Street Raised Read online

  The route was a little complicated, but they had to travel surface – the ‘People’s Republic of Bezerkley’ was just about the only community in the Bay Area freeways went around rather than through. Berkeley’s over-educated curmudgeonly citizens had pretty much invented NIMBY-ism, being the first city to successfully fight off the urban planners constructing the Interstates.

  Little Willy loved Berkeley, and felt as close to home there as anywhere. He was proud of how Berkeley – the ‘Athens of the West’ – stood in counterpoint to San Francisco, Herb Caen’s ‘Bagdad by the Bay.’

  Berkeley, named after an Irish bishop who maintained that we can only know our own perceptions and sensations regarding a stimuli, and that we never know the true ‘reality’ underlying our own limited viewpoint. Berkeley, the city that invented the wet suit, the hot tub and the yuppies. Berkeley, proud possessor of a cyclotron, one of the parents of the atom bomb, and the only city on earth to have an element named after it – Berkelium, of course.

  Bob found a parking spot on Dwight, right in front of that old Animal House, Barrington Hall. Outside Barrington some gutter punks were rooting around in the ‘free’ box. The door to Barrington’s interior was very dark, but Speedy knew there were ‘merry pranksters’ inside moving through the gloom in frantic hyperactivity trashing the place; people wearing nothing but saran wrap on their bodies or lounging about in drug sodden somnolence.

  Was Barrington still holding its ritual Wine Dinners, where acid-laced punch and pot brownies were served and bands like Black Flag and Flipper played for the tripping crowd? Were the interior walls still painted black, and/or covered in those crazy psychedelic murals and graffiti chronicling decades of counter culture activity, all the way back to the Summer of Love?

  Barrington, where the Doctor Zeus Room and the DMT Room both held court on the second floor, and you could climb up to the Yellow-Submarine-themed stairwell of the third floor and watch the walls melt as you fried on LSD.

  Back in the day this was the place where Speedy came to cop 100-hit sheets of blotter acid and sling the individual doses retail at two bucks a pop – given how many graduate level UCB chemists hung out at Barrington, the quality of any pharmaceuticals purchased there was always top notch.

  Being the little nerd that he was, Little Willy had always enjoyed that Dungeons & Dragons and board-games in general were a way of life and a religion at Barrington. Willy would occupy himself playing games or chatting with his fellow mutant freaks while Speedy conducted business, and it had often been hard to pull Willy away after.

  As for Fat Bob? He wouldn’t go near Barrington without a vial of holy water, he’d always waited outside when Speedy was making a buy back then, and he especially had no interest in stopping for a visit today with Miya in tow.

  They walked up Dwight in the direction of People’s Park, to the Ave. Willy ignored Shakespeare & Company Books on the corner across the street – Shakespeare didn’t give him as good a deal on used books as he liked.

  They were four blocks from the Campus. Speedy, Fat Bob, Miya and Little Willy turned left past Shambhala Booksellers and the Print Mint, and reached Moe’s.

  Moe’s Books was a landmark in the East Bay. During the Free Speech Movement in the 60s, the store’s founder Moe Moskowitz had refused to close his doors when the authorities imposed their curfew. In ’69 – when Alameda County Sheriffs fired buckshot into unarmed protestor’s faces and launched teargas canisters onto the school-grounds of Willard Junior High on Derby – a lot of people on the run from the rioting cops took refuge in Moe’s, as well as in Cody’s Books up the street. Mister Moskowitz himself was very well respected on the Ave.

  Willy muttered his goodbyes to Speedy and Bob, then carried his armload of trade-ins inside to the front counter. Willy had been a book hawk for Moe’s since he was little, gleaning used books from yard sales and flea markets then selling them to Moe’s for a profit. Moe had personally trained Willy in the fine art of book-gypsying, and you always got a good deal when you sold there.

  By chance Moe himself was on station behind the counter that day. The barrel-chested old Jewish bookseller, with his tanned bald spot and his cheap suit coat, stood listening to one of the classical music 78s he always had playing. An unlit cigar jutted from Moe’s mouth – one of the Macanudos he seemed to be eternally chomping – as he mused to the scratchy old vinyl playing on his turntable: Debussy’s ‘Claire de Lune.’

  Moe gave his old apprentice Willy an assessing look when Little Willy approached the counter, but refrained from whatever comment Willy’s current physical condition might have inspired. Instead Moe only murmured polite greeting before totting up the trade value on Willy’s latest book offering. Willy didn’t even notice the discouraged expression on Moe’s face as Moe handed Willy a slip for the books traded in.

  Starting in the basement, Willy progressed upward through all four floors of the bookstore. The smell of old paper, the feel of the bindings and covers when Willy hefted them from the shelves, and the stacked knowledge that all these piled tomes represented? Little Willy was in heaven here.

  The next album in the stack dropped onto Moe’s turntable: Erik Satie’s ‘Trois Gymnopedies;’ Moe was the in mood to hear ivory tickled today. The music echoed through the bookstore from top to bottom, soothing Willy as he searched for some simulation of meaning in one of the only places he’d ever felt happy.

  While Willy was worshiping in his church, Speedy and Bob took Miya north toward UC Berkeley. The air here was filled with the smells of falafel and pizza-by-the-slice; with the aroma of tofu and other, more anonymous vegetarian cooking.

  After Dwight, the last four blocks of Telegraph before the campus were one-way and the heavy auto traffic flowed uphill, the same way the three were walking. Street vendors lined the curbs selling amber jewelry and macramé, turquoise necklaces and sand-molded candles, tie-died clothing and ceramics.

  As far as the eye could see in that direction, both sides of the Ave were crowded with pedestrians: arrogant frat boys and Pretty Polly Purebread girls; Cal kids bedecked in Cal logoed outfits; frightened parents, and mobs of tourists walking slow and taking up the whole sidewalk; black Oakland thugs cruising for opportunity, and Marin kids slumming the Ave after smoking shrooms up in People's Park. The pedestrians regularly spilled out into the traffic-congested street, prompting a non-stop chorus of honking and back-and-forth exchanges of vituperation.

  Also as far as the eye could see, on both sides of the street an abundance of homeless leaned against walls; or lay side by side in long rows on the cracked, filthy, spittle-stained sidewalks; or stood in groups aggressively accosting passersby.

  The air here was filled with the lingering body odor exuded by these unwashed homeless. The puddles – and the stench of bodily fluids wafting from doorways – giving evidence that the Ave functioned as an open air toilet and fuck den.

  These throwaways came to Telegraph in pursuit of the ‘Summer of Love,’ not realizing it was a whore’s promise long gone. Flower Power would never exist again, Willy always maintained; it had been a hypocrisy and a lie to begin with.

  Still the 80s runaway kids came to Berkeley in an unending stream, trying to play hippy despite not having the money to make it fly, in stark contrast to the moneyed college students and trust fund babies moving past them pretending the poor ones weren’t even there. Two worlds, co-existing on Telegraph with nothing in common but physical proximity.

  Speedy and friends passed Caffe Mediterraneum – Ginsberg and Kerouac had hung there in the Beat days; Patty Hearst had been a habitué as well, before the she-wolves of the SLA gobbled her up. The Caffe could almost be a symbol of an Avenue that had earned its street cred in the maelstrom of 60s counterculture, but now specialized in overcharging college students who had enough money to attend one of the most prestigious campuses on the planet.

  A squirrely little dude standing outside the Caffe was holding a big sign that read ‘Fuck Fuck Fuckety Fuck: I don’
t want money for food, I need money for CRACK.’

  The dude’s girlfriend saw Bob eying her and screamed happily “We’ll save a push for ya.”

  “Don’t do it,” Fat Bob growled in all seriousness to the two panhandlers. “It’s the devil’s game.”

  On the corner of Haste the three passed Cody’s Books with its two-story-tall windows. As Cody’s storefront ran at a 45-degree angle to the corner rather than filling the block all the way to the street, the extra triangle of sidewalk thus created was a natural venue for escape artists, fortune tellers and even stand-up comics.

  The Last Hare Krishna was there on this particular day, beating his tambourine. A young black kid wearing glasses was selling home-mixed “special request” rap tapes out the trunk of his car, said to call him Too Short. Willie the Polka Dot Man stood perfectly still by Cody’s’ entrance, dressed in his trademark dots and performing his human dummy routine. Julia the Bubble Lady wandered by – she let Miya blow some bubbles, but Speedy and Fat Bob still had to pass on buying a copy of Julia’s latest book of poetry.

  Larry – a shirtless long haired wild man in incredible physical condition that also happened to be the High Priest of Rare – was across the street. As they passed, Larry Rare ran out into the middle of the street and dropped prone, forcing all the traffic to stop and wait while he whipped out a set of 50 pushups.

  Speedy could see that trademarked Berkeley expression of deniable passive-aggressiveness on many of the drivers forced to a halt by Larry’s performance: the vague, almost undirected glare; the almost imperceptible sphincter tightening of the mouth; and, of course, the microscopic head shake of disapproval, signalizing their highness’s displeasure. But not a single one of them honked; they never did, whenever Larry Rare popped out his handstand pushups, or his sets of pull-ups on any overhead structure he could use for the purpose.

  The trio crossed Haste. Across the Ave inside Rasputin Records, the counter clerk was playing ‘Wooden Ships,’ the Crosby Stills & Nash version. A very serious chick with a clipboard accosted the trio at that point, trying to have Speedy and Fat Bob sign a petition for a ballot initiative making it municipal law for Pi to have only ten digits beyond the decimal point in future.

  Outside the Hof Brau – an Old-World-German-style buffet run by a large clan of Asians – a couple of street kids cadged some spare change off Speedy, and told the trio that the Grateful Dead were playing at the Greek Theater tonight. As always Jerry Garcia and the guys would have speaker stacks set up in the Tennis Courts, so deadheads unable to pick up a ticket could listen and party for free.

  The trio continued on, soaking in the sights. Outside Larry Blake’s, a sign said Robert Cray would be playing in the basement bar that night. Around the corner from Yarmo’s and Fat Slice Pizza, several of the Durant Mob Rules girls stood smoking outside the Silver Ball Arcade – undoubtedly taking a break from pumping quarters into the Dragon’s Lair machine, or from playing Robotron 2084.

  Jake the Snake and another Berkeley Trailer’s Union member were hanging outside the Silver Ball as well, straddling their mountain bikes while they chatted up the DMR girls. Jake and the BTUs were hard partying brawlers that rode their bikes like madmen up on the back trails of the Berkeley Hills when they weren’t hanging on the Ave looking for trouble. Speedy had always gotten along with Jake well enough. But Bob and the BTUs had a long standing feud, sort of like the Thing and the Yancy Streeters in the Fantastic Four.

  The trio crossed Bancroft Avenue, which ran east and west paralleling the campus’ edge. They stood next to the Bear’s Lair – ‘Go Bears!’ – and the Cal Student Store.

  The posters and mimeos thumb-tacked to the nearest kiosk fluttered in the wind – Speedy noted one flyer for the Psychic Faire. No address was given, perhaps because ESP was assumed for all involved.

  Looking south down Telegraph, traffic poured one way up toward them, tee-ing into one of the busiest intersections in Berkeley here at the University boundary on Bancroft. To their north Sather Gate – that weathered, green-patinaed bronze archway commanding the entrance to Sproul Plaza – was just visible between the double rows of trees flanking the walkway.

  Toward the east, the wild-peacock-haunted Berkeley Hills stared back down at them. The ex-hippie crowd was well represented up in those Hills, which always seemed paradoxical to Speedy as the whole neighborhood was also dripping with Establishment cash.

  Little Miya indicated she was thirsty, and Uncle Fat Bob trotted back across the street to fetch them all some Orange Julius.

  Hundreds of students surrounded them on the broad expanse of brick cobblestone, hurried about headed for class, or whatever other business young Citizens-in-Training might be up to. An anonymous ant mob, scurrying along – each ant intent on their own business, each staring out at the world and each other from within the confines of their own personal microcosm.

  Speedy smiled inside: here he stood, a hawk among the pigeons with no one the wiser. None of these marks saw the hazard Speedy knew he represented. None of these people bumbling cluelessly around him paid one iota more attention to their environment than they had to, moving mechanically through the behavior patterns they’d established for protection.

  That had always confused Speedy when he’d been a kid: How could people not be able to tell you what was going on down the block in the background; or know what color the car across the street was painted without looking at it more than once; or determine just what a person’s intentions toward you were by their body language and posture alone?

  But Speedy’d finally realized that even though they walked on their hind legs like him, most of these so-called humans didn’t think at all if they could help it. They spent their lives slipping, they had no idea what vigilance was.

  They didn’t constantly glance in any convenient reflective surface to see what was going on behind them. They didn’t make a habit of tracking the people around them to see who was approaching and who was receding, what was in who’s hands, or (most important) who was paying attention to them while pretending not to.

  Even though the realization of other people’s weakness was the backbone of Speedy’s game, he wasn’t sure to this day whether it was a comfort or a hindrance. Could he really enjoy having the advantage over them all, when their sub-normality effectively exiled him for life?

  Speedy looked at Miya, considering just how protective Fat Bob was of his little niece. She was a pretty cool little rug rat – Speedy admired that she seemed on the ball, that she wasn’t all whiny and obnoxious like some ankle biters he’d seen. She was an alert one – she definitely had potential.

  “You like games Miya?” Speedy asked.

  She nodded.

  “Well I’ve got one we can play. I ask questions, and you answer.”

  Miya thought about it. “Like a riddle?”

  “Something like that.” Speedy looked down Bancroft toward the bank of payphones at Sather Lane Alley. He jerked his chin at a blond girl in the middle of a phone call, and then looked down at Miya. “Who’s that girl talking to?”

  This wasn’t any kind of riddle Miya had ever heard of.

  “I don’t know,” she finally said. “How could I know that?”

  “Try. Guess.”

  Miya looked at the blond girl again, who was too far away for Miya to hear what she was saying. Miya saw how unhappy the girl looked, at how fast her mouth was silently moving. As Miya watched, the blond hung up and stamped her foot.

  “Her boyfriend?” Miya asked uncertainly, looking at Speedy to see if she got it right.

  Speedy rewarded Miya with a smile. “Good guess. Nice. Of course we can’t be sure from this far away, but you’re probably right.”

  “Let’s go ask her.”

  “No.” Speedy flashed his eyes over at a black dude buying a ring from a sidewalk jewelry vendor. “What’s that guy thinking? What kind of mood is he in?”

  Miya considered the man as he pocketed his purchase and stepped off. “He loo
ks happy. He’s smiling.”

  “He thinks he got a good deal,” Speedy agreed.

  He nodded at a middle-aged man in a nice suit, just purchasing a cup of cappuccino at an open-air coffee stand. “How much money does that man have on him? Where’s he keep it?”

  Miya looked at Speedy pityingly. “Do I even have to answer? He’s handing that lady money right now. He took it out of his front pants pocket.”

  Speedy nodded, grinning. “A’ight, you spotted his folding. But he’s upscale enough he might have plastic too – and if he does it’s in his wallet, in his breast pocket.”

  Speedy looked around for another educational specimen.

  “See those two?” He nodded towards a street kid who’d been leaning against a wall huddled within his black trench coat, until a college boy’s approach roused him from his seeming apathy.

  As Miya watched she saw them trade small objects, both green. They both acted like they thought they were being sneaky.

  “You always watch their hands, and you always watch for the exchange,” Speedy said. “It defines it.”

  Bob rolled up and handed them each their Orange Julius. Speedy and Miya took sips off their respective straws.

  “If we had time I’d show you how to follow them without them knowing you’re there,” Speedy said. “Does that sound like fun?”

  Miya nodded, smiling. She looked around the Ave, at all the people and activities, as if seeing the whole scene with new eyes.

  Fat Bob squinted at Speedy, at Miya, and then back at his friend again. They walked back down the Ave toward Moe’s to pick up Little Willy.