Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [51]
Why do I dream of Fred’s corpse instead of Fred the way he was at Vito’s or Steep Steps or the Boss Bean? The corpse floats in the shallow pool of rainwater in the sad ruins. No face, a thing: bloated, naked, rock-scraped.
Through Fred’s death, I learned something new about Berkeley. Not about Berkeley the scuzzy city north of Oakland in the East Bay, menaced by fault lines every which way—a West Coast Troy or Rensselaer, if you like, though with many more sari shops and satay houses; and with many, many more panhandlers, street vendors, pistol-whippers, performance artists and prophets in drag; with fancier mansions in fire-prone hills and, in the lower flats, tackier adobe holding pens—but about the space that Ham and his friends inhabited.
Berkeley, I began to understand at the wake Ham held for Fred on Last Chance, was a kind of fraternity, a marine unit, all-for-one, one-for-all, teammates-for-life bonding experience, it was the you-had-to-have-been-there, you-had-to-have-seen-it place, something I was too young for, too late for, and would never appreciate. It was the only place in America where it could be taken for granted that everyone over thirty, say, had slept with everyone else over thirty. But that Berkeley was no more, gone the way people back east talked of old Manhattan. That Berkeley was as much a time as a site: it was a time of dark possibility, discovery and forgiveness.
Ham was Mr. Berkeley, that Berkeley. He was its center. And because of his Berkeley training, he got along with street people like the Stoop Man and the Duvet Man and Devi the Waif, and still lived on a houseboat in Sausalito and picked up women half his age. Because he was Berkeley, he took people in, gave panhandlers five-dollar bills, served AIDS lunches, boycotted more kinds of food than I’d ever eaten. He, Jess and Fred had marched for peace, for civil rights, for women, gays, migrants, had gone to jail, signed petitions, run for city councils, run radical campaigns. And now they also drove big cars, lived large lives, flew business class, ate at the best restaurants, drank the best wines, took massages, ski trips, private cruises. They climbed together, deep-sea dove and white-water rafted together. It was their community-hedonist thing. Food, revolution, sex, art, ecology, drugs, music, books, writers, films. Epicures, sensualists. They cozied with movie stars, politicians, best-selling writers under fatwa, but it wasn’t a big deal to them. Berkeley might be the Harvard of the West Coast, but it didn’t empower them to assume arrogance. They kept a low profile. Harvard taught its graduates that the rest of the world was inept and waiting for them to take over; Berkeley taught that the world was a cool place and shouldn’t be disturbed.
Ham took charge and produced the wake as a little folk, a little punk, a little gospel-rock catharsis extravaganza. The music: Peter, Paul and Mary; Pete Seeger. The flowers: Lilies in mourners’ hair. Cremation: Blessed and switched on by a Buddhist priest named Steve Lama. Scattering of ashes: After a two-hour hike and off a Point Reyes promontory.
The powdered corpse played with seals and sea lions.
Vietnam wasn’t a war; it was a divide. On one side, the self-involved idealists; on the other, we the napalm-scarred kids. In between, a country that elected leaders, who got boys like Larry to pull the triggers.
After the hike, the select few, among them the ex-lover who’d shaved her head—Ham kept A and B lists—ended up on his houseboat in Sausalito. The way they grieved wasn’t familiar. Where I wept, got drunk and started songs I didn’t know the words to, they hugged, they smoked, they groped, they melted into an intimacy that was physical. One image that stays with me from that evening: the Hairless Hat-Wearer, wearing the wispy dress I’d clowned in in Dahlia’s shop the first time I’d run into Jess, danced the Seven Veils in the galley kitchen, and