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Prologue
Subject A: Bonehead English
Experiencing a spiritual epiphany is like hallucinating from a drug overdose. Both alter your future in ways you can never imagine. While you’re under the influence of either, you’re acutely aware that something inexplicable and bizarre is occurring, but you don’t want the vision to end until you’ve figured out what’s causing you to look at your life with a surreal insight.
On my eighteenth birthday in October 1976, while waiting at the Berkeley BART station, I noticed a young woman board the train several cars from where I stood. She was dressed similar to me, wearing a blue sweatshirt with an embossed gold script Cal logo, straight-leg blue jeans, and carried a heavy book pack. From her clothes, she looked like a freshman university student. As I stood in the aisle, grasping a handhold ceiling strap in a jam-packed rocking train of silent commuters headed towards the end of the line in Richmond, I felt compelled to talk to her.
Was she commuting each day to school as I was? Would she be riding the same connecting bus to my hometown of Briones Valley, a small, middle-class suburb on the banks of San Pablo Bay? Was she also living with her parents while attending her first year at the University of California, Berkeley?
On this milestone birthday, I had become an adult in the eyes of the law. Yet, not a single student, teacher, person or nonfamily member noticed or cared. Except for my teaching assistant in chemistry, who spoke only to impart scientific knowledge while holding a piece of chalk, no one had uttered a single word to me or conversed with me that day.
I had just endured an interminable four hours in a chemistry lab, trying to attain some subatomic result within a minor standard deviation of acceptable answers. I had failed miserably. My calculus homework remained in my book pack unopened.I would be spending my first evening of adulthood trying to resolve equations I would never understand.
However, I wanted to understand her and without a contrived plan of what I was going to say, I urged myself forward, bumping against people who were standing firm in the aisles and traversed my way from train car to train car.
“Hi, I’m Derek Marston. Are we in the same Subject A class?” I thought that would break the ice, assuming she knew what Subject A was.
Or perhaps: “Weren’t you in my high school photography class?” But that line would ring hollow if she had attended a school that was small enough that every senior knew every other senior, and besides, I was a college man now. Why bring up a past I was glad to escape?
In the third train car, I saw the back of her head. I hurriedly sat in the empty seat opposite her, trying not to smile at my lucky break.
As I looked into her face to speak, I was revolted at the sight. My beguiling woman wore a reddish brown shag hairdo as disheveled as a cheap wig hastily pinned to a Styrofoam head. Her wrinkled face, lined with age, was pocked with red freckles and her bulging eyes and gaunt cheeks gave her a ghoulish appearance.
Despite her ghastly look, she had a tiny-jeweled earring in her pierced left ear that stood-out like a small diamond in a coal slag. She was the woman I had seen entering the train, and she must have seen the disappointment in my face.
“You must leave,” she said, staring at my brow.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize the seat was taken.” I was looking for a graceful way out of my dilemma.
“No. Stay seated. You must leave your home and find happiness.”
Why was she telling me this?
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This episode is based on a true story.
Although seventy-five percent of this memoir is factual, liberties were taken with the other twenty-five percent for plot purposes. That is where scenes were recreated from memory when they were not clearly defined in the journals written by the author from 1976 to 1980.
Individual characters are composites of several people and do not represent any one person, and the names have been changed to protect innocent people that may be guilty of indiscretions in their youth.
