View from Mount Tamalpais.
The mention of the LSD blotter acid brings back the memories of three acid trips I took that year, all outdoors and with my dorm friends from the year before. Craig had a Volkswagen beetle and one Sunday we set out on an adventure to ‘Anno Nuevo’, a point on the coast towards Santa Cruz, where Sir Francis Drake had landed and left a plaque, some four hundred years before. It was a gray and drizzly day and the parking lot off highway One was a good mile long walk to the point and beach. We dropped the acid as we arrived, Joe, Craig’s roommate and best friend, and another dormmate Ron from Boston. We started walking along the dirt path. Because it was a gray day and in January there were no other visitors to be seen. I walked ahead of the group, reached the beach first and just as the acid began kicking in and tired from the walk I decided to sit down on a black log up ahead and watch the waves. It wasn’t a tree trunk as I had supposed, it was a Sea Lion, as that was the season they beached there. It rolled and bellowed as I sat on it, frightened out of my wits. But they don’t bite humans, just roar, so I scampered away to a small cliff and found a sort of cubbyhole in it where I got out of the rain just starting to drizzle harder. There I pulled out a cigarette, a ‘Lucky Strike’, lit it up and began to smoke. For some reason the unfiltered cigarette, the scene of the desolate beach and ocean, the Sea Lion still laying there, and the little cave I was in gave to my imagination the most vivid sensation of being a cave man, feeling like one for a good ten minutes, until the other’s came up and broke the delightful dream.
On the drive home that afternoon, on the freeway to San Francisco, the rain resumed and while driving along in the center lane Craig’s windshield wiper flew off the car. To our shock and amazement he stopped the car in that lane, the cars behind us whizzing around us to avoid collision, got out and ran back in the center of the busy freeway to retrieve it. We in the car were all screaming, expecting to be struck at high speed any second. But after a minute of this panic he ran back to the car with his precious two-dollar windshield wiper, got in and resumed driving. Such is Acid. I’d forgotten the lesson I learned from my very first trip. Never do it outside in a strange place, where very unexpected things can happen.
On the second trip we chose Mount Tamalpais and from the side facing the Pacific ocean, miles away, we gazed for hours on a perfect sunny day at the patterns the ocean currents and whitecaps made. At one point one of us threw a rock down the steep, grassy hillside and all of us marveled at seeing the trace of its whole course as it bounced away. We took turns throwing the other rocks we could find around us but soon ran out. There was a pause then we saw one more gleaming object arc before us and bounce far away down the incline. We turned to Craig, puzzled. He was so caught up with the spectacle he had just throw his car keys as far as he could. I think it took us a good hour, all of us searching, to find them. That was the end of that trip.
But we did it once again that year taking Grant instead of Ron. We drove again to the top of Mt. Tamalpais with its beautiful views, parked on a dirt road near the top, dropped the acid and began walking up a narrow trail. Half-way up the acid hit us, powerfully. All the bushes around us became vibrant, alive. A little further on we found a tree and a shady, flat grove and under it and a puddle perhaps six feet long with a bottom of green moss and little minnows in it, perhaps tadpoles. We all stopped in amazement to admire this microcosm of life and even said to each other what a wonder it was. We stood there five minutes just staring into it. Then we heard a noise. Grant had unzipped his pants and was pissing in it. We all screamed at him but he wouldn’t stop until he relieved himself. We told him angrily that he’d just destroyed an entire universe. But that didn’t faze Grant at all. I suppose his hot girlfriend made him think he was the master of universes. But he did flunk out of school the next year and leave without a degree. I wonder if his girlfriend left with him.
That summer my parents were preparing their move to Niagara Falls. My father had been promoted once again to plant manager. But the move turned out to be an unhappy one because six months into it he abused his power and began sleeping with his much younger personal secretary. News got out and my mother decided to divorce him. Perhaps it was just a mid-life crisis, or too many years together. I blamed neither, with filial love and respect for both. I was pleased to see they had enough vigor in them to go through a radical change at their age, based on principals, and not fall into begging forgiveness and clinging to the dull habits most people stick with after thirty-five years of marriage, as they creep to death hand in hand. They both began new and distinct and enjoyable lives in their mid-fifties, second lives, rich in new experiences they never would have had together. It turned out to be a good thing for each of them.
I moved into an upstairs flat in a Victorian house on Dwight way with my good friend George F. and a lesser acquaintance from the dorms, Tom D. The flat had a kitchen, bathroom, private entrance but only two large rooms in front, sharing a long balcony that stretched the whole front of the house. We gave Tom the room in front of the kitchen and divided up the larger room beside it with a carpet George borrowed from his folks, so big and thick it made an almost soundproof wall when we hung it up in the middle, fastening it to the ceiling every few inches with nails. I took the front room and he the back. We both had doors to the other room and I had a balcony door. So did Tom. The rent was cheap, and we were only half a block from Telegraph ave. and four from campus.
The location of this house brought about a monumental improvement to my life. It was just a block away from the ‘café Mediterranean’, which I began to frequent every night after dinner, and where I quickly developed a love of strong coffee and sit in the mezzanine where I’d study and drink cup after cup, till the place closed at midnight. This became my perfect study hall. The reading I accomplished doubled. I could knock off all my homework before ten and then dive into my personal favorites of the moment, always changing, and if I ran out of something of interest I’d walk across the street to Moe’s, buy another classic, cross the street and grab another cup of coffee on my way back up the stairs to a fresh reading feast.
It was such a perfect fit for me that I can safely say that from that Fall quarter, when I discovered it, and for the next two years and three months I continued at Berkeley, I could be found in that place at least 340 of the 364 days it was open each year. It had one holiday, New Year’s Day, and each of those years I took a two-week holiday from school, the two weeks after Summer quarter ended and Fall quarter began.
