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

I'm a little schoolboy too

For You, The Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 1

So after about a year in San Francisco I was easing into an oddly domestic scene. I’d finally caught up even in our elaborate communal group ledger for expenses and etc., which we called GLEE for short. I’d essentially been on the communal dole when I first arrived and had to borrow money to do anything. Every time I ate a group meal I was marked down for my share of the groceries. In fact, if you gathered together leftovers from the dinner the night before and wrapped them in a tortilla for lunch the next day, you’d be included in the tally for that dinner. This we called “the burrito trap.” We took turns making dinner and cleaning up, in pairs. The rule was that the same pair who made dinner also cleaned it up - that was there was no incentive to leave a big mess. I couldn’t cook at all, so I would be the one washing the dishes and the pots.

When I started legal summarizing I was still barely getting enough money to break even. Sometimes the three guys who were working as paralegals in the office of an eccentric gay Princeton alumnus would pay for my roundtrip fare on the N-Judah streetcar and buy me lunch downtown so I could make a fourth for bridge. It always tickled my dad that me and my friends were bridge addicts, as he associated that with the preppy (or, as he called them, “tweedy”) kids of his own college days in the ’50s. I had simply discovered that bridge was the perfect form of procrastination. You’d agree to play, “just one more hand,” and miss another class and then another till it was dinner time.

Once I had the full-time job I was able to dig my way out of my glee-hole and could maintain a little balance in my checking account. I found myself even getting a little excited when my bills came. I’d get out my checkbook and pay them immediately, not even waiting for the grace period to pass. I think I was getting over the shock of how low down on the social and financial totem pole I had landed by following the Dead out to California instead of following the other stock broker wannabes to Wall Street. In my own small way I was making it on my own and I was inordinantly proud of the fact.

I recently came across a photo of myself, in my tie and shirtsleeves, with a leather briefcase my sister got me, and in my dorky ’80s style oversized horn rims. It’s obvious now that my hair was receding pretty fast, but it was still shaggy and falling across my eyes at the time. I hadn’t yet started trying to grow it long yet. I was fresh faced and clean shaven, no tattoos or piercings. Piercings weren’t even really in yet except for earrings which had already crossed over the the jock/frat crowd by then. It was a year or so later when the RE/Search “modern primitives” book came out and seem spark the huge outpouring of odd piercings and split tongues and genitals and the total mainstreaming of tattoos.

No, I was just a junior working stiff at that moment, trying to fit in, but I think I was on the verge of freaking myself out with just how settled I’d become. I’d forgotten about rock and roll and art and even writing and I was setting myself up for a major tailspin.

One of the gomers, Bo, was this big ex-football player who had redirected his competitive urges into strategy board games. He used to joke that if he didn’t reinnoculate himself with a bonghit on a regular basis that the demon Cthulhu inside him would emerge. We were all ready to propitiate him and keep the soft-edged fuzzy teddybear around instead of the potentially rage-fileld monter inside him. He had gone back to east for a visit and returned with a new girlfriend in tow, Suzy Schotzkopf.

Somehow Suzy ended up moving in with all of us although no one seemed to like her much, not even Bo. We held one of our interminable consensus-building meetings and the anti-Suzy impulse was just too disorganized to fight the inertia. Instead, in our passive-agressive self-medicating ways, we just none of us helped her move in. She was the type who was constnatly apologizing to everyone, preemptively. She said “sorry” like every other word. I felt a little guilty for not helping her move her furniture in, especially when she was hauling a small couch up our tight little winding staircase by herself. I swear I heard her bump into the wall and say “I’m sorry” reflexively to no one. Suddenly I didn’t feel guilty - just ill.

Suzy offered to drive Simone and me up to Angel’s Camp (near where Twain wrote about the frog contest) for an outdoor concert with Santana and the Dead. This would be Simone’s first Dead show, so I got Friday and Monday off to enable us to make the trip. Santana was the sweetener because who didn’t like Santana? Inevitably, on the way to the show Suzy’s car broke down. We spent hours at some nowhere gas station near a freeway on-ramp with Suzy trying to get something in her transmission fixed and constantly apologizing to both of us. Somehow, I have no idea how, she got the car working again and we made it to the site well after dark. We had to do the dirt-camping thing, sleeping next to the car, and of course we were kept up most of the night by drunken and tripping ‘heads playing battered old guitar and howling at the nonexistent moon.

The shows were on Saturday and Sunday and in some ways the days were perfect. That may have been the high point of my time with Simone. It was a little weird seeing the father with a toddler near us who was unable to leave the show the first afternoon even when his daughter was obviously overwhelmed by the noise and chaos and heat. But most of the people around us were stereotypically kind and thoughful, and Simone was actually surprised at how slick and together the Dead sounded by the late ’80s.

I’m not sure exactly what she was expecting - either heavy metal based on the band’s name or maybe something really sloppy based on the awful bootleg tapes I was still listening to before the Internet and digital changed that whole scene - but she was pleasantly surprised that they didn’t just jam endlessly or acidically. She even gave them the ultimate compliment by her own standards: in concert they sounded a lot like Genesis. I scoffed at that of course. For me the highlight was when Santana sat in with the Dead as they resurrected a long dormant song, Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl and when Carlos and Jerry pushed each other to shreddy extremes on All Along the Watchtower, an obvious tribute to Jimi, one of Santana’s greatest heros (along with Miles).

We didn’t get much sleep again the night between shows and Suzy was really having no fun but she was committed to driving us back so she stuck it out. I paid her for our share of the gas but I think she really just wanted to be treated like a buddy and I wasn’t willing to go that far.

Another cluster of my friends from college had grabbed a house on Parnassus Way in the Berkeley / Oakland hills. They were all grad students at UC, mostly in eastern european languages or politics. They also lived with a couple of undergraduate girls who were both zaftig and whom I both thought were very sexy. Every now and then I’d go to a party at their place on Parnassus and usually end up spending the night. For some reason Simone never seemed to go to those parties. I did a lot of flirting but nothing ever seemed to happen.

The two sexy girls, Ava and Bronwen, one blonde, one dark haired, used to tease me a lot. I guess it was obvious I had a thing for them. They would joke about things like threeways or dressing me up in their lingerie. I was game but it never seemed to go anywhere. Usually we’d all drink a huge amount and pass out. I’d spend the night on a couch in the living room and in the morning we’d all go to the breakfast place atop Walnut Square in Berkeley for eggs and bloody marys. One time Bronwen was away so I crashed in her bed. In the middle of the night I rummaged through her drawers and stole a few pairs of her panties. I was pretty perverted like that back then. She showed up in the morning and was surprised to find me in her bed but I played it cool and smuggled my booty out of the room without her noticing.