Grant's girl.
So I quit attending two classes without a qualm. My grades for that quarter were two ‘F’s’ and a ‘B’ in the history course. On the drive back home that quarter break I told my father, with a degree of apprehension, my grades. But I was surprised by his equanimity at this news. I also told him I’d decided to change my major to History. He said nothing at the time, (he was a fairly quiet man). I thought I’d disappointed him and that he hoped I would follow in his footsteps and become an engineer. But I was wrong in this. He was bigger than that and only wanted me to find something I liked. He’d given me a ‘carte blanche’ to university. Later that day he told me he didn’t mind my change of major. He himself had a deep interest in history. That’s why he subscribed to ‘History Today’ for many years. I would borrow and read this magazine every month as it came in, along with his ‘National Geographic’. This must have softened the blow if there ever was one. Or perhaps he had misgivings over his own life choice of becoming an engineer (which he had to take to support his family, having two daughters by twenty three). He never criticized any choice I made afterwards, though he spoke his mind and was used to giving orders all day at work. On the home front he seemed happy and content, complimenting my mother on her excellent meals.
When he did mildly censure some point of child-rearing, as news came in of my sisters’ or Aunts’ children’s problems, some as serious as anorexia, I wondered at times why he spared me, as I led a very unusual life in those years, first ignoring all norms and degrees, diverting my expensive university career (which he paid for) into my own strange fields of study, then living the bohemian life, carefree and without any regard to my future.
But I did see that he respected learning. He saw that I was a very serious student and in conversations with him knew my deep application to books and history. In my wildest gypsy days after I left school, he’d come to the Bay Area a few times each year on business and always make it a point to take me out to a posh restaurant. On a few occasions, one in particular at ‘Alioto’s’, I roasted him for a good hour, saying an engineering career serving a company, though comfortably lucrative, was a sell-out to human potential, that the industrial world and the course it took us down was a dead end for humanity and the planet.
He took this tirade with complaisant attention and not personally. I couldn’t help spilling it out at that point in my life, not against him but as a statement of my own burning, artistic ideals. I was eating a forty dollar meal on a white tablecloth for two hours and living in a free, backyard cottage in a slum and hadn’t had or spent forty dollars the whole last month. But I was the happy idealist and he saw it, maybe even envying me. The fact that I didn’t ask him for anything, as he dropped me off to my shack that night, must have impressed him. When I did criticize him I always did it with respect and love and I knew he saw that. We shared a mutual, wordless admiration for each other from early on. I think he looked down on women to some degree, though never in a rude way, and he looked up to knowledge and intelligence in a huge degree. And in those days, in my ragged clothes and long hair, I beamed intelligence, like a halo. I was a non-stop talker and it was often in the clouds.
During that second quarter, with so much free time, only attending one course, I made it a point to drop acid once a week, partly because it was such clean and excellent LSD.
About the third or fourth evening after moving into my dorm room there was a gentle knock on my door and there stood a well-dressed, presentable, young man holding a large paper bag, a grocery bag. He asked me if I would like to buy any drugs. I asked, ‘what type?’ He said, ‘any type you want.’ I said: ‘come on in’.
His name was Joel. He was a graduate student working his way through law school. He’d knocked on everyone’s door and found such a warm reception on our floor that he became a frequent visitor thereafter.
I purchased a small bag of weed and some acid, ten hits of blotter, with some of the funds my parents had just left me with for the quarter. He knew we’d all be ‘in pocket’ at the start of the quarter, thus his timing, (I’m sure he became an excellent lawyer down the road). I especially liked the Bach music and starring at my stars on these trips, or else partying with friends in their rooms on weekends. Scott thought I was weird so I didn’t even tell him when I was high in my room.
I wasn’t one to throw things out windows, but living on the top floor, so high up, some of my hall mates became fixated with the study of gravity. Our windows were large and slid wide open. If you moved your desk you could run right up to the opening and toss an object far into the vast expanse of air and watch its long, slow, parabolic descent.
Contests were held on my side facing the cafeteria to see who could throw a plate the furthest, usually landing on the cafeteria roof and marking the spot to beat. Grant, in the room two doors down once threw an apple through a fourth-floor window of the opposing dorm, shattering it to bits. That was a feat no one could equal. He had a pitcher’s arm. I’m surprised no one ever threw themselves out a window, the contests became so fervent. Soon our cafeteria roof was littered with dishes of all sizes, cups, bottles, fruits, even some disliked school texts. We smuggled the plates out after dinner under our shirts.
On the other side of the floor a different game occurred, a different venue. Below it ran College Avenue, a busy street. The study here was to drop an object and estimate its probable impact upon a moving vehicle or pedestrian. For people small wads of wet, rolled up toilet paper were used. Grant had an incredibly beautiful girlfriend, (she also had huge tits), who seemed extremely simple minded. I don’t know how she got into Berkeley, yet I remember to this day exactly how hot she looked in her white, tight sweater. She became a fanatic for this sport, coming up to our floor several days a week. We’d stand around her, with Grant always at her side, just to stare at her as she leaned out the window, her breasts drooping, tossing the little wads from our laundry room window. She had the silliest giggle and called the sport ‘too-too’ balls. The remarkable feat in this arena was an apple thrown so precisely that it took out the front window of a bus moving quite rapidly. The runner up was a pumpkin dropped through the convertible top of a parked car. As the authorities could never tell who threw a particular object, no one was blamed.
We had a way of delaying anyone’s arrival to our floor. Richard and Doug shared the first room on my side, number 801. I was in 805. Most of the throwing contests were held in their room. In the Spring, they even removed their windows entirely, taking out the trim, for greater throwing space. Richard came with some valuable knowledge, (we each shared all the tricks we knew, forming an encyclopedia of sorts). He knew how to cut and bend a clothes hanger to a certain shape and slide it along the top of the elevator door, and catch a latch that would open it up, no matter where the elevator was, but freezing it at that point. We did this whenever we knew the college authorities or police were on the way. They’d wait for the frozen elevator for ten minutes then take the ugly eight story walk up the fire escape staircase. We could hear them coming a few floors down, release the elevator to normal functioning, run in our respective rooms and close the doors, sit at our desks with books open and pen in hand, innocent angels doing homework.
This trick allowed us to play another game, great for the first few weeks until everybody caught on. Fridays and Saturdays around eleven at night were the best times because the girls were often a little drunk by then. Every other floor in our dorm was girls or boys, and we got to know the girls on the seventh floor, the cute ones, and could even recognize their voices. After many joints we’d send one of our gang to the seventh floor. He’d wait till the hall was empty, ring the elevator to that floor and give us the signal. We’d open our door with the hanger and climb on the crossbeam and roof of the elevator right at our feet, close the door and ride the elevator up and down the dark shaft, staying totally silent, a trip in itself, but better yet, unbeknownst to anyone inside the elevator. On the crossbeam, right at our fingertips was a set of overrides that could stop the elevator at any point in the shaft and open or close the door.
We’d sit and ride until we heard a bevy of girls get in. If they went to the second floor we’d do nothing. But if the elevator sped past it we’d give them the ride and scare of their lives. We would suddenly stop the elevator mid-floor and have the door open facing the brick wall of the shaft, close it a moment later and take them up and down, doing this repeatedly, as if the elevator had gone mad. They’d be pushing their buttons uselessly, getting into a greater and greater panic, some of them close to freaking out. Others would start cursing female curses, funny to hear. It was a laugh to hear them talk in an ever-higher pitch, at first trying to reason out the problem, then losing it more and more as time went on. Our hardest task was to keep ourselves from laughing. Finally, we’d let them out on some floor and listen to their sighs of relief. But the news got out after we told a few guys on other floors what fun we’d had. After that we’d try it and just elicit loud banging on the ceiling with the girls yelling: ‘We know you’re up there you assholes. Damn you. Just let us out’.
