Madman, thou errest: I say, there is no darkness but ignorance, in which thou art more puzzled than the Egyptians in their fog.
— Clown, Twelfth Night, IV.ii.42
As he walked onto the campus where his father had worked Willie’s whole life, the drug raid in Santa Cruz seemed like the distant past. Today was Thursday, and he wouldn’t be able to complete his delivery to the Renaissance Faire until Saturday. He was grateful for the chance of a couple of days in Berkeley, his hometown, to collect his thoughts, to be himself.
“Thanks for meeting me,” Willie said to Robin as they walked under the redwoods and the giant eucalyptus grove along Strawberry Creek. Willie liked this part of the walk; the trees formed a pleasant, transitional buffer zone from Santa Cruz to Berkeley. “I thought I was surprising you.”
“You told me on Monday you were coming. I thought I’d surprise you.”
“I don’t remember telling you.”
“You were probably stoned.”
They came out of the trees and under the shadow of the gigantic Life Sciences Building, PHYSIOLOGY and BACTERIOLOGY looming over them in towering neoclassical letters above a wide lawn. Willie felt a tug of pride as he passed the familiar Department of Dramatic Art, nestled in a small wood-shingle shack in a shady spot. Across a circular driveway, the marquee of Durham Studio Theater advertised DOGG’S HAMLET / CAHOOT’S MACBETH. They crossed the creek over a stone bridge, and a short flight of steps brought them up to the wide cement expanse of Lower Sproul Plaza, largely empty but for a few students, late to their nine o’clock classes, watched from on high by the statue of a Golden Bear. Robin stopped at a prominent bulletin board in front of the Bear’s Lair, the campus pub. The plywood was covered with notices of rooms to rent, bands playing clubs, political manifestos, plays opening.
Robin took a stack of flyers and a staple gun from her book bag. “Hold this,” she said, handing Willie the flyers as she took one, and with a confident ka-thwunk of the staple gun, pinned it to the board.
RALLY FRIDAY!!!!
TIMOTHY LEARY
Speaks out against Carlton Turner, Ronald Reagan, and the
Fascist Tactics of the DEA
12:00 Noon
Upper Sproul Plaza
BRING SIGNS! BE HEARD!!!
This announcement brought to you by the committee to
F$¢K REAGAN!
“Who’s Carlton Turner?” Willie asked.
Robin looked at him as if he were from another planet. “Reagan’s drug czar since nineteen eighty-two?”
Willie hadn’t followed politics, or much of anything, very closely during his years in Santa Cruz. “Right, right. And what’s he doing now?”
Robin gave Willie a withering look. “Burr-other. It’s true what they say about Santa Cruz, you really do have your head in the clouds. Have you heard of a little thing called the Anti-Drug Abuse Act?”
“Enlighten me.”
As she moved around Lower Sproul Plaza, handing out and pasting up flyers, Robin told Willie about the Act: new legislation just signed by President Reagan that required mandatory prison sentences for first-time drug users. The only out: finking on other drug users. “I can see it now,” she said. “Kids who get busted for crack turning in their parents because they have some hash in the underwear drawer.”
“Oh, come on, that’s not gonna happen,” Willie said defensively, but he again had a vision of Todd at a metal desk under a single bare lightbulb.
“And the worst part is, there’s a scale for the sentencing. Marijuana gets less jail time than crack. You know what that means?”
“More brothers in prison than suburban whites,” said Willie, but his mind was busy trying to guess where on the sentencing scale giant psilocybin mushrooms fell.
“Yes. It’s totally racist. Oh, and there was a vast budget increase for the Drug Enforcement Agency. They’re using copters, planes, who knows, probably spy satellites, too, all over California.” She looked at Willie seriously. “You and your friends should be careful.”
Willie unconsciously shifted the weight of the duffel bag on his shoulder.
Robin continued, “So . . . we’re going to try to take down Carlton Turner.”
“With Timothy Leary? Is he the most credible opposition you could find?”
“He’s more credible than Carlton Turner. In Berkeley at least. You know what Turner said last week? That marijuana — did you hear this? — marijuana causes both homosexuality and compromised immune systems . . . and therefore, the AIDS crisis.”
“No way.”
“That’s right,” Robin said, “according to Reagan’s top drug man, pot causes AIDS. Again . . . you should be careful.”
Willie was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable. “I have been experiencing unusual cravings for butt-love recently.”
“Leary’s nuts, but Carlton Turner is evil and nuts.”
“Maybe he’s not evil,” said Willie. “Maybe he’s just a repressed, gay, self-loathing, alcoholic Republican.”
Robin smiled cynically. “They always are.”
She had finished papering Lower Sproul, and they trotted up the steps to Upper Sproul Plaza. For Willie, any vestigial feeling of the quiet, misty forests of Santa Cruz faded. The plaza was a giant petri dish of political life. Faculty, staff, and students of every age and description bustled to and from classes.
A short, dark woman in fatigues hawked copies of The Daily Worker. “The Soviet Union will outlast America! Read why here!”
A long-haired, spiral-eyed Jesus freak with a megaphone read from Revelation:
“Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?”
He continued his rant as Robin and Willie passed, but his brimstone eyes bored in on Willie and screamed, “Sinner!”
Along the length of Sproul Plaza, leading toward Sather Gate, there were tables arrayed end to end in the shade of two lines of pollarded trees. There were tables for undergrad collegiate pursuits: the French Club, the Geography Club, the Chess Club, and the Latin Club. There were tables for ethnic associations, staffed by lonely, long-faced students offering support for other lonely, long-faced students from Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Africa, Palestine — the latter being the longest faces of all. There were also tables for Jews for Jesus, Buddhists for Jesus, and Christians for Buddha. The Democratic Party, the Communist Party, and the Green Party were there. PETA, YMCA, NOW, and the ACLU were all represented. There were tables for support groups for the transsexual, the transgendered, and the transcendent. There were tables hawking hawkishness, and tables hawking dovishness. Right to Life, Right to Death, Death to Gay Rights, they were all here. And there were actually people checking out the tables, too, picking up flyers, signing petitions, and talking earnestly to the earnest kids sitting behind them.
Only one table was entirely forlorn, a single, melancholy, well-dressed, clean-shaven young man sitting behind it: this was the Berkeley outpost of the Log Cabin Republicans. The Gay Old Party was not a big demographic in Berkeley.
And there were the crazy people. William the Polka-Dot Man lay in front of Sather Gate at the campus’s nineteenth-century entrance, wearing a white jumpsuit covered with large red dots and controlling the silent machinery that prevented the Apocalypse. The Piano Man (not, thankfully, Billy Joel) played standards on a piano that appeared on Sproul each morning from who knows where? The Bubble Lady blew soap bubbles from a small green container and sold copies of her quite good books of poetry. The Hate Man said clearly and viciously to Robin and Willie as they passed, “I hate you,” as he did to everyone, all day, every day. Then there was the man who wandered around the plaza muttering nonstop in some sort of high-level mathematical language, but who — either by choice or by curious lack of the self-promotional abilities possessed of the other Berkeley madmen- and madwomen-savants — had no snappy moniker: he was just Serge. Willie listened for a couple of seconds as he passed: “The imaginary number square root of negative one times Planck’s constant divided by two pi . . .” Rumor had it that he was a former physics professor who took too much acid.
And then there were the performers. A solo guitarist played classical versions of Beatles songs. There was Stoney Burke, crazy or crazy like a fox, ranting a political comedy diatribe to a small audience. A juggler juggled a chain saw, a bowling ball, and an egg while his partner lay beneath him protecting his crotch to much laughter.
Robin was sticking a flyer to the side of the Piano Man’s piano (by his silent, nodded permission) when Willie heard someone saying, “But soft, what wind through yonder lighter breaks?” Willie turned to the sound, and saw that on the steps of Sproul Hall, the very steps from which Mario Savio ignited the free speech movement in 1964, there were two young men, one freakishly tall, wearing tights, puffy shirts, and high-top sneakers, performing Romeo and Juliet to a craning crowd of two or three dozen students. He nudged Robin. “I’m gonna go check these guys out.”
Robin nodded, uninterested. “Okay.”
As he approached, Willie saw that the two men were actually three. One, wearing a bad wig and a dress, sat atop the shoulders of the third, whose head was cloistered under “her” skirt. “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? . . . Romeo?” The handsome, bearded Romeo was busy hitting on a hot girl in the front row. “Up here, Romeo,” said Juliet, then screaming with sudden hysteria, “on the balcony, you fucking moron!”
The crowd laughed.
“Dude,” responded Romeo (after handing the cute girl his card), “you can’t say ‘fuck.’ This is a facility of higher learning.”
“No, it isn’t, this is Berkeley.” Another laugh. “I can say whatever I want to,” Juliet continued. “The free speech movement started right here on these steps. Joan Baez sang here!”
“Joan Baez sucks!” said Romeo.
“Fuck you, Romeo,” said Juliet.
The crowd, which had already doubled since Willie arrived, laughed uproariously. They were eating it up.
“Would you please say your next line!?” said Romeo.
Juliet crossed her arms petulantly. “I’m exercising my freedom of speech by not saying it.”
“Just say it,” Romeo pleaded.
A line from the scene suddenly popped into Willie’s head. He couldn’t resist, and called out, “O gentle Romeo, if thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully!”
The performers stopped, and turned to stare Willie down. The guy playing Romeo said, “Oh great, now we got a Shakespeare wannabe in the crowd.” Laughter. Romeo continued to cut Willie, the heckler, down to size. “That’s totally not the next line. You just skipped the whole balcony scene, genius.”
From under Juliet’s dress came the heavily muffled sound of the poor third actor. It sounded something like “That’s fine with me!”
The crowd roared.
Juliet wiggled on his shoulders. “Quit it!” she said to the man under her dress. “Your beard scratches when you talk!”
The crowd roared again.
“Okay, Shakespeare,” said Romeo to Willie, “give me the cue one more time.”
“O gentle Romeo,” said Willie, “if thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully!”
Then, acting to Juliet but pointing pointedly at Willie, Romeo said, “Lady, by yonder blessed virgin, I swear.”
Willie smiled his most charming smile and said, “Fuck you, Romeo.”
The crowd roared again.
“Okay, being funnier than us is not allowed,” said Romeo.
The troupe moved on and rocketed through their shtick to a final tragic death tableau of Juliet splayed out on top of Romeo, dress hiked up to show most unladylike tighty-whities.
Willie laughed through the whole thing, and so did Robin. It had taken ten minutes, and they passed the hat afterward. It seemed like almost everyone put a buck or two in the hat, partly because the troupe cleverly spread out and surrounded the audience: no one could get away without making eye contact with one of them. Willie had only nine bucks in his pocket for the entire weekend, but he felt bad about screwing up their act.
As Willie dropped one-ninth of his life’s savings in the hat, Romeo saw him. “Thanks. That was funny.” Willie watched the flow of dollar bills — and a couple of fives, and at least one joint — wondering idly just how much dough these guys pulled in, in one show; and wondering, less idly, just how many millions of dollars Shakespeare made in the world, between plays, movies, books, tourism — he must be a billion-dollar industry. And the money was only the surface: what about the intellectual, moral, philosophical, poetic capital? Thinking about it made Willie feel small, and the prospect of his unwritten thesis seem huge.
Willie found Robin in the middle of the plaza. She tucked her remaining flyers and her BluStik back in her Copymat bag.
“Okay, I’ve done my bit for saving the world this morning. I’ve got some time before my next class, you want to get coffee or something? I’m kinda hungry.”
It was a stunning day. Warm in the sun, cool in the shade. The preclass rush had quieted down a little. The Piano Man played “Moon River.” Willie glanced over to the northeast, where Strawberry Creek ran through the campus, shrouded in live oak and sequoia, ivy trailing down its banks. The first time Willie had visited Robin in Berkeley, on a summer Sunday when the campus was quiet, they had picnicked by the creek and made out . . . Willie had gotten a hummer.
Now, he gestured with a nod toward the trees. “Maybe you could have a quick snack by the creek?” The second he said it, he panicked with the possibility that she might say yes — his dick, he realized too late, was still crusty with dried Dashka.
“Mister One-Track Mind,” Robin said. “At this hour, I’d actually prefer coffee and a bagel to pure protein. Come on, I’ll buy.”
The couple headed out of Sproul Plaza toward Berkeley’s south side. The light at Bancroft Way changed. As Robin stepped out into the traffic first, she reached back to take Willie by the hand, and guided him toward the bustling morning jostle on Telegraph Avenue.