On The Road In The 1970's:Part 4

Market Street in San Francisco looked interesting as I walked from the Greyhound Station to the Bay Transit Terminal during the morning rush hour, opposite to the way most of the commuting workers, who had come into San Francisco from across the Bay or from a MUNI trolley or cable car in a neighborhood elsewhere, were scurrying. But I was eager to first make my pilgrimage to Berkeley and walk down Telegraph Avenue and across the campus, before I did any exploring of San Francisco for the first time.

When I first visited Berkeley in the 1970s, the BART subway that connects Berkeley to San Francisco had not yet been completed. So the way people living in Berkeley and Oakland who wished to use mass transit to commute to a job in San Francisco did so was to take one of the Alameda County buses which drove across the Oakland-San Francisco bridge and into the Bay Area bus terminal. Hence, during the weekday morning rush hour, when I first walked into the Bay Area bus terminal and tried to figure out which bus I would have to hop on to reach Berkeley, the terminal was filled much more with morning commuters from the East Bay area than it would later be in the decades after the BART subway line was more completely built and more people began using BART to get to work, rather than taking a bus from Berkeley to SF.

I can't remember much about my bus ride from SF to Berkeley--from the same bridge that the Greyhound had taken me a few hours before, but in the opposite direction--except that I still found it interesting to look out of the window as the bus drove across the Oakland-SF bridge. What I do recall, though, is that I felt excited, when the bus reached its last stop on Shattuck Avenue in Downtown Berkeley, and I eagerly walked up the hill towards Telegraph Avenue, where I walked into the lobby of the first old building on Telegraph Avenue near the the campus that I noticed having a sign indicating it was some kind of hotel or SRO kind of place.

In the 1970s, you could still usually arrive in a town and walk into some kind of motel or hotel or SRO and, without having made a previous reservation, obtain a vacant room to rent for a week. So when I interrupted the book-reading of the dressed-up and bored-looking white woman in her 20's who was sitting behind the check-in desk of the small hotel lobby and asked if a vacant room for a week's stay was available, she coldly gave me the key to one of the vacant rooms, in exchange for me giving her a cash payment for a week's stay.

The room was very small, but it had a bed for me to sleep on. I no longer can recall whether or not it had its own bathroom or whether hotel guests had to share a bathroom in the hall with each other. Whether or not the room had its own bathroom likely mattered little to me, since, whenever I needed a john during the day or evening while in Berkeley that week, I usually just used the one in the campus student union building.

I spent very little time inside the hotel room during my week in the Bay area. Being bearded with long hair at that time in the 1970's, I didn't need to waste any time shaving in the morning; and, since the hotel room lacked a refrigerator or kitchen or hot plate, I fed myself on what I ate outside of where I was staying.

Each morning during my stay in Berkeley I would buy myself a freshly-squeezed glass of orange juice from the stand that was then set up at the entrance to the University of California campus at the top of Telegraph Avenue. Then I would usually buy a scrambled egg breakfast with toast in some local restaurant near the campus; and that would keep me from feeling hungry again until the evening.

Most of my first day in Berkeley was spent walking around the UC-Berkeley campus, sitting on the steps, ledges or benches near the plaza around Sproul Hall, where the large student rallies of the 1960's used to be held, and hanging out there for a few hours watching the students walk by; before later walking off campus and back towards Telegraph Avenue, where I spent the last few hours of sunlight browsing in bookstores and vinyl record shops.

Campus buildings like Sproul Hall and campus plazas like the one in front of Sproul Hall seemed much smaller in size in the 1970's than I had imagined then being in the 1960's after seeing photographs of the UC-Berkeley campus protests. I had hoped that, by just hanging out on the UC-Berkeley campus for a few hours each day during the week I visited, I would bump into some New Left activists in their 20's whom I had known in the 1960's who might be politically active underground or aboveground in the 1970's on the West Coast, still active 1970's New Left activists that I hadn't known in the 1960's, or 1970's students who were carrying on the 1960's tradition of Berkeley student protests in the 1970's. But nothing like that happened to me during the time I hung out on Berkeley's campus for the week.

By the 1970's Berkeley's campus seemed as dead--after the level of direct U.S. military intervention in Vietnam was reduced following the Nixon administration's massive "last gasp" Christmas bombings of civilian targets in North Vietnam in December 1972--as was Columbia's campus in the post-1972 period of the 1970's. Rows of Movement people standing behind tables and handing out leaflets or having political discussions near the campus entrance or around Sproul Hall plaza was no longer part of the Berkeley campus youth scene by this time in the 1970's.

I had hoped to also bump into some street musicians singing topical protest folk songs on or around the Berkeley campus or along Telegraph Avenue. But during the week I spent a lot of time hanging out in Berkeley, the street musicians who were playing the most near the campus and attracting the largest student audiences on the street were just then musicians who played bluegrass instrumental music in a skillful way. Browsing in the bookstores and vinyl record shops off-campus also didn't lead to any verbal encounters with any politically and/or culturally radical non-students in their 20's or current UC students during my stay in Berkeley. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 3

The Greyhound bus continuing on to San Francisco was now even more filled with passengers than before, because more new passengers had boarded the bus at Salt Lake City than had gotten off the bus there. Another continuing passenger had re-boarded the bus in Salt Lake City before  I did and moved into the seat on the bus seat where I had previously been sitting before arriving in Salt Lake City. So I  had taken one of the vacant seats across the aisle, near the window, for the remaining highway journey to the West Coast.

As more and more new passengers got on the bus, the vacant seats near the front of the bus began to completely fill up and the vacant aisle seat to my left near the back of the bus became one of the last remaining vacant seats that a new passenger could locate. So when a blond-haired white woman of average height in her 20's, wearing blue jeans and with a large backpack on her shoulders, who most men would likely consider physically beautiful, stepped on the bus, the vacant seat that was next to where I sat was to where she walked with her big backpack.

"Is anyone sitting here?" she then asked me, in a voice that reflected a German accent, as she stood in the aisle.

"No one's taken this seat yet. So it's O.K. for you to take this seat," I replied with a smile and in a friendly voice.

The young white woman passenger then took off her big backpack, placed it on the baggage rack above the seats, and sat down in the seat next to me.

"How far are you going?" I then asked.

:To San Francisco," she answered.

"Where are you from?"

"From West Germany."

"What brings you to the USA?" I asked with a smile.

"I  never was here before and I thought I would be able to see a lot of the the country with the pass I bought from Greyhound. But all I mostly get to see when I'm riding the bus is jut a lot of highway that looks the same everywhere."

I laughed and replied:  "Sounds like the capitalists that control Greyhound fooled you. That's what happens when the U.S. government doesn't run transportation companies in a non-profit way like they do in Europe."

With a look of surprise, the young West German woman said with a smile:  "You sound like you're a socialist."

"Of course, I am. Aren't you a socialist?" I asked.

"Yes. In West Germany every young person I know is usually a socialist, because our parents have always voted for the Social Democrats and brought us up to be socialists. But we're all told that in the United States "socialism" is considered a dirty word," she answered.

"It's still considered a dirty word. That's one reason the USA is more militarist now than your country is now," I replied.

Having grown up in the United States during the 1950's McCarthy Era, most people in their 20's and early 30's during the 1970s in the USA were--despite their anti-Vietnam War sentiments and the campus and off-campus activism of the New Left student movement and Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s in the USA--still generally both anti-socialist and anti-communist in their political views; and to the degree that some were anti-capitalist in their political views, they were were much more likely to define themselves in the 1970's as hippy-anarchists, rather than hip socialists or hip communists. Within the off-campus 9-to-5 straight work world in the 1970's, "coming out" of the political closet openly as either an anarchist, socialist or communist in front of other workers still generally caused other U.S. workers or U.S. supervisors at most workplaces to begin viewing you with suspicion and marked you, in their eyes, as being some kind of politically deviant, unpatriotic subversive.

But European youth in their 20s and early 30s who had grown up in Western Europe in the 1950's in contrast, besides being anti-war, were generally only anti-communist, but not anti-socialist in the 1970s. One reason may have been because the anti-communist Social Democratic parties' leaders often managed their economically advanced capitalist society's welfare state apparatus, on the basis of democratically-elected parliamentary majorities (as well as, sometimes, because of the covert funding of some of these anti-communist Social Democratic parties received from the CIA); and these Social Democratic parties still identified themselves as socialists in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

So, not surprisingly, after a few minutes more of conversing with the white blond West Germany beauty sitting next to me on the Greyhound bus ride from Salt Lake City to the West Coast, I began to feel that she was both much more politically aware than nearly all the non-socialist or anti-communist U.S. white women in their 20s with whom I had conversed in the 9-to-5 world and post-1972 campus world in the 1970s, and closer to me, philosophically. And she struck me as someone I could easily fall in love with.

We spent most of the daytime on the bus moving west over the Rocky Mountains and into Nevada talking with each other to make the time go faster, and laughing together when some white Western men in cowboy hats and cowboy boots, who seemed kind of right-wing, though not dangerous, boarded the Greyhound bus at one of its stops in the middle of Nevada, off of Interstate 80. Much of our talk was about how U.S. militarism in Vietnam and elsewhere was continuing to threaten world peace.

She seemed to agree with my observation that because most people in the U.S.A. hadn't personally experienced the effects of World War II as had most people in Europe, this might be one reason why people in the U.S.A. were still less pacifist in their political sentiments than were most people now in West Germany and other Western European countries. We also discussed possible reasons why U.S. society seemed so much more crassly materialist and consumers in the 1970s than even West German society had become.

When the Greyhound bus finally arrived in Reno, Nevada in the early morning darkness, both the young West German woman and I looked out a side window of the bus more intently to get a better view of the blinking neon lights outside the Reno casinos that were nearest to the bus station; while the cowboys we had picked up in the middle of Nevada, with excitement, hurriedly exited the bus to, presumably, either gamble on the slot machines or at the tables in the casinos, that were open 24 hours each day, or to try to pick up women or prostitutes with whom to spend part of the day.

Both the West German woman tourist and I found the Reno part of our bus ride more interesting to view from the bus than the time on the Interstate 80 road. But the Greyhound bus stopped only for about ten minutes in Reno, just to drop off passengers and pick up the new passengers who were traveling from Reno to Sacramento and on to San Francisco. So there was no time available for the West German woman and me to get off the bus and explore Reno on foot.

By the time the Greyhound bus reached Sacramento, California later in the morning, the sun was shining and it was daylight. And by that time, the young West German woman seemed to feel that she was too tired to continue conversing since, like me, she had only slept on and off, in-between the conversations we had had on the ride from Utah and through Nevada. So when half of the passengers left the Greyhound bus in Sacramento and two empty bus seats behind the two we were sitting on became available, she stood up from the seat next to mine and went to stretch out on the now two empty available seats behind me' in order to try to get an extra few hours of sleep on the bus, before it finally pulled into San Francisco.

At the same time that she dozed off behind me, I also stretched out across the now-vacant seat next to me and was able to sleep a bit more until the bus reached the Greyhound bus station in Oakland and before it headed over the Oakland-Bay Bridge and into San Francisco later in the day.

I found it exciting to look out the window as the Greyhound bus headed over the Oakland-Bay Bridge and felt happy when I realized that, after first longing to see San Francisco and California in the early 1960's as a teenager, I was now finally able to satisfy this longing. But because the West German beauty had given me the vibe and impression before shifting to the seats behind me on the bus that, despite enjoying our conversation, she wasn't into either exploring San Francisco tourist sites with me during the next few days or exchanging names or addresses to remain in contact after our trips were over, I felt slightly disappointed when we said goodbye to each other after leaving the bus at the Market Street station and going our separate ways: she to some San Francisco hotel or hostel and I to the Bay Transit Terminal, in order to make my way to Berkeley for the first time.

Yet I also reminded myself that, if I hadn't been lucky enough to have had both the young African-American woman sit next to me in Omaha, Nebraska and the slightly older West German woman sit next to me in Salt Lake City, the whole bus ride from New York City to San Francisco might have been a much less interesting trip for me to experience--especially since the scenery outside the window on Interstate 80 eventually started to look the same for miles and miles and traveling via interstate roads--rather than on the old U.S. highways that went through Western town main streets and downtown districts-- provided bus riders with less of a sense of what the cities and towns you bypassed, rather than passed through, looked like.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 2

By the time the bus reached Omaha, Nebraska the Greyhound bus was filled with more passengers and there were now less vacant seats on the bus. In fact, the only available vacant seats were two seats near the back of the bus: the vacant seat next to me and the vacant seat  next to a taller and heavier big white guy across the aisle from me, who didn't have a beard and long hair like I then did. So, when a short, thin African-American woman, wearing slacks, who looked like she wasn't yet in her 20's like I was by the 1970's, had to choose which vacant seat to take, she, not surprisingly, decided that the vacant bus seat next to me was the better place to sit while riding the bus during the night and trying to get some sleep during the night on the bus, until the bus reached Salt Lake City, by way of Laramie, Wyoming.

Before people started using Walkman and plugging Walkman devices into their ears in order to listen to music while riding on buses in the late 1970's, it wasn't that unusual for passengers sitting next to strangers on Greyhound buses to converse with each other during a bus ride, in order to make time pass by faster when they weren't trying to sleep a little on the bus or didn't feel like reading a book on the bus (especially if reading a book on a moving bus made them feel nauseous).

So after the bus started rolling west on the highway out of Omaha, Nebraska in the night, the young woman sitting next to me and I started to quietly converse a bit on the dimly lit bus.

"How far are you going?" I asked.

"To Los Angeles. I'm meeting my boyfriend there to get married," she replied with an excited smile.

I can't recall now what else we briefly talked about before we both turned off the bulbs above our seats and each tried to fall asleep on the uncomfortable narrow seats within the now darkened bus.

By the 1970's, I had read about the Sal character in Jack Kerouac's On The Road novel becoming involved for awhile with a Latina woman he first encountered sitting near him while he was traveling on a Greyhound bus ride on the West Coast. But I was still surprised to feel the soon-to-be-married young woman from Omaha leaning closer into me from her aisle seat, and resting her head against my chest and between my arms as we both began to doze off to sleep during the night bus ride. And by the early morning hours, we were sleeping entwined, as if our two adjacent bus seats were being occupied by a couple of young lovers.

Feeling her young woman's body so physically close to mine all during the night was a pleasurable feeling for me that also made it easier for me to sleep. And the moments during the night when she awoke to shift her body's sleeping position slightly, and, still half-asleep, touched me in an affectionate way, made me, who was also half-asleep, feel that I was living in some kind of dream world with the soon-to-be-married young woman from Omaha.

By the time we reached Laramie, Wyoming, however, the sun was out, it was daylight and the young African-American woman sitting next to me and I had both awakened. Having slept in each other's arms during the night, we now looked at each other in a different way than when she had first boarded the bus in Omaha; and we now told each other what our first names were (although I long ago forgot what she said her first name was). Then, during the bus stopover in Laramie, Wyoming, she went into the women's restroom to freshen up and returned to the reboarding bus station platform with a scarf covering her hair and looking as if she was about to go on a date.

I no longer recall what we talked about after we both reboarded the bus in Laramie and sat next to each other while awake on the bus ride from Laramie, through the rest of Wyoming and onto Salt Lake City, where she was going to leave the bus for San Francisco that I was on, in order to transfer to another bus that would take her from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. But I do remember wishing her the best of luck in her marriage, before I reboarded my bus for San Francisco at the Salt Lake City bus station while she continued to wait for the bus that had not yet arrived in Salt Lake City to take her to get married in Los Angeles..

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 1

On The Road In The 1970’s: Part 1

By the 1970’s, I realized that, for a working-class person in the United States, working in a 9-to-5 factory cage or skyscraper office cage for 50 years meant intellectual, moral, spiritual, artistic, political and emotional death during the workday for 50 years. And by the 1970’s I also realized that, for the working-class student in the United States, the kind of life that you experienced on campuses or around campuses like Columbia or Berkeley in the 1960’s was life in an ivory tower fantasy world, representing only a temporary 4-year reprieve from the real world of off-campus, enslavement, repression and alienation experienced by the majority of U.S. working-class people.

So by the 1970’s I no longer felt it mattered very much whether I lived or died, since the future for me looked completely bleak personally and completely bleak for the majority of working-class people who lived in U.S. society under the post-1970’s U.S. economic/political system of corporate totalitarianism, hip capitalism and feminized imperialism. Yet before I died in my physical form in the 1970’s, I still wanted to see the West Coast, and especially to visit Berkeley and the Bay Area, in the 1970’s.

By the end of my freshman year at Columbia in 1966, I wished that I had tried to figure out a way to afford to enroll at University of California-Berkeley in Fall 1965, rather than only applying to Columbia and CCNY, because I mistakenly assumed that living and/or studying in Manhattan near Harlem would give me the most meaningful and stimulating college undergraduate experience. And were it not for the Fall 1966 re-founding of Columbia SDS as a more mass-based campus group, my subsequent involvement in Columbia SDS as a steering committee member and participant in the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, I would likely have totally regretted that, while applying for college, the lure of living and/or studying in Manhattan near Harlem caused me to rule out trying to figure out a way financially to enroll at U. of California-Berkeley.

Carrying only a large knapsack, from my early teenage years as a boy scout, I went to the Port Authority bus station, near 42nd Street and 8^th Avenue in Manhattan, on an early September weekday evening, to buy a $100 one-way ticket from Greyhound that would then allow me to ride from New York City to San Francisco, on a bus that would get me to the West Coast in 3 days. And, aside from the clothes I wore and the clothes in the knapsack, the only important things I brought along with me on the bus were my bus ticket that would get me to California, the keys to the basement apartment in Jamaica in which I still lived in as a tenant, and maybe about $150 in 1970’s money.

The Greyhound bus to California left around 11 p.m. or midnight from the Port Authority bus station and, because it was a night during the week and not a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night, was not very crowded. So until the bus reached Omaha, Nebraska, early in the following evening, no other passenger was sitting next to me. And I was able to stretch out over two seats during the first night on the road of the bus, as the bus drove first down the New Jersey Turnpike to Philadelphia, then across Pennsylvania on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and then through Ohio and Indiana and Illinois.

Four decades later, I can’t recall talking to anybody  else on the bus or anything memorable happening on the bus, during the period that it traveled from New York City until the time it reached Omaha, Nebraska.