July 10, 2002 6:00 PM
I land on the moon

The People’s Park flap was gone almost three months. Chain link fence contained the place. The Manson family was driving around the town before going to LA on a rip. The Barb and the Tribe were passed out on each corner and down on University Ave peaches and penumbras were sold out the aisles of an all night grocery. It was July. It was the twentieth. It was 1969. And when Armstrong blew the line 240,000 miles away, my new wife and I were trudging up the stairs, carrying meager boxes and suitcases to Phil and Kay’s apartment at the Pacific School of Religion.

It took a couple weeks to get established. An apartment rented from Landlord Elmer over on Ashby, round the corner from the Black Panther National Headquarters. Two apartments down from the nightly concert given from Country Joe McDonald’s balcony. Five blocks from constant turmoil and riot control.

Came the looking for jobs. Andrea got one first at the Bank of America main office at the far end of the Tenderloin, home of P. Giannini. I cleaned an occasional movie theatre, applied to run a newspaper clipping service filled with chattering Hispanic women clicking scissors across a table, talked to one of the large grave insurance companies that abound across the Bay Bridge. Walked Hammett’s dark streets in a tie and sport coat. Out of place in almost every world that San Fran exhibited.

I would find solace during this period of unemployment, in two places. Ocean side San Francisco in Golden Gate Park there was a bandstand filled with empty concert chairs. I would read and dream between unemployed appointments. In Oakland, I would go to Lake Merritt, blue water mid city with small sailing craft tacking, finding the wind. A ribbon of tar macadam around the lake, and gentle grass covered hills into the park.

Which lead to lawn bowling courts and the myriad of retirees that played the day long. They were not the loud and sometimes drunken with all the spirit and passion of the men that I remember that played bocce in the alley behind my Carver Street house. The game only nominally resembled Bocce. The idle old folks were gentile, with supreme expressions of bliss, self satisfaction and awareness as they would roll the ball on a manicured grass lawn. It was cucumber sandwiches and tea contrasted to provolone, mortedella and wine.

As I sat there, day after day, newspaper, marked with irregular black penciled circles, on my knee, Chandler and Hammett (both recently discovered in the mystery section of the Berkeley Library, highly recommended by Berkeley denison Anthony Boucher in article from an old mystery magazine) on the bench next to me, I started to recognize this undistinguished mass of older folks as individuals. I could only give you as I write this, a high fictional account of those personalities, a choice I leave for another writing. Clouded feelings that linger in my memory, made somewhat more vivid by a glass or two of blood red Cabernet and feverish typing.

They would kneel, close to the ground on mats and examine the lay of the courts. Like a golfer reading the break and speed of a green. Then stand, bending deeply and roll the biased ball down the lane, striving to place it as close to the jack as possible. Hardly a cry of triumph, just a small smile that followed the gently swaying accurately placed body English that surely must have affected the course of the bowl. I sat outside the fence on a park bench and they never paid me much mind. Concentration on the game was intense. I longed for inebriated yells as I watched, howls of disapproval, a victory dance followed by vicious gulping swallows of grappa. None ever came. But they eventually won me over. Expressionless, liquorless, focused, they rolled game after game. Men clothed in green pants, yellow shirts, women with their hair pulled severely back wearing plaid culottes that bared no danger. White buck shoes and tennis sneakers. The court, carefully short cut grass surrounded by a perfectly wood framed gutter. The wind blowing genteelly against an American flapping flag, sails snapping on the lake, which was surrounded by high rise senior apartments on the far side hard against the four lane boulevard.

I shake a fag loose. Feel the heat and smell the orchids in General Smallwood’s hot house. Take a sip of his brandy. I reach. One small step for a man.