I was in Berkeley last weekend visiting my friend J. I actually decided to head over there at the tail end of another trip to visit college friends, so it was sort of unplanned.
Berkeley conveys a very specific message to people. Rarely does the mention of a city’s name cause people to make a disgusted face, as if you’d casually mentioned that you were going to Thailand to sodomize little boys. They immediately conjure up images of filthy, aggressive street people; rampant public drug use; and hypocritical ivory-tower liberalism. Other people glaze over and think of Berkeley as the Amsterdam of the West – a university town where free love still reigns and people get into deep-thinking discussions about international politics on the street.
The truth is that they’re both probably right. The last time Berkeley was relevant to the national culture was the ‘60s, and the city hasn’t really progressed much since then. Its population has actually gone down since 1970, which is almost unheard of for a large West Coast city. The university is still there, but most of the students are more concerned with getting their engineering degrees and moving back to Los Angeles or San Jose or Seattle. Telegraph Avenue, the epicenter of the ‘60s antiwar riots, is now lined with street vendors who use their time between acid flashbacks to sell cheaply made jewelry and politically enlightened bumper stickers reading “Fuck Bush.” Berkeley also has its own answers to the outdated, toothless Blue Laws that still exist in the South, except they tend to be more sweeping. For example, yesterday was Columbus Day – or, as it’s known in Berkeley, “Indigenous People’s Day,” a time to “celebrate 514 years of resistance.” I have to say, I was under the impression that they’d stopped resisting a while back. Just celebrating that holiday seems like the equivalent of holding a championship parade for the St. Louis Browns. Also, Berkeley is a “Nuclear Free Zone,” meaning it’s illegal to operate a nuclear reactor within city limits, and no work can be done on nuclear weapons within its borders. While this is noble in theory, as if Raytheon was beating down the city walls to install a factory where warheads are manufactured by blind native children, it doesn’t exactly stop Berkeley from getting its power from the reactor in Pleasanton, less than 30 miles away.
People’s Park is also still ostensibly the city’s heart, but it’s gone from being known as a community gathering place to somewhere you should probably avoid unless you want to run into a “Protest for Nude Rights.” A couple of years ago I made the mistake of cutting through the park on a Saturday afternoon and came face to face with a large, sweaty naked couple, who greeted me pleasantly. The man was carrying a large placard reading “Naked Power,” but unfortunately the way he held it gave me a full view of both his shapeless wife’s overgrown forest of pubic hair and his tiny, Kellogg’s Corn-Pop penis. It was at that point that I realized visual rape is a crime that needs to be put on the books.
This isn’t to say that you’d want to be in People’s Park after sundown either. There are usually a handful of rapes in Berkeley every year, and the ones that don’t take place in the dorms are usually in the park. At night the park is littered with the silhouettes of beat-up sleeping bags, most of which contain the standard combination of a smelly guy, a bottle of Gordon’s gin, a cat or three, and a truly epic amount of body hair.
Where other cities would reject their homeless, the Bay Area embraces theirs… sort of. Because San Francisco is the only American city that isn’t openly hostile to its homeless population, vagrants from across the country come to the Bay Area. But to get by in the City proper you have to have something to offer – a talent, a routine, something beyond violently shaking a McDonald’s cup at everyone who walks by. San Franciscans are the equivalent of that guy everyone knows who has seen every adult film ever made, to the point that the only thing that gets him off anymore is Japanese tentacle rape porn. There are at least six thousand homeless people who live in the City. When you walk past 50 bums per day on your way to work downtown, the competition for the 85 cents from your daily venti latte gets a little fiercer. The cream rises to the top, so that most of them have a gimmick. If you’re a homeless person and you’ve staked out a corner right across from where another bum is lip-synching James Brown’s entire catalog, you’re going to have a tough day.
And thus, economics takes its course; the invisible hand of the bum market shoves them across the bay to Berkeley. College students are young, idealistic, and they buy a lot of fast food, which means the average kid wandering back to his apartment from campus probably has 50 cents in his pocket. He’s also probably more easily intimidated than someone who’s spent years being confronted by bums, to the point that when a bum gets in his face, it will usually result in him forking over a buck or two. Just like in the wild, aggression generally has its rewards – the angry bird gets the worm.
But for all the crap, I have a strange fondness for Berkeley. It is about as far removed an experience as you can get from where I grew up without leaving the country. And all things considered, dealing with the abject ridiculousness that is downtown Berkeley probably can’t be any more mentally taxing than spending my formative years in a town where pundit/douchenozzle Ann Coulter is considered a legitimate journalist. Berkeley has awesome geography and it's in the perfect location; it's a 15-minute subway ride from my favorite city in the world. The East Bay still has a genuine small-town feel in places, whereas on the Peninsula if you walk into a burger joint it's probably going to cost you $18 for a burger and it's going to have goat cheese on it. This is probably because 40% of the people who live on the Peninsula are engineers from Bangalore or programmers from the Midwest, whereas there's pretty much no reason to stick around Oakland unless you grew up there.
When I was applying to college I knew I wanted to get away from home. By the middle of my junior year of high school, I was pretty certain that I was going to go to Stanford or Berkeley. My parents were convinced that I should apply early decision to Stanford, which means if they accept you, you're in. I wrote my essay (a heartbreaking story about helping orphans in Mexico), sent out my transcript, and waited. Then in the interim, before I got accepted to Stanford, I got a letter from Berkeley. It informed me that I had won a Regents scholarship, essentially making my education there free. At the time, even despite having been to Berkeley before, I assumed that Stanford and Cal were pretty much the same school on opposite sides of the Bay. This sent me into a monthlong depression, because in my estimation, I was about to bend over for $50 grand in student loans that had just become eminently unnecessary.
Within my first couple of months at Stanford, though, I saw the differences. The student body was about the same, but the campus had been sanitized of the needle-wielding bums and ethnic restaurants that gave Cal its character. Where Berkeley students had fifteen different options when they wanted chicken curry, we had a Subway. And we didn’t get that until I was a junior.
The first time I visited Berkeley that year was for Big Game. This was 2002, when Stanford was winding up a streak of 7 straight wins over Cal. Our football team was at the tail end of a four-game losing streak, and the Cal fans were up in arms about the possibility of taking back the Axe. I took a bus to the game with the rest of my freshman dorm and we pulled up to Strawberry Canyon late – about 10 minutes before game time. I was pumped. I have always loved college football, and I could not wait to see one of the best rivalry games in America. But then something happened.
There are a couple of "epiphany" moments in life when you realize that you're That Guy. Some of you may never reach this point; you're doomed to go through your entire life without ever realizing that you are an assclown. You're the girl who's singing on top of the bar, not realizing that every guy in there is trying to un-memorize the image of your lumpy ass. You're the guy who wears a Bluetooth earpiece in the coffee shop. One of you was probably the guy standing in front of me at the Stanford-WSU football game a couple of weeks ago, jangling your keys like a palsy victim during WSU kickoffs and repeatedly trying to start the Wave.
When I got off the bus, I realized that I was That Guy. As the mass of students streamed toward the stadium, the Stanford freshmen around me were chanting "Safe-ty School!" at the Cal fans along Fraternity Row. It was like the scales fell from my eyes. I was afloat in a teeming river of pasty skin and patchy beards. Most of the Stanford guys were wearing the Casual Uberdork combination of khakis and running shoes, and most of the girls were fucking disgusting. These were the kids who spent their high school careers snorting at Monty Python jokes in the library before class. This wasn’t the pot calling the kettle black – it was the Warren calling the Corky retarded. We finally got to the ticket gate, where we had five minutes to kill. I started a conversation with the guy next to me.
Me: "Dude, we really need to get some pressure on Boller, otherwise we're fucked. Our corners are way too small to play bump-and-run with them."
Him: "What's bump-and-run?"
Suddenly, I was jealous of kids who went to Arizona State and Georgia and Texas A&M. And Berkeley. I can read, but I might trade that ability to be a part of a knowledgeable fan base and a winning football program. And as for the female population of both campuses, well, you can’t polish a turd. Still, there are bars on every corner in Berkeley, and even the crunchiest commufeminist womyn becomes a 5’9” bombshell with triple-D tits and an ass you could bounce quarters off when you’re four double Jack and Cokes deep.
I split. I walked down to J's apartment, and we ended up watching the game from Tightwad Hill. Even from there, I could see the Stanford students still chanting "Safe-ty School!" from their section in the corner of the endzone, long after Cal had put the game out of reach.
From that day forward, I never blamed Berkeley students when they complained that Stanford students are arrogant tools. I ended up staying in Berkeley the rest of the weekend, and it started to grow on me. And last week, when I finally got back, I remembered why.
I was walking with J to Bongo Burger on Center Street on Saturday night. Before we got two blocks down Telegraph, a homeless man planted himself in the center of the sidewalk. He was the healthiest homeless guy I’d ever seen; he was sporting a sizable beard and was probably 6’1, 230. It was like Hamish Campbell from Braveheart was getting ready to ask us for a quarter.
"Gimme some cha-"
"No," J said, before Homeless Guy could finish his demand.
Homeless Guy was undeterred. Realizing that he wasn’t going to get any change, he put his head down and powered through the gap between us like Jerome Bettis, slamming into our shoulders and finishing by exclaiming “Bastards!” as he hustled on down the street. J just kept walking, considering some variation of this scenario has happened to him twice a day, every day for the last four years.
Every single day I’m there, Berkeley gives me something to write about. The city is a theater of unintentional comedy. Like the time I saw William Hung almost get hit by an Oakland city bus on Bancroft Way, or the time a guy took his pants off and started yelling in the Circle of Freedom…in front of my parents, during my first campus visit. Given the worthlessness of my current degree anyway and my chosen “profession,” maybe my college choice wasn’t such a good decision after all.
