Tape 17, Side A
[Begin Tape 17, Side A]
So you’re studying Russian.
So I’m goin’ to school, goin’ to school, yeah. Well it was real, it was real nice. The teacher, Glenna Bryant, she was not a native speaker but she was an excellent speaker and an excellent teacher, and she prepared her own stuff and her own work; there was no textbook, and she had some stuff at the language lab, and the way it was engineered you really could go as fast or as deeply as you wanted to; and I tore it right up, I ate it right up so that by the end of that first semester I had gone beyond what she had prepared even for those who wanted to take ten units and I was doing other stuff for her too, you know, she was on the verge of becoming an administrator, and so the next semester after that she was only able to devote a little bit of time to Russian and I was sort of helping her out in the class, and the next semester after that I was sort of doing the class [laughs].
Really?
Yeah, for intro level people, you know, for intro level people, just getting them started.
So how was your accent?
That’s really, as it turns out you know, because I tried to carry it over to UC Berkeley, I wasn’t interested in conversation [laughs] and I wasn’t interested in literature, I was only interested in the mechanics of the language, you know, the production of the speech and the beauty of the sounds.
Really?
Yeah, so I never got into… that’s why I kind of finally dropped out and bombed out at Berkeley because it got to be more concentration on the lit… you know it was Slavic languages and literature, that was the major. It was more a concentration on the literature, you know, it was more of that academic analysis that I hated so much, only this time in Russian!
So were you interested in the literature for yourself, I mean just to read it for your own?
Oh yeah! I was that, that’s true, and in fact two or three of us spun off from the class and outside of the class—this is for, you know, quite a while—we would meet and read to ourselves, you know, we’d have parallel textbooks and we’d read a certain point and then, without trying to do too much English, try and explain the terms that we didn’t know and so on. So that was a little later phase, but in the first part of it I was just soaking all this stuff up, because a lot of it was, a lot of the pacing, the so-called self-paced, whether you went from one level onto the next, was passing a test and I was always good at them tests, so I knew how to do that, so I was up to the ten units real quick; that’s really all I cared about at that point. It was like the second semester and into the other years that I started doing other things. But that was ten units. The other two units I had to take, you know, I took a silk-screening class and I think I took a music class, maybe an art class; took a couple art classes, art appreciation type classes and I’d just fall asleep because they showed slides: as soon as they turned the light off, that was my cue [laughs] because I couldn’t stay concentrated enough. I never did get the whole Ionic, Doric, Corinthian column thing straight, and what’s the difference between Rococo and… whatever that other kind is. I can picture Rococo architecture now but I can’t picture…
Rocky Rococo*.
[Peter Lorre voice] Rocky Rococo… Betty Joe Bialosky* [laughter]… Lee Roy started taking some classes up at Merritt too, so sometimes we’d ride the bus together. He was taking a lot of ornamental horticulture type classes. Now I could make some extra money by working in the Office of Veteran’s Affairs there at Merritt, so I started doing that, you know, because they had a big Office of Veteran’s Affairs: a lot of the people who were at Merritt were getting their two hundred forty-eight dollars too [laughter]. Plus they made veterans’ loans available, and I glommed on those right away.
What were you borrowing money for?
Errr…
What the heck.
Yeah, what the heck, it was there. It was like Mount Everest [laughs]. It was available.
And you didn’t have to pay ten for twenty.
No, you didn’t have to pay ten for twenty, and as it turns out, you know, you could string ‘em along… you were supposed to start paying after you… well you weren’t supposed to be eligible if you weren’t carrying a full-time load and you could start paying after you graduated, so that’s another reason I kept going and going twice as long: four years instead of two years, is to back that off. I paid ‘em all off though. I don’t think Lee Roy did. I think every now and then he gets a call from the Veterans’ office. Yeah, okay, I’ll send you a dollar. A lot of people defaulted on those veterans’ loans. But you know we all sort of looked out for each other. The Veterans’ Office, the people who were staffing the Veterans’ office were… probably the chief was a veteran and there were a lot of students there who were veterans, so you know we watched each other’s back. After a while they put a ringer in there. They sent a representative from the Veterans’ Administration; she had a little office in there too, so it was kind of hard to get things by her; you could still do it a little bit. I think I could… yeah, I got work-study helping out in various ways. I can’t remember… well one thing I did was—during the summer I think it was (was it? I don’t know)—it was a video course, and so this teacher, Annette Macomus, who was a… I guess her husband was a science fiction writer: she knew a lot about science fiction, she was some kind of English person, but they were doing this tele-course on, jeez, Elizabethan drama I guess: the plays of… that’s what they were showing on TV were the plays of Kyd and, I don’t know, all sorts of people. Is that Elizabethan?
Yeah, and also they don’t get shown, I mean they’re not done that much: The Spanish Tragedie of Kyd…
Yeah. If I had been paying attention I would have watched those shows [laughs], because they had all the material, so I was just helping her with the… you know every now and then all the tele-students would have to meet and take a test, actually meet on campus, so I helped with the, you know, that was one of my work-study jobs; and I don’t remember any more.
So you would add to your two hundred…
… forty-eight, yeah, from time to time I’d get some little bits and pieces here and there. And then, you know, I’d try anything: once I was handing out handbills for some restaurant, and I was helping one of the guys in the veterans’ office who was making Tibetan style hats out of rabbit skins; so I’d go to his house and he’d get all these skins out and you’d punch holes around the periphery of them and thong ‘em up and then take ‘em, you know, just little piece work, and then he’d take ‘em to the lady who was actually selling them, so, you know, just little bits and pieces here and there, nothing too heavy, nothing too taxing.
What was Kathy’s response to your new life?
Well, it was pretty good at first because, you know, there was money, there was more money involved and we could go places, go out to eat and maybe go to San Francisco or something like that, but we were sort of drifting away for a whole variety of reasons, drifting apart, and I eventually drifted all the way apart, and I found myself an apartment and you know we were basically done. And she was involved in women’s groups, women’s activities, she would have women’s meetings over at her house from time to time.
I remember that those years—seventy-two, seventy-three—wasn’t that kind of the…?
Yeah, seventy-three, seventy-four it was the height, you know, all that… Sisterhood is Powerful, all that stuff was coming out.
So did that kind of become an absorbing thing for her the way these other things were becoming for you, Russian and all?
No, no, not really, because I mean she was really interested in all these things and was going with that flow and she was keeping journals and, you know, she developed a whole new side of herself and I hadn’t [laughs] and I wasn’t interested in anything really, I mean I wasn’t absorbed by anything. I was having fun but it wasn’t, you know, it could have stopped the next day and it would have been fine, I would have gone and rolled on to something else; but she was really interested in this stuff, and as it turns out she had another angle too: it turns out she was a lesbian [laughs]; it turns out later, you know.
Was this a surprise to you?
No, well, sure it was a surprise to me. Oh… The first thing I think of is: What have I done to this woman? [laughing] It’s all my fault! [laughs]
[Laughing] You’ve driven her off of men entirely.
But no, she just moved in that way, you know. I think it happened, I think it was kind of a thing that happened to a lot of people, a lot of women at that time, you know: this huge ground-swelling of consciousness raising and the closeness of all these other women who feel just like you do and who are also developing new ways of thinking and new understandings and that sort of thing. It was all kind of serious, but of course I wasn’t able to take it seriously, so I wasn’t… I thought it was fun, in fact I’m starting to make friends there in my Russian class and one of the women who was like a little, she was in like the year ahead of me, she had been going there for a while, she had been in Russian for a year already; I didn’t know any of these people but as I became more self-paced I started crawling up into their realm because I was leaving the other beginners behind, I was advancing ahead up to where they already were. So there was a woman there, she was like a… she had a husband and a child and she was older than the others and I said: Oh, you might be interested in this women’s group, so I hipped her to it too. So she, Tina [laughs], started attending these women’s groups also with Kathy and so, you know, so there was all that synergy or linkage going on too. And I had moved off by myself by then and I was living in various apartments, yeah. I lived in lots of different places and sometimes with a couple of people: I lived in a room in a guy and his wife’s house for a while. So again, just trying to find… and I had a room over there on Arch Street for a while, just looking, you know, looking to find that perfect place, and abandoning the one I was in when I got tired of it, or maybe I didn’t have enough money to cover that month’s rent and I had to go cool it somewhere else for a month before I saved it up again.
Was it pretty hard to make that money cover the…?
Yeah, it really wasn’t much, I mean it was nice when I was in Kathy’s place ‘cause she carried a lot of it; that was a real apartment with a real living-room and TV and all that stuff and a porch and furniture [laughs], some of those things.
[Laughing] Strange, strange concepts.
Yeah, but it was easy to go from room to room; I don’t think it’s so easy now, you know, you could rent a room for a month for $75 or something like that. Now it’s probably 750 [laughs]. So I wasn’t too… I mean I wasn’t heartbroken or anything like that because as I say we weren’t really hooked up that tight then anyway: I missed the apartment [laughs], I confess!
Did she sort of break it to you? I mean how did you get the news that she was…?
I don’t remember; it think it just happened; it was in the air; and also I was aware there was one of these women that she was particularly interested in, you know, I sort of knew them because—actually I did live there when—because I had to go away when it was time for the group to come in on group nights, I had to go away. Sometimes she had to go away, but on those nights I had to go away so they could have the, you know, so there weren’t no men around [laughs]! I tried to tell them that I wasn’t a real man.
[Laughs] He’s just a girly-man. How radical would you say it was? I mean would you say there was a lesbian separatist element? Was it the radical edge or was it kind of middling…?
Yeah, yeah, I think it was, and I don’t think that many of them knew exactly what was going on. As time went on… I think of all the people—I think Mike Stanis’s wife was also in this group too—and you know some of them were already friends and were already on the same wavelength more or less; but no, it wasn’t political, it was all personal and it was all, a lot of it was social, you know, just social, because Kathy didn’t have a lot of friends either, which was probably my fault, you know, because I never wanted to do anything; I still don’t [chuckles], you know, as a couple or anything like that; in fact [laughing] I don’t even want to do anything as a single [laughter].
You just don’t want to do anything, period.
No, I don’t want to, I don’t want to. I will if I can go in five minutes [laughter]…. So it was okay, and, you know, it just freed me up in another way actually. I missed some of the comforts, of course, the comforts of home, but pretty soon I was meeting with all these people for readings and that sort of thing and one of the people I was meeting with, we were all meeting with, was Tina. She was in the Russian class.
This is your Tina?
This is my current wife, yes. This is my third or fourth wife, I can’t remember which, one of my wives. So sometimes we’d go over to her house, which is now my house, our house, so she was living here then—this is seventy-three—had been living there for a while with--
--And she was married?—
She was married—with her husband and her little boy, Matthew; and so sometimes we’d go over to her house and do Russian on the front lawn or inside the house or something like that, and then suddenly I started going over there all by myself and we’d do a little Russian now, sometimes, and, you know, we got to talking and, you know, she had an unhappy marriage and things were sort of drifting apart, and I didn’t do anything, I didn’t do anything to…
You’re not a home wrecker?
I’m not a home wrecker. I didn’t do anything to encourage it; but I didn’t need to do anything, it was bad enough. And you know there were some vibes there but we didn’t really, we didn’t really do anything bad or even talk about it really. She really liked Monty Python, and that was a plus, so, you know, sometimes we’d sit over in the cafeteria at Merritt and I’d just go through Monty Python routines. And I just liked the whole… whenever I’d go over to her house she’d be playing big band music on the radio, there was like a forties station, big band station, and I just liked the way she was with her son and the way she was with other people, and I just thought she was enormously courageous too to do all the stuff she… I think she was working and she had to take care of her child and she had these problems with her husband and she went to school too, so she was doing all this stuff and, you know, I thought that was real brave.
It sounds like her husband wasn’t too much help when it came to the day-to-day things.
I guess not; I guess not; and, you know, I’ve heard lots of stories since then about how bad he was and how much she hated him [laughs] and the things that he did. Got married real young….
But she didn’t unload too much to you about…?
No, no.
She didn’t say: This is horrible or…?
No, none of that came out then; she didn’t do any of that. I mean it became clear in one way or another that it was deteriorating, and I made sure that I was going to be there when it did [laughs]. You know, somehow or other I was gonna be in the vicinity, but it was kind of a long process, and in the meantime I was… Lee Roy was working at Kip’s. They had a bar there, they had a pool hall there in Kip’s, so he found some job working in the pool hall and he got himself an apartment over on Dwight Way, right across from Herrick Hospital; that building is torn down now; but he was going back to Ohio—he comes from Ohio—he was going back to Ohio for a long time for some reason and asked me if I was interested in the apartment and I was, and so I took over that apartment, and so that’s why I was living there for sort of the tail end of my Merritt time and the beginning of my UC time.
So how long were you at Merritt before you transferred?
I was at Merritt four years. I managed to stretch it out to four years.
[Laughing] You got four years out of that?
Yes, and I was taking, you know, more language classes were self-paced, so I wanted to make sure I had that twelve units, so I was taking language classes, and some of them I wasn’t doing so good in, and then I’m starting to think: this is gonna end and I’m gonna have to go somewhere else if I want that—I could still get veteran’s benefits, I think you could do it for six years or something like that, I’m not sure.
What other languages did you take?
I took some Spanish and took a French class and took a German class and took an Indo-European linguistics type of class. They had some pretty good teachers there at Merritt and they were payin’ ‘em well; they could have worked at UC but I think they were paying ‘em more for what they were doing at… the Peralta colleges were paying well. The tuition was free, and then it went up to a whopping two dollars. I took some earth sciences type classes and some California immigrants classes and that sort of thing, but I didn’t take no gym. I didn’t take no gym classes.
For other people gym is Mickey Mouse, but for you it’s a certain F [laughter].
I hated that. That’s right; I had to keep my grade point up. So I took all these classes and got to know all the language teachers; there was a couple of good ones, and I met one real crazy guy there who was also taking lots of classes. His name was Jose Louis Fernandini, he was from Peru. He was a real character. It turns out later he was a real right wing… I went to his apartment once and I went inside and closed the door and he had this great big picture of Pinochet on his door [laughs]. Yeah, he was a Pinochet lover. But he was kind of funny too. He loved Dylan; he loved to sing Dylan in his, he had this great crazy Peruvian accent. Sometimes he’d call me up at twelve o’clock at night, drunk and singing some Dylan song with his accent. I heard… no, no, this is true, I talked to him later on, he started his own tour guide business in San Francisco and he himself conducts the tours and he can do it in Spanish, German, French, Italian, something else, I can’t remember. So he was pretty polyglot.
He did well in the language classes.
Yeah, he did well. He’s the one who told me once—he always had eighteen-year-old girlfriends, you know he was probably pushing thirty by then—he always had eighteen-year-old girlfriends and he always said he had to get rid of them, you know, when they became nineteen or twenty or something like that.
They were too old.
Yeah, too old. He’s the one that once, I got these sandals, like Italian sandals, and they had just little straps around the top part of the foot, and he saw them and he said: Do they make those for men too? So he was always ready with a quip [laughter].
A wise guy.
Yeah, he was a wise guy.
Did he ever go into the reasons behind his love for Pinochet?
Not in so many words. I had the feeling that his family was rich in Peru and you know that’s when the Sendero Luminoso were just starting up, and I have a feeling that they got screwed by a socialist government or something like that, or he knew rich people in Chile who were screwed by the socialist government or something like that, so he was anti that. I’m not sure why though.
So just to telescope that whole Merritt thing: I did as little as I could and I survived on that money for four years doing little odd jobs and with veteran’s benefits, and I had a nice little apartment there on Haste street when I went to UC. I think Tina had already started going to UC; she was going to be a Spanish major; and that’s around that time that she finally kicked her husband out and we sort of became an item; but I was still living over there, you know, I didn’t want to let that go [mock hysteria]: I had my apartment; I didn’t want to let that go. So I survived there for quite a while, I think, you know, I survived like a year of school at UC, because I was studying Russian and linguistics. Oh, they had some great linguistics classes: Robin Lakoff, she was doing a great linguistics class, and I had the linguistics of Slavic languages with—I can’t remember her name now, I think she’s still over there (Glenn* knows, Glenn knows all these people).
Yeah. Did you know some of the people that we have worked with? Was Barry Jordan in…?
No, I didn’t know anybody like that. There were a couple of people from Merritt who were in the Merritt Russian class that were here too, but they were a year or so ahead. I mean it was serious, serious work here, this wasn’t no self-paced jazz. I mean they had real Russians [laughter]. They had some real Russians teaching them classes…
[Laughing] Not those fake Russians.
Not those fake Russians. And it was fast and furious, and you know the conversation classes were about conversation, and I never had anything to say even in English: Yeah, hi, how are you? and so on… So I couldn’t carry on a conversation in Russian because I couldn’t carry on a conversation in English. And I wasn’t interested in the literature part of it. I loved the linguistics classes and some of those things, so I started taking as much of those and backing off all the other required courses, like there was an awful awful course on the Russian Orthodox Church and how that… oh man! [chuckles] I don’t know how they got that in there. What was that? I don’t know, Slavic Theology or something like that.
That was not your cup of meat?
That’s right. I had to let that one go after a couple days, so my grades started getting bad and I knew that… I did have a work-study job or two here: I think I worked in payroll.
Really?
Yeah I worked like in… not payroll but, not accounting but, you know, where they actually give the money to the students: disbursements or something like that. Yeah. I did that for a while; I didn’t like that; then I got a job in the library. I think I’ll go get a job in the library. My first job in the library was targeting.
Targeting? What’s that?
That’s when you take these little magnetic strips and you put them on this big metal wand and you slide that metal wand down the spine of a book and you hold on to it and take the… smooth it down, let the metal strip which is adhesive adhere, and take the metal baton out, and you’ve got a little magnetic strip in the book. I was doing that in the Main stacks. That was the first wave of…
When they first had the system to…
When they first put the system in.
I need to turn the tape over. What year did you get your first library job?
I guess we’re in seventy-nine now [laughs]. We skipped a few years there [laughs]. But nothing happened, you know, not much happened, except ah… not much happened.
[End Tape 17, Side A]
So you’re studying Russian.
So I’m goin’ to school, goin’ to school, yeah. Well it was real, it was real nice. The teacher, Glenna Bryant, she was not a native speaker but she was an excellent speaker and an excellent teacher, and she prepared her own stuff and her own work; there was no textbook, and she had some stuff at the language lab, and the way it was engineered you really could go as fast or as deeply as you wanted to; and I tore it right up, I ate it right up so that by the end of that first semester I had gone beyond what she had prepared even for those who wanted to take ten units and I was doing other stuff for her too, you know, she was on the verge of becoming an administrator, and so the next semester after that she was only able to devote a little bit of time to Russian and I was sort of helping her out in the class, and the next semester after that I was sort of doing the class [laughs].
Really?
Yeah, for intro level people, you know, for intro level people, just getting them started.
So how was your accent?
That’s really, as it turns out you know, because I tried to carry it over to UC Berkeley, I wasn’t interested in conversation [laughs] and I wasn’t interested in literature, I was only interested in the mechanics of the language, you know, the production of the speech and the beauty of the sounds.
Really?
Yeah, so I never got into… that’s why I kind of finally dropped out and bombed out at Berkeley because it got to be more concentration on the lit… you know it was Slavic languages and literature, that was the major. It was more a concentration on the literature, you know, it was more of that academic analysis that I hated so much, only this time in Russian!
So were you interested in the literature for yourself, I mean just to read it for your own?
Oh yeah! I was that, that’s true, and in fact two or three of us spun off from the class and outside of the class—this is for, you know, quite a while—we would meet and read to ourselves, you know, we’d have parallel textbooks and we’d read a certain point and then, without trying to do too much English, try and explain the terms that we didn’t know and so on. So that was a little later phase, but in the first part of it I was just soaking all this stuff up, because a lot of it was, a lot of the pacing, the so-called self-paced, whether you went from one level onto the next, was passing a test and I was always good at them tests, so I knew how to do that, so I was up to the ten units real quick; that’s really all I cared about at that point. It was like the second semester and into the other years that I started doing other things. But that was ten units. The other two units I had to take, you know, I took a silk-screening class and I think I took a music class, maybe an art class; took a couple art classes, art appreciation type classes and I’d just fall asleep because they showed slides: as soon as they turned the light off, that was my cue [laughs] because I couldn’t stay concentrated enough. I never did get the whole Ionic, Doric, Corinthian column thing straight, and what’s the difference between Rococo and… whatever that other kind is. I can picture Rococo architecture now but I can’t picture…
Rocky Rococo*.
[Peter Lorre voice] Rocky Rococo… Betty Joe Bialosky* [laughter]… Lee Roy started taking some classes up at Merritt too, so sometimes we’d ride the bus together. He was taking a lot of ornamental horticulture type classes. Now I could make some extra money by working in the Office of Veteran’s Affairs there at Merritt, so I started doing that, you know, because they had a big Office of Veteran’s Affairs: a lot of the people who were at Merritt were getting their two hundred forty-eight dollars too [laughter]. Plus they made veterans’ loans available, and I glommed on those right away.
What were you borrowing money for?
Errr…
What the heck.
Yeah, what the heck, it was there. It was like Mount Everest [laughs]. It was available.
And you didn’t have to pay ten for twenty.
No, you didn’t have to pay ten for twenty, and as it turns out, you know, you could string ‘em along… you were supposed to start paying after you… well you weren’t supposed to be eligible if you weren’t carrying a full-time load and you could start paying after you graduated, so that’s another reason I kept going and going twice as long: four years instead of two years, is to back that off. I paid ‘em all off though. I don’t think Lee Roy did. I think every now and then he gets a call from the Veterans’ office. Yeah, okay, I’ll send you a dollar. A lot of people defaulted on those veterans’ loans. But you know we all sort of looked out for each other. The Veterans’ Office, the people who were staffing the Veterans’ office were… probably the chief was a veteran and there were a lot of students there who were veterans, so you know we watched each other’s back. After a while they put a ringer in there. They sent a representative from the Veterans’ Administration; she had a little office in there too, so it was kind of hard to get things by her; you could still do it a little bit. I think I could… yeah, I got work-study helping out in various ways. I can’t remember… well one thing I did was—during the summer I think it was (was it? I don’t know)—it was a video course, and so this teacher, Annette Macomus, who was a… I guess her husband was a science fiction writer: she knew a lot about science fiction, she was some kind of English person, but they were doing this tele-course on, jeez, Elizabethan drama I guess: the plays of… that’s what they were showing on TV were the plays of Kyd and, I don’t know, all sorts of people. Is that Elizabethan?
Yeah, and also they don’t get shown, I mean they’re not done that much: The Spanish Tragedie of Kyd…
Yeah. If I had been paying attention I would have watched those shows [laughs], because they had all the material, so I was just helping her with the… you know every now and then all the tele-students would have to meet and take a test, actually meet on campus, so I helped with the, you know, that was one of my work-study jobs; and I don’t remember any more.
So you would add to your two hundred…
… forty-eight, yeah, from time to time I’d get some little bits and pieces here and there. And then, you know, I’d try anything: once I was handing out handbills for some restaurant, and I was helping one of the guys in the veterans’ office who was making Tibetan style hats out of rabbit skins; so I’d go to his house and he’d get all these skins out and you’d punch holes around the periphery of them and thong ‘em up and then take ‘em, you know, just little piece work, and then he’d take ‘em to the lady who was actually selling them, so, you know, just little bits and pieces here and there, nothing too heavy, nothing too taxing.
What was Kathy’s response to your new life?
Well, it was pretty good at first because, you know, there was money, there was more money involved and we could go places, go out to eat and maybe go to San Francisco or something like that, but we were sort of drifting away for a whole variety of reasons, drifting apart, and I eventually drifted all the way apart, and I found myself an apartment and you know we were basically done. And she was involved in women’s groups, women’s activities, she would have women’s meetings over at her house from time to time.
I remember that those years—seventy-two, seventy-three—wasn’t that kind of the…?
Yeah, seventy-three, seventy-four it was the height, you know, all that… Sisterhood is Powerful, all that stuff was coming out.
So did that kind of become an absorbing thing for her the way these other things were becoming for you, Russian and all?
No, no, not really, because I mean she was really interested in all these things and was going with that flow and she was keeping journals and, you know, she developed a whole new side of herself and I hadn’t [laughs] and I wasn’t interested in anything really, I mean I wasn’t absorbed by anything. I was having fun but it wasn’t, you know, it could have stopped the next day and it would have been fine, I would have gone and rolled on to something else; but she was really interested in this stuff, and as it turns out she had another angle too: it turns out she was a lesbian [laughs]; it turns out later, you know.
Was this a surprise to you?
No, well, sure it was a surprise to me. Oh… The first thing I think of is: What have I done to this woman? [laughing] It’s all my fault! [laughs]
[Laughing] You’ve driven her off of men entirely.
But no, she just moved in that way, you know. I think it happened, I think it was kind of a thing that happened to a lot of people, a lot of women at that time, you know: this huge ground-swelling of consciousness raising and the closeness of all these other women who feel just like you do and who are also developing new ways of thinking and new understandings and that sort of thing. It was all kind of serious, but of course I wasn’t able to take it seriously, so I wasn’t… I thought it was fun, in fact I’m starting to make friends there in my Russian class and one of the women who was like a little, she was in like the year ahead of me, she had been going there for a while, she had been in Russian for a year already; I didn’t know any of these people but as I became more self-paced I started crawling up into their realm because I was leaving the other beginners behind, I was advancing ahead up to where they already were. So there was a woman there, she was like a… she had a husband and a child and she was older than the others and I said: Oh, you might be interested in this women’s group, so I hipped her to it too. So she, Tina [laughs], started attending these women’s groups also with Kathy and so, you know, so there was all that synergy or linkage going on too. And I had moved off by myself by then and I was living in various apartments, yeah. I lived in lots of different places and sometimes with a couple of people: I lived in a room in a guy and his wife’s house for a while. So again, just trying to find… and I had a room over there on Arch Street for a while, just looking, you know, looking to find that perfect place, and abandoning the one I was in when I got tired of it, or maybe I didn’t have enough money to cover that month’s rent and I had to go cool it somewhere else for a month before I saved it up again.
Was it pretty hard to make that money cover the…?
Yeah, it really wasn’t much, I mean it was nice when I was in Kathy’s place ‘cause she carried a lot of it; that was a real apartment with a real living-room and TV and all that stuff and a porch and furniture [laughs], some of those things.
[Laughing] Strange, strange concepts.
Yeah, but it was easy to go from room to room; I don’t think it’s so easy now, you know, you could rent a room for a month for $75 or something like that. Now it’s probably 750 [laughs]. So I wasn’t too… I mean I wasn’t heartbroken or anything like that because as I say we weren’t really hooked up that tight then anyway: I missed the apartment [laughs], I confess!
Did she sort of break it to you? I mean how did you get the news that she was…?
I don’t remember; it think it just happened; it was in the air; and also I was aware there was one of these women that she was particularly interested in, you know, I sort of knew them because—actually I did live there when—because I had to go away when it was time for the group to come in on group nights, I had to go away. Sometimes she had to go away, but on those nights I had to go away so they could have the, you know, so there weren’t no men around [laughs]! I tried to tell them that I wasn’t a real man.
[Laughs] He’s just a girly-man. How radical would you say it was? I mean would you say there was a lesbian separatist element? Was it the radical edge or was it kind of middling…?
Yeah, yeah, I think it was, and I don’t think that many of them knew exactly what was going on. As time went on… I think of all the people—I think Mike Stanis’s wife was also in this group too—and you know some of them were already friends and were already on the same wavelength more or less; but no, it wasn’t political, it was all personal and it was all, a lot of it was social, you know, just social, because Kathy didn’t have a lot of friends either, which was probably my fault, you know, because I never wanted to do anything; I still don’t [chuckles], you know, as a couple or anything like that; in fact [laughing] I don’t even want to do anything as a single [laughter].
You just don’t want to do anything, period.
No, I don’t want to, I don’t want to. I will if I can go in five minutes [laughter]…. So it was okay, and, you know, it just freed me up in another way actually. I missed some of the comforts, of course, the comforts of home, but pretty soon I was meeting with all these people for readings and that sort of thing and one of the people I was meeting with, we were all meeting with, was Tina. She was in the Russian class.
This is your Tina?
This is my current wife, yes. This is my third or fourth wife, I can’t remember which, one of my wives. So sometimes we’d go over to her house, which is now my house, our house, so she was living here then—this is seventy-three—had been living there for a while with--
--And she was married?—
She was married—with her husband and her little boy, Matthew; and so sometimes we’d go over to her house and do Russian on the front lawn or inside the house or something like that, and then suddenly I started going over there all by myself and we’d do a little Russian now, sometimes, and, you know, we got to talking and, you know, she had an unhappy marriage and things were sort of drifting apart, and I didn’t do anything, I didn’t do anything to…
You’re not a home wrecker?
I’m not a home wrecker. I didn’t do anything to encourage it; but I didn’t need to do anything, it was bad enough. And you know there were some vibes there but we didn’t really, we didn’t really do anything bad or even talk about it really. She really liked Monty Python, and that was a plus, so, you know, sometimes we’d sit over in the cafeteria at Merritt and I’d just go through Monty Python routines. And I just liked the whole… whenever I’d go over to her house she’d be playing big band music on the radio, there was like a forties station, big band station, and I just liked the way she was with her son and the way she was with other people, and I just thought she was enormously courageous too to do all the stuff she… I think she was working and she had to take care of her child and she had these problems with her husband and she went to school too, so she was doing all this stuff and, you know, I thought that was real brave.
It sounds like her husband wasn’t too much help when it came to the day-to-day things.
I guess not; I guess not; and, you know, I’ve heard lots of stories since then about how bad he was and how much she hated him [laughs] and the things that he did. Got married real young….
But she didn’t unload too much to you about…?
No, no.
She didn’t say: This is horrible or…?
No, none of that came out then; she didn’t do any of that. I mean it became clear in one way or another that it was deteriorating, and I made sure that I was going to be there when it did [laughs]. You know, somehow or other I was gonna be in the vicinity, but it was kind of a long process, and in the meantime I was… Lee Roy was working at Kip’s. They had a bar there, they had a pool hall there in Kip’s, so he found some job working in the pool hall and he got himself an apartment over on Dwight Way, right across from Herrick Hospital; that building is torn down now; but he was going back to Ohio—he comes from Ohio—he was going back to Ohio for a long time for some reason and asked me if I was interested in the apartment and I was, and so I took over that apartment, and so that’s why I was living there for sort of the tail end of my Merritt time and the beginning of my UC time.
So how long were you at Merritt before you transferred?
I was at Merritt four years. I managed to stretch it out to four years.
[Laughing] You got four years out of that?
Yes, and I was taking, you know, more language classes were self-paced, so I wanted to make sure I had that twelve units, so I was taking language classes, and some of them I wasn’t doing so good in, and then I’m starting to think: this is gonna end and I’m gonna have to go somewhere else if I want that—I could still get veteran’s benefits, I think you could do it for six years or something like that, I’m not sure.
What other languages did you take?
I took some Spanish and took a French class and took a German class and took an Indo-European linguistics type of class. They had some pretty good teachers there at Merritt and they were payin’ ‘em well; they could have worked at UC but I think they were paying ‘em more for what they were doing at… the Peralta colleges were paying well. The tuition was free, and then it went up to a whopping two dollars. I took some earth sciences type classes and some California immigrants classes and that sort of thing, but I didn’t take no gym. I didn’t take no gym classes.
For other people gym is Mickey Mouse, but for you it’s a certain F [laughter].
I hated that. That’s right; I had to keep my grade point up. So I took all these classes and got to know all the language teachers; there was a couple of good ones, and I met one real crazy guy there who was also taking lots of classes. His name was Jose Louis Fernandini, he was from Peru. He was a real character. It turns out later he was a real right wing… I went to his apartment once and I went inside and closed the door and he had this great big picture of Pinochet on his door [laughs]. Yeah, he was a Pinochet lover. But he was kind of funny too. He loved Dylan; he loved to sing Dylan in his, he had this great crazy Peruvian accent. Sometimes he’d call me up at twelve o’clock at night, drunk and singing some Dylan song with his accent. I heard… no, no, this is true, I talked to him later on, he started his own tour guide business in San Francisco and he himself conducts the tours and he can do it in Spanish, German, French, Italian, something else, I can’t remember. So he was pretty polyglot.
He did well in the language classes.
Yeah, he did well. He’s the one who told me once—he always had eighteen-year-old girlfriends, you know he was probably pushing thirty by then—he always had eighteen-year-old girlfriends and he always said he had to get rid of them, you know, when they became nineteen or twenty or something like that.
They were too old.
Yeah, too old. He’s the one that once, I got these sandals, like Italian sandals, and they had just little straps around the top part of the foot, and he saw them and he said: Do they make those for men too? So he was always ready with a quip [laughter].
A wise guy.
Yeah, he was a wise guy.
Did he ever go into the reasons behind his love for Pinochet?
Not in so many words. I had the feeling that his family was rich in Peru and you know that’s when the Sendero Luminoso were just starting up, and I have a feeling that they got screwed by a socialist government or something like that, or he knew rich people in Chile who were screwed by the socialist government or something like that, so he was anti that. I’m not sure why though.
So just to telescope that whole Merritt thing: I did as little as I could and I survived on that money for four years doing little odd jobs and with veteran’s benefits, and I had a nice little apartment there on Haste street when I went to UC. I think Tina had already started going to UC; she was going to be a Spanish major; and that’s around that time that she finally kicked her husband out and we sort of became an item; but I was still living over there, you know, I didn’t want to let that go [mock hysteria]: I had my apartment; I didn’t want to let that go. So I survived there for quite a while, I think, you know, I survived like a year of school at UC, because I was studying Russian and linguistics. Oh, they had some great linguistics classes: Robin Lakoff, she was doing a great linguistics class, and I had the linguistics of Slavic languages with—I can’t remember her name now, I think she’s still over there (Glenn* knows, Glenn knows all these people).
Yeah. Did you know some of the people that we have worked with? Was Barry Jordan in…?
No, I didn’t know anybody like that. There were a couple of people from Merritt who were in the Merritt Russian class that were here too, but they were a year or so ahead. I mean it was serious, serious work here, this wasn’t no self-paced jazz. I mean they had real Russians [laughter]. They had some real Russians teaching them classes…
[Laughing] Not those fake Russians.
Not those fake Russians. And it was fast and furious, and you know the conversation classes were about conversation, and I never had anything to say even in English: Yeah, hi, how are you? and so on… So I couldn’t carry on a conversation in Russian because I couldn’t carry on a conversation in English. And I wasn’t interested in the literature part of it. I loved the linguistics classes and some of those things, so I started taking as much of those and backing off all the other required courses, like there was an awful awful course on the Russian Orthodox Church and how that… oh man! [chuckles] I don’t know how they got that in there. What was that? I don’t know, Slavic Theology or something like that.
That was not your cup of meat?
That’s right. I had to let that one go after a couple days, so my grades started getting bad and I knew that… I did have a work-study job or two here: I think I worked in payroll.
Really?
Yeah I worked like in… not payroll but, not accounting but, you know, where they actually give the money to the students: disbursements or something like that. Yeah. I did that for a while; I didn’t like that; then I got a job in the library. I think I’ll go get a job in the library. My first job in the library was targeting.
Targeting? What’s that?
That’s when you take these little magnetic strips and you put them on this big metal wand and you slide that metal wand down the spine of a book and you hold on to it and take the… smooth it down, let the metal strip which is adhesive adhere, and take the metal baton out, and you’ve got a little magnetic strip in the book. I was doing that in the Main stacks. That was the first wave of…
When they first had the system to…
When they first put the system in.
I need to turn the tape over. What year did you get your first library job?
I guess we’re in seventy-nine now [laughs]. We skipped a few years there [laughs]. But nothing happened, you know, not much happened, except ah… not much happened.
[End Tape 17, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:10 PM
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