music lessons again, with a rented horn, and learn to play jazz.
Hell, I even hashed over the long list of gypsy trades again, of back-to-the-land enterprises that might allow me to make a go of it back on Borschert's land in New Hampshire. It was so much easier, on paper, considering the long list of possibilities: cooking, painting, tanning, farming, carpentry, furniture making, masonry, metalwork, stained glass, blacksmithing, machine repair; raising apples for cider, bees for honey, goats for milk, maples for syrup, pines for firewood, chickens and ducks for eggs, pigs for hams....Could I possibly learn to make musical instruments, comic books?
At the very end of my option list was the last recourse - to return to Baltimore. I could just throw in the towel on these far-fetched, flimsy plans that were all dead-ends from the start. I could just as well pump gas in Baltimore, crash in a shabby old row house downtown, live on steamed crabs, National Bohemian, and O's games on the radio. For that matter, I could even spend half my pay on a season ticket. And then, who knows? I might take some law courses at night school . . .
In fact, when September rolled around with nothing but gas on the horizon, I decided to ditch this tarnished California dream and boot it back "home." I still went to work, thinking it over. It was too bad that I couldn't even get on with a housepainter - to make use of my longest job experience to date. I'd tried. Just last week I'd asked a young, hip-looking contractor about the business. He told me it shouldn’t be too hard to hook on with somebody.
"But whatever you do," he cautioned in an ominous tone, "stay away from Carl Caldwell."
"Oh, yeah, why's that?"
"Man, I worked for him three weeks - in the spring this was, to help him out on a big job - and he finked out royally on the payment. I came out with about two bucks an hour for my trouble. He's a bastard to steer clear of."
"Okay, well, thanks for the warning."
I wondered if I were really hard up, if I would work for Caldwell. He probably had trouble keeping help . . .
That very afternoon, after filling up a long white Cadillac, I was punching through the credit card when something caught my eye. The little gold letters on the card read "Carl Caldwell." A shiver ran up my back. I took the slip out for him to sign. He was still in the driver's seat. He didn't look like a housepainter - powder blue leisure suit, immaculate car, middle of the day - but I guessed he drove around checking on his lackeys' work, or dropping into the bank to drool over his greasy profits.
"Thank you," I said in my worst robotic dumb-waiter's tone, and let him drive away.
However: my destiny had, on life's hidden, magic plane, been working somehow. The gas station job itself, that came out of the blue to save me from driving a cab, was one sign. The Kardell card was another. Now, on the day I made plans to call home and arrange a return to Baltimore, lady luck showed her face full out in the open. A white Ford van drove in for gas; a kindly-looking old man with bushy eyebrows and rumpled clothes got out. I noticed while pumping that his van was full of familiar equipment: ladders, tarps, buckets of paint.
"How's it going?" I asked.
"Oh, not too bad."
A comfortable silence, under the breathtaking beauty of that cloudless sky. There hadn't been a cloud in sight, come to think of it, since I'd arrived that spring.
"Doesn't it ever rain here?" I suddenly wondered aloud.
"Oh, sure, it will. Another month or two, she'll begin. Then you won't see much sun for four, five months. All that cloud and fog from out the Bay . . ."
"I'm just, ah, new in the area. Still looking . . . say, you a housepainter?"
"That' right."
"How's business?"
"Oh, pretty good. I've been doing it for, oh, thirty years now. It's pretty much the same as ever. People always need painting done. Lately, I've got enough work just with jobs for old friends, people I know."
"You ever need help? I mean, I've spent some time as a housepainter myself, and actually I've been hoping to get back into that line of work here. Any way you could use an extra hand?"
He looked at me more closely. The gas clicked off and I remounted the handle on the pump as deftly as I could, twisted the cap back on his tank.
"Well, actually, y'know . . . maybe I could. You say you've done it before?"
"Yes, all last summer. And some other jobs, a couple other times. A friend and I were contracting . . ."
"Hmmm. How much would you expect to be paid?" His forehead knitted, the close-set, blue eyes peering at me from under the bushy brows.
"Oh, that doesn't matter. I mean, whatever seems fair to you. Three, four dollars an hour?"
"I could give you a try, see how you do. But I couldn't promise you anything more than three dollars an hour."
"That would be just great. Just fine." I took his credit card and rushed into the office to punch it through. This time I was in for another surprise: "James Haney," it read. It was the same name as my uncle, the one who'd gotten me hired at American Tote, two summers before.
So finally, I was set on a new, more promising course. Who knew where this new career would lead? I gave notice to Gerald, who accepted my change of plans graciously. After all, I'd already told him the morning of that fateful day that I was thinking of quitting and going back to Baltimore. Then he seemed annoyingly concerned - I didn't know whether on account of his crew, or the dubious wisdom of my decision. Now he seemed happy for me.
I would miss Gerald - a former Army sergeant who'd mellowed in his later years, grew bushy red sideburns along his florid cheeks, resigned himself to life at the gas pumps. Gerald, who'd been nice enough to set me up with his stepdaughter, Linda, only three weeks before: that brief, idyllic romance . . .
I'd been minding my own business, running cars onto the wash-chain, wiping windshields, pumping gas. Gerald's new wife Ruby had been showing up more and more to hang around the station, keeping him company, I guess. Then she started bringing her sixteen-year-old daughter, Linda. Linda was a quiet, mysterious girl. She eyed me with a shy smile. I smiled back. We never exchanged two words - no more than a
"Hi."
"Hi."
I, too, was shy, had my own preoccupied thoughts, felt this world unreal, that I was just passing through. So Ruby, one day, made her move. She, too, had had her eye on me, in her own way. Gerald came up to me at the end of the day-shift and said, "My daughter's kind of taken a liking to you." Ruby and Linda sat in Gerald's LTD, the motor running while we talked outside.
"Oh . . . yeah . . ." My heart started its little trip-hammer action, automatically. I thought of Linda's tiny rosebud mouth, her silken black hair, her flashing dark eyes.
"I think she wouldn't mind sleeping with you, if you'd be interested."
My jaw fell open. I didn't know what to say. Linda, and Ruby, and Gerald, were all waiting. The engine was running, that low purr.
"Uhmm, sure . . . I'm interested. But, I mean, how old is she?"
"Don't worry; she's almost sixteen. Next month. No problem. You want to come out with us tonight? We'll go dancing. You can stay the night, I'll bring you in in the morning. What do you say?"
I peeled off my smock and in minutes found myself in the back seat next to Linda.
She smiled at me sweetly, looked me in the eyes ever so briefly, and took my hand.
We stopped on the way to their house in Napa, some thirty minutes away, at a roadside lounge. There we had dinner and drinks. Linda sipped from Ruby's glass of rye; I drank Black Russians. After dinner I sat with my arm around Linda on the curved, red plastic seat, watching Gerald and Ruby waltz. We practically had the place to ourselves. Linda and I said little, maybe the odd comment about the schmaltzy music coming from some hidden source. We even tried a dance ourselves - an uninspired waltz, that at least gave us a chance to move our bodies together with a new, tingling heat. She was a small young lady with firm, ripening breasts, and appealing thighs swelling out from her short vinyl skirt.
We retired early to Gerald's bungalow in Napa, a classic lower-middle class suburban paradise full of tacky, mock-ornate furniture, gaudy carpets and tasteless knickknacks. I didn't care. Linda lived here. She squeezed my had as we crossed the threshold. Ruby gave me a quick tour - "Here's the living room, here's the kitchen - help yourselves to anything you find in the fridge - the bathroom you can use beside Linda's room, over here . . ." She gave me a knowing smile with those well-lacquered lips, puckered a powdered eye up in a wink. It was all okay with me.
The heat of my long-dormant passion was rising. No matter that I hadn't exchanged more than half a dozen sentences with this newly-grown child. As soon as were alone we closed the bedroom door and gave way to our mutual desire. Her fingers played eagerly over my body, under my clothes. I sought those delicate, thin lips and parted them with a hot tongue. It was all over with us. We tumbled in short order to the high, four-posted bed, onto the huge mattress. Linda deftly turned back the hideously-flowered bedspread . . . the spread that would have been hideous to a discriminating eye, that is. But my eyes were only for Linda, her nubile, now half-nude beauty. We were bound in an onrolling, unraveling ball of emotional release, of caressing, stroking, and gentle affection.
In minutes she had all my clothes off and we slid on love-smoothed bodies together into the silken sheets. I covered her with kisses of wild joy, of gratitude and wonder. I still couldn't believe this all was happening - but I hadn't yet stopped to argue, and I wasn't about to, now.
Her hands continued their eager explorations; I answered with mine. Then, in a burst of response to the taut, marbled softness of those tender thighs, I slid into her. Her small lips heaved up to take me in, legs spread wider and clenched, then opened as a full, fleshy flower in summer sun. We melted in the waves of that oneness, that crescendo of love's pleasure.
As the waves subsided, we rocked gently, moaning softly and stroking each other's cheeks with silent fingertips. I remember her eyes, most of all - blue-green in daylight but now black depths - infinite pools telling secrets too ancient, too powerful for words. Finally, words didn't come. I wondered if this was her first time; but I didn't ask. I did inquire about those eyes, her remarkable olive-fair complexion, the oval face. She told me her ancestry was Irish, Italian and a bit from India. All I's, by coincidence, and what a combination! We soon slept, the peace of exhausted children. Made love again in the early dawn, before Gerald's knock on the door -
"It's after six, Will. Time to get up."
Groan. "Okay. Be right there." A last, musky, dusky kiss.
Linda's eyes grew suddenly wide. "Will you come back to me?"
"Yes."
I did go back, a couple more times. I sat with Linda in the fenced-in backyard by their little pool, clad in bathing suits, talking and sunning, the last days of summer.
I asked her, "So, you're about to start school again, are you?"
"I don't know."
"Oh? What's happening? Have you been out of school for a while?"
"Sort of. Took half of tenth grade, last year, then we moved. I didn't bother to go into the school here. It kinda seemed like, well, what's the point, y'know?"
"Yeah, I know what you mean. What about Ruby and Gerald, they didn't care?"
"They weren't really together then. Gerald wouldn't care anyway, about school. And Mom, well, she only finished ninth grade herself, before she got pregnant with Sheila, my older sister."
"Oh, I didn't know you had a sister."
"Yeah. She's in L.A., modeling."
I could believe it.
"What about you?" Linda asked. "Did you finish school?"
"Me? Oh, I'm through with schools, for a while. Just trying to make some money, now."
That last time I saw Linda, when I left I gave her an envelope with a poem inside, that I'd written in a time between our meetings. It was called . . .
For Your Eyes Only
The tired faces, city feet, and all these worried dogs
Trudge unseeing under a new day's sky
There the fleece-clouds roam
in gentle waves of blue
on giant plains of clearest sky
unmarked,
save for you.And there your face is gazing
staring out of space
your eyes a glow of a hundred suns
the starlight in your hair
your breath the breath of icy night
when all the world is cold -But then your eyes bring fire
to this barren planet
and the desert blooms
for you.The hot red sun is glowing
and the earth moves deep
for you.Again you stare
and lightning flashes
from the center
of your eyesYour eyes are all
and the night is yours -
so hear my call for you.
I don't know what Linda thought of my enraptured verse, because I never saw her again. When I said goodbye to Gerald my last day at work at the Texaco, I asked him if I might still get together with Linda sometime.
"Oh, Linda," he said matter-of-factly, "she's gone back up to Sonoma with her mother."
Gerald, in his stoic way, had become accustomed to taking life's ups and downs in his stride. After an instant's panic, loneliness and pain, I could already recognize in Gerald's calm eyes the lesson I would now need myself: Easy come, easy go.
Oxford Street, October, Friday the thirteenth. Eli's parking cars at Lordship's. Ed's gone out with Kevin, drinking with some old school chums. I'm home alone, exhausted after a hard week's painting. Mr. Haney's retrained me, after saying I held my brush "like a farmer." Now I wield it like an artist's brush, like a pen. But there's little art in the work itself. Slapping yellow latex on clapboard siding, scaling ladders all day, my thoughts in solitude are free to roam while he starts work on an extra job he's been able to take on. I've begun to despair already even as I exult in my new secure freedom. It's not just my life that's going to the dogs, you see: it's the planet, at least that outer layer of veneer we've gotten too used to calling "civilization."
I take refuge in art, the sanctified spirit of wild landscape, in the form of poetry and music. My favorite is Sibelius - I turn to it as to an old friend, a confidant and father confessor, as to a sage or oracle with wisdom to share. The most moving, most languorously evocative of the deep peace of mountains, is the tone-poem "The Swan of Tuonela." I listen with the stereo headphones, and the profound depth of it passes over me like dark water. I'm swimming in that blackness, that peace, that somber yet graceful finality, and I see a vision - a vision I record in words, a vision of "Silent Apocalypse":
I saw a hundred cities fall|
their teeming millions strangled
fallingdying
screaming to the pit
while all aroundthe vast dark walls
midnight blue
the canyon wallsthe great ravine
shudders with the weight
of the falling cities.Limbs and cries are scattered
downward in a giant
explosion of deathwhile above
atop the canyon walls
the dark deep forest sleepsthe moon clouds roam
silent in the midnight sky
the smoking stars drift far away from sightand the hundred cities die
with a dusty, gasping heave
down on the soft unknown of the canyon floor.
Oxford Street, December fifteenth. I walk the four blocks home from the gas station, where I've signed on again, since the rains have come and Mr. Haney's cut back to a trickle of interior jobs that he'll handle himself until spring. I'm on graveyard shift now, a boon for me because I can spend all night drinking coffee, reading and writing - and get paid for it. Oh, and, serve maybe four or five customers between midnight and six-thirty. I sometimes entertain strange company, too: the shifty-eyed freak who quit this shift before they hired me; the fat, bald fairy who drops in "to talk"; Hobart in his Corvette and wild composer's hair, blasting classical music out of the 'vette's tape deck . . . all in all, the job suits me all right.
Except now, walking home in the early morning against the commuter traffic two lanes strong flowing down Oxford Street, stinking of gasoline that won't unstink during breakfast (supper) or while I drift off to sleep (nap) in my bed . . .
When I walk in the door I smell bacon frying, more coffee brewing (no thanks). Ed's up early, for a morning class. He's still only a junior. Eli, who shares their double room, is no doubt still sleeping. Kevin’s probably upstairs in his room dressing, getting ready to go on the day shift (late again). On the coffee table in the living room is a little roulette wheel. If I think my luck's down, I should check a little closer.
So I take the tiny steel ball and say, "Hey Ed, pick a number, any number," and spin, and drop it in, and Ed from the kitchen says, "Uh . . . four" and it drops right neatly in - four.
"Well, Ed, you win the jackpot. Thirty-six to one."
"Thirty-eight. You forgot the zero and double-zero. How the fuck did you do that?"
"Me? I just spun the wheel and dropped the ball. You called it. Look, why don't we try again, just to be honest. A number for Kevin. Say, five?"
"Sounds good to me." Ed laughs a little nervously.
I spin, and drop the ball into the whirling wheel of fortune. Chat-chatterollll . . . plop (five it is.) "Five it is, Ed."
"What? I don't believe it. You can't just - "
"What about Eli, now? We can't leave out poor Eli, even if he is still asleep."
"Oh, Eli must have spent the night at Paula's; he never showed up last night."
"Whatever. He could still use a jackpot. Whadya say - gotta be a six, huh, Ed? C'mon, you started this."
"Who - whad - no, it was your idea, I mean . . . well, yeah, okay. Six. Why not."
Of course (of course?) it turns up a six. Let's see, that's thirty-six (I mean thirty-eight) times thirty-eight times thirty-eight . . .
I quit while I'm ahead. For now, that is . . .
In 1972, Baltimore was dethroned and Oakland's star was on the rise. The baseball Athletics and football Raiders both came into their own and began a string of championship seasons that would last as long (and only as long) as my sojourn in the Bay Area. But I kept my loyalty to the old home town. By Christmas, I arranged to go back to Baltimore for my first visit in a year.
At first I thought I might hitchhike, figuring to spend only fifteen bucks or so. Another option was the freaky "Magic Bus" (a commercial successor to the mechanical hero of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), which offered a cross-country fare of sixty-five dollars. The Greyhound was a hundred. Flying one way would cost a hundred and fifty or so, and was out of the question. At the last minute, still not knowing what to do, Kevin gave me the idea of the drive-away service, whereby driverless cars needing inter-city transport are matched with car-less (not to be confused with careless) drivers like me. And my folks came through with airfare to Baltimore as a Christmas present. I would plan to hook up with a drive-away car there for the return trip.
I had some other motives for the trip east besides the family visit. If I could somehow get up to New Hampshire, there was still that Karman Ghia to deal with, and its cargo of records, clothes, books, class notes, red candles and rug, tiger-striped bedspread . . . all packed into a trunk, three suitcases and seven boxes, I remembered; plus the more valuable items, the stereo and snowshoes. The other attraction of a trip to New Hampshire was to check out a school I was interested in, a branch of Antioch College in Harrisville. This was a new, experimental program offering teaching internships and a degree in Environmental Education. My pet project, which I'd been nursing for several months now, involved teaching environmental awareness through literature. The Romantic poets, the American Transcendentalists, and various modern essayists such as Aldo Leopold supplied, I felt, fertile ground for such study. If the program seemed right I could apply in the coming spring for the following September.
As for after Christmas, Kevin had plans to trip down to Mexico with a couple of other friends and I was invited to join them. That prospect appealed but I left it hanging till the rest of the itinerary developed more clearly. As long as I was in the east, a higher priority was to look up my good friend Dana, with whom I'd kept up a mutually supportive correspondence during our respective wanderings through what we called "the malleable matrix" of time and space. And on the return trip, if I took the southern route through Texas I could stop by to see Warren, another crazed alum from Bissell Hall, and Steve from high school and Maine, who'd entered law school at S.M.U. That would get me close to the Mexican border, for a possible rendezvous with Kevin's gang.
Before all these little schemes could wheel into motion, I had to fulfull the duties of a family Christmas. It wouldn't do simply to blow into Baltimore, show up at home and say "Hi, Mom and Dad - can I borrow the car?" I did maintain good relations with them, but the home scene was full of the usual tensions; the same only worse. My father's last-chance job with Citgo had fallen through, and now he was trying to scrape together more work through old connections, buying real estate for service stations. He was officially an alcoholic - except, of course, to himself.
In that phase of their life they were dead days for my mother, dead nights in her separate bed, then separate bedroom. Always, the TV on. I took refuge in books I'd left behind; in painting childish watercolor sketches - my latest creative experiment; and in reading the Bible - might as well give it a shot, I thought, at Christmas, and try to get to the bottom of it at last.
But reading about Jesus, his real life - and then considering what he was really all about and wanted for the world, and how people would have to change so radically to be like that, and it just wasn't happening, not now despite all the talk of revolution and social change, and hadn't really changed at all in two thousand years of trying (or not even trying) . . . I had to weep, finally, at the end of those Gospels, over the tragic gap between what was and what could be, what should be.
My mother tried to understand. But of course she'd been having to cope with despair for too long. Personal, social, cultural . . . Forget your idealism son, it'll only cause you pain and disappointment. Learn to accept and get along.
No thanks, mom. Let me weep. Jesus wept.
Christmas passed, in its way, and I did borrow the car for a trip up past NYC to Hartford to connect with Dana. We enjoyed a long joyous reunion the rest of the way north in Louis, his faithful old VW bug, wherein we reenacted all the old characters, the whole leering, hawk-eyed, addle-brained cast from our slapstick mythology. There was Sir John Suckling, Lord Chauncey, Little Fitchie, Arnie ("a guy at the bar"), Ernie ("a guy at the barber shop"), the mad Empress Carlotta, Rasputin, a wide-eyed tie-dyed tourist in Freakland, a salty dog, the Dog Prince, the King of the Bowery, a wizened old deck-swabber, a fat hippie with dyed hair, the principal of Tigris Plateau High School, a middle-aged unshaven bum acting as a child on his way to school, Princess Pignatelli, a young yak, Dolly Dagger, a fat sparrow's bandy-legged lover, a wombat with crushed and bleeding wings and gums, Florence Henderson, Boy Pupa, a cudgel-brandishing evil wood-troll, Amon Re, Priggish, the surly burly chain-saw executioner, Charon, Numbah One, the Countess of Shrewsbury . . . these the principal characters, not including the extras: some five pirates, two parrots, a zombie, half a freak, thousands of cattle, men, monkeys, lapdogs, gypsies, henchmen and cronies of Numbah One, and bands of wild, mad dogs roaming the crumbling streets of New York. On the way back we talked poetics.
My interview at Antioch was disappointing. I hadn't yet applied; this was more an exploratory foray, by which I sought to find out if my intended area of study could fit in with the program they offered. It didn't fit very well. I had a pleasant conversation with the program director, in which I discovered that their course offerings emphasized environmental studies through the sciences and social sciences. Literary treatments would be on the fringe - they could try to accommodate my approach but I would also have to delve into biology, field study, geography, earth science, politics. I was more interested in esoteric concepts such as "organic form" in poetry as espoused by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Denise Levertov.
The other part of my prospective epic journey was a washout. As Dana ran short of time off from his box-office job, we decided to get back to Hartford instead of detouring to Cornish to retrieve my chattel. I figured I could get in touch with Rob to sell the car for me (or take it to the junkyard, sending me the contents by bus or mail). As it turned out from later correspondence with him, I would lose everything that remained there of my former life. Rob got twenty-five dollars from the junkyard for the car, enough to pay for the towing. Oh, was there stuff in the car? he asked in his return note across the continent. He hadn't noticed. Ommm, I hummed, through clenched teeth.
The drive-away agency was located in a walkup office in a seedy section of old rowhouses in downtown Baltimore. The proprietor was busy in the back room when I walked in; he called out for me to have a seat, he'd be with me shortly. There was no secretary. I wasn't sure I even had the right place, as there were pictures of bald heads and bushy hair - before-and-after shots - on the walls, over shelves of shampoos and ointments. "Donatelli's Scalp Treatments," read a sign on the peeling wall behind the desk. I rechecked the address I'd written down for A-1 Driveaway, 708 N. Calvert St. The number on the frosted door pane was correct. Then I saw a vinyl folder on the desk embossed with "A-1 Driveaway - P. Donatelli" and was relieved - somewhat.
The man was yakking to someone in the back room about scalp massage, follicles, keratin, pH. Suddenly he poked his half-bald head through the curtain and said, with eyes bugging out, "Hi - I'll be right with you. Hi. Hi." The head popped back out of sight. He resumed yakking. I started wondering if maybe I should have investigated further than the first Yellow Page listing.
But it turned out okay, Mickey Mouse outfit or not. I filled out a couple of forms, paid a fifty-dollar security deposit, received instructions for dropping the car off at an agency in San Francisco, and was given the Baltimore address of the car's owners. I would have seven days to make the trip, in a VW Super-Beetle, with convertible top.
So I was all set. But I couldn't resist; before waling out the door I had to ask, "So you operate two businesses in here - a baldness clinic or something?"
"Oh, yes, yes. Hard to make a living being too specialized, you know. You have to branch out. Paying rent on one of these offices isn't cheap. Actually the scalp treatments are more lucrative - " He suddenly lowered his voice as the curtain stirred and a little hunched-over man walked through. He glanced at P. Donatelli and me opposite at the desk, muttered something about next week and his account, gave a little wave and walked out. I was curious to see his new improved head but alas, he'd already taken care to put on his hat.
"Here, let me show you something," Donatelli said as he stood up and walked around behind me. "Do you mind?"
"Okay . . ." I ventured.
"You see," he went on, digging strong, supple fingertips into my scalp, "the hair is alive, at the root. But if you don't give it the proper exercise, it dies and, after that, your head doesn't want it around any more. So of course the result is, it falls out. Now, what you need to do is . . . " (and I wondered if I was suddenly running up a new bill) "rub like this, in small, circular motions, the size of a quarter. First one spot, then the next, in a line all the way from back to front. Then, back again. Working down the side, like this . . ." I could imagine all those quarters piling up, on his desk. But it did feel good. He gave me a quick, complete once-over, covering the entire scalp. "There. Now does your hair feel alive, or not?"
"Yes, it does, actually. That's really something." He'd moved away a couple of steps to gauge the improvement; I stood up and said, "Thanks for the advice. I don't owe you anything - ?"
"No, no, no. You have a good, healthy head of hair. Just do the scalp treatment like you just had, two, three times a day - you'll never go bald."
"Oh, really. I thought it was hereditary. The maternal grandfather . . ."
"No, no, it's what you do to take care of it. It's all in your hands."
In the wintry weather around New Year's, I chose the mid-southern route, across the eastern part of the country. But in Tennessee, the first night out, I ran into a fierce snowstorm. The Beetle had fairly good traction considering its summer tires; I was glad I'd learned to drive in the snow of the Midwestern winter. Cars were sliding off the road with increasing frequency as impatient drivers tried to pass to move up the crawling line. I had to chuckle as I watched driver after inexperienced driver pull into the left lane, accelerate, and coast right over into the left-side ditch. Finally it got so bad I decided to head directly south to Alabama. When the snow turned to rain I turned west again, then stopped for the night, to sleep curled up in the back seat, in the parking lot of a small-town church.
Next day through Mississippi, on a back-country shortcut to Interstate 10, I saw one of the familiar signs for palm readers. This time I thought, why not, I'll give it a try, and stopped.
It was a dingy blue trailer on a weedy dirt lot. I knocked on the clattery aluminum door - the gypsy came. Madame Rosa, the sign had read. She looked the part. Swarthy complexion, thick lips, deep, dark liquid eyes. I saw her lithe and lissome daughter leaning at a door in the hall, in the shadows - I wondered if she was part of the deal.
Apparently not, at least not yet: she disappeared. Madame Rosa sat down and firmly, gently took my hand. She held it and looked in my eyes. She was quiet, searching with penetrating gaze. Her eyes were open, black pools, in which my very soul quickly found itself swimming, floating, naked to her view. The palm she disregarded. It was the eyes she wanted, the window to the future, the past, the all-present.
Then she told me what I wanted to hear.
"You will have good fortune. You are on a journey; the journey will come to completion without harm to you. In one or two months, you will receive money. Until then, things will be as they have been. You are alone. Sometimes lonely. This will not be unfortunate, as you will meet friends, new friends, to help you along your life's journey. Romance, someday, not soon. Do not worry. You will be loved, will meet the person who you can love, without reservation. Someday, not soon."
She glanced briefly at the token hand, which she still held firmly. I wondered if the daughter was listening - suspected she wasn't involved after all.
"Is there anything else you wish to know?"
My career, I thought . . . life's direction for me . . . Antioch . . . other jobs? I had trouble formulating a question in my mind. It all seemed okay now, that everything would turn out all right.
"Um, my job, jobs - is there any prospect of success, I mean, major change or direction or anything, in the next little while?"
Madame Rosa looked at me, I thought, a trifle scornfully, as if she were disappointed that her reading hadn't satisfied me yet - or perhaps that my concerns were so mundane. She made a show of studying the lines on my palm, and said, still looking down, "Nothing dramatic in the next period of time" - whatever that meant. "Eventually" ("not soon?") "there will be success . . ." (inner sigh of relief) "but that will be short-lived. I see many changes. Do not worry." She looked into my eyes again, and now showed the trace of a smile from those reddened lips. "It will work out okay for you." She dropped my palm, slowly, in midair. It hung there, as if still held, then faded into my lap. I held her eyes for a long moment, and found myself smiling back.
"Thank you," I said. "How much do I owe you?"
She gauged me for what I was worth. "Ten dollars."
I rolled on through the South, states I'd never crossed before: Louisiana, Texas. I'd decided by then not to go to Mexico. I was short on cash again and would be better off getting back to my all-night shift at the gas station, for which Gerald had been generous enough to arrange a fill-in during my two-and-a-half-week vacation.
It was bitter cold as I drove into Dallas. I stayed with Steve and Julie for a couple of days, sleeping on the floor in their tiny apartment. We weren't the same as the two boyhood friends in high school, or the two college kids painting houses together in the summer. Steve was married now, and serious about school. I was still footloose, had ventured further into freakdom - into drugs, poetic fancies, alternate lifestyles. We still shared interests in photography, literature, sports. Beer and wine, computer baseball. But it wasn't the same. I lost my temper when Steve kept winning those Mickey Mouse games; I accused him of manipulating the dice. Impossible, he countered - then blamed me for the same ruse when I reeled off six wins in a row.
But we'd both matured, and we could put the spat behind us when the cards got put away. We most of all enjoyed reminiscing about those lazy, hazy days of summer, the mystic fog-filtered memories of Maine. I found time one day to look up Warren, to invite him over to meet my friend from another past life, Steve. They shared a common passion for photography but little else. Warren had dropped out of Dartmouth midway through his junior year after spending time in the booby hatch, having flipped his rational lid in a maelstrom of freaky aesthetic and counter-cultural theory, LSD, and good old, clinical manic depression. Now Librium had mellowed him out. Still, his endless babblings about his art, his painting, his piano-compositions, his book-play-movie-tape, was obviously a bit too much for the lawyer-to-be and solid, earth-bound wife.
Ice-storms and sub-zero temperatures had just hit the Dallas area during my stay there. As I prepared to leave I heard dire warnings of road conditions and further bad weather. I put off my departure for another day and then, under clearing but still frigid skies, hit the road west. The road surface, even on the interstate, was covered by ice - the common, visible variety as well as the more invisible, treacherous black ice. Tractor-trailers had peeled off both sides of the highway and lay there where they had fallen, on their sides like huge, stricken beasts. I took my time and finally got through the worst of it, on into Arizona and New Mexico. At Pancho Villa State Park I lay out my sleeping bag under a cold, starry night in the desert air and slept soundly until the pink purity of dawn rose in the sky. I was within sight of the Mexican border, a high, chain-link fence. I decided I wasn't missing much, and happily drove on to California.
On the coast the air was mild and sunny, so I took down the VW's top and breezed up the coast highway au naturel. Fog banks lay on the water, shrouding the foot of the cliffs. Above on the inland side rose the heights of coast mountains into legendary Big Sur country, where I could envision Zen monks puttering about in wooden clogs, sipping green tea . . . and somewhere up in there, Henry Miller tapping away the tales of a long and adventurous life, waited upon even in his eighty-year old twilight by some young half-clad things, some beauties he'd attracted there by the magnetism of his genius, his infectious charm.
Finally, graceful Mt. Tamalpais, lording over San Francisco Bay, welcomed me home. "Home?" Why not? It was as good as any . . . in fact, better than most. For now, I'd take it.
February 17, 1973:
This year the rains
washed the sun-curtains away, and we were left
watching the cold come on: a rare blue starglow
around the moonFebruary sunsets lost
in a fleet of cloudships; two million eucalyptus
dead - and we were shut out under an unnatural
sky, diggingin the wet rough grass,
raw fingertip roots
planted in ashes and prayers
I was back to my old haunts, daydreaming among Berkeley's Strawberry Canyon hills, running, hiking, meditating, looking down from afar at the bustling human hive. Across, at the far reach of view, lay Tamalpais, and the white, unseen beyond. Here in the canyon, behind a neighboring hill, hummed the atomic weapons research laboratories; down the hill the other way, low-ceilinged, fenced-in buildings issued screeches of nameless monkeys, and howls of experimental dogs.
Life in the Oxford Street townhouse continued as before, with the exception of a new tenant. Fred Gross was the latest academic refugee to find his penniless way to Gerald's car wash. A poet, a philosopher, a wild-eyed, bearded bard, he too donned the gold smock and pumped the tanks full, wrote up the credit cards, pushed the button for "Hot Wax." He was crashing with friends, he said to me one day, and was looking for a more permanent place to stay. His extra portin would help to pay the rent, so I told him I'd talk to the other guys. We all agreed it made good sense and so welcomed Fred aboard.
We'd developed our own routine for dealing with meals and dirty dishes. We took turns studying a battered, second-hand Adelle Davis cookbook, and whipping up creative variations on wheat-germ-and-lentil loaf, lecithin cookies, soyburgers with brewer's yeast gravy. Dishes were washed daily, on a four-man rotation. Fred, instead of pitching in when his day came around, saw himself as an unnecessary fifth starter and so consigned himself to the bullpen. That is, he remained seated in the large old armchair faced squarely out the sliding-glass door to the patio, gazing at the Victorian house across the street, across the Bay looking due west, past Tamalpais to the ocean blue, beyond to Japan, China, India . . . realms of Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Blake . . . back around to Whitman, Ginsberg, projective verse . . . echoes of Spinoza, Schoepenhauer, Plato, Kant . . . dreams of the alchemists, Jung, Rilke, Melville, Pound . . .
We finally had to ask him to leave. He understood. All that trouble, dish-grime of the material plane, that was okay; he'd find another place, crash with friends again. I admired Fred ever after that for harboring no hard feelings. We continued to work at the gas station together occasionally over the next year and a half, to visit for the odd talk about great books, our own great books to come, about life's ineffable mysteries and the frenzied articulations of the gifted voices that alone could dare to give them shape. We met for the odd guzzle of California Chablis, the odd line of good cocaine, the odd jaunt together to the weekly readings of the Berkeley Poet' Co-op. Fred remained a constant beacon of inspiration to me with his uncompromising dedication and boundless energy for the one thing he cared about: the life of the mind, in its fullest expression.
Me, I had my share of clutter still to deal with on this material plane. Temporal jobs, my elusive "career," that still-elusive "lasting relationship." Steve, I reflected, now had it all together, or was well on his way. Our once-"parallel worlds" had clearly diverged. But where was my life-line going? I hadn't any clear clue. In times of anxiety about this state of limbo, I took refuge in the emptiness of mind taught by the Buddha, and practiced by my old Friends, the Quakers. I started attending six a.m. zazen at the Berkeley Zen Center, and dropping in some Sundays at the Friends Meeting. At neither place did I connect closely with fellow-seekers; I held myself back, as if waiting, knowing it would all be for naught, knowing I was still, basically, just passing through.
I did, however, gain some lasting insights from these spiritual havens. The stern Zen master paced the ranks of the cross-legged novitiates all focussed on our noses at the inclined attic wall. When he saw a head nod, or a back sag, he would silently pad to the sitter's side and - SNAP - his little snapper, his mini-whip, in close range of the ear to bring one's attention back to the ramrod state of present awareness, erect spine, level gaze half-focussed in dim light. Object and subject were both the empty, emptying mind. At the end of the session we'd bow and scrape at the foot of some heathen deity - a practice ridiculous on the surface but of great benefit to cramped knees - like calisthenics, to the tune of a mantra.
The one memorable event I attended at Friends House was an evening discussion on community, featuring a slide show of an intentional community one man had visited in British Columbia. There was some interest in the Meeting in forming such a community in California, and the slide show was shown to provide added interest, some visual stimulus for discussion. The progression of slides showed the man's arrival in Vancouver with his wife and ten-year-old daughter, their journey eastward into the interior, their passage into the lush, temperate rainforest of the Kootenays. they'd taken their holiday in mid-summer, it was obvious from the rich, glossy greens of fall foliage, the brilliant colors of flowers in bloom. In the community of Argenta, the slides showed, people of all ages, of gentle and hardy demeanor, gathered at potluck meals, helped raise hand-hewn timbers, tilled fertile garden plots. The scenes were idyllic, and they carried, through the celluloid and through the time and space that lay between, a certain peace, a sure and subtle joy. I enjoyed the ensuing discussion without any particular engagement; rather, I remained held in the strange spell of the slides, my imagination caught, suffused with a portentous meaning I could not then divine.
January 28, 1973: newly re-elected Richard Nixon signs the long-awaited peace treaty with North Vietnam. They've finally, it seems, been able to agree on the shape of the conference table in Paris. it's an anti-climactic end to a war that has been long-lost. For me the war had been effectively over ever since I sneaked out the back door where I felt the cold draft coming in.
My thoughts are turned inward, at this uncertain time in a certain life. My graveyard shift is most conducive to writing poetry and rambling poetic prose, generally in the form of letters to Dana, or Steve, or Warren. I continued to chart elaborate life-maps of imagined travels, lists of vocations, calculations of monthly incomes accumulated by such-and-such a time, freeing me to go off in such-and-such a new and untried, or old and uncompleted, direction. I've pretty much soured altogether on the idea of the Antioch program at Harrisville. It just isn't me. Or, it is me, but it's self-indulgent, impractical, chasing at intellectual rainbows. I'm going to get down to business, get serious about finding a real job. Soon . . .
But first - there's another customer out there. Oh, it's Paul again . . . hmmm. Put this stuff away.
"Hi, Will."
"Good morning, Paul." I look at my watch. It's almost one a.m. "Whatcha doin' out tonight?"
"Oh, just walking. I couldn't sleep again." He looks at me knowingly - knowing something I don't want to know. His massive, pale head, bald but for a fringe of longish, gray-white hair around the sides and back, reddens slightly, highlighting splotches and freckles of various sizes. Paul is large around the middle. He waddles into my tiny office, leaning toward the empty chair by the door. He looks at the cover of my notebook - the plain, torn cardboard cover reading simply "Berkeley: Fall '72 . . ." "What's that you're writing now? More letters?" he asks, sitting down.
"No, not tonight. Planning my future. Trying to figure out what I might do for a real job."
"Ah, but what's the matter with this one? In a so-called real job - and I've been through plenty of 'em, I'll tell ya - you wouldn't be able to sit here and do all that scribbling, read all those books - " he gestures to the small stack on the side of the desk.
"Yeah, you've got a point, there. But at $2.00 an hour, you can't get ahead of the game, can't save anything to go anywhere."
"Where would you go?"
"Oh, lots of places. To the mountains, mostly, I guess."
"What, do you ski?"
"I have. Used to, when I lived in New Hampshire. But I'd just like to see more of them, do some hiking . . ."
He's stopped listening, and holds up his hand. "Wait," he says, "you like to ski? Why didn't you say so?" You know my friend Theodore - uh, Teddy, heh-heh - he's got a cabin in the Sierras, a ski cabin, right near Squaw Valley,where they had the Olympics?"
"Oh, yeah . . ."
"Well, we're working on taking a trip up there second weekend in February. If you'd like to come, I don't think there'd be any problem finding bed-space for you."
I don't like his thick-lipped smile at all; nor his strong body odor that fills the close office air. Still, the prospect of being up in the Sierras, skiing in the snowy mountain air, sounds mighty good, from this corner of "gasoline alley."
It works out okay, in the end. Paul, for all his obvious come-on's, keeps a respectful distance as he senses my independent vibes. His like-minded friends and lovers, Teddy and Kenneth, perhaps have been given the word as well: I'm Paul's friend. So with a little lingering trepidation, combined with a smattering of guilt that it's me who's taking advantage of their gay hospitality, I let loose on the slopes and enjoy some real skiing for the first time. The New England ice is nothing to this real western powder. Here, in these vast, windswept, wild and snowclad mountains, here I sense I'm closer to my true element: not yet truly "home" - the details haven't ye gelled - but getting there.
I'm back at the gas station, the all-night shift, catching good jazz on the radio, playing solitaire Mickey Mouse baseball, and forecasting careers. I sketch an outline map of the Western Hemisphere, and dot my life-lines. North - to Alaska, for construction or canning, to British Columbia, for fishing or teaching, to Idaho, or to Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming. East - to New Hampshire or Vermont, to Cornish or Harrisville, or to Baltimore, for jobs in government, construction, painting, or airlines. West - remaining in the black dots representing Berkeley, SF, LA, where I might apply for the post office, Hunt's cannery, or Kerouac's idyllic post as a park ranger/fire lookout, or just paint houses again. South to Mexico, Central or South America, where I might join the Peace Corps, even, or research new frontiers of the literary dimensions of nature-spirit, as only the New World offers; seeing as how the Old World's already wasted in the last throes of what Pound called "a botched civilization." I want to see it all here in the still-wild West, before the tentacles of monster megalopolis suck in everything. I'm filled with an apocalyptic foreboding of the shortness of time, of history's threatened life-span. This sort of paranoia takes some of the pressure off of the importance of any of these so-called careers I've been imagining, and it leads to what amounts to a post-hippie, in other words a yuppie manifesto for life in the seventies, as it would never be expressed by a yuppie directly but rather, by their underground spokesman, the paranoid punk poet:
"The Beat Experience" has become the mass experience, for better or worse. Now what is left for those of us born in those 50s, faced with the paralyzing despair of the overrun 70s? Maybe Salinger knows, staring out the window of his house on the hill in New Hampshire. Where are the good writers I know? Steve was married long before his time, Dana was forced in and out of teaching and now wants to act, to dance (are there too many words?) and Fred trips along Berkeley high wires, spinning mad verse like a true poet.
Whitman a Nationalist
Ginsberg a former History major and Protest Leader Guru
Emerson a Preacher
Thoreau a passionate Outcast
Snyder an Oriental Scholar and Hip Chief
Kerouac a dead drunk.And all the Romantics, Romantics
And then there are the masses, and the masses of bad new beat-life self-named "Poets" organized for all to join, and publishing stacks of ordinary words on plain brown wrappers on home free presses. Grow your own, and you're an instant Poet. Then split for the north woods. Build your own Kustom Kamper, then - quick, while there's still time to make the waiting list for reservations. Or stand in the mile-long line to hitch a ride from University Ave., alone or with your chick, and grow your own . . . beard. When will it end?
And then where do we go? Back to the Eisenhower tomb, reincarnate in his little dog Dick? It sounds like rain again, but it's 1973.
There's no identity anymore, it's all been soaked up. And this time not just by time, but right now, all possible forms are here. Every moment is a mass identity search, and now every movement is already flushed away.
Of course there's always a new season to come, new combinations of the same old names, genes, aspirations, and struggles. Pity we have to wait our decade of stagnation before the shit explodes: 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, . . . Midnight black the colors fly, murky liquids soaking the sky, mounting hordes earthbound, fleeing under attacks of rampant energy, to be released from within to replace the lost solar reserves. What a fine picnic 'twill be. What shall we do until then? Fuck.
Do any others understand, or do I rave alone? Whatever, I proceed with a certainty of tone if not of purpose. It's a dark certainty given me by the dark drift of events, by Nature herself (no communist professor) whispering in my ear. The trees whispered, I sound out, in impassioned poetic refrain, standing out in the midnight dark under the poor little quivering trees planted in the asphalt of the gas-reeking car wash lot, with the neon lamps buzzing, and a gentle breeze stirring the brittle, round leaves . . . and I listened.
In early spring I put aside all romantic illusions, trim my hair short and don the old necktie-noose for an interview at Kaiser Steel. Brian's dad is a bigwig there and I hope to gain from the personal connection - though I've only met the man once.
I know what I'm up against when I enter the Personnel Manager's office (as if I didn't know already, inside that tower of power, forty stories of glass and steel). Here sits Mr. Kaiser himself, I think, indeed a man of steel, complete with iron gaze, smelted cheeks and hair with a Bessemer gleam.
I lie to him that I'm ready to take a new, serious direction in my life. I bank on my past membership in a fraternity, at a prestigious college. I hope that my cheeks do not appear too tender and pink, my eyes too soft and round. I try to convince myself, along with him, that I can peddle ingots to industrialists. He sees right through me, I can tell.
I ride the rapid transit home. Sterile, tinted, the comfort of tombs. In short order Mr. Kaiser turns down my application. I sigh. Everything, comes the echo of my mother, happens for the best.
Still suffering the angst of a prolonged adolescence, I take refuge in the fellow-feeling of my distant soul-mate, Dana. His life has taken a turn for the better. "Dana," I write, "I knew from the vibes of the envelope of your last letter that you'd have news of breakthrough in acting. Spring shoots blinking new green eyes on a rain-thawed field. As for my own paltry existence . . ."
Life here continues on its gravelly railway path. Food stamps authorized, gas station fulltime work resumed, grad schools (Berkeley, Irvine, UBC) investigated, and now all lies still.
Whither fond hopes of exotic world travels, whither the peace of a good married life? Instead, I face the dead bourgeois frame houses, age-pounded sidewalks, fragile society names, all hurried through lost conversation, waiting for the wind and the good sound of . . . what?
My frustrations. To express a whole philosophy in real jazz words . . . only for Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy? That is freedom. And always the other side, too, the dark warm side of the day, when the whole universe moves soft and silent into a new universe. Unfortunate that the real result of mated men and women is a packaged box of dry goods, hung on a leash from an old dog's neck.
My quest is always to fathom a real rationale for . . . for anything. What am I really looking for? It has something to do with a mindless, yes mindless in a way, devotion to something other than that plain, sad picture of fact that surrounds me. It's the stale smell of the ordinary, the mediocre, the everyday, the continuing blank that frightens me; the must reeking from an old attic, a stagnant water-hole drying in a bleak desert.
The madness of formlessness needs forms to exchange on the battlegrounds and chessboards of substantial human society; meanwhile the pure watershed of high empty sanity drips through rusty lead pipes into an aching septic tank . . .
That is why I write: not merely to give henscratch form to unanswerable questions hovering forever in the void between the chicken and the egg; but to give new shape to the questionable reality of the carnival sideshow; and also, behind it all, to know that all lies still.
Last week I was hiking down a mountainside to the ocean in the late afternoon, when those inevitable fog-bodies started truckin' up the hill past my face, and the world was transformed. The ineffable blue sky was shrouded in living mystery, and I crouched spellbound, even as the cows I was communing with lay perched on the golden hilltop dreaming in the fog.
This was a new scene, of course, a lesson in vegetarian consciousness nestled on mountainous bags of meat, then blown away on the higher pipings of a shepherd's flute from the summit above; yet I still was partly in Maine, on that jungled isle of tides and deer and beer, and whiffleball home-run derby, and pong and zucchini squash, and paint and bats and fog . . .
He writes back, every month or two, boosting my spirit, my ego, my hopes for life worth living, worth sharing; he holds before me, in his older wisdom, a truth I too often forget in my philosophical posturing: that "love is the ultimate aesthetic." Oh yeah. I guess that's right.
In the meantime, there's our private brand of jaded mythology, the joy of the sideshow, the carnival of life. Dana signs his letters with mementos of our jointly jaundiced imagination, to spice my otherwise ordinary, workaday world. If truth has many faces, the theatre of the mind hosts many more: in signing off he's Dana my human friend, but also "a Hittite," "Walt Whitman," or simply "a hunk of spiritualized, rotting, cheesy flesh"; he's Aristotle Astral, a Bavarian citizen, an albino falcon; Dr. Demento, Dali Lama, or Dr. Demento Daggery; Lefty Motorspeak, Caliban Americi, or Bip, a Rustic Clown.
I guess I finally took a hint from Dana's example, because when a fellow gas-pumper said his theater company needed someone to play Lieutenant Rooney in Arsenic and Old Lace, I took him up on the offer. I guess he thought I looked the part, tall and serious, with my fresh haircut and clipped mustache. Larry, short and balding, with drooping black mustache, would by my sidekick in the play.
Thus began a grueling but rewarding schedule of rehearsals in Hayward, south of Oakland. The Hayward Arts Council sponsored the production in a local auditorium. The cast was amateur, but experienced. I'd acted in school plays before and now was anxious to explore this potential talent.
I enjoyed the focussed concentration, the creative energy of the enterprise, the camaraderie, and the enticing companionship of the leading lady, a hot redhead who wore, unhappily, a wedding band. The play went off smoothly enough. I felt competent in my role, but not destined for stardom. I could file the mannequin of Lt. Rooney in the attic of my memory beside Alexander Hamilton and some Roman general with a silvery cardboard short-sword, grade six, F. E. Bellows Elementary.
There was more in the way of cultural life to explore in the city while I was there. Classes in Kundalini Yoga. Arts cinema. Concerts, a jazz festival, hot dance bands in clubs. In that time I saw Ravi Shankar, Elvin Bishop, Larry Coryell, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis, Weather Report. The Oxford Street gang took off up the coast one day and stopped for a beer at a bar in Ukiah, and just happened to catch in action an obscure but brilliant jazz-funk group, Cat Mother and the All-Night Newsboys. In the rustic, rural setting full of hill freaks freed of city slicks and inhibitions, the dancing was wild, pure, Dionysian joy. In the intimate closeness between dance floor and low wooden stage, the band picked up on the energy and took us all on an unforgettable ride.
On another occasion, we got tickets to see the Grateful Dead, touted as the ultimate concert band, right up there with the Stones. Except the Dead was known to go on all night long. Especially in San Francisco, where it was reported they were to try out a new, quarter-million-dollar sound system. The Cow Palace was jam-packed. Huge banks of amplifiers towered like buildings to the ceiling. Hash and mushrooms were our drugs of choice that evening. The air inside was stifling. In the thick atmosphere, under the heavy beat of the music, wedged in the swaying, rocking, standing-room-only crowd, I started to have trouble breathing. I feared a rerun of that cocaine collapse. I sank to the floor, for the layer of cooler air there coursing between all the legs. It gave some relief, but not enough. I wormed my way to the glass doors at the entrance, started to open one. A security guard standing nearby stopped me:
"Hey, you can't open that!"
"Whadya mean? It's suffocating in there. I need some air."
"You go out, you're gone. 'Less you got another ticket." Was he smiling?
"Aw, come one, man. How about I just open it, then, and stay here in the lobby. We need some air in there."
"Can't do it. These doors gotta stay shut."
I fumed and paced in the lobby for a while, cooled down and finally reentered the hall, where I remained in the back fringe of the crowd. With those amps blasting, it didn't matter anyway how close you were. The music itself was great. I was grateful, still alive.
In Berkeley I frequented the Long Branch Saloon, where country-rock bands like Asleep at the Wheel played. Besides the dancing, the Long Branch offered such attractions as a wide barn door that opened to the street; once I saw a burly motorcyclist come roaring in and sweeping around on his smoking hog, in the spirit of the old West. In a more mellow moment, while Kevin slow-danced with a prospective pick-up, I sat back and watched the band play. The female lead singer was crooning away into her mike, looking at me as she sang of lonely love. She was beautiful, perhaps truly lonely (as I certainly was), and our eyes met - a brief but deep contact, a telling moment of intimacy - or was it? What would come of it? What could I do with this feeling of - was it love? Would I, could I go up during the break and ask her for a date? Saying "I liked the music"?
I remained in my chair, as if chained to a different fate. But not altogether different . . .
More and more as the spring wore on, Kevin and I were feeling our oats and began, with more serious intention, more boldly hitting the singles bars in San Francisco. We both had stale memories of the Thai girl in Ed's class who dropped by to talk during the fall. A flirt, she was, a pretty tease, who would sometimes invite us down to her red Camaro in the apartment building's basement parking lot - to sit there and talk. Maybe she'd been waiting for an aggressive move on our part, which never materialized. Then, she stopped coming by; and all winter, for all of us (all except Eli and his strapping, six-foot athlete, Paula, that Jewish princess with an all-American body) there had been a drought of female companionship, not to mention sex, or love.
So we hit the bars, and eyed the ranks of slutty, made-up babes, who were eyeing the ranks of lusty, drink-charged studs. The strategy worked. One night I hooked up with a Filipino woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties but didn't mind dancing with me half the night, or accepting the drinks I bought her. Of course I couldn't find out a thing about her in the deafening din, but that didn't matter here. It was the bodily contact we both were after, not the exchange of ideas. Finally she shouted in my ear, "Do you want to leave?"
"With you?" I shouted back.
"Yes," she smiled with wide, slack lips.
I managed to tell Kevin on the way out that I'd see him later - that is, I'd find my own way back across the Bay. Did he shake his head slightly? Was he jealous? I doubted it; he was working on his own blonde number. "Okay," he said and waved me away with a knowing smile.
We walk to the woman's apartment, some six blocks away. Her name, I discover, is Sheila. She's a seamstress. She lives with a friend named Carrie, who will be there at home tonight. I walk with my arm around her, feel the firm softness of her back, her small shoulders. She's not large breasted, I've noticed, but has an appealing shape as revealed by the clingy fabric of her low-cut red dress. She's wearing a light brown shawl outside for the cool night air. Her hair is raven-black, long and flipped up slightly at the end. I feel something is happening here. So profound - and yet so ordinary.
Her apartment is not impressive. It's small; the old furniture is faded and chipped. A bare light bulb in the kitchen shows Carrie in curlers reading a magazine at a cheap breakfast table.
"Hi, Carrie, this is - Sheila hesitates for a moment - Will." She looks at me, smiling.
Carrie looks down at her bathrobe, her rumpled nightgown. "Well," she says, "it is morning, after all, ain't it?"
Sheila laughs. She takes off her shawl and tosses it on a chair in the living room. "Would you like something to eat?" she asks me. "Here, sit down - " and she motions to a chair opposite Carrie. An empty chair remains in the middle, for her.
"Uh, sure, okay," I agree, as I see her already bustling through the fridge, the cupboard. She takes out a can of mackerel, a pot of leftover rice, sugar and soy sauce - precisely the ingredients Hobart's Filipino friend Tosti has served me once at his place. Cheap, sweet, and spiced with tobasco, surprisingly good.
Before our snack Carrie gets up and goes off to bed, yawning. "I guess I'll go on to bed now, you two, leave you to - yourselves."
"G'night, Carrie," says Sheila brightly. "See you in the morning."
Carrie winks at me and walks off, out the kitchen and down the short hall.
And then it's left for Sheila and me to act out our little drama. There wasn’t much drama to it, really. A bit more small talk, and she clears the few dishes, then gets up and brings some bedding out of the one bedroom down the hall and plops it on the living room floor. She looks up with an afterthought: "You are staying, aren't you?"
I start to wonder how long she means, but then come to my senses and realize she means tonight - to fuck and be fucked. That's all.
She seems serene, undressing - or is it just routine? She stops when the dress is off and looks at me, kneeling at the head of the bed, still fully clothed. She leans bare-breasted to undo my shirt, my belt buckle, the zipper.
I begin, finally, stroking her cool, light brown skin. The nipples on the flattish breasts become taut. She fondles a growing erection on me, removes my pants and socks.
I get into the spirit of it, stroking thighs, kneading breasts. She holds me over her, pulls me down inside. The cave is large, wet . . . somehow too loose. It's all too easy, too swift. And all too quickly, it's over. I breathe deeply, heaving on her chest. She plants large, moist kisses on both my shoulders, then sinks back down, relaxed. I rest along the length of her body, spent and sinking into sleep.
In the morning we caress again as if it's what we should be doing, should feel. Maybe she does. Maybe I do, even. It's hard to tell. Is this what love is like, how love begins . . . or how it ends? We dress, have coffee and juice and toast and jam, exchange phone numbers, then kiss and say goodbye, till next time. There will, we assure ourselves, be a next time. It's been too long, I can say for myself, without it.
Sheila called the following Wednesday, four days later, to say hello, how're you doing, and that there was a party on Saturday night. "Should be a good party, y'know what I mean?" I wasn't sure what she meant, but imagined there would be some good dope there, at least. I agreed to pick her up and take her there.
"No, that’s all right," she said. "I'll just give you the address. You can meet me there."
Okay, I thought, no problem.
It was a happening scene, a lively bunch, all styles and types. People were dressed in weird costumes: a couple of balding, middle-aged twins, dressed as if in baby clothes with tight, striped pastels; a clown, a witch, a sailor . . . a party, it became apparent, for someone's birthday. I came in my plain jeans, my Oxford shirt. From conversation I gathered that this was partially a theatre crowd, and partially gay. I wondered about Sheila and her friend Carrie, but dismissed that hypothesis when I remembered our own makeshift bed and saw Sheila now in intimate conversation with a Nordic guy dressed as an airline pilot. But who could tell what was real, in such a circus? Sheila barely glanced my way, simply flashing a smile and waving, "Oh, hi, Will, glad you could make it." That's all she said to me all evening, so preoccupied was she with other company.
I got involved in some serious dope being passed around in another, cushioned corner of the room. I found myself sitting beside a slender young black man named Rondel, who worked as a movement and dance and acting teacher, as a director and choreographer. Many of these people he knew, he told me, from his classes and productions.
Rondel seemed quite curious about me, my interests. He asked me what kind of music I liked best, when he saw me grooving to the Stevie Wonder. "Ah, Jimi Hendrix," he said, smiling coyly, "I'll have to tell you a story about him sometime."
"What, did you meet him? Both members of the soul brotherhood?", I wondered.
"Oh, chile, more than that, ah ha ha ha, more than that. That man, well, sometime." Again, that enigmatic smile.
Rondel reminded me suddenly of Dwayne, with his gentle grace, his easy friendliness that was almost sensual. I knew then we could be friends . . . but also that this was dangerous territory, for a homophobe like me. I knew also, somehow, from the grizzled kinky hair on the side of Rondel's jaw, perhaps, or from hints of his worldly experience, that he must have been five or ten years my senior. For this reason also I began to beware of his growing intimacy - yet at the same time could trust him, for the wisdom of his greater experience.
I realized we were sitting pressed side to side. I moved away with a shift of my legs to another cushion, and caught a hurt expression crossing his face for an instant. He laughed it off then and said "What you afraid of, boy," and leaned over with an arm on my leg, looking up into my face with mock consternation.
I appreciated the value of his use of the mask and joined in with my own repartee: "Don't call me boy, boy."
Rondel laughed and sat up again. He took the joint that was being passed his way from the other side, took a long draw with large, soft, puckered lips while looking me in the eye with a serious expression; he held in the smoke and passed the joint to me. His hand brushed against mine in the passing and hung there, warm against my skin. He withdrew it in a way I felt was . . . tender.
With Sheila out of the picture, at least for this evening, it seemed, I stayed there talking with Rondel - about theatre, jazz, poetry. I thought he'd be interested to know of my recent acting experience, and further back, of my performance of "Starshine" as Ah's cosmic wizard.
"Wow, that's really outasight," Rondel responded with genuine interest. "You know, that's the kind of thing, just the kind of thing I’ve been doing with my theatre class, over at San Francisco State. Taking music, and interpreting it with movement - well, that's dance. In a musical, you've got a whole story line to produce, with moving bodies . . ."
"Yeah, a translation of the arts, is what it's all about. Even acting is that, is bringing a text to life with a living character."
"Yeah, right on, that's right. You got it, man. You say you write poetry? That would be perfect to use for a dance or movement class, or even a whole production. I'd love to hear some of it sometime."
It was suddenly all a bit too fast, a bit too big. But the prospect of going with this fateful contact, getting into public performance for real, was irresistible. When Rondel said, a short time later, "Hey, how'd you like to come to my place for some dynamite weed?" I said in my obstinate innocence, "Sure, why not?" and left with him, without so much as a goodbye to Sheila.
Rondel tried to put the make on me that very night, at his apartment on Thirty-fourth Avenue. Listening to some soft jazz, grooving on late-night fatigue and good, mellow, dope, glowing with new-found fellowship, stretched out on his carpeted floor, it was inevitable. I resisted.
"No, I'm not into that."
He withdrew his arm from my waist. "Okay. You wanna talk about it?"
"About what?"
"Why you're not into it. It's because I'm not a woman - or is it because I'm black?"
"No, no," come on. It's just me. I mean, sure, okay, if you were a woman - "
"Like that whore who invited you to the party . . ."
"Yeah, okay. It's true. I like women. I'm a man. I like you fine, as a friend. But not for - loving."
He scowled and turned away, pouting, a dark cloud pressed on a furrowed face. "It's always the same with you guys who are prejudiced . . ."
"I'm not prejudiced! It's just that - "
He turned on me, angry now. "Have you ever been kissed by a man?"
"No!"
"Then you're prejudiced."
"Aw, come on." I sat up, leaned away from him, sighed and shook my head.
"That's what it is. It's exactly what it is. You've made up your mind without even experiencing the thing you're so afraid of. Do you think it's going to hurt you, or what?"
"Of course not. I'm just not into it - okay?"
Rondel rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling, saying nothing for long moments. Finally he shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and said, "Okay fine." He smiled. "You're right. If you're not into it, we can still be friends. Okay?"
"Yeah, that's the way I look at it."
"Here, I'll roll another joint. You don't have to be anywhere else tonight, do you?" He looked at me with big, round eyes, with slightly comic implication.
"Nah. I don't have to work until Monday."
"Great. You can crash here if you want. I'll drive you back to Berkeley tomorrow."
"Oh, you don't have to do that. I'll - "
He waved me quiet, licking the seam on the paper. "No, no, no trouble at all. Tomorrow's my day off, too. Hey, you like Italian food? There's this great little place on Geary Street, for lasagna; I'll treat you to a lunch there. Can you pass me those matches?"
So it went. He laid off, the rest of that night, playing it cool, easing me off like a big fighting fish securely hooked on a long, taut line. I slept on the floor that night, by myself. The following week, I was in his bed - not eager, but willing to allow, for the sake of "friendship," certain minimal advances, affections necessary to Rondel's part of the relationship. It seemed to me a kind of sacrifice, to allow those warm lips to touch mine . . . and in time, for those searching fingers, that questing mouth to taste my sex.
It would be as distasteful for me to dwell here on the details of such encounters, as it was then for me to endure them. And so again I plead my distance from it, allowing but a glimpse of that raw experience. The pattern remained more or less the same as what I've described already, for the next year. Always, Rondel pushing, with some vain but bottomless hope, for my conversion. Always, me holding back, taking but refusing to give in the matter of sexual affections; keeping, I felt, my virginity intact while holding the thin line of companionship, and the more abstract sense of "brotherly love," intact.
Rondel, remember, held both red aces: the spiritual heart, and the diamond of theatre. He held the key to that glittering, creative world where all is possible, fame and fortune included, for a small price of admission - the suspension of prejudice, inhibition, and disbelief. He matched my black spade of independence, my club of convention at every hand; and likewise I played for the stalemate to the end.
That same spring when I met Rondel, things were changing for me on the job front. Eli finally came through with the Vellegio's contract, and so I could quit the car wash scene again and begin commuting to San Francisco. That job put me into a higher class of cars than I'd parked on the East Bay. Mercedes and Rolls were naturally the top of the class - silk-smooth, like riding on air. I had trouble with one, barely reaching the pedals. No wonder: the license plate read "NATE 42" and I realized the seat was pulled back for the legs of Nate Thurmond, the Hall-of-Fame basketball great from the Golden State Warriors. When he came out later to pick up his Rolls, I got him to sign the back of his ticket stub for me.
On that job I encountered the low as well as the high; and in between, a steady diet of San Francisco sourdough bread. Sitting on my chair on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, munching my bread and reading a book, a bum came staggering up one night from the nearby wharves. Grizzle-bearded, wrapped in an old gray coat, his unkempt hair wind-blown around his head, he shuffled to a stop and looked down at me. I looked at him calmly, if with some unease, out of my bourgeois, suburban eyes - or was it another quality, the intellectual, the poetic, the pacifistic, that piqued him? Whatever it was he saw, he didn't like it. He sputtered and snarled into my face -
"You - why are you always smiling?"
He stuck out his jaw, showing the line of lower teeth in the same way I used to mimic, with my friends, the appearance of the werewolf of the horror films. Only this guy was for real.
I'd seen him before, I now realized, shambling by on the other side of the street. Close up, he became the Steppenwolf, the face of the madman, the wild man unmasked. I looked at him with my doe eyes, speechless.
Grimacing at me, he repeated his challenge: "You're always smiling!"
Was I? Or did my benign expression simply translate to a smile as it refracted into that tortured soul, that blasted countenance? I remained speechless.
"Why," he persisted, spraying spittle into my face, "are you always smiling?"
This last was uttered much like a growl. I cringed, inwardly, looked down at the book on my lap. Aldous Huxley's Island. He huffed and puffed, finally gave up on me and continued on his way.
In May the impasse broke: I finally got a good job, a real job - that is, one paying more than three dollars an hour. I'd applied some months before at the various airline counters at the Oakland Airport. Previous to that, I'd even applied as an airline steward, hoping to reap the travel benefits as well as the decent salary. When I struck out there, I resorted to asking for jobs as a baggage handler. Early in May, I got a call from Air California saying they could use me in the air freight office. $4.85 an hour. I jumped at it.
Only one problem, I quickly discovered. I'd need a car. I borrowed Ed's car, yet another yellow VW Super-Beetle, to drive to work the first half-week. On Saturday, a day off, I went shopping for a car of my own. With the prospect of a good steady income, I tapped my willing parents for a fifteen-hundred-dollar loan, and hit the used-car lots.
I was too excited to dicker over price. When the salesman asked me, "How much do you have to spend?" I told him flat out, "Fifteen hundred."
"Ah," he said. "Right over here. We have a beauty for you, I know will be just the thing. You'll love it. Come look at this baby. Fifteen hundred dollars - cash, is it? - will drive it away."
I was smitten with it, all right. A yellow (what else?) Datsun 2000 convertible roadster, five speed, radial tires . . . it was perfect. Oh, except for the top - when I tried it, it didn't quite fit shut. "No problem," said the salesman. "We'll replace it for you, no extra cost."
"Right now?"
"Well, uh, no, I don't think we have any in stock; but I'll put it on your bill of sale. You come in again, in a month or so, we'll fix you right up."
"All right. Sounds fine." I wasn't worried; I didn't expect any rain now for the next six months. I pulled out my wallet and the deal was made.
Following the openings at Vellegio's and the airport came a third event, an acceptance to the University of British Columbia's MA program in English. I'd also applied to the University of Victoria, also in BC; they said they were full for the coming year, but that I should try again the following year. Sorting through the options now presented to me, I figured I could work all year at the airport and earn enough to help pay my way to one of the two BC universities the following year. The tuition was not large - about a tenth of what some of the stateside institutions charged. The acceptances gave me a welcome security about the future, though that was counterbalanced by a lingering hesitation on my part, a feeling that maybe my foray into "the real world" was about to terminate before I'd soaked up its experience to the fullest; before I'd explored all my latent potentials in more creative fields, like writing, music, theatre . . . Now, at least, I'd have a year of grace in which to try to be what I might.
Two weeks into my job at air freight, friend Warren arrived for a visit from Texas. He'd called the day I bought the car, saying he had some vacation time coming up and would like to come out to see me. Fine, I told him; I'd be working at my new job, but we'd have some time on my days off, maybe to go to Reno, where Brian Lawton had gotten a job as a chip-man.
The weekend with Warren came and went like a whirlwind. I introduced him to all my friends and acquaintances; Fred was the most interesting combination with Warren. The two of them competed for the wildest theorizing and aesthetic ramblings, manic explosions of verse and spontaneous outpourings of schemes for painting, music, literature, theatrical art. Fred had a new project for making money: a series of abstract, acrylic paintings to be sold on Telegraph Ave. Warren expounded on the latest version of his book-play-movie (yet to materialize), during the whole of our walk to a Bergman movie; the outline was co