The Breakfast Nook

“Friday March 2nd, 1984: Friday night I partied, first at ‘Brennan’s pub’, where we had good talk (I think with Jim), (drug aided) about relationships. Then over to Steve’s at 10:30 for more lines, but duller talk, and then at the odd chance of his suggestion, we prance loudly to the Plough, one block away for the last 45 minutes.

“There no more than the regular dullness happened, the same old faces, short greetings, a dance or two with unlovable women. We were about to leave, when, by another fluke, we stayed and invited some people to Steve’s for a few more beers. About fifteen come, and a case of beer and a bag pulled out from a newcomer’s pocket, containing some very good speed which he was very happy to share, especially when Steve and the rhythm guitarist from the ‘Natives’ (one of the very best bands that sometimes played at the Plough) started playing very well. I sat and talked with this new guy with the speed and an hour later met his sister.

“With her I had a very pleasant time and within a few hours of ‘tete a tete’ conversation, I became very much taken by her looks and general personality.

“She had the looks and mannerisms and even the voice of a very young ‘Shirley MacLaine’. She seemed to have a very good nature and good humor, carefree, so different from the gloom and sarcasm of most others I’d talked to lately. Nor was it the stupid good humor as befalls those who simply don’t see all the mess in their lives and the world around them. But I’ll not praise too high what I don’t yet know. She might have a boyfriend or a husband and be unavailable for future meetings.

“We went to the ‘Hut’ at 6 a.m. in a crowd, where she and I had even more intimate conversation, it getting better and more mutually enjoyable as time went on. But at 8:30 she had to leave and return a car to the man she lived with. I hope we shall meet again soon”.

There is so much pleasure in the first acquaintance of someone who captivates you and vice-versa. The first talks are like the unfolding of vast treasures of personality before each other’s eyes, which you are still only measuring and admiring at first glance and have yet to enjoy. This new hope when it first appears so bright and so close, is the greatest of pleasures attainable to the mind. For the attainment of the hope almost always proves far less than the first great expectations, a thing which most philosophers assert and which bitter experience confirms.

Her lips were puffed and red

Pillows to grace a bed

Beckoning my spellbound head

With all the love they hinted and revealed,

Minted to please.

Upon such tiny ships as these

Our fates are sealed.

When she drove off that sunny Saturday morning with her brother, I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again. And I didn’t see or hear anything from her, or expect to, for a full three months. But she had secretly taken Steve’s phone number before she left and knew how to find me. She hadn’t given me hers. I didn’t even know what town she lived in. She was my mystery woman, who appears unexpectedly in the night and in the morning vanishes.

Then, out of the blue, I get a phone call on a Wednesday morning in the first week of June. It’s her and she says she has a package I might be interested in buying and she would like to come over. When the phone call came I was sitting at a nice little breakfast nook, with my notebooks before me, in the kitchen of a cottage that Bones and May were renting in the flatlands of Berkeley. They were away for two weeks and had asked me to house sit. There was a large window beside me and the sunlight was streaming in. I gave her the address.

I had now permanently moved out of the apartment with Chuck. Five months with him was enough. His constant moroseness and slamming doors and cursing to himself all day, despising life and everything in it (except the poker game) made for no pleasant vibes in our place. The fact that he stayed in his room 98% of the time helped, but even walking by it I would hear him curse to himself, translating Russian farm magazines twelve hours a day, articles about new tractors or cow milking machines, just to meet the rent and his quota of “turkey packets”, his one staple. I probably hold the world’s record as a roommate to him. But I’d known him since the eighth grade. We parted when rent ran out the end of May, on good terms since he wanted to move to Santa Cruz. Hiram was there, (his only other friend), and helped find him a place and visit once a week, for a few hours or a few minutes, depending on his mood.

I’d been seeing a lot of Jim and Maureen lately and had a standing invitation to move into one of the many spare bedrooms in their large house in Oakland. But I’d already talked to John Seebach and agreed to take over his room at the warehouse when he moved out July 1st. So when this offer to house-sit for Bones came along I hit the road, one happy, freewheeling, wandering scholar.

And it was easy. I could fit all my belongings in the trunk and back seat of my now smooth-running Volare. Only our beloved poker table and its chairs were a question mark and this matter was resolved when Bones accepted to have the table and the game moved to the middle room in his house.

Before she arrived I knew what she was bringing, so I invited Steve and Jim over for an impromptu party. She comes in, we all do lines and the conversation begins. Steve and I do most of the talking in the kitchen (where the lines are laid out), while she mostly listens. Jim is in two worlds, trying to be with us but rushing from the kitchen to the living room where the T.V. is on and the playoffs between his Boston Celtics, (with Larry Bird in his prime), and the Lakers is on, each game a cliffhanger. Our conversation in the kitchen is subdued but as I get high I talk away, (trying to impress her) about my writing and poetry attempts, my notebook there on the table. Steve mentioned his extreme bike riding as his hobby while Jim keeps running back and forth to do more lines yet not miss a shot in the game, another extreme sport.

Steve came up with one good thought I’ll never forget. It’s not in my record of this day but doesn’t have to be, it was that good. We were talking about ‘B’ movies and saying that if viewed in the proper mental framework they could be quite good. Jim had mentioned, (during a commercial break) that he and I had watched two Bob Hope movies together the night before and laughed a lot. Steve chimes in, to corroborate our theorem, that he based his whole life-philosophy on the Jerry Lewis movie ‘The Nutty Professor’ and this, after a good laugh and a moment of reflection, struck me as an insightful and profound statement. That movie is a brilliant character study, or rather a split-personality study with the wise lesson that you really are, (or can be) who you think you are. It was Jerry’s final ‘tour de force’.

She stayed three and a half hours. Once again I was taken by her and showed it, trying to impress her but not too overtly, still not knowing if she was even attainable. She’d been up the night before and was a little frazzled and (as I termed it) a bit ‘goofy’. But even that endeared her to me all the more — my pity syndrome.

“At six I walked her to the Bart station with a slightly sad, pensive look on my face. But I felt it and smiled at points. As I looked at her at times I thought for a moment how much I should let myself like her, ready perhaps to look for faults or turn-offs. But I didn’t. She may very well be unattainable, happy with her boyfriend. I have yet to find out. If she calls again in the next few weeks I’ll know pretty well what’s up. But this time she gave me no clue. She said she knew few people, had something to sell and needed the money. I’m sure I’ve communicated, though not too strongly, my interest in her company. I was dying to know if she was going steady, or how much she liked me but was too shy to ask, which made me act awkwardly. As we parted she seemed confused, looking down (she did many lines that afternoon) and with a halting speech she said ‘goodbye’.

So then she vanishes for another three months, leaving me in total limbo.

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