The one rule my father laid down was that I was never allowed to leave the house after dinner, except on weekends. So I went to my room to amuse myself with my many hobbies. The only T.V. was in the family room, and my habit from France still prevailed. I had no interest in it. I always did my homework and made excellent grades in high school.
After dinner and homework I had a variety of interests beckoning my attention, my stamp collection, science kits from Radio Shack to solder together, board games (Avalon Hill games) you could play against yourself or others I made up on their model at my large desk. I read magazines from the den, my favorites being ‘National Geographic’ and ‘History Today’, while my friends, Brad and Jim, ran around in the streets at night and flunked so many courses they had no chance except for a ‘Junior College’.
I took advanced courses, in mathematics taking pre-calculus in my last year along with analytic algebra, acing both. What also helped me get into Berkeley was a very strange friend I made in the eighth grade. On my first day there (it was the middle of the school year), I was sent to the back of the room to the only spare desk, next to a boy named Charles P. He was in the back because he had no friends, hated everyone and was mutually hated. But my teacher assigned him to show me around the new school and tutor me through my first days of classes. So we slowly became friends.
He was a handsome, blond–haired boy with a good physique, a German look and background, but a very unhappy youth living alone with his alcoholic mother in a small apartment. She was sad and divorced, made him T.V. dinners and sat in her chair and drank. He had his room and what he called his science lab, a large closet he used for experiments. I would visit him every few weeks, the only boy who did. By fifteen he was building his first laser from a kit. By seventeen, taking science classes together we proposed to our old, physics teacher to let us use a storage room and set up a vibrationless table made of heavy sheets of metal layered between foam pads and make holograms at night. They came out well and we also fixed the school laser, broken for two years, just by luck, turning a few screws and re-aligning the mirrors. This got me over the hurdle. I picked Berkeley as my first choice and was accepted. Chuck didn’t. He had poorer grades and went to San Francisco State for years before getting into U.C. Santa Cruz. But he did live in Berkeley later, learning Russian and becoming a translator of technical magazines for the C.I.A. through a private front. I moved in with him for five months in 1984. Then I moved out, that’s all I could take of him. He was my friend but so surly, ever since I met him, that he was hard to take. But he did attend our poker games beginning in the summer of 1982. We called him ‘Chuckles’ and poked fun at him constantly and he took it in good humor making grumpy, ‘off the wall’ replies, a real character which only a poker game like ours could accommodate.
He never had a girlfriend, not even a chance at one, however desperate the girl. But he started frequenting a whore house at one point in Berkeley and befriended an oriental girl there. She took a liking to him, giving him free dates and even introducing him at one point to her mother. But she also gave him herpes and the relationship fizzled.
But back to my boyhood. It happened on some occasions that my friends were away or sick, or sometimes just by choice I would hike the hills alone. Here’s another poem on the subject:
A Boy
A have called grassy hills my friends
And oak tree bowers my home,
Collected sticks for boyish ends,
Made fallen birds a tomb.
I’ve laid out pathways to my taste,
Given rocks and dells a name,
Like Moses who traversed a waste
And left it not the same.
I ruled vast realms when I was ten
And ordered many a useless thing
And was I not like Cyrus then
A proud but lonely king.
(Cyrus was the first king to form Persia into an empire, rising from being a goatherd as a boy. When you read the account of his life in Xenophon’s ‘Cyropaedia’ you get the feeling of a man, who whatever he gained, was never happy, a man with a void in his heart that nothing could fill. My last lines reflect this as I read the book in college. By ‘ordered’ I also mean ‘arranged’)
When I was sixteen two other boys came into my life as different as could be. The first was Alain Z., a Jewish boy who had just moved into one of the newly finished houses right up the street. He began riding the bus with us for a good two months but no one spoke to him. He was quiet and too well dressed, unlike us. His father was a doctor and he was to be one too. So one Saturday I went to his door. His mother answered and I asked if he could come out and play. I heard him running down the stairs. If I’ve ever seen what could be called a gleam in someone’s eye it was right then, a gleam expressing overwhelming joy.
He was much more refined than my other friends and rarely played with us in a group. But I found the time for him and we played board games till late into the night doing sleepovers. One, called ‘Stocks and Bonds’ was our favorite. He joined our stamp club. This is the one thing he did with Brad and Jim; we would sit in a room and swap stamps and talk. We had walky-talkies and could talk to each other from our bedrooms and did the countdown together on New Year’s Eve, 1970.
The other new friend I met through Brad and with his acquaintance came our first introduction to pot and L.S.D. only a few months apart. He lived over the hill, across the highway that led to Half-Moon Bay, (which we sometimes hitch-hiked as boys, to the beaches just south of there). His name was Rich L., an only child and a wild one, his independence bolstered by two circumstances. He lived in the fixed-up basement of his parent’s house with its own bathroom and private entrance and had been told by his parents that at the age of twenty-five he was going to inherit a large sum of money from his rich grandmother. So he was never too concerned about school or bothered with thoughts of choosing a career and drugs and ‘getting high’ became his favorite pastime.
His parents were hardly ever home on weekend nights and even if they were they didn’t come downstairs. So his pad quickly became our Friday night hangout of choice, our party room. It contained a couch, a table and chairs, a black light and psychedelic posters, carpet, stereo, many records, and frequently, his buddy Stewart, two years older than us and the local drug dealer. He was old enough to buy us six-packs of beer, (he had a car and fake ID) and Rich always seemed to have the money, and the thirst.
When I met him he was late sixteen and already becoming an alcoholic. His parents were partiers with many friends and kept an extensive liquor cabinet constantly restocked, from which he would pilfer. He was very sociable and outgoing, loved telling and hearing stories, going to movies, especially crime ones and was a good all-round companion you could trust. He reminded me of a young Kiefer Sutherland in looks and recklessness.
Pot came in twenty-dollar ounces, mostly leaf and far less potent than today. But it was fun to roll up, which made us feel like cowboys, fun to smoke with the effect of wild laughter.
Sometimes we got hold of a Thai stick or some hash, always through Stuey. This would have more of the hallucinogenic and physical effects of strong pot.
But we didn’t stop there. LSD was everywhere at that time in the Bay Area and usually a dollar or two a hit, and very strong.
