Chapter 1 

In The Imaginary Land of One's Birth

I would tell the tale of my days in Berkeley when I was the "poet of my dreams," but every day seems, now, to flow into every other day until there is nothing left but a massive impression that is difficult to pull apart. So the story will be haphazard. It will be the dear myth it was and is, even at this late and sobering date. Today I drove through the city and though nothing seems to have changed, everything seems to have changed. The cars are bigger, the people sloppier. Driving up Solano Avenue I noticed the great bowl of houses up in the hills and lovely it all seemed. Back there I thought are the forests and parks, the golf course and merry go round and the little farm that had the cow with a tear seemingly fixed under its eye. I see some of the old rascals and cringe. They lived as though there were no consequences. It was a good time. The people now gather under umbrellas and have lunch along the streets and avenues. It has become a gluttonous city. And the dogs remain fed on more than the scraps.


My first impression of the city of Berkeley was not a pretty one. "This is a burnt out refugee camp," was the first entry in a journal I decided to keep in the mid-70's. I had actually been born in the city but moved after a few years over the hills and into the valley. I moved back as if I were on an ancestral hunt.

To me it was always the City of Dogs.

It was fitting that a distressed young man would come to a distressed city, one that was ruled by the bums and dogs. It was a shoddy little place;

The infamous riots and goings on from the 60's were gone. A few nutty radicals dotted the little side streets and their 1910 Victorian houses but everything else receded behind the privacy of private aspirations. There was something visceral about the renunciation that went on in Berkeley in those years. No one wanted to admit that they had been part of something they thought was so large but was, in reality, rather small and stupid. A huge prank fueled by dope and loud music. Be that as it may it was a strange place in 1975.

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.




David Eide
January 24, 2014