For You, the Stars
Chapter Two: Have a Cigar
Installment 2
I’m not sure why Simone never made it to those parties in Berkeley but it may have been because neither of us had a car. If I wanted to get there I’d have to take the Muni downtown and the Bart across the Bay and then I’d still have to get someone to come down from the hills to pick me up from the downtown Berkeley Bart station.
I also think Simone didn’t like my Berkeley friends. They were kind of pretentious, always talking about art theory and Marx. Simone liked to discuss lit crit and she liked to discuss feminism, but she also liked to be the best-informed, smartest person in a discussion, and the ex-Ivy Leaguer grad students had too many humiliating rhetorical tricks up their sleeves, along the lines of “Well, if you haven’t read Gramsci, then I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation.”
I liked having this other place to go and this other set of friends and I liked being able to flirt fairly freely without any real consequences, knowing I had someone to get back to, at least after sleeping off a hangover.
Simone and I did most of our hanging out in the Haight. At first the place had a sort of magical cachet for my Deadhead friends, but once you had checked out 710 Ashbury and the remaining head shops, you’d notice the hippie-slash-beggars everywhere and that the place was getting kind of yupped out. What the neighborhood did have going for it was a couple of good places to eat.
We especially liked going out for breakfast in the morning. At the Crescent City cafe we could get pseudo-New Orleans food, like omelets with shrimp and hot sauce. Or if we were willing to walk down toward the lower Haight and wait on line for 45 minutes we could get an impossibly huge breakfast / brunch at the Pork Store Cafe.
We went to movies at the Red Vic, lolling on uncomfortable secondhand couches and eating popcorn with brewer’s yeast on it instead of butter and salt. We bought clothes at the thrift shops. Well, mostly I did. Simone didn’t care too much about fashion, favoring a serviceable collegiate, sweater-and-jeans style that suited her pretty well. I was trying to reinvent myself, systematically replacing every preppy scrap of clothing in my closet with something blacker or tighter or made of a less natural fabric. I was still a bit overweight but I wasn’t dressing loose and sloppy to hide my body anymore.
I was also starting to let my hair grow longer. I had finally noticed the sharp angle of my hairline heading toward my temples and it occurred to me that if I ever wanted to wear long hair in my life that the window was in danger of slamming shut. My hair has never grown fast, though, so at first it was just too long in the front, falling in my eyes all the time, and bushy on my neck. Over the next few months I had it almost to pageboy length all around.
Somewhere along the way I also picked up a multicolored guatemalan (yes, I know that’s redundant) shirt that pulled over instead of buttoning up the front. I refused to wear tie-dyed t-shirts all the time like my Gomer buddies. I fancied my self a punker shade of hippie. I liked Black Flag and the Meat Puppets and I went to the I-Beam to see Camper Van Beethoven and later Primus. If I was going to dress colorful it was going to be with a little more panache than your standard preppy Deadhead.
I noticed I was also getting privately more critical of Simone’s appearance. Not the way she dressed. I was fine with that. It was subtle things, like her freckles, which I had really liked at first. Unlike some guys, I find freckles to be sort of cute. But she had freckles up the wazoo (literally). I think less of her skin was unfreckled than freckled. I’d be looking at her in bed and my mind would do a kind of strange figure-ground kind of flip and suddently I’d see her as a ginger-colored person lightly flecked with pale pink skin. Being high may have had something to do with that.
Also, as young as she was, her skin seemed kind of like that of a much older woman. It was very thin, and was already showing wrinkles on her forearms. Her upper lip had those lines you usually see only on women and men in the 60s or 70s. I knew enough not to mention any of this to her, but now that I think about it, I may just have been getting a little tired of her body. I was a young guy who had just discovered that maybe it wasn’t quite as hard to hook up with women as I had previously though and - who knows? - maybe I was laying the groundwork for my escape.
One of the folks I used to see at Parnassus was this very artsy, very pale woman named Dannie. She had pitch black ringlets of hair and she had very pretty blue eyes. In some ways she seemed to have stepped out of a pre-pre-Raphaelite past. She may have known this because she spoke in a fey high-pitched trill. When everyone else wanted to go out for eggs and bacon on Sunday mornings, she would lobby for some cute little bakery she knew where we could get fresh croissants (pronounced the french way, rolling the r and dropping the s). Sometimes she’d convince the gang but usually the hash browns and bloodies place would win out.
She wore her body well. She was fairly large around. Not too tall, but with a rounded belly and arms and legs like a baby. I still found her pretty. I had never had utterly conventional tastes in women, but she was outside of the type I had considered in the past. A few years later I made an unsuccessful pass at a lawyer in her thirties who was a coworker of another one of my roommates, so maybe in general I was intrigued by people outside of “league” in one way or another.
I had the feeling Dannie was flirting with me more than the usual amount that went on with all the drinking up on Parnassus. She’d make eyes at me or make sure she was in my line of site. She’d seek me out for quiet conversation. At one party at another house in Berkeley I didn’t know enough people and I felt sort of mopey and lonely so I went outside to sit on the porch by myself.
I had it in the back of my mind that the lonely poet staring at the sky might be an attractive pose and sure enough Dannie came out to talk to me after a while. She made a point of squeezing next to me in the backseat of car when we all left that party to go to another one and she took my hand in her much bigger hand and squeezed it while everyone was talking all around us.