My first vehicle

After three or four weeks there, things being a little bit crowded, I took Dennis up on his offer and moved back to Berkeley. It was at this time that I purchased my first car, Norma’s very beat up 67 Barracuda for three hundred dollars. It had been T-boned on the passenger side and that door deeply rammed in. The window was gone but the miracle was that the alignment was still perfect. The door wouldn’t open, never would, and you had to slither in the window to enjoy that seat. But I fixed the gaping crater by simply getting a piece of wood and a car jack and cranking it back from the inside, pushing it out a foot to something near its old self. Now the door just looked badly crinkled. Norma had lost the gas cap at some point but with her rare female ingenuity (so attractive to me) replaced it with a potato, now grown black and hairy with age. I replaced that with a cap for five dollars right away. One must have some dignity. Children often stared and pointed at the mangled car as I drove by, wondering how it still ran, but now I was mobile.

So I drove proudly across the bay to Dennis’ apartment to crash there for a few weeks. It was mid-November, I remember, because I rented a room in a house with an American Indian girl he introduced me to Dec. 1st. She was short, (under five foot) quiet and plain looking and it was one large room with few furnishings. The rent was fifty dollars each. There was a single bed against one wall, which she said I could have. But I didn’t want to make her feel the lesser partner, so when she rolled out her sleeping bag in the middle of the floor the first night I asked if I could do the same, told her I’d prefer it that way, so we slept on the floor in our sleeping bags, right next to each other, our pillows too, our heads almost touching, and she liked this arrangement, this silent company. We had no intentions of sex. We hardly got to know one another in that one month, she was so untalkative. In a few gestures, a few breakfasts shared and tidying up together we enjoyed a slight union and she’d open up and talk with me on household matters. I was on the ave. most days and at Dennis’ most evenings, or Phil’s, often coming home late. She had that aura of sadness so common to her race, which made her withdrawn. But I think she was happy there because I treated her with all kindness and respect and so did Dennis and Andy the few times they’d drop by.

But before I leave the few weeks at Dennis and Andy’s I have one odd story to relate. At ground level, attached to their apartment complex was a covered parking lot for the many tenants. There, in his allotted spot, Dennis parked his Volkswagen. He told me when I moved in that there was a street person who sometimes slept under his car and he was lucky to notice and not run over and mangle him the first time this happened, the car being so low to the ground. But it puzzled and bothered Dennis to no end that this person always chose his car to sleep under when there were dozens of far higher, roomier cars all around.

Now Dennis was excitable at times and melodramatic, even histrionic if there was some irritant, and he would fly into what I always thought was a very eloquent rage (as he’d done years before in my landlord’s kitchen). It happened one morning that we were going somewhere and, sure enough, the body was under the car. Dennis woke him, a bit rudely, and was determined to get an explanation once and for all.

The person crawled out and to our surprise we saw a young man our age with long hair but not shabby looking at all, dressed as well as we were, with a little knapsack at his side. He was even clean shaven. This only added to the mystery. In a perfectly affable tone he told us he would explain everything if we could sit down somewhere. We invited him to our kitchen for some coffee.

He told us he had a girlfriend and that on some nights, having something to do with her roommate, he couldn’t sleep with her. So on these nights he packed up a few items of hygiene and some books, (college level reading) which he showed us, walked to this parking lot and slept under Dennis’ car because it was the darkest spot in this all-night, over-lit garage. Mystery explained. He also told us he liked to do speed and could get us some of the best if we were interested. We said maybe and he told us he’d drop by in the afternoon with his girlfriend. Off he went to some gym on campus where he said he could shower and shave, a perfectly reasonable fellow.

“Wonders are many, but none is more wonderful than Man.” Sophocles.

Later that day he showed up again and to our surprise his girlfriend was tall, good-looking and intelligent. We talked a while, then I set off with him in my car to score some of the speed he was raving about. We drove to a house about ten blocks away, I gave him sixty dollars and he told me to wait in the car, he’d be right out. Well I waited thirty minutes and began to feel uncomfortable sitting in a parked car so long with people walking by so I decided to drive around the block and park in a different spot. There I sat another twenty minutes without seeing him, thinking I’d been ripped off. So I drove back to the apartment. Upon returning I found out he must have come out of the house just as I was going round the block, so he walked back to Dennis’ place to collect his girl and leave my share, about half of what I expected, then left and was gone, forever.

Dennis had to work the next day so he only took a taste. I was in a mood to party so I invited Phil over, and after a few more lines we decided to drive to Marin, to Kim and Norma’s, which we did in his car, picking them up then straight to the bars where we met Brian, a friend of Kim’s. The stuff was so strong our party lasted till the bars closed then back to Norma’s then to a patio bistro at seven A.M., ordering mimosas and boisterously talking to everyone around.

I’m surprised we didn’t get kicked out. But Marin is for rich people and they get deferential treatment for the big tips they leave, and Brian was saying crazy stuff like: “Let’s talk swimming pools”. They assumed we were rich. In the lower East bay we would have been kicked out, (not from any bistros, as there were none, but from some six a.m. bar) or worse, arrested.

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