Back to Berkeley

My escape to Mendocino from my marriage had not gone as well as I had hoped. I seemed an outsider there so it was back to Berkeley for me. At least I would be able to easily see my kids. By now it was 1970. I had been living on savings since moving to Mendocino and needed a job. A good friend I had worked with, Bud, was working at a private trade school. The school was run by another friend, John an Oglala Sioux who had a lot of connections with the local Indian community. The school was being bankrolled by a Texas millionaire John knew. With his connections to the local Indian community John was drawing mostly Indian students from various reservations throughout the west. They were enrolled through the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in Alameda. The school also had students from various welfare agencies and the state unemployment agency programs for retraining workers. There were even a very few students paying their own way. Bud was the backbone of the instruction having built a lot of experience over the years as a very good mechanic. John also taught classes and I ran the office; my job consisted mostly of billing various agencies for the tuition of the students though I occasionally filled in with some electrical theory classes.

I settled into a quasi bachelor life. After my split I was not anxious to get back into a serious relationship so I floated along not seeking anything serious. Relations in the early seventies were pretty undefined. A lot of people were trying different versions of connecting. I was not floating alone.

I was making home brew at the time. It was still illegal, a leftover from the days of prohibition, but there was little chance of anyone being busted as long as brewing was limited to personal consumption. I made ten gallons at a time and bottled it in salvaged bottles. I experimented with different recipes and usually had several cases of various recipes and ages in a closet. The home brew made me very popular, especially after the bars closed. More than once I had to discourage someone trying to crawl through a window at 2:30 in the morning hoping to get to my stash.

Bud was very popular with the students because he was not only a good instructor but he loved to party. He had a strong "Blue Collar" background and related well to the students. Because of my job running the office I did not interact as much with the students, nor did I relate as well to the students. Somewhere along someone, because of my long hair, called me "Custer" and most of the Indian students referred to me as such. Bud and I did a lot of bar hopping together. My apartment was not far from the school and we often got together there after work to plan an evening of revelry. The love of partying, home brew, and Indians came together one evening at my apartment. Bud came by with several Indian students and we were all sharing some of my home brew. My home brew was considerably more potent than ordinary beer and it could sneak up on the unaware. That evening a few of the students were getting a little more than a buzz from the beer. Bud thought it would be funny, given the name that the Indians had attached to me, to start a chant, "Kill Custer". A couple of the students, looked like they were really getting into to the chant. I decided to chant along, to show that it was all in good fun, but I chose to chant out of sync with the group. I was trying to break the rhythm of the chant. I thought that if I could disrupt the rhythm it would lessen the mood. My chants out of sync seemed to break the rhythm and for a while things seemed to be fine, until Bud left, leaving several drunken Indians with me. One even started following me from room to room when I went to my closet stash of beer to replenish the drink. I did my best to get rid of them by suggesting that we all go to a local bar. It was not until I feigned running out of beer that I finally I succeeded in clearing them out. The next day I asked bud why he had left me alone with drunks chanting “Kill Custer” and he said that he had waited outside to make sure that things did not get out of hand. I was not convinced. It took several years before I told Bud that he was forgiven.

Much in the same spirit of communes there were many who tried to share there experiences with what was loosely referred to as the "Berkeley Free U" an offhand reference to the University of California at Berkeley. There were classes in cooking, art, politics and a wide range of other topics. I occasionally offered classes beer making and in photography, which had been my major when I graduated from what was then referred to as San Francisco State College. Typical of my life then I was just coasting along. Bud, even though he was married, and I spent a lot of evenings in local bars trying to pick up women. It was a river and I was floating down stream. There seemed to be few reasons to come ashore.

A typical evening might start off as nothing special. One such evening when nothing special was happening Bud came by, he had been drinking as had I. He was hungry, as was I. Neither of us had eaten since lunchtime. We decided we needed some food before we continued the evening. I was not in a mood to cook so I came up with the idea of grabbing a pound of hamburger from the refrigerator and convincing a friend to cook it for us. It seemed like a good solution, after all who could refuse two charming half drunk souls, so off we went to a nearby friend's house. We knocked on the door and waited for our savior chef.

“Hi Diane, will you cook this for us?” I said thrusting the package toward her. Somehow she did not seem to show any enthusiasm about the task.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

With hamburger, still raw, still in hand we left, still hungry, still not willing to cook for ourselves. Back in my car we were driving, aimlessly, down San Pablo avenue and there it was, a "Jack in the Box" with drive through window. There were no cars in the drive through lane so I pulled up to the window and when the attendant asked what we wanted I handed the pound of hamburger in through the window to him.

"Hi, will you cook this for us?" I said.

The hour was late, there were no customers. He must have been bored.

"Why not." he replied as he took the hamburger. He formed the meat into two patties and put them on the grill. We sat in the car where we could see him working. He added "I am going to have to charge you for the buns, they keep track of them." It was a slow night and no other customers came behind us while we waited and watched. Diane's response aside it all seemed perfectly reasonable and natural to us. We were after all good fellows with a perfectly reasonable request. We showed our thanks with a big tip. That was the best Jack in the Box hamburger that I ever had.