Simple living
In late June, 1982, with over two thousand dollars saved up, I made the trip back to Berkeley, once again by bus. Bones had sent me a letter and said he’d arranged a place I could move into, right behind the house where he lived.
This is a letter I wrote to John Paul, my cousin, a month after arriving, as I’d visited him in Toronto shortly before I left and invited him to follow:
July 20th, 1982. Dear Cousin: Owing to vicissitudes of Fate not easily predictable, I find myself at present employed and generally busy. I came here expecting to live off my savings and enjoy a long vacation. But a week after arriving I was offered a job too lucrative to reject. Instead of sitting around with a guitar or a book in my hand I am now set up as an electrical apprentice, for at least the next three months. I have a small pad which you can use whenever you appear. Don’t expect a constant host as I’ll be working.
Drugs and decadence are in abundance here. The people I hang out with play guitar two or three evenings a week. We play cards, go to bars, look for dates and try to recover the other nights. You’ll have a good time here. Try to come.
He did show up but that was eighteen months later.
Of all the places I ever lived, that little garage apartment behind the Victorian house on Woolsey street most fitted my personality, my wallet, my lifestyle and my happiness. It had privacy and quiet when I wanted to be alone and enough space for a large dining room table for our poker games and weekend parties. On one side there was a kitchen and bathroom. On the other, at the back of the main room, was an indented space cut into the garage next to it, on a platform one-foot-high, just large enough for a double mattress, my bedroom. It was a bachelor’s apartment with character. My front door opened to the back driveway of the house. The roof sloped down from the front door to the back where it was only six feet high, making my sleeping space something like a small cubicle, only five feet high. The main room was ten feet wide and twenty long. There was one large window beside my front door where light streamed in, a smaller one on the low back wall with a view of a fence two feet away, covered in green vines. There was another in the kitchen looking at another fence and a clouded window in the bathroom, which was just large enough for a shower stall, toilet and sink.
For furniture I hardly needed anything. The first week I moved in I went to the Ashby flee market on Sunday and purchased the old dining room table that would immediately become our weekly poker table, with six chairs, a faded, red, cushioned chair for reading, set beside my front window, and a stand for a record player below the back window. All this cost only a hundred dollars at the flea market. The rent was 225$ a month.
A record store had recently caught fire. The sprinklers went off and all the covers were ruined. So the records were sold off in their white paper jackets for 50 cents each. I put together a nice collection of classical music for almost nothing. I had no T.V. and didn’t want one. Music and books and friends provided all my entertainment.
The location was also ideal. Woolsey street was just one block above Prince and three blocks from the Starry Plough. Telegraph avenue was just two houses the other way, and a ten block walk up that street put me in the center of my world, the coffee shops, bookstores and the University library.
Yet in such a small premise, which many would call a shack, I had, for eighteen months, a feast of rare experiences, of new loves and new friends and wild poker games, and more parties than any house within a ten-block radius could boast, or even come near.
It’s all in the host, his intelligence in inviting the right set of company over, all cross-energizing souls, talented talkers and musicians, male and female acquaintances, sitting around my table at eight on a Saturday night, opening up the first half-gram bag of speed for a guaranteed great night of entertainment. With the front door open, the weather warm, a few phone calls made or just neighbors within hearing distance, my room filled to capacity and overflowed into the back parking lot outside. A reputation developed and the weekly parties swelled. And because they were so enjoyable for all involved, the circle kept widening. That’s what happened, progressively, from the winter of 1982 through the fall of 1983. And I have the journals that captured this crazy social whirlwind in detail, and the series of women lovers I met, and the great friends unexpectedly gained, which wove the rich tapestry of experiences that changed me from a youth into an adult.
The house in front of my garage apartment was an old, white Victorian house, two stories, divided into three units, with two external staircases leading up to the upper units. The one on the side of the house led to the front unit where Bones and May lived, a spacious one-bedroom unit with a large living room bright with tall windows, an elegant apartment. In the back, facing me, was a much smaller studio with its own staircase, where, for a few months resided the patchouli woman, (named from her overuse of that fragrance). The poker games were at my house from the week I moved in and Roy, part of our poker gang, (along with Eddie, from the seventh street house of two years before) met her and began dating her, much to our surprise. She was a plain, gabby and almost annoying Jewish woman we couldn’t stand. But something about Roy enamored her. His attraction for her was the perfume. He was a big, friendly, giant of a man, simple, naively honest, good hearted and I hate to say it (because I liked him so much as a friend) slow witted and slow talking, a perfect poker mate but no social star, a laborer for life. Yet they hooked up, perhaps her only boyfriend in a long time and they seemed to love each other passionately for a while, in her den, until she moved away. We sometimes stood at my door looking up in wonderment at their frequent comings and goings, out of scent range.
Downstairs, in the largest unit, covering the whole bottom floor, lived Ed and Brigitte. Ed had a professional, high paying job, something managerial, as he was sent to Belgium on some mission for several months where he met Brigitte and found the time to date and enamor her and convince her to come back to America to live with him. She was newly arrived, had a cute accent and broken English, and was friendly and smiling to me and my friends whenever we saw her in the back yard taking out garbage. But she didn’t socialize or join us, probably through shyness, though she must have heard us frequently, always loud and having fun with my door open every sunny day. She stayed in her apartment, all alone and far too much, while Ed was away working long hours. But that pent-up loneliness was soon to explode and break out one day, or rather one night and day, at one of my wildest parties.
For all my years of university studies, and my longer and lonelier years of solitary reading, I can say with surety that the greatest reward I received from wide reading, besides a gleaning of the best of human genius, was that it amplified my natural desire to make friends from the most incongruous people, so unlike me and each other in every way that you’d never expect that we’d exchange ten words together stuck under a bus shelter during a brief downpour. Yet I did make these friends many times over, since childhood, deep friendships that led to the best adventures and memories I have, the most valued. This journal is the parade of them, like a Roman triumph, through my eyes. Its whole aim is to describe our first meetings, their histories, and the growth of our relationships to show them in their fullest bloom.
My friendships were so rich, often chance encounters with people of wildly different backgrounds and personalities, yet growing so strong, so fast, lasting over the years, so joyful to the both of us all along the way, it was a discovery and celebration of the most basic human commonality that applies to us all, that makes us all brothers and sisters in this sojourn through life, both happy and sad. But I had the gift of communicating this affinity in an enthusiastic way that attracted sympathy and talk, so we felt like two castaways on a life raft in an ocean storm. Everyone saw that I had many friends. But many of them felt at first that I was their best friend, because I was so happy to see them and so intimate in our private conversations, until I introduced them to my other friends and we became one happy set.
