A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read

Gomers

For You, The Stars
Chapter One: Eyes Like a Cat
Installment 3

One thing that had changed for me almost immediately upon moving out to California was that I started being successful with women. I don’t know if it was the light or the air or if I just had enough distance from my family and the stressed-out world of the east coast. Or maybe it was that the kinds of women I was made to be with were out here, but even before I had a job I managed to hook up with a pretty cool girl.

I was living with a bunch of guys from college, most of whom were from the class before me, so they’d already found a big old Victorian near the Haight and were staying together there in communal squalor when I arrived. They called themselves Gomers for reasons too complicated to go into. On the livingroom wall was a portrait photograph of an elderly couple whom we called the Gomperses. Visitors usually figured they were one of our parents so they wouldn’t comment on how strange they looked (they were wearing their best polyester and the photo looked like it was taken around 1973 and hand tinted). We named them Gompers after some of the mail that used to come to the house, but that name was actually unrelated to the Gomer slang we used to refer to each other.

Back in school most of us used to hang around in a party room called Doo-dah that had been used by stoners for nearly two decades. It was technically a shared living space between two dorm rooms, but it was understood that you could drop by just about anytime, especially if you brought weed. There was a bar in the room but it was never stocked. Likewise there was a mini-fridge that usually had nothing in it. For a while there was a hookah. And there was a stereo that 99% of the time was used to play lousy-sounding old analog audience tapes of Grateful Dead shows from the late ’70s and early ’80s. We left the hookah in the room for the nextd class when we graduated.

I knew some of the guys better than others in school but living together in a medium-sized house I got to know them all pretty well before long. For the first few months I slept on a mattress in a little breakfast nook off the kitchen but eventually i graduated to my own room. I had no job yet so I got myself the cheapest room in the house. It was desgined to be a dininig room and it shared double glass doors with the livign room. I covered them with tapestries for privacy but the sound still carried.

The room was tiny and I had no furniture beside a futon, so I was always down at floor level. Eventually I scrounged up some cinderblocks and blanks and then Chad gave me his old black and white tv so bit by bit my floor-level existence got a little more liveable.

I started to get real close to Dave, whom I hadn’t known that well in the Doo-dah days. We had a lot of interests in common. We were obsessive about going out to see live music (and not just Dead shows like most of the Gomers), and we were even interested in high brow stuff. We started a plan called Operation Culture and, to the extent that we could afford it, we tried to go to one classical type performance every month. One month it would be the ballet and the next the symphony.

Also, Dave started taking a writing class at San Francisco State and this aroused my reflexive sense of competitiveness and awakened my latent urge to tell stories or at least to be perceived as a writer.

All my life people had asked me if I was a writer or told me to be one. This was all based on my glibness. I tried to explain to people that talking and writing were entirely different but people would just talk about my “way with words” and make assumptions. After a while I started believing them, but I wasn’t that interested in the hard work or writing and rewriting or of writing all the crap you had to get through before you figured out the trick to writing something good. I was happy to be viewed as a writer or someone who “must be a good writer” as long as I didn’t have to write anything.

But then as soon as Dave started taking his class I wrote a short story kind of just to show off. But I found my own stories pretentious and boring. Dave wrote hilarious tales in the mode of Philip Roth and Kafka, such as a surreal story about a guy who bought a disembodied breast and would call himself down by holding it when he got stressed out.

Dave and I also shared a desire to meet women and get laid. He had a friend from high school in New Jersey who lived nearby and that guy invited us to a party one night. I wouldn’t usually want to go to a party where I didn’t know anyone but like Dave I wanted to meet women and get laid so I went.

That was where I met Simone. Don’t worry, I’m getting to Cecilia, but I’ve got to put everything into context.