Telegraph Avenue and the Air-Conditioned Nightmare

(A Memory from the Edge of the Crowd)

I dunno. I think I was a sophomore in high school—so that would be 1964, or thereabouts. I’d spent the summer skipping my monthly haircut. It wasn’t long by today’s standards, but in Richmond, it was long. That was fine. I saved my allowance and spent it on paperbacks.

I was consuming them at a voracious rate.

Unfortunately, my selection was determined by the library at The Hole in the Wall junk store. I think the owner found most of the books in local dumpsters. I was buying books that had been thrown away. More importantly, I was reading books that had been thrown away.

Apparently, science fiction was considered disposable then—because there was a lot of it. That’s how I learned to read everything by a writer I liked. Robert Heinlein was king.

Every now and then, I’d find something different. Like The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. Powerful stuff—but I couldn’t find anything else by him. Then I found Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Well now—banned in Boston and sexy as all get out. Sure enough, someone threw out Tropic of Capricorn. I was on a roll.

One day I scored Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus. I had reading material for weeks. By then, the books weren’t even sexy anymore—but they were still banned. All of them were published by Grove Press. None of the local bookstores carried Grove Press. A clerk finally told me the only store he knew that did was in Berkeley.

Berkeley was only fifteen miles south, but it might as well have been 400 for a kid without a car and no idea how to transfer from one bus to another.

The junk store kept getting repeats. I needed new books. So I studied a map, found a bus line that dropped me near University Avenue, and decided to walk the extra miles up to Telegraph. I could have gotten a transfer, but I walked.

The bookstore was there—on Telegraph Avenue. The center of the college student universe. I’d buy a couple of books, then wander over to campus to start reading.

That’s where I first saw Mario Savio, and the Free Speech Movement. They spoke to crowds gathered under the trees. I listened from the edge. I was intrigued.

For the next year or so, I kept coming. I’d buy banned books, read on campus, and linger on the edge of the protests.

Then I got older.

At sixteen, I wasn’t on the edge anymore. I was in the crowd—being shoved, clubbed, tear-gassed.

I got much older.

Somewhere in there I read The Air-Conditioned Nightmare by Henry Miller. It was first published in 1945—about his cross-country tour of America after years as an expatriate. He wasn’t impressed. He saw what others ignored. Long before On the Road, Miller was already writing from the outside.

I thought, I want to do that.

My English teacher pointed me toward the Beats. I found Kerouac. I returned to Cody’s Bookstore for more education.

I didn’t go to UC Berkeley. But I had my education on the streets of Berkeley, and in the stacks of Cody’s.

I came of age on Telegraph Avenue.

Sometimes now I think I grew older too soon.

I’m in Berkeley today. There’s not much left from those days.

The bookstores are gone.

The junk shops replaced.

The coffee shops have surrendered to Starbucks and Peet’s.

Change is everywhere.

Which just proves:

I am older.

And I remember too much.