My sister, Paula, and I were just kids in 1965—ten and nine, respectively—when an article about our half-brother, Joseph, my father’s son from his first marriage and named (I long thought) for Joseph Schildkraut, appeared on Saturday on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. Joseph has always been the hippest person I’ve known. Walt Disney’s death, he once informed me, was the greatest day in American cinema. His three favorite movies are The Terminator, Thief, and 2001: all attitude. He once did a U-turn in a kelly-green Triumph (with me in it) across an eight-lane highway. He’s always seemed very male (as a child he went in for the sheriff’s costumes and Lone Ranger outfits that never had much appeal for me), endearingly vague, elegant, handsome, and cheerful, if a bit self-satisfied.
Now he owns a film-editing company, but in 1965 he was a senior at Berkeley and, according to the article on the front page of the Chronicle, “part of a vast and busy University of California drug-peddling operation.” The article was headlined “Big UC Campus Drug Case—Hunt for ‘Mr. Big.’ ” Joseph wasn’t Mr. Big—“allegedly a Berkeley campus source of large quantities of narcotics and so-called mind-expanding drugs such as LSD and DMT”—but it was clear he was on speaking terms with Mr. Big: “Officers went to Shields’s apartment at 1709 Channing Way and found therein, they said, 720 ampules of DMT with an estimated market value of $1,500.” The usual retro pleasures are present when reading an old newspaper article:
A meeting had been arranged for yesterday at which Detro and Jimenez were to buy $10,000 worth of LSD from Mr. Big. But Mr. Big failed to appear and had, in fact, vanished.
Jimenez and Detro recalled that during one of their early meetings in the San Pablo Avenue bar, Mr. Big had demanded that they put up part of the money in advance. They refused.
“Well, like, man, I don’t know you guys,” Mr. Big replied, “and you could be narcos (police).
“You know, the State got 50 new undercover men.”
Jimenez answered, “I never heard of a bust (arrest) at UC.”
Joseph had to reassure my father that he was completely innocent—he had no idea what his roommates were doing with so many glass ampules; he thought it was part of a lab experiment—and my sister and I had to worry all weekend about what taunts would greet us at school on Monday. The funny thing was that no one, not friends or fellow students or teachers or the principal, seemed to have seen the article, or if they did see it, they didn’t connect it to us, or perhaps they simply had the grace not to wonder aloud (it’s a common enough name, I suppose, and we’ve never looked that much alike, Joseph and I). So what I did after several days of silence—and I’ve never known whether my sister did the same; we weren’t prone to compare notes about this kind of an event—was to bring the article to school and wave it in people’s faces and in that way glean at least a little glamour from the guilt by association.