The infamous mezzanine, my think tank.

This man was one of my longest and intellectually closest friends.  I met him in the cafe Mediterranean in Berkeley when I was in the midst of my nightly book readings and school homework, just starting to learn Latin and Greek.  In my posts describing that period I mentioned the three close friends I made at that time and place.  The other two, Bruce and Joel each filled a page.  But when I started writing about Bill I realized that our friendship was far more lasting (fourteen years) and complex to even begin to describe in a series of posts.  So after two paragraphs I simply said that he'll be a recurring character in many future posts and you'll have to glean his persona from them.  Here's the link to that one https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/untapped-wealth-xddxenx .  Now I'll add this bit of vignette.

I considered Bill a very close friend and whenever we ran into one another we were happy to meet. He was always ready to enter into a deep conversation when we met at the Med. or even ran into one another on the street. He never visited our parties or our houses. He lived in an apartment building just two blocks from the Med. In our thirteen-year acquaintance I remember seeing the inside of it just once, for two minutes. We were walking down his street and all of a sudden he remembered he had an urgent phone call to make, so I was invited in.

He was often poor and jobless. But our talk was usually so abstract, the facts of our private lives rarely entered into it. After knowing him for many years someone once told me that he was gay. I couldn’t believe it but never brought up the subject, so I still don’t know and don’t care. Bones taught him the pleasures of pot. For some years he drank but I never saw him drunk. His mind was so active you’d consider him the most sober man you ever met.

When Will was close to being born in 1987, he visited our cottage in Santa Cruz and stayed three days. Sanita liked him. We dined out and walked the beaches and talked the whole time. When Will was born and named, he thought it was after him. I never undeceived him of this pleasure. Soon after that we moved to Upper Lake. But it was a pleasant and fitting near-ending to such a long friendship.  When Sanita and I moved to Piedmont a year after that I would ran into him again a half dozen times and we'd spend the evening together, just like the very first days we met, talking away the hours in the mezzanine of the Med.

I slip back and forth in time when I try to define and understand my own character. That’s my prime objective. But back to Bill. He was the most inscrutable friend I had, his mind so complicated and rich and perceptive, his character so polite and refined, yet he led in most outward ways a miserable life, so talented and yet unproductive, so bohemian. He should have written his ideas down for some academic paper to print, because his talk was perfectly refined prose of the highest caliber. His employment history was a disaster. He lived his finest moments sitting in the mezzanine of the café Med, smoking a cigarette, dreaming, or rather, philosophizing in his head. And when he talked with me it all spilled out, in all its bounty. I’ll copy a few we had (as some were so good they demanded to be recorded that same day) and from the fragments attempt a summary, a portrait of his unique being.

“April 27th, 1984. 1 p.m.: I went to the warehouse last night at 8 p.m. Had a fairly interesting conversation with Jim for a few hours on Greek Tragedy for his paper. (he was taking this course for his breadth requirement. He was a science major. I’d talked him into that course and now I felt some obligation in helping him finish it) Then we descend to mindless trivia, visiting another warehouse full of scrap parts of electronics, playing at repairs for John’s T.V. Home at 4 a.m. looking through an old notebook, fixing up a few poem fragments in minor ways, starting a new sonnet, getting nowhere, unfinishable, till 9 a.m…" Here I complain about the late stage of a speed high, how I sit and dote on a few words for hours, almost trance like, or worse, in a total haze. But later, as always, I get my second wind.

“9:30 a.m. I went to the Med. saw Bill, sat down with him and we begin to talk, first about his job hunting, but as usual, within five minutes, expanding philosophically the topic to insights and valid generalities on all working positions and attitudes to work. Then we move on to happiness in general, concerning which I held forth for the next half hour with an impressive eloquence, (I could see it in his face and the care with which he listened). I don’t know if it was that I had sobered up a little, or that his aid just prompted great talk. But we most certainly had it.

“The words came readily to my mind with an ease that allowed me to frame my sentences as well as I now write (which I do as fast as my hand allows). It is very pleasing to talk well, and I think it was very helpful to Bill himself. I told him my strengths, being part of a tradition of which I’m proud, which I love, which molds my character and supports it above worldly matters, which makes me undefeatable with this past, (ten times more than those who have no mental past to draw from) and I told him he had this also — at which he pricked up his ears — the same way I used to listen to him, rapt in admiration.

“It was an uplifting conversation. Then we get into reading a few great poems from my ‘Untermeyer anthology’ and parts of another, inferior book I just bought, ‘Annals of the Poets by C.P. Smith’.

“Such talks do me good. They re-balance me, comfort all the ills of the week, efface the worldly blots on my soul. The three hours of such talk is enough to recover me for another week. I form great hopes by practice to improve my eloquence…Bill’s attention today was fruit enough. I think it affected him deeply. We had an awkward parting. He seemed to wish to say something but did not.

“I told Bill that I have been very happy, though by conventional standards should not be. My love life so far has been like crossing a dessert with a few oasis’ in my path, and at most of those I found the water poisoned.

“We talked first about the overall importance of categorization in thought. All questions can be answered if we put then in the proper framework with bounds, and many seeming paradoxes occur when one oversteps the normal context of the problem when thinking on it. The great force of Classics comes from the author setting up parameters for his essay at the beginning, starting at the most basic points and answering all preliminary questions to the work undertaken, describing his intentions, his limits and goals. Sallust does this. Cicero ‘on Duties’ does it. So does Samuel Johnson. You read the preface and know exactly what to expect and what not to expect, so it’s your choice to read on.

“I remember saying I was so happy and complete it might even hinder my creative work… that I had no need of fame…I wished to create something great, and if it took till sixty so be it. It was the quality that mattered”.

So this is how Bill and I talked for hours, reinforcing our confidence in ourselves from our rare inner resources of knowledge, a deep familiarity with the best books ever, not the trash of pseudo-inspirational, modern books, that promise to uplift, composed for those with five-minute attention spans. We’d read the heaviest books ever written, the pure gold of thought which put us in the highest and luckiest rank of mortals, the most intelligent, far above employers, jobs, and society’s ‘slings and arrows’, as if we had all the intellect of Milton ‘redivivus’.

Almost all our conversations took place in the mezzanine of the Med., where the S.D.S. was born, where plans were plotted for the radical transformation of society by some of the best student minds of the sixties, at the finest University in the world for free, original thinkers. Both of us would have fitted into that group with fluent ease and eloquence. Who else had read Giordano Bruno, More, Erasmus, Montaigne, Johnson, Veblen and Marcuse? I would have been a fountain of precedents and citations to their radical proposals, perhaps the most radical of all with such rare freethinkers in my heart and at the tip of my tongue to quote. Bill could do the same, easily. Bruno also, being deeply read and interested in modern political theory and sociology. I missed that era by a decade but would have been part of that set.

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