In the summer of 1972 I graduated high school but didn’t attend the ceremony. I was sitting in the back of Rich’s car with my friends, smoking joints as he drove near our high school. That day the third Santana album came out and we were eager to hear a radio station play it, right as the graduation ceremonies were about to begin. So I made my choice.
A week later I started my first job, (arranged by my Father) in the print room of the American Can Company, behind the drafting department, pulling out beautiful, large prints from their drawers when someone needed a copy. The originals never left the room. They were on huge sheets of vellum, and so intricate in detail, each one must have taken draftsmen months to make, the complexities of the parts scaled to perfection, all in beautiful ‘three dimensional’ views. The copies I made were handed to the machinists to execute.
In early September, my parents drove me across the bay and led me to the eighth floor of Davidson hall, room 805. There were three complexes of four dorms each, all eight stories high, each filling a block with a cafeteria in the middle. Twelve dorms with eight floors makes ninety-six floors. Only one floor that year out of all these developed a notoriety that spread far and wide through all the halls and administration buildings. That floor was mine.
At the end of the school year a fine was tallied up and imposed on every student in these twelve dorms, divided equally to cover the costs of reparation for damages caused in any extraordinary way, not for the ordinary wear and tear of common use. The bill that year was over thirty dollars per student, an all-time record, much more than any previous year. Of that damage I can safely say that our unique floor was responsible for over ninety-five percent of that damage. We were lucky it was spread evenly around. Had it been assigned to the region of the damage, and the perpetrators, most of my fellow floor mates, me included, would not have had the money to continue university. But the year was 1972, and after three years of long and violent riots the administrators had finally learned to tread very lightly in all matters of discipline, or to single any little group out for punishment, which would give one more chafing cause to the rest of the student body to rise up and riot again.
We weren’t all bad apples. There were thirty of us on that floor, two to a room, and I’d say at least ten, like my roommate Scott, (whom I had nothing to do with) were mild-mannered, studious, serious youths bent on getting their degree and nothing else. But the rest of us were rebels, or at least inclined that way, and we learned from each other new tricks and modes of misbehavior. On weekends, (and soon most nights) doors stayed open and the music and pot smoke blared out into the hallway, inviting one and all to join in partying. The dullards headed to the libraries till midnight when they closed, hoping the parties were over so they could get some sleep. Chaos and mayhem reigned on our floor and as our reputation spread, like-minded rebels from other floors would join us, especially on weekends, women too, lots of them, creating wild scenes, wandering in and out of the open doors.
How many times did I wander down the hall to a friend’s room and come back an hour later to find two or three strangers, one at my desk rolling a joint, others sitting on my bed or Scott’s desk (as he was always at the library)? But they were all welcome. I’d introduce myself and make three new acquaintances and enjoy the talk and another joint. Towards midnight I’d tell them my roommate would be back soon and that he’d insist on light’s out, a serious student bent on good grades. My attitude was the complete opposite, but they’d always shuffle away without a murmur, to the next open door or their own floors.
School quarters were ten weeks long and after our getting to know each other, and our acclimatization to this new freedom, our partying started slowly, like our reputation, before it snowballed. It took a few weeks to come together and grow, so I did very well at school that first quarter, getting an ‘A-minus in Calculus and Physics and a ‘B-plus in American history.
By the second quarter (from January to March), it became an all-out riot on our floor and my grades succinctly reflected this change. After the first week of my combined Calculus and Physics course I quit all attendance, but for a reason that had nothing to do with partying. I’d copied a homework question off the blackboard in my Calculus class one morning and took it home but couldn’t solve it after turning over page after page in my textbook. So I took it to my teacher the next day for an explanation. He stared at the equation and after a long pause told me that it would take him, a third-year graduate student in mathematics, many more years of study to be able to solve it. What happened was that I’d copied it wrong, made just one little error with a ‘minus’ instead of a ‘plus’ sign, which put the equation into a whole different league of complexity. But his answer disturbed me and I thought a great deal about it in my room that night. Was I going to spend my life filling my head with numbers and signs, where years of hard study gave you command of nothing but the tiniest piece of an endless puzzle? I didn’t particularly like numbers or Calculus or Physics for that matter. I was accepted into Berkeley on the merits of my grades in those subjects and at first I supposed I had some obligation to that pursuit. My history class still delighted me and also my newfound interest in Michel de Montaigne’s ‘Essays’, which I started reading dozen of pages of every night. It became my bedside book before sleep, while listening to a record collection I found in the very same place, ‘Moe’s books’.
There was only one table-sized bin of records in that store, (their taste in choosing material was impeccable) where I found an eighteen-record set of Bach’s complete organ works by Walter Craft. One thing that intrigued me about it was its sheer size. I’d never seen such a large collection in one box. So I bought it, probably for that reason, as I had no acquaintance with him, and played it at low volume on my portable player, wearing earphones so as not to bother Scott. I soon became fascinated by it.
One other thing I bought at ‘Moe’s’ was a four by six-foot large map of the stars, all black with luminescent dots of various sizes representing the stars we see, with their numbers printed in deep violet beside them, which you had to look at closely to see, as they were so close to the black in color. I posted this map on the ceiling right over my bed with thumbtacks. From the bed laying down you could only see the white dots, almost like looking at the night sky. When Hiram from down the hall first saw this innovation of mine he knew he’d found a kindred soul and we became fast friends. Above his bed he’d fastened a grid of tiny, different colored lights hooked to a row of buttons he held in his hand and by tapping different sets of buttons he made the patterns of lights change. He played with this for hours in the dark, as I did my stargazing, sometimes on acid. These were the pre-computer days, but you could tell we were getting close.
