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A week later, I was in the UC housing office seeking a place to live for the Winter Quarter. I wanted to move into the dormitories on the south side of campus, but there were a dozen students on the waiting list. The fraternities had already had rush week, but if the frat boys were like the pompous and self-centered jerks I met in my classes, I wanted nothing to do with them.
On the Roommates Wanted board were two listings: one for a black nonsmoking vegetarian female into EST willing to share a room with a white lesbian Jewish female graduate student working on her master’s degree in Political Economics of Natural Resources. The other advertised for a male who was willing to live in a pool cabana illegally converted into an in-law unit and work as a pool-boy for the landlord in exchange for a lower rent. The landlord wanted prospective tenants to submit a picture with their application and be willing to discuss their top ten sexual turn-ons.
OK, I admit, the latter listing was from the Berkeley Barb, the local adult free weekly, in the personal classified section. I would have considered the listing, but I didn’t understand what the abbreviations GWM, S/M, N/S, B/D, m4mm meant.
My prospects looked bleak until I reached into my sweatshirt pocket and found a crumpled flyer from a hawker at Sather Gate. The flyer was for housing at the University Student Cooperative Association, or the Co-op. The handout advertised housing that was cheaper than the dormitories because it was student-run and operated. Each student had to contribute five-hours work a week at the house. The flyer said there were openings for Winter Quarter starting in January.
Here was my chance to move and be near campus. I applied for the first available spot at any of the eleven houses.
My inauspicious residency at Cloyne Court, 2600 Ridge Road, Berkeley, California, north of the UC campus, was about to begin.
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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.
