The Boston to Berkeley 40 Blahs Blues

As I LEFT my sister's apartment in San Francisco, for the last time, my brother-in-law shouted after me, "I hope some red-neck driving along takes a pot-shot at you. That'll teach you!" I didn't say anything, it may just have been one of his lawyer's tricks. I just hoped he didn't find out my sister had lent me $20 to hitch back home.

I'd only been in San Francisco about three or four weeks but I was tired of looking for a decent job, tired of living with my relatives, and tired of the beautiful people and the beautiful scenery; it all seemed like a misplaced setting for a big Hollywood production called "California Dream."

I DROPPED OUT of school suddenly, three weeks into the term because I couldn't manage and within two days, I was in San Francisco. The day before I left I went to University Health Services to hash it out with a psychiatrist. But I was slightly disappointed in the tiny man with a heavy German accent who sat me down and began to ignore me. He wrote notes continually during the session, using a thick, phallic Mont-Blanc pen that was twice the size of his hand. After I told him everything that was happening, he turned to me and said, "It seems to me you are running away from yourself."

I managed to overcome my guilt feelings for having left poor, little Dr. M. all alone with his pen the minute I stepped on the airplane. I had never been west of the Mississippi. I thought San Francisco seemed like the promised land. Finally I would find out about the legendary west coast. The minute I got there the whole myth began to materialize. There were my sister and her husband, both deeply tanned, waiting in their MG. I climbed into the back, and we sped through South San Francisco into the city. Fortunately, it was dark, so I didn't see the heavy industry or the huge sign painted on rocks and set into a dull green hill, saying, "Welcome to South San Francisco."

The next couple of days my brother-in-law, Ray, kept the legend in tact. He took me around to the best parts of San Francisco. We started with Presidio, one of the most exclusive sections in town; the streets wind around each other, and the houses look out over the Pacific where it meets San Francisco Bay.

Ray just graduated from BOLT, Berkely's Law school, the previous June. He told me, someday he'd like to live in Presidio, maybe after he got into San Francisco politics. He said politics in 'Frisco are though to get into, you need the approval of the city's aristocrats, and they've been running San Francisco since before the California gold rush.

Then again, Ray was a pretty ambitious guy. He'd gone to Ohio State in the mid-1960s, dropped out for awhile, and worked on Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign. He still prizes a picture of himself shaking hands with Kennedy, and sometimes he gets depressed when he thinks of how it all ended. Eventually he went back to college, and after graduating he joined VISTA. That's where he met my sister, Barb. They got married just three weeks after they first laid eyes on each other.

HE FOG was just beginning to lift from the ocean when we went to Point Lobos. In the sun, it looked like baskets of cotton tumbling over; a light golden haze, mixed with the green and brown of Marin heights across the channel. Ray and I climbed down on the deep-scarred rocks and went into a small cave hidden between a deep cut in the rocks. We could hear the small waves smack crisply outside, but inside the small grotto our voices were dull and hollow. Ray began talking about school.

"You know, I didn't think much of Ohio State when I was there. It was a big place, and it was easy to get lost in. The whole time I was there, even after I came back feeling strong, I never got to know a single prof."

He waited a minute for some reaction, but I just nodded. I wanted to hear more before I jumped in.

"You shouldn't have left school, though. That was a bad mistake. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't drop out, even for a little while. It wrecks the continuity, and you go back without any sense of commitment.

"The only reason I made it back was Kennedy. That man gave me something to hold onto."

His speech ran on like an early epistle of Saint Paul, full of the vigor of liberal martyrdom. I never did jump in.

Barb and Ray led pretty simple lives. Their apartment on Fulton Ave., right across from Golden Gate Park, is just barely furnished. They spend most of their time working on class action suits and civil rights cases.

But there was always their underlying ambition, and a lot of quarreling over the grants project. I couldn't take it for very long. Unemployment wasn't making the situation any better either. I went to several employment agencies but they all said the same thing: "You can't get a full-time job if you're going back to school, and we all know you're going back to Harvard, even if you don't."

I MOVED OUT of the San Francisco apartment without letting either Barb or Ray know. I decided the environment was a little to polarized for me there, so I went over to Berkeley. I didn't have any money, although I had a few good books and three records: On the Threshhold of a Dream, by the Moody Blues, Deaf, Dumb and Blind, by Pharaoh Sanders, and Readings of James Joyce, including an original cut of Joyce reading from Finnegan's Wake.

Telegraph Avenue is lined with petty peddlers in cheap jewelry, serious arts-and-crafts people, and all kinds of hustlers on the make. I fit right in trying to sell my three records. There was another guy on the corner with several boxes full of albums going for a buck and a quarter, but I looked them over and they were in pretty sad shape. I decided to sell mine for two and a half dollars. It was a buyer's market that day; the most I could do was enjoy the people walking by.

Eventually one man, a tall black, dressed in a three-piece suit with a watch-chain strung across his vest, stopped. He examined my piddling collection, and picked up Joyce. Now, I was kind of partial to that album, and I wasn't kind of partial to that album, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to part with it. This guy wanted to buy it for 50 cents. He started telling me in this hasal tone about Joyce as if he were some expert, so I told him either to pay the money or leave. He paid me $2.50.

All during the day a couple of scraggly drifters, one with his two front teeth missing, kept coming up and asking me if I'd sold any yet. They feigned concern. I thought they were real nice guys until I finally did sell something. Then they came right out and asked me if I wanted to buy some dope.

I used my money to buy a meal and spend the night in Berkeley's only hotel, an old worn-down warehouse located in the small industrial section. It wasn't much better than sleeping in an alleyway, but it provided some shelter. Most of the people in there were drifting, just like me.

One couple came in late, and an older woman was with them. She turned out to be the mother of the girl, and she was dropping her off with her boyfriend so they could spend the night together. Here was this mother hugging her daughter and crying, "Take care of yourself, honey," then the boyfriend joins in and they all huddle together crying and smiling at the same time.

I WENT OVER to my other sister's house in Oakland the next day. I really wanted to just disappear, but decided I'd give the so-called sane world one more chance. Sharon was studying Montessori and her husband, Paul, was a social worker in the Oakland Welfare Department. They were a lot more down-to-earth than Barb and Ray--they showed their ideals through actions rather than words. I almost could have stayed there.

For a week I looked for a job, but didn't find anything. I didn't know what I wanted to do, either. I went to a Manpower office and waited for a full day in its hot back room full of down-and-outers; I checked the Berkeley campus for work, and I even took a civil-service exam. Nothing seemed to work.

I wanted, most of all, to write. One day I went to the San Francisco Library for an open seminar on writing. It was pitiful. There were all these old people who had been published once, years ago, and never had anything published since. The chairman of the group had been mugged the night before. His face was badly bruised, a patch covered his swollen eye, and his arm was slashed. I wouldn't have found out about his arm if he hadn't lifted up the bandage to show everybody the 27 stitches. I left before the meeting started.

I was on the brink then; San Francisco was driving me crazy. No school ever taught me about all this. So I stuffed my pack full of books, and went back over across the Bay Bridge to Barb's place. She gave me a check, and said I could only cash it if I would talk to Ray. I went out and got the money while she called him. When I came back to pick up my backpack, Ray was waiting. That's when we parted company.

I started hitching in the middle of Golden Gate Park with a sign that simply said, "EAST." Ninety hours later, I was back home in Niles, Michigan, trying to regain what little sanity I had left.

Nixon was re-elected president that week.