The third friend I made in the Med., and the most important to my mental growth over the next decade, was Bill. He was some ten years older than me and often sat in that mezzanine at night, chain smoking and drinking cup after cup of coffee, just gazing around, never with a book. After seeing me study there night after night he came up to me one evening and politely asked what I was studying. He told me he’d been a graduate student at Berkeley in the German department, but dropped out several years earlier, I forget why. But I found out in my first conversations with him that he was extremely well read, to an amazing degree. He knew all the Greek plays, all western philosophers, from Plato to Wittgenstein.
He’d read German literature in depth, studied deep in psychology, from Freud on, and there was barely an author in English or French literature that I could mention that he hadn’t looked into. But there were a few. I read to him some of William Shenstone’s ‘Schoolmistress’ one night and he was delighted by it, completely taken aback, amazed, as if I’d just given him a lump of gold. That’s how much he loved quality lit. I never saw him read a book, but he seemed to know thousands, and many of our conversations over the years were long and brilliant, as this account will show when I transcribe them from my journals. I did write them down in the later years, (after 1982) the night they happened, word for word, knowing their rare value to any intellectual being, (just like Boswell did after a night with Johnson).
But unlike Bruce and Joel, I’ll reveal his character and our friendship as it developed over so many years. It’s a long story that can only be described in episodes.
One aspect of the great design of this coffee house (built and run by Italian immigrants in the early sixties, probably on some model they’d seen in Italy) was that the main, large floor had about fifteen tables, all round, that seated four people comfortably, meant for conversations over coffee. The mezzanine covered only half that floor space and had smaller, round tables, two chairs each, meant for one or two (or three if one stole a chair from another table). This floor was much less busy than the main floor and just right to spread out one’s homework at a table, sitting alone, and finish it. There was less talk on this floor to distract one. And the owners never minded how long you sat, even with just one cup of coffee.
It was a unique place and a perfect fit for Telegraph avenue and Berkeley. It had a Spartan décor, nothing on the walls, inexpensive but delicious coffee and attracted even street people. Most of the clients wore jeans, many had long hair. No one was excluded. The rich and elite, the Frat and Sorority types avoided it as low brow. Rumor was the S.D.S. first started there, with Mario Savio, at the same tables in 1964, and many of its actions plotted there. I can certainly picture it. The place was perfect for radical idealists to meet.
It was such a match for me. I spent almost as many hours there as in any lodgings I ever rented in Berkeley, because for ten years, on and off, I visited nightly and stayed six hours till it closed at midnight. It played such a role in my development, my reading, my psyche, my dreams, becoming part of my personality even, that I had to write a poem about it:
In Berkeley
In Berkeley, a college town
I went to university
And there, amidst the madness found
A friend to honest poverty.
Erasmus in a bookstall lay
Tattered and alone.
My dollar went the nearest way,
The book and I went home.
In coffee shops and smoky dens
With him I passed the hours
And met a set of closer friends
Than any in the ivory towers.
For Petrarch came and Virgil too
In old editions, torn and yet
The voices of this pocket crew
Rang much more living than the new.
I found such wealth of poetry
To classes I’d forget to go
And while Odysseus traipsed the sea
The waiters bustled to and fro.
One Spring my school and I were parted.
I watched the roofs and towers recede,
Quiet, but not heavy hearted
For I had troops of books to read.
After the first quarter Tom left us. He was a vegetarian and so sensitive a soul a few of our comments drove him away, mostly mine. George and I stayed on another quarter, being good friends, drinking together on weekends, often joined by Richard and Doug. But with the rent a third more we vacated. I went to live with Hiram and a black would be politician named Adam Strange, a very strange fellow. He was always wanting to talk on political issues. He was tall and handsome and had died his black, curly hair a bright orange color, to stand out, and spent much of his time on Sproul square on campus, stopping students and challenging them to debate issues, campaigning for a seat on the student council. They lived just around the corner and had an empty bedroom. I moved in for three months.
He was rarely there, no doubt debating somewhere, but one evening he did come home early and I remember getting into a long talk with him after I told him I was a Classics major. He took some issue with this choice of mine and went right at me, both of us standing in the kitchen for three hours, arguing our points, racism and oppression on his side, the enlightenment and civilization of all mankind on my side. Hiram stood behind us in the living room, listening and smirking. It was a marathon debate, but in the end we both came away with an equal amount of good points, (or scores, one might say) and shook hands at the end of it, friends, tired, but knowing we both had sharpened our debating skills and learned a little from each other. We got along perfectly after that for the short time I was there.
I forget where George went. We sort of lost tract of him, both Hiram and I, until he showed up at my garage cottage on Woolsey street in 1983, eight years later. Hiram had been sleeping on my floor in his sleeping bag for several weeks, just returned from a trip across Russia, with his knapsack his only possession, and no money. George came over one Friday night with Richard. When they first showed up I was delighted to see them again, after so many years. We were sitting at the poker table and I was drinking a beer and offered one to each of them. They both declined, having business in mind. They sat down with us, but George began to berate us on our bohemian lifestyle, thinking he could sway us into social normalcy, as if we were wasting our lives and as if it were any concern of his. At first, we listened complacently, still in a glow of meeting two dear friends again, not seen in so long. But his tone grew sharper as he went on, calling us ‘derelicts’ and ‘fools’, wasting our lives and doing nothing when we had brilliant minds and could achieve so much. Richard was smart enough to sit silent the whole time, watching the show.
This speech, from a former ‘Aqualung’, (the name of our group in the dorms), and he the chief member, the founder of our club, began to irk me. I looked at both of them and said: ‘Well, I see you’ve both totally betrayed our past, traitors. And I suppose you, George, made a great decision in your career. I’m not asking how much money you make and can boast about, or how big your house is. I’m sure it’s nicer than mine. But tell me about your job, spent around sick people every day, really sick and dying people, cancer patients, when you can only help a few? What’s it like in that hospital each day, with so many deaths, so many gunshot wounds, incurable cases, people moaning on stretchers? It must make for some interesting conversation to take home to your wife and children at the end of each day. You can tell her the names of all the new diseases just discovered, the names of the patients you’ve just lost or are slowly loosing, must make for some great bedtime conversation just before sex. You’ve picked a great profession, George, surrounding yourself all day with sick losers. And don’t forget, you are the company you keep. So why don’t you get out of here, as your making both of us sick’.
At this point Richard stood up and grabbed George to leave. George was rather speechless and they both left, quickly. They never came back. I have no idea what career Richard had chosen, but from his saying nothing, I’m sure it wasn’t something he was very proud of, or he would have spoken up. One thing about derelict bohemians like Hiram and me, we have plenty of time lying around, doing nothing, to examine and see the obvious lies and wounds and corruptions society imposes on those who go down its yellow brick road.
