On a happier note I’ll choose my friend Jim (Jimbo) to describe next. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, all Irish, beer drinker and belcher extraordinaire, the most joyful, jovial and joking of our group and the only one who was three or four years younger than all the rest.
I met him on Mike’s insistence, in the early part of November 1982 and he quickly integrated into our group, our poker games and our parties.
It must be a strange experience. He’d just arrived in town to begin work with his employer, Robert Malone, staying at his sister’s house in the flatlands, knowing no one. She was ten years older than him, (he came from a large family) and had nothing in common with him, except a sisterly love and care. He had no friends one week and a large, assorted group of them the next. Stranger still, the agent of our meeting, Mike, he didn’t really like at all (just like most of the poker crew, and why Mike never joined our card games). He’d just run into him by chance on some street corner, at some red light, and Mike, being outgoing and garrulous to a fault, insinuated himself into Jim’s life. When Mike met me a few days later, he knew right away that we’d hit it off famously, and practically dragged me off to this house and meet him one afternoon.
I invited Jim to the very next poker game, where he made a great impression and after that was more than welcome to drop by my place, or Steve’s, or Bones’ anytime. We took him to the Plough after that first game and he was in a wonderland of happiness again, about to make an even larger set of drinking friends, as he had that rich Boston, semi-Irish accent, and a good number of the regulars there were pure Irish and responded in kind to that brogue with a strong, prejudicial liking.
Late next Spring, by now a best friend of ours, after innumerable games and parties and bar nights, Robert Malone had a large house to build in a short time and needed help. Jim talked him into hiring a whole pack of us, including John Fyzer, John Seebach and even Larry Davis, for work there that lasted over a month, at eight dollars an hour. But it was an impressive feat on Jim’s part, Larry and John Fyzer being perhaps the two most unemployable souls in North America.
Our close friendship lasted two years (our friendship much longer), as he moved back to Boston in Sept. of 84. In fact he took Steve. S with him for a month. He had a job there that Steve (a house painter) could share in and make some good coin. He even had a great place for both of them to stay, near Harvard University, with pubs and restaurants and nightlife just blocks away. At the same time my warehouse days were coming to an end and I moved into Steve’s empty pad for that month, where monumental changes in my life took place.
About the middle of these two years, in the early fall of 1983, Jim’s on again, off again girlfriend, Maureen, came to Berkeley and they rented a three-story, old Victorian house together, (at least five bedrooms) in a poorer part of Oakland, where we had several, large, wild parties.
She was blond, medium height, probably six inches shorter than Jim, who was at least six-foot two, with a round, pretty face and an athletic build. She was energetic and loved the outdoors. When she moved back to him, she’d just finished a year-long stint working for the Parks department at Yosemite. She was very strong-willed and intelligent and always had her own way. They’d argue sometimes, as lovers do, but I think she won about ninety per cent of the fights because I lived with them for two weeks in that big house in the Spring of 84 and watched the dramas. But most of the time they were a fine couple to behold and she was friendly with all of us, his buddies, even charming, though she didn’t drink much or party with us. They’d met and lived together in Boston before they both came out West. Now in their early twenties, (twenty-three or four) they were trying it again.
Sometime in the Spring of 84, while I was staying with them, I took her on some side jobs as a helper. These were weekend jobs I’d found on my own, re-wiring old houses. By now I was competent enough in electrical knowledge to do that and I sold myself out at a low rate, twelve dollars an hour, cash, and got jobs. An assistant at eight dollars an hour made the jobs go twice as fast and my clients had no complaints when I offered this. So I took her on as a sort of apprentice, and with her energy and intelligence (and good looks) pleased me and impressed my clients.
I’m guessing, in retrospect, that she also had some hidden agenda in entering a mostly male-dominated trade to prove herself, which she did, excellently well. I was impressed with how fast she learned everything I taught her, how well she could handle a drill or any power tool I handed her. She had both the strength and the dexterity. You could plainly see her biceps when she wore a tank-top and she was all the prouder of them the bigger they grew. She enjoyed hard labor. After only five or six of these weekends, learning the basics of house wiring and the words of the trade, the lingo, she applied for and got an impressive job as an electrical apprentice on a multi-million dollar project re-fitting a part of the Lawrence-Livermore laboratory up on the hill above the university, some neutron collider with thousands of wires to pull through pipes.
I remember what she told me about this work. It was labeling and numbering hundreds of wires each day and making up bundles of them and taping them in sets to pull through conduits, working on a crew with twenty others, all men. She kept this job for a year, making excellent pay, raises, and also, I’m sure, self-esteem, in a field dominated by men. Jim left her and went back to Boston that Fall. She stayed. I saw her rarely but we kept in touch and she called me up once to help her out on a side-job she scored the next Spring, a weekend job, a large house to re-wire. I did it as a favor. I’d been living with Lindsey and then Dave for months and had no need of the money.
I put on my old tool belt and helped her out a few days. That was the last electrical work I did for the next six years, and the last I saw of her for the next two. She thanked me for the big job I helped her get and shortly after moved back to Boston, where she rejoined Jim for a short while, then broke up with him and became a full-fledged, out of the closet, confirmed lesbian, with Boston the perfect town for LGBT, as it was full of them and full of liberalism, in the best American tradition, where it all started.
