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Berkeley in the Nineties
Too late for hippie heyday & too young to be yuppies we wandered creeksides & used bookstores. There were still so many movie theaters. Our parents marched against the many wars & fed us carob chips. We foraged in free boxes for old wrap skirts but had absorbed consumerist desire, & also longed for new J. Crew. There was no internet yet & so we listened to Steve Miller Band on repeat & cut geometry to skinny dip in the Essex Street hot tub. We knew the code, just as we knew to disapprove of America. We walked out of high school after Rodney King. We helped our mothers shop for bulk oats at the Co-op. We felt we could & couldn't solve it. We could say systemic racism but couldn't name yet how our lives were implicated. We drove our grandmothers' Volvos up Marin & watched the spangled world from Grizzly Peak. We climbed Mount Diablo in spring rain. We learned the meaning of the word hegemony but thought the word itself was hegemonic. We got high to the patter of the windchimes. When we missed our friends we wandered to the farmers market for bruised peaches. Bruised peaches were our kind of revolution. There was not internet yet & so we made elaborate cutout flyers to invite our friends to picnics up at Codornices. Bodies in space were revolution. Some of us were feminist & queer. Some of us wore wool sailor pants & passed out at bad university parties. Oh my god, that was embarrassing. Some of us cut class to spend days reading in the dank public library. Alone in our aloneness we fumbled with one another's bodies in dim alleyways near City Lights. Our revolution: under cherry blossoms, reading Virgil. One of us made red mushroomy kombucha. One of us taught the others to eat burdock. The burdock eating didn't really take. Some days we paid the toll for people behind us on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. At Steep Ravine howled Whiteman at the sea. Most days, we were a crumbling outpost. Nearby the street preacher, Paul of the Pillar, spoke in helter-skelter baritones from liberated air on the Cal campus. We too believed in liberated air & some nights bought Paul sausages at Top Dog. Under the Campanile, we discussed how Ginsburg was a sellout now because he posed for Gap ads in wide-legged chinos. Chinos were not the revolution. Trigonometry was not the revolution. We memorized short poems by D. H. Lawrence. We were quick fish who read Gary Snyder in someone's dad's Mendocino cabin. Some of us climbed ferny gullies on winter solstice & got topless. Decorated each other in white reindeer lichen. Recited the Tao Te Ching. Had sex on a cliff. Reindeer lichen was the revolution. We craved transcendental revelations, the radical & burning future: We lobbied for condoms in the high school bathrooms even though the bathrooms needed toilet paper—