Nicky

My Hunter S. Thompson days were almost over.

I was never a ‘dropout’. I finished my B.A. degree in Classics (Latin and Greek) at U.C. Berkeley and had almost all the required courses for the same degree as an English major. But I could only choose. I had overstayed my welcome there as an undergraduate, changing my major three times and racking up 214 units of courses when the maximum allowed was 195. But in those days (the seventies) no councillor or administrator followed your career unless you went to them for advice. This was the age before computers and red flags. I probably could have gone on another five years there taking more courses on the graduate level (I took some) until some law abiding professor reported me.

But my sense of morality (I was reading much of Seneca at the time) and one of my teachers there prompted me to visit an advisor as I had completed my B.A.

It was two weeks before the quarter break for Christmas. The advisor was shocked as he looked at my overstay and wanted to make me quit the three courses I was taking and leave immediately. But the spirit of Christmas prevailed when I humbly asked him to just let me finish out these few weeks and be on my way.

Unfortunately my way led me to the University of Toronto with a scholarship for which I’d recently applied. The fools at Yale and Harvard turned me down, a big mistake on their part if their academic standards were on a par with Berkeley. I might have stayed another few years in that environment and completed degrees. But Toronto was on a sub-par level and after five months of attendance on a one year M.A. stream I quit academia in disgust forever.

But not the study of literature, which I continued full time for many years to come, at odd part-time jobs to get by, in free shacks in ghettos near Berkeley, as I still had a valid stack pass to their main Doe library (a hard to get item, even for graduate students, as it was the repository for all their most valuable books, many two to four hundred years old), while I lived on next to nothing, a true bohemian, my one purpose in life being to read all day.

Passing over six and a half colorful years, and many, many books on the calibre of what they call ‘academic’ reading, and the beginning of my electrical career which started two years earlier and by which a week of work could support me for a month, I moved into a warehouse converted into living spaces, illegally, but in such a bad neighborhood few inspectors would ever dare venture, so it slipped under the rug, so to speak, for several years.

 My warehouse room, one wall of windows, obviating sleep. I built a curtained loft to improve it.

It contained about twenty units, 200 dollars a month each, simple cubicles 20 by 20 feet in dimension, to which you were given a key after signing a bogus lease, and to furnish as you pleased. This situation attracted mostly a disreputable sort, all white (the invisible owner insisting on that, his major domo, the only one we ever saw, for papers and rent collection), in an entirely black ghetto, just a few blocks west of San Pablo avenue, in Berkeley, the wrong side of the tracks if you could see it on an ethnicity map in the summer of 1984. But this was 14 years before Google launched.

I was a veteran by then, of hard core partying and all-nighters, addicted to no drug but familiar with all. It was the company I ran into and lived with in the intervening years. In fact it started in the dorms my first year at Berkeley, a hive of drug-consuming, law-breaking, sometimes rioting, rebels.

But to skip over all these hundreds of ‘boogie nights’ over those years this warehouse proved my undoing, almost.

It was full when I moved in, on it’s last legs in fact. I rented a room from a best friend who was leaving, to whom ‘drug indulgence’ was on a much higher plane than the average American can conceive. He was leaving because it was too much for him, which should have given me a clue.

He’s dead now, twenty years gone. So I’ll include his picture, as one of the most intelligent human beings I was ever graced to befriend. And that’s in Berkeley, including famous professors.

But I was between houses, right after an ugly end to a dizzying, all-consuming love affair and not quite recuperated in all my senses when I moved in.

The next three months tell the story. I kept a very full, day by day, journal of the whole adventure. It was both my lifeline and my redemption to those months, if anything can be called a recompense for a dive into the abyss.

When you cluster together a group of some twenty, young, mostly male residents, from university students to drug dealers to illegal European hideaways, all of whom use either speed or cocaine on a nightly basis, grouped as I say, in rooms down a long, ‘L’ shaped corridor, with drugs always available at all hours and most doors open to the wee hours, you have the perfect recipe for self-abuse and many, many sleepless nights. I lasted three months and slipped away one night in my car, a red ‘Volare’, of all things, not in good shape.

If one neighbor wasn’t partying on a certain might, his neighbor most assuredly was. And I made the horrible mistake of leaving my door open almost all the time, my general disposition being, as they used to say in Victorian times, ‘affable’.

In a more current and simple lingo you can interpolate that word with ‘idiot’.

If you want a continuation of this story, give me a sign.