Journal of a Naked Poet - VI

In the summer of 1964 I applied to the University of California at Berkeley, and was accepted. I had to take a placement test for the Spanish language, and placed in the top ten out of two thousand students taking the test. But when I registered, I did a really stupid thing: I signed up for a full fifteen units, although I had to commute from SF by taking two buses, and had to work every day after school and on Saturday. To make things worse, my first class was at 8:00 a.m. Meanwhile, my paltry savings account was going down and down.

One day, while rushing from my linguistics class to my Shakespeare class with a heavy book briefcase, I walked smack into a glass door, which knocked me even sillier than I already was. This caused me to take stock and question the wisdom of what I was doing. But before that, something just as unexpected came along

It was the Free Speech Movement, the first of many such major protests on university campuses that would sweep across the U.S. Whole books have been written about it, but what I can tell you is this: it was very compelling, and I came to consider it more important than anything that was going on in the classrooms. Maybe it was, but I already had too many problems to be skipping classes.

I was one of the students who, practically in unison, dropped into a sitting position on the Sproul Plaza pavement around the campus police car that now held a fellow student, preventing the car from leaving. We sat around the car in shifts, and that night, after a Joan Baez concert in the Greek Theater, I came back again. It was dangerous in several ways. The campus police had been bolstered by the un-academied Oakland police. As we sat around the campus police car in a tangle of legs, the protesters passed around that it was Gandhi's birthday. It wasn't, but it gave us something inspiring to think about. We eventually went home, after the University administration agreed to a settlement (which they later reneged on).

By day, I would listen to Mario Savio, Bettina Aptheker, and others, sometimes wearing an armband. I sometimes trudged in a circle in front of Sproul Hall in my trench coat, carrying that heavy book bag that included the complete works of Shakespeare (I had to be dressed for work at Berlitz), while FBI agents took pictures of us from the Sproul steps. In the late afternoons I went straight to work, getting off around 9:15 p.m. and walking through the dark streets of the Tenderloin to get to my apartment. I often carried an umbrella (for possible use as a weapon). One night a menacing type started to approach me from across the street, and I pulled a screwdriver out of my trench coat pocket, knowing that in the light from the streetlight it would look like a knife. He crossed back over to the other side.

One day I signed a petition in support of the civil disobedience of the student protesters, which earned me a threatening letter from the Dean (I'll post it below if I can find it). I was always tired, and worse, I had no time to study. Finally, I decided that I had had enough.

Text © 2020 by Donald Jacobson Traxler.

Journal of a Naked Poet - V

The Sixties were important and seminal, in some ways life-changing, for me. The decade started out with my decision to leave the Jesuit novitiate. After a couple of years at San Diego City College, I moved to San Francisco. At the beginning of 1964 I got a studio apartment in the Tenderloin with a bed that unfolded out of the wall. It cost seventy dollars a month, and had steam heat. I moved there mainly for health reasons (the flat on Andover had unvented gas wall heaters that filled the place with humidity, and I had visions of ending up with TB, like my grandmothers brothers in Ireland had). That studio apartment reminds me of the song from My Fair Lady, "All I want is a room somewhere, with one great, enormous chair--oh wouldn't it be loverly . . ." I had that enormous chair, and it was exceedingly comfortable. The neighborhood, though, was another story. On Easter Sunday, 1964, I stepped out of my apartment building to see a man lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. He had been stabbed by another man, in a fight over a floozy from one of the bars across the street, The Round Table and The Square Chair. Another man was killed in my building. After that, the frail and  emphysemad old apartment manager from Chula Vista had to give up that job. He was replaced by a man from Tennessee who liked to sit on the front steps of the building with a shotgun across his lap. That settled things down.

For some reason, I must have thought I needed to be exposed to the seamy side of life. The neighborhood was full of prostitutes, boozers, and transvestites. The police constantly busted the hookers, especially the transvestites, but did little to make the neighborhood safe.

It was in that Tenderloin apartment that I first read TALES OF THE BAAL SHEM TOV, and TALES OF THE HASIDIM, vols. 1 and 2. This was formative for my spiritual outlook. I had a poster of Chagall's "Rabbi of Vitebsk" on the wall. I drew a large, decorative "shalom" (the Shin looked like a boat) on the shade that covered the unsightly light well.

At that time I was teaching English at the Berlitz school in San Francisco. One of my students, Miss Matsushita, was the daughter of the owner of the largest electrical company in Japan. It rankled me that she would soon be entering the University of California. I knew exactly how much English she could speak, since I was teaching her, and she was in no way ready. It was her father's money, and nothing else, that would get her in. I had always intended to go to Cal myself, and was certain that I would be admitted, though I had little in the way of funds. I decided to apply.

Text © 2020 by Donald Jacobson Traxler.