I lived briefly in a transient hotel on Shattack Avenue; the piss of which I can still smell. It was run by a frightened looking German lady who was always aware that the next guy to register at the hotel may be a parole violator hungry for some sex or money. She didn't know. She thought I was a runaway and, in a way she was certainly correct about that.

Below the hotel was an adult book store and a little pizza joint that smelled fat. Paper was always blowing up and around the streets, the noise was constant. I didn't not solicit noise, it was always there. At first I thought to myself, "ah, noise, you must have noise to make it a real city." Within several years I was trying to escape all noise and found it to be the most corrosive of modern phenomena.

Berkeley taught me early that walking is a good thing if one can put up with the exhaust of cars and trucks.

I had a car for awhile and a bicycle. The car was an old Volvo and I had driven up into the mountains with it to dry out from the divorce. When I came back I lived in it for a month or so on a pretty tree-lined street around the Claremont section. I had tried to stay in Tilden Park but the first night a Berkeley policeman woke me at 2am and chased me out. That's when I drove half asleep down the hill to the place near Claremont, parked, and did not drive the car again for a year. I slept in it for a month and then moved into the transient hotel and finally found a place in west Berkeley. I finally sold the car off after a year checking it out occasionally to make sure they hadn't towed it away. And when I sold the car neighbors did come out and look at me, look at the guy who had the Volvo that had sat there for a year collecting bird shit and dirt.