Jim and his girlfriend and my ex. and son, taken seven years after the poker games began (my wife was the picture taker.)

Before I finish with this poker crew I have to mention the one other addition who became a regular and never missed a game for years. He was the youngest of us, a big, strapping, blond haired lad just arrived from Boston, with its strong accent, a beer drinker and companion par excellence, always jovial and smiling. I met him in October through Mike, who’ll shortly appear in these pages. Mike must have met him at some bus stop soon after arriving in California, same as Jim, so they talked awhile as two strangers with that in common. A few days after I met Mike I was practically dragged by him one afternoon to the flatlands of Berkeley (near the bay) to a large, decrepit Victorian house and introduced to Jim C.. He’d just moved in with his sister and had no friends, just the promise of a job in construction from Robert Malone, a contractor also from Boston with some houses to build in Berkeley, so out he came.

I soon as we met and talked for half an hour in his sister’s living room, I saw he would make a great addition to our poker games. I invited him to the next one and after three hours of wild play and talk he had a whole new flock of friends. He was the perfect, final complement to our crew, different from us in background, but in pure, gleeful youth and cheer, he doubled all our merriment. That night and in the games after that we’d sometimes laughed so hard tears rolled down our faces. Then we took him to the Starry Plough and he was in heaven. A few months later he procured several of us, even Larry, work with Robert Malone, when we needed it.

It was in these first weeks back in Berkeley that my journal took a turn in content. Up to then it had been bookish or philosophical reflection. Now, with my weekends so eventful, it added a journalistic scope, recording memorable events, parties, notable conversations and details of the settings and the drugs consumed, often recorded a few hours after they occurred. This is the real stuff of autobiography, a series of pictures in words, and I shall transcribe the best of them as they occur.

I notice in these hastily scribbled notes, (because my emotions were still freshly engaged) that I sometimes say blunt, ugly things about acquaintances and friends that would hurt them to read. But they were the sentiments of the moment, passing moods, not my calm and lasting views of them. So I’ll copy them whole, preferring stark veracity to the complicated reflections of how others might take it, or make omissions that distort the truth of the moment, like those many crossed out parts you see in government reports, knowing that behind those blackened lines the most important truths lay.

The first involves a three day and night binge party with May, Bones’ off and on again girlfriend, (mostly on). He was away somewhere for several weeks and Bob G. was staying in his apartment up front, fresh from the divorce we talked him into. May was staying somewhere nearby, with some of her old prostitute crowd. I could tell this from her easy, five-minute access to drugs, day or night. It happened at the end of September. As this was my first try at reporting, I can see it’s a little bit stilted and crude, call it juvenile. But it improves swiftly, as those who read on will see.

September 30th, 1982: After an easy day of work I arrived home safely with Bob in hopes of a calm and restful evening, with plans for a similar day to follow. But fate was of a different mind. As we pulled into the driveway and got out of the truck, May drove in, planning, no doubt, no more than an innocent and brief visit, a friendly social call.

There she stood, looking beautiful as ever, her head gently swaying in the breeze and the evening sunlight, telling how she had just got a new batch of Quaaludes, how she had tried some and how they were ‘okay’.

She came in and generously placed the bag of them on my table. There were fifty of them in the beginning. I took a shower and as soon as I came out ‘Uncle Roy’ arrived. He went to the fridge and took my last beer. He sat down at the table with a serious look on his face. He told us he had some serious business to transact. He produced a minute piece of hash, a small lump, and told us he must weigh it exactly, on the scale in Bone’s apartment as he intended to put it up for sale. I told him to just eyeball it. He looked back at me shocked and dismayed, as if this would be to commit some kind of crime or offence against the world of drug dealing.

So I sat down at the table and after a moment’s hesitation, a foreboding qualm, popped a Quaalude and downed it with the last swallow of Roy’s beer.

A little plastic bag containing some forty-five Quaaludes, lying open in the middle of a large wooden table. I remember staring at them and making the silly remark that this was really ‘California living’. But ‘California dying’ would have been closer to the truth.

May ate some more ‘quacks’. Then Bob tried one.

Bob and Roy go to the front house. Next May and I are on the phone calling Zan to see if we can get some speed. Zan has none. So we try for the second best, cocaine.

The easy availability of cocaine in this state contributes no small part to our general decadence.

May stumbles out the door at eight o’clock. She could hardly walk, so from my chair I thought it prudent to advise her to drive carefully. She returned, to my surprise, in fifteen minutes with a quarter gram.

Here’s where my account ends but where the party begins, for three days and nights. The coke woke us up so we go out and get booze. Whenever the coke ran out she would run out and get more. People dropped by and would contribute money and do lines and stay a few hours, then leave us to ourselves. We got some sleep the first two nights thanks to the ludes, but would start off each morning with more lines, the breakfast of champions.

Saturday night we were really wrecked and walked to a Blues bar around the corner on Telegraph. I remember slow dancing with her to good blues, though the bar was near empty, then stumbling home. She dropped one of her contact lenses as we were about to go to bed and we spent two hours looking for it, on our hands and knees on the floor without success. Then we finally cuddled in bed. Sunday she left and I passed out to awake Monday morning feeling deathly ill. I called Bob G. upstairs, thinking I might need a ride to the hospital. He came and calmed me down, made me some tea and sure enough, I began to feel better. There was a dollar bill on the table with a triangular blood stain on it. That’s how much coke we snorted. The ludes were gone. We’d given some away but probably consumed half. May could down three to my one.

That Monday I wrote: “8 P.M., lying in bed with fever still, very weak, head aches but calm, full of hopes and dreams. I spent the next day just lounging and reading”. The next entry is this: “Thinking of calling May on the telephone, the reason, just to talk to her, to hear she’s okay, to see if she wanted company — the superficial reason, to ask if she needed money, a place, anything I might help her with. But then hesitation — what if she doesn’t want”… and there it breaks off. Of course I didn’t call her. When Bones came back a few weeks later she moved back in with him and nothing said. In fact they stayed together after this for many, many years. The poker games went on as usual and we were friends as before, not as thick as before because I made new friends, while they kept to themselves. They didn’t come to my nighttime parties but they did join in one large afternoon party I threw. And once every month or so we’d have dinner and a quiet evening together, just the three of us, and talk about the past, that is, parts of it.

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