History of My Reading: Intro To Berkeley

I was dropped off in Berkeley in late summer 1969 on College Avenue at a house shared by a Knox College grad I will call JB. (Even at this remove, it’s hard to know how people feel about themselves in the 1960s.)  I had friends from Knox in the Bay Area, but JB was more a friend of Joni’s, and she had arranged that we would stay there (or “crash” there as we’d say) upon our arrival.  But it was only me. 

 JB shared the house with a young man, maybe a bit older, who was either a medical student or intern or both, and a very attractive young woman who worked in a Berkeley clothing shop.  I was given a space behind the couch in the living room for my sleeping bag, and a fairly definite limit on my stay.  

 I believe it was on the very day of my arrival that two other former or maybe current Knox students showed up, fraternity brothers perhaps, to take JB on a drive up to Napa wine country.  She couldn’t go but they accepted me, and I found myself in the back seat of an open sports car, cruising up the highway, awash in the California sun.  We stopped at a wine tasting or two, they bought a few bottles and on the way back stopped at a roadside stand for fruit, bread and cheese, making it a kind of Mediterranean adventure.  Within a few hours, I was back in Berkeley. 

 I met up with a few Knox friends in Berkeley, including Mike Hamrin and Mary Jacobson, but had no prospects for another place to stay when my welcome period expired.  I tried a night outside in my sleeping bag, but turned out to be a hopeless hobo, because by morning I had a definite head cold.  I got my spot back behind the couch until I recovered.  It was probably then that I read the first book in Berkeley I remember, which had little to do with Berkeley but more with the happenstance of being on the road, and the guest in someone else’s house.  In fact, I can’t guarantee it happened there, but by process of elimination, it probably did.

 In any case I remember the book very clearly, and the happenstance.  I saw a paperback book in the living room, perhaps on a mantle piece, with an intriguing title and cover.  It was Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester, a science fiction author whose name or work I didn’t know.  What I found was a British edition, complete with the UK price (4/6.) This novel was published later in the US with the title The Stars My Destination. 

 I read it through, intrigued by the science fiction ideas, propelled by the plot.  Apart from some of Kurt Vonnegut, I hadn’t read actual science fiction in a long time.  I didn’t do much more than open even the best-sellers and hippie favorites like Dune and Stranger in A Strange Land.  But this book got me interested again. I was especially taken with the concept of “jaunting,” which was a latent ability to transport oneself by the power of thought that it turned out everybody has.

 Alfred Bester has since become a revered name in sci-fi, especially for this novel and the one that preceded it, The Demolished Man.  He is now considered an inspiration for both the New Wave and cyberpunk science fiction writers. He himself had a love-hate relationship with science fiction, and spent most of his career in other forms.  Bester wrote for comic books, especially Superman (something of a family business as his mother had played Lois Lane on radio), as well as radio, television and magazines, especially the travel magazine Holiday, where he was an editor. I’ve more recently acquired a selection of his sci-fi stories and essays, with a few articles and profiles, notably of authors Robert Heinlein and Issac Asimov, titled Redemolished. 

 Re-read today, The Stars My Destination seems a different book.  I was probably impressed by the villain being the autocratic head of a huge corporation, but that’s become more frequent in fiction as in life. Though basically a riff on The Count of Monte Christo, the extreme pulp fiction characters and the throwback attitudes towards both women and men tend to detract, but the forward momentum of the story remains.

 I probably read it through my stuffed head, until one evening the medical student/doctor prescribed a heavy dosage of beer, and took me to a bar.  He was right. I was better the next day.  Meanwhile, Mike Hamrin had moved into a house at Shattuck and Ashby in Berkeley with several others, and invited me to join them. 

The house at 3011 Shattuck as I remember it was a white wood frame building with a back porch entrance at the end of a set of wooden stairs. It was a plainer version of many older houses in the Bay Area, where wood had been plentiful and more practical in terms of earthquakes.  This likely was the second floor (the house there now is a large two level), with the first floor occupied separately, and it may even have been a duplex, but all I recall is the rooms and the people living where I did.

  Inside the back door to the right was the kitchen, and to the left a small living room.  They were separated for most of their lengths by a wall.  Off the kitchen towards the porch was a small unfurnished room, which may have been a pantry or even a servant’s quarters in the house’s heyday.  Past the kitchen was a hallway and several rooms and bathroom.  

 Four people were living there when I arrived.  David and Priscilla were a couple.  Mike had a girlfriend who visited but had her own place.  The fourth was a young man I’ll call Phil because he was from Philadelphia. He may well have been the named tenant.

 It was a varied group.  Phil was Jewish, I had a Catholic background and the others a Protestant, if any.  David was a California Indian.  Today I’d guess Yurok, though his hometown was not that far north, so maybe not.  I don’t recall if Priscilla was from New England, but there was something mythic about her alliance with David.  Despite these differences, which we rarely if ever discussed, we were united by age, general attitude, the times and the place.  And of course we all smoked dope (to varying degrees) and were therefore “heads,” as opposed to “straights,” which in those days referred to anyone who wasn’t a head.

 David has acquired a small yellow school bus, and reconfigured the inside to accommodate gear and the possibility of living in it.  We made a number of road trips in that bus, mostly along the coast.

 On one trip we were pulled over by a Highway Patrol.  We were told it was illegal for the bus to look like a school bus, and we were therefore instructed to paint it.  Which we happily did, in a somewhat haphazard psychedelic style.

We might be accompanied on these trips by others who stayed at the house for awhile.  These might be day trips or longer, when we slept in the bus. On one such trip we wound up late at night at Drake’s Beach in the Point Reyes Seashore in Marin County, and had a ghostly visitor’s center all to ourselves.  It was a kind of chalet, with restrooms and huge vending machines that glowed in the night. 

 These longer outings might include hiking and taking an ocean dip, impressing upon me how frigid the waters are in this part of California even on a warm day.  And as a result of one such adventure, I was surprised and very impressed by another California feature: poison oak.  I’d had poison ivy several times “back East” and had some immunity, but not to the unknown poison oak.  I got a bad case. 

 We consulted a hippie elder who advised rubbing wet baking soda over my entire body.  So I spent several days isolated in that little room off the kitchen, lying on my sleeping bag, naked and covered with clumps of wet and slowly drying baking soda.  (Nudity was fairly common in this house.  Priscilla often stirred the morning oatmeal still naked. Seeing naked bodies doing normal things became ordinary with surprising speed.)

 The persistent itching as well as the flaking baking soda made my hours of reading in that room particularly memorable.  I got small bottles of the cheapest California white wine (which was still pretty decent) and whatever comfort junk food the little wine store near us sold.  There were books in the house, only some of which had a known origin.  One was a volume of Hemingway short stories, probably the Scribner collection.  I read it to the end, accompanied by white wine and Oreos.  This is a definite Berkeley memory.  (I finally hobbled off to the Free Clinic and got some topical medicine, and either it worked right away or my affliction had just about run its course, or most likely both.)

 I made some other trips more or less on my own. I went into San Francisco (usually hitch-hiking), including a few times to meet up with Ric Newman from Knox.  The first time, I saw him in the San Francisco production of Hair.  When we met in the lobby afterwards he was enthusiastic about the prospects for What’s Happening, Baby Jesus?, the play I wrote and directed our senior year, in which he played the lead role.  He thought Hair had made it a hot property.  I was unconvinced.

 I’d been in San Francisco just once before this trip, so I saw some of the sights this time, like Fisherman’s Wharf, and made my pilgrimage to North Beach and the City Lights Bookstore, known throughout the world as the center of the beat literature revolution.  I bought a kind of pamphlet book by Alan Watts, just 25 pages, titled Beat Zen Square Zen and Zen.  I was interested in Watts and Zen but since it was published by City Lights Books I mostly bought it as a kind of souvenir.  It was all I could afford.

 One day on the UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza I ran into someone I’d known slightly at Knox.  He was a few classes behind me, and was scouting California campuses, perhaps to transfer or for grad school. Eventually I accompanied him on a hitchhiking tour of  several other coastal colleges, including UC Santa Cruz, and ending up at San Jose State, where we were the overnight guests of English professor Richard Alexander, who’d left Knox to teach there. He fed us the most substantial meal I’d had in awhile.

 But I spent considerable time over the next few months in Berkeley itself, particularly on the UC Berkeley campus and along the now fabled Telegraph Avenue.

  I had arrived in Berkeley in late summer 1969 at an uncharacteristic moment: it was quiet.  Both the university and the city had been in near constant turmoil since even before the Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s.  That turmoil had reached a new height just a few months before I got there, with the events that culminated in death and military occupation enforcing a kind of police state. It was the battle of People’s Park.

 The University had acquired through eminent domain a large property near the campus and within the residential and business community near Telegraph Avenue.  In 1967 they bulldozed the buildings on the site but left it empty.  It became an eyesore, a repository for abandoned cars.  Nothing much happened until early April 1969 when a group of local merchants and residents met to figure out what to do about it. Then everything happened, very fast.

 At this meeting, a student activist presented a plan to make the space a public park, and the attendees approved.  An article appeared in the Berkeley Barb, a local/ underground newspaper, and a hundred people, including a landscape architect, showed up to begin building People’s Park.  Eventually a thousand people participated, either working on it or contributing plants and money.

 The university then suddenly announced it had immediate plans for the site: a university sports field.  The chancellor met with park activists, and promised not to do anything to the site without notifying them.  A week later he ceded a quarter of the property to the park builders, and repeated the pledge. A week after that, that pledge was broken.  He announced the beginning of construction.

 

On May 15, Governor Ronald Reagan sent the Highway Patrol and university police to tear out the plantings for the park and erect a fence.  Demonstrations began immediately, spilling from the university’s Sproul Plaza—made famous by the Free Speech Movement—to the adjacent Telegraph Ave.  The crowd of several hundred headed to the site. The police used tear gas and called in reinforcements as the angry demonstrators became a formidable 6,000. 

 Members of some sheriff’s departments carried shotguns, and in pursuing vaguely violent protestors, fired in their direction.  Instead they hit innocent bystanders, killing a man watching from a bookstore roof on Telegraph Ave, and permanently blinding another.  Hundreds of protesters and some law enforcement were injured, some seriously. 

 That night Governor Reagan sent in nearly 3,000 National Guard troops, who acted as an army of occupation for the next two weeks, liberally using tear gas to prevent anyone from planting anything, and breaking up groups of four or more on the streets.

 The turmoil increased, more people became involved, the university partly shut down, and demonstrations continued.  On May 20, National Guard helicopters dispersed tear gas over the Berkeley campus, which spread through the city of Berkeley.  School children miles away were taken to hospitals for treatment. 

After that the unapologetic Reagan government backed off somewhat, withdrawing all but 200 troops, who nevertheless continued to prevent four or more people from talking to each other.  There was a peaceful protest march on May 30. 

 By the time I arrived in August, there was a silent stalemate.  When I first saw the site, I noted that it was one-third dry earth and a few plants, one-third sod being drowned by implacable water sprinklers, and one-third asphalt, where a solitary police sat on a bench guarding it.  Some people drifted through.  A helicopter suddenly flew over, startling me.  But nobody else reacted.

  Meanwhile, there was such internal pressure from Berkeley faculty and a majority of students that the university was at an impasse. Eventually people drifted back to treating it as a park (which is what it is today, with both good and bad effects.)

 But already in August it seemed that Berkeley as a place had moved on. Most students were gone for the summer, and what was left was Berkeley’s ongoing experiment in how a counterculture might function.

 Not that Berkeley gave up politics.  In the few months I was there, I heard activists Bernadette Dohrn, Angela Davis and Tom Hayden each speak on separate occasions and circumstances on the UC Berkeley campus.  

I took notes on Hayden’s talk in a large classroom where he was introduced by sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg, author of a book I’d so admired in high school, The Vanishing Adolescent, and of the more recent Coming of Age in America.  This was just before Hayden went on trial as a member of the Chicago 8, charged by the Nixon Justice Department with inciting violence at the Democratic Convention in 1968. 

 Whatever his positions or his image later, Hayden sounded very militant to me on that day.  He foresaw a long revolution in America of perhaps 20 years, with periods of violence and periods of peace.  When the revolution is successful, the worst counter-revolutionists, such as racists, would be confined in their own ghettos.  “The enemy is not in your head,” I heard him say.  “The enemy exists and must be dealt with.”

 In terms of a broader cultural revolution, though he had no kind words for hippies, he approved the form being developed by people in Berkeley, of “collectives,” small groups of people who live their politics but may specialize in a particular activity, like medicine, to support the community now but also be equipped to take over after the revolution.  “If you have any faith in the future,” you have to plan for after the revolution,” he said. 

One such collective in Berkeley, said someone in the audience, was teaching itself first aid and self- defense, for future confrontations. There had been quite a few antiwar demonstrations down Telegraph Avenue, and a lot of injuries inflicted by police.  But there were other institutions responding to the day-to-day needs of what might loosely be described as the counterculture.  There was the Free Clinic staffed by volunteer doctors, and a similar organization for legal aid.  There were efforts to feed people and distribute free food.

 There was also informal support.  The food co-op—basically a supermarket—did not prevent scavengers from carting away overripe vegetables and fruits that were discarded.  Some restaurants fed people out the back door, and I witnessed individual waitresses placing food left behind where “street people” could reach it. 

 What was the counterculture?  Political opposition was a major catalyst—from opposition to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee at UC Berkeley in the late 50s and early 60s, student issues, to the ongoing and growing opposition to Vietnam and the draft.  In the face of overwhelming disapproval by their elders, this alone created a sense of separation and fostered a subculture within especially the younger generation. 

 It was also a more general rejection or at least questioning of prevailing societal values, expressed at one end by the 1967 film The Graduate (part of which takes place in Berkeley) and at the other by the hippies, the political radicals, and their hybrid, the Yippies.

  But at its heart, the counterculture was about an alternative search for meaning.   Questioning the value system of the dominant consumer society (“Work, Study, Get Ahead, Kill” was an antiwar march chant), questioning the basis for current social mores, for attitudes towards the body and the soul, were catalysts for explorations of self, society and reality itself, by means of experience and imagination that were encouraged and enabled by the “mind-expanding” substances of cannabis and the psychedelics, but by no means limited to them. Music and other people were major psychedelics in the counterculture.  And sometimes, even books.

 Inevitably it led to spiritual quests and, as I saw in Berkeley, more formal forays into psychologies.  That aspect jumped out at me immediately upon my arrival. But more on all that next time, plus the bookstores of Telegraph Ave, the Midnight Movies and the First Annual Holy Man Jam.