Out of Oakland

Out of Oakland.  If university life was a journey, this was the crude itinerary of my junior and senior years.  Just as no one expects the earth's core to cool any time soon, no one foresees any letup in the Berkeley housing squeeze.  Not during the next two centuries.  From today's reports, I cannot tell any real change in Berkeley's housing crisis since my late adolescence.  

I found myself lucky to be living in a condemned house in North Oakland in 1967.  For, at least, the place was near an all-night supermarket and less than 15 minutes from campus.  The house's condemned status may have a Gothic ring to it, but the truth had much more to do with the California Department of Highways, which had decided to roll six lanes of traffic right through my bedroom.  Not to worry.  I soon found a rooming house in a section of Oakland known as Pill Hill for its proximity to hospitals, set up portable house there and began pedaling the 25 minute ride to campus on my precious French bicycle.  

The rooming house's residents must have numbered at least 50, but the true count was never known.  Opening the wrought iron lock on the front door only admitted more mysteries.  The stale dust of ages wafted from bristly floral carpet in the hallways, followed me up the stairs and hung about my room.  At night, a Murphy bed folded down from the wall.  Of course, I brought my bicycle inside.  With the bed down and the bike parked, there was barely room to plug in a small hotplate and heat the evening's soup.  When I even bothered.  

What I bothered was the tenants.  The unseen and the undead of the Alcazar Apartments had a way of slipping notes under my door.  I often discovered them days after their arrival, mistaking them for stray scraps of paper I had dropped myself.  It was usually in the throwing out of my own detritus that I noticed a paper scrap was oddly folded or strangely lined and, when unfolded and inspected, contained a request that I not walk too heavily or slam doors too loudly or turn on the shower too mightily in the mornings.  With the notes incomprehensible, the tenants invisible and my homework interminable, I skittered in and out of the place.  The dust had an oddly disturbing effect on a 20-year-old, wreaking as it did of things hidden and dying.  I was dying to get out of there.

I dropped in and out of the Berkeley campus housing office the way birds leap on and off a feeder, and one day, there it was.  A room, a large carpeted room, in a shingled house on the north side of the campus.  There was even an electric heater, shared use of a kitchen, windows on three sides and a lone tenant who often had his door open and did what I did, studying.  Redwoods did what they did in that part of Berkeley.  They grew on all sides of the house, shading it, darkening things, sidling up to the shingles on the exterior, woodsy, mossy surfaces nuzzling and moistening each other.  A subtle atmosphere rose and mixed with the smoke from the stone fireplaces and brick chimneys of the neighborhood.  Cozy and professorial and not even a bike ride but a five-minute walk to the edge of campus.  Out of Oakland.

Naturally, with so much beauty around, and an atmosphere so attuned to my spirit, that is to say, darkly contemplative...everything had to go wrong.  My love life saddened me.  Then a bullet in the spinal cord paralyzed me.  And it all happened in and around this shingled house on Spruce Street.   

There was the downstairs.  That was where the graduate students lived.  They were already in a different epoque.  They drank wine, albeit cheap, on a regular basis.  And they talked, it seemed, for pure recreation.  One had a girlfriend who was both Jewish and from Mississippi, giving her a drawl with a strange sharpness along with a sultry vibrance...all of which had me downstairs often.  Another of the lower tenants sold LPs in a record store, disappearing into the shop's back room to type away at his PhD thesis in geology.  He was a short, nondescript Jewish kid from LA.  And he was so unimpressive in demeanor and conversation, that I would barely have noticed his existence, save for what he kept bringing home from the record store.  Woman after woman.  He kept meeting them, or they kept meeting him, in and around the record bins of late 60s music.  The third graduate student was visiting from Britain, studying architecture.  He had a girlfriend in London and was more or less counting the days until his return.

The brit was named Nick, and his household function had to do with anchoring any conversation.  Things usually worked out so that no more than two graduate students were home at the same time.  This meant that when I came downstairs, took my seat and took my wine, I was the third leg in a stool.  The conversations wandered about.  But they usually settled for an uncomfortable period on whichever grad student was absent.  Unless Nick was absent.  And for reasons that seemed utterly natural at the time, he seemed to be above or beyond discussion.  Perhaps he had the status of visitor or foreigner, his presence known to be temporary, and was afforded the courtesies of a guest.

What was said about the two others?  Well, the one with the Mississippi girlfriend had only that distinguishing feature.  She was all over him, everyone said.  Her Southern tongue was practically out and panting, the others agreed.  He was all she was interested in, and he was doing a pretty good job of things, judging by her general air of sultry satisfaction.  When the downstairs population reversed, the record-store and geology guy became the topic.  He barely exists, Nick observed.  There is no one there.

Nick's words seemed full of bold assertiveness and deep perspicacity.  Yes, I could see what he meant.  The L.A. guy said or did little to distinguish himself.  He made no brash assertions.  He did not come down heavily on one side or the other on anything.  He was on time for work, even more or less on time with his thesis.  Moving along in a colorless way, he was also getting laid constantly.  In retrospect, I do not believe that anyone mentioned this point ever.  Never mind.  For the point of Nick's points was their pointedness.  His tongue was neither acid nor sharp, just unsparingly precise.

News coverage from Vietnam featured the latest hundred-round-per-minute helicopter gunship.  Nick observed that such armaments must 'efficiently convert a bloke into the past tense.'  This turn of phrase hit home.  The verbal wit cut away pretense.  It restored the power of language -- just at the moment when words like 'escalate' were beginning to numb public discourse.

By mid-June I was lying in the campus hospital, paralyzed from the neck down, and receiving frequent visitors.  Nick dropped in once before his departure for the UK.  He said he was glad to be going home.  My shooting was part of it.  He didn't say more.    

I didn't know what made me send $120 to P.O. Box 707, Berkeley, and buy a one-way charter flight to Gatwick Airport, complete with refueling stop at Niagara Falls.  I needed a change.  Or maybe I didn't, it occurred to me sailing down the night freeway to Oakland Airport.  Lloyd Airways.  Whoever heard of it?  Well, there it was, and here I was with my friend Darryl, an otherwise extroverted member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who seemed inarticulate on the subject of my shooting...yet was often around, particularly at the roughest moments.  Facing the aluminum stairs that lead from the floodlit tarmac into the midnight plane and God knows where, may not have been the roughest moment, it was among the most frightening.  Darryl took a scarf off his neck, tied it around mine, and I clomped my metal leg brace up the steps.  I recognized one or two of the students stashing rucksacks in the luggage bins.  One was Mitch, a frantic waver of hands in several English classes.  I did not say hello, certain he would not recognize the gaunt, recently paralyzed me.  Soon everyone was seatbelted into their destinies, and it didn't matter.

In traveling to Britain, I needed some sort of entry point, and decided Nick would have to do.  He met me at the airport, and together we boarded a train for Victoria Station.  Another country.  I had seen from the air that drivers really did use the left side of the roads.  And now there was this authentic British train with a wall of passenger doors for quick exit from each compartment, all of it now passing modern high-rise blocks.  Was this London?  No, Nick said, this was Croydon.  Which did not matter either way, Croydon, schmoydon.  I was somewhere else, 6000 miles from the scene of my shooting.  By the time the actual London rolled by the windows of a cab, the wrenching journey from California was beginning to hit me.  

Would I like a pint?  Nick stopped by his flat, ran my bags inside and guided me to a pub at the corner.  It was all incomprehensible, this bonhomie in the 10 pm midsummer twilight.  I didn't drink much ever, felt frail and physically vulnerable and, since my emergence from hospital, had hung at the edges of any social gathering.  So what was I doing in a pub?  Forcing a smile, forcing some beer and forcing myself to stay awake.  Let's go for a spin.  

Somehow Nick had friends, an Austin Mini, me and a festive sense of night in London.  I can't really recall where we drove.  I'd had more to drink in the previous hour than I'd had in the previous year.  And now things were rushing by, amber things, lights.  This was one of the strangest new British experiences, yellow streetlights.  They widened and the pavement reddened as we headed up Pall Mall.  I had only heard of the cigarettes.  But now there was this, a wide red road with yellow lights...as odd as the yellow brick road, which might have had red lights.  And at the end, the most impressive wrought-iron gates, which fortunately were wide open, admitting our little car and its load of intoxicated youth.  

Two policemen appeared from nowhere.  Nick stared dead ahead.  Talk, Paul, he hissed, this is Buckingham Palace.  And so it was, I observed in the friendliest of ways to the cop leaning into my window.  When was the place open for visitors?  Well, the man said, in the most patient tone, this really isn't a place one can visit.  Although there was a small museum to one side.  He pointed, I looked, then thanked him, and Nick backed out a little too quickly, I thought.  But we were off.  Off the hook.  Driving back to Harley Street.

When I climbed the stairs to the flat Nick shared there, I barely noticed the place.  On the ground floor were doctors' offices, of course.  On the upper floors at night all I saw was the bed.  And in the morning nothing stood out except for Ascot water heaters.  They seemed quaint to me, these miniature, heat-as-you-go producers of hot water.  In my mind, I thought of them as emblematic of some British trait about thinking small.  I may have been right about the latter.  In terms of energy efficiency, they were way ahead of their time.  

With the weekend approaching, Nick drove us to his parents' home in Welwyn Garden City, a postwar modernity experience on its own.  The days were long, and this one inexplicably sunny.  After dinner, which I don't recall but we must have had, Nick and I tooled about Hertfordshire.  He had a remarkable capacity for speed in the country lanes, and by the time we shot out of the hedgerows and into a clearing big enough for a pub, my face was white.  Nothing about the pub brought color into it.  I was not used to being around groups of people, even six months out of the hospital.  Something about the cheery badinage of Nick's country pub mates made me feel like a stone on the flywheel of life.  I wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs, standing then sitting, aware that beer would race through my body at a speed that could be measured with a stopwatch.  

Aside from being physically frail, I must have been terribly depressed, dragging myself about from one British experience to the next.  Eventually, I hooked up with another American friend, found myself a bed and breakfast near Kings Cross and liberated Nick.  I saw him one more time, several years later, after stumbling into one of the other Berkeley downstairs graduate students at Sadler's Wells Theatre.  Nick and I did not say much.  We did not have much in common, after all.  Still, something about him had pointed me in a new direction and given me, for my first days in Britain, a solid start.