The Rocky Road to Rockridge
On most of my adventures, nobody goes up in a fireball.
My skin was parchment-thin where it had been burned off. I noticed this when being transported out of the hospital in a wheelchair. My arm brushed against a smooth handrail and it broke the skin. Outside in the direct Hawaiian sunlight, the intense tropical radiation made my skin crawl like a jellyfish decomposing in the sun. I would have to spend most of the daylight hours inside for a few months.
Friends set me up with two house-sitting gigs in Puna. The first was a house in "Vacationland" subdivision, a couple hundred yards from Kapoho Bay. The neighborhood had been built on a flat pahoehoe slab barely 4 feet above sea level at high tide. If you dug a hole down through the layers of lava in your yard, you would have a brackish pond that rose and fell with the tide. Most houses did dig such a pond in their yard like the one where I was staying, and stocked it with little guppy size fish that would eat the mosquito larvae.
It was my job to feed the fish, and to occupy the house so it wouldn't be robbed while the owners were off the island. It had seemed a good idea when the mosquito fish had been first introduced to control the bloodsucking insects, but like so many attempts to improve on nature's balance they became one of the most harmful introduced species in Hawaiian streams' aquatic ecosystems. They prey upon small o'opu, the similar size fish that are the only native freshwater species in Hawaii; as well as transmit disease and parasites to them, and compete with them for food and living space. Their appetites also played a role in causing some species of Hawaiian damselflies to go extinct. They are too widespread now to ever be eradicated.
This was a peculiar time in my life. So many things that I touched had blown up. Just like the sleeping grass fireball, I can trace the source of all my personal disasters to a ground zero at the tips of the fingers of my own hands, now scarred with a pinto coloration, as a reminder.
It's interesting to wander around in someone else's book collection. They had a number of Buddhist books, Taoist books, new age teachers, novels, biographies, and peculiar books about the Baal Shem Tov, a mystic Rabbi, born in 18th Century in Western Ukraine.
In my Religious Studies curriculum, there was no course that delved into Hasidic Judaism. Even if there were, I wouldn't have likely been drawn to it. My interests and the classes I attended were about the traditions of Asia: Hinduism and Buddhism. Now, in 1978 it had been 14 years since I began to adopt the Buddhist perspective as my own in college; and having visited enlightened states so many times and in so many ways, that it has become like a permanent program running in the background, and a tool to be brought forth to gauge every action and apply to every event.
The Baal Shem Tov's teaching, a cornerstone of Hasidic tradition, was to become aware of the web connecting the divine to all human activity in every waking moment. Of course, I could see the parallel with Buddhist thought in this. It turns out his enjoyable fables contain solid advice for living and relating to others, and can be read just for the fun, which I did.
The Baal Shem Tov was a real person, but the stories about him are quite fanciful, and meant to be parables and allegories; quite entertaining and illuminating. The typical Baal Shem Tov story that I recall goes like this: The Rabbi is speaking to his student. There is a wedding to be performed at a village at some distance the following day and the two are going to travel there in the Rabbi's horse-drawn carriage. It's getting late and the student is anxious about having the time to make it, but the Baal Shem Tov is unconcerned. It gets later and later until the excursion has become impossible: a hundred miles to travel in one night. When the student thinks all is hopeless, they climb into the carriage, and start off into the darkness. The carriage is not hurrying; the horse's hooves beat out a slow "clop, clop, clop". The carriage rocks along slowly and as the Baal Shem Tov closes the curtains and begins to tell a story. The story would be about the people to be married, and who they were in former lives, and how the celebration would be a culmination and resolution of their past unfinished business.
As the journey and the story progressed, the rocking of the carriage got softer and softer, and the clopping ceased; to be replaced by the whistling of the wind. The story would induce something of a dreamlike trance in the student who would in time fall asleep, to be awakened by the rocking of the carriage and the return of the horse's slow "clop, clop, clop". Miraculously they had arrived at the wedding site, with time to spare. Then the fateful drama would unfold.
When my brief tenure at the Vacationland house came to an end, another similar situation came up, just a few miles away. This time it was in Wa'a Wa'a, the largely undeveloped jungle area along the road from Kapoho to Hawaiian Beaches, where Dick and Carol lived.
The house sat about 30 yards off the little traveled Beach road nestled into thick vegetation. With no other residence within a quarter mile, this place was even more isolated than Vacationland.
The house had a tricky lockup. The front door had no visible latch when the residence was closed. You inserted a nail into a hole and operated a wooden mechanism that way to open it. The house belonged to a writer who had built it himself, mostly of redwood. I don't remember his name. The housesitting was arranged by somebody else and I never met him. Even so, I was inspired about the cleverness of the structure and the fact that he was a writer.
With the life changing matrix of my injuries, the isolation, and solitude; that, combined with the Baal Shem Tov stories, I was getting kind of wiggy down there. So I began to write; "Art Is A Banana Tree With No Bananas"...3200 words of rather hallucinatory poetry. Today, decades later, it's still a work in progress. But this is where my writing began.
I received a small amount of money from Marsha for my efforts in the smuggling enterprise, but since Winston was in jail, there was little hope of anything more in the near future, if ever. I began to plan my return to the mainland once again.
Before I left, I stayed a short while in the home of a young couple, Jason and Allison (now Iris) in Kaumana, above Hilo. She was very pregnant, so pregnant in fact, that if I delayed my trip to California a few weeks, I could stay around and help out until the baby was born, which I did. Finally a healthy baby boy was born, hippie style in a wicker mamasan beanbag chair in the living room. My role, when the birth began to take place, was to be the cameraman, so that Jason could attend to Allison and the newborn.
I flew to San Francisco shortly thereafter, and with the very last of my money, on to Santa Barbara. I arrived in Carpinteria with literally nothing. I was 34 years old, with a 7-year old son that I hadn't seen in over a year. My father came to town on a planned visit about the same time, having ridden the bus from Las Vegas where he lived. He was broke, too, living on Social Security and in declining health. He had circulation problems in his legs, and as we walked to the beach and back, he had to find places to stop and rest.
For a while there, 1976 and 1977, I seemed to be going through life with a "kick me" sign on my back, with a series of situations where I had done my part, but partners in the enterprise failed to complete their end of the deal and pay me; or they got arrested and could not pay me. Then I blew myself up in a gasoline explosion. Then even another deal of the same pattern: I did my part, but the payday never came through.
A corollary to my Buddhist worldview is to accept responsibility for all. So rather than rue the mindless fates of randomness, I look for the source of misfortune at my own fire-scarred fingertips, and seek to adjust my ways. How is it that so much that had befallen me was of the same pattern? The common element was me!
Now in the summer of 1978, I would be starting all over again. Answering an ad in the SB News Press to manage some student housing in Isla Vista. The job came with an apartment. I got the gig. I appealed to Marsha for $250 to buy a little Honda motorcycle, so at least I was mobile. It was summer and the building was empty. It had been a fraternity house until recently, and the local alumni advisor for the national organization was going to just rent student apartments out to whoever. I had moved in and gotten started getting things in shape, when the guy who had hired me came with some bad news. He hadn't informed other members of the organization about what he was doing, and when he told them, they were totally against the idea, and I would have to move out very soon. Well, I had to laugh; kick me again.
What next? I was demoralized, but still young and healthy, and my skin had begun to return to normal, except for pinto markings on the back of my hands, and it was still a little thin. I had about $300 and a motorcycle. That's it.
I figured I had used up my beginner's luck in 1977, and had come out of that very serious situation unscathed; I could have gone to prison. If I were ever to resume my life with Johnny, risky smuggling adventures would not be the pathway.
I went back to the Bay Area, this time to the East Bay where I knew there would be opportunity. I went to work for my old friend Gary Cohen from the commune, and at last, my habit of choosing to rely on the unreliable was broken. I did work; I got paid. I did work; I got paid. I did work; I got paid. This continued for a year, never a glitch. After leaving the commune, Gary had become a general building contractor like his father had been, usually keeping several remodeling projects going in the Berkeley Hills at the same time. It was everything I needed to learn the craft of home building.
At first, I was living in the rundown Nash Hotel in the center of downtown Berkeley. It was a cheap room with a bathroom down the hall, and it was just what I needed. The best thing about it was that a block away was the Keystone Berkeley, a legendary music venue. In September 1978, Jerry Garcia was playing there a lot, and I took advantage of the situation. After a few months, Gary took possession of some income property in North Oakland. There was a 3 bedroom house that was rented out, and at the end of a long driveway, there was a triplex that was vacant, and that's where I came in. My job was to renovate them one by one, evenings and weekends, and when Gary's other remodeling projects couldn't fill my time. He was going to rent them out as soon as each renovation was completed.
As soon as the first unit was finished, Gary found a renter for it. A single lady named Katy, who had some kind of office job in the SF. Before long, when I was dealing with things around the triplex and helping her get settled, we began to flirt. Then one afternoon when I got home from work she invited me over for a glass of wine after I got cleaned up. So I came over freshly scrubbed. She sat me down on the couch and poured two glasses of white wine on the coffee table. Then she got on her hands and knees at the other end of the couch. She said, "Ummm..." and rolled her eyes as if she was thinking of something to say, and then lunged across my lap and bit me on the left side. Best first date ever, but like my grandfather, I'll "draw the curtain here," on that kind of steamy stuff.
We had a thing going there for months, but finally all three units were renovated, and I needed to move on. As much as I enjoyed working for Gary, I was getting another offer. This was from Mark Taylor, the same Mark Taylor from the one-way bus ride to Mazatlan. In the time since, he had started a hot tub business with a showroom on College Avenue in Berkeley and had a booming business going; and guess what? I did work; I got paid. I did work; I got paid. I did work; I got paid. I did work; I got paid. This went on without a glitch for another year. What do you know? All I had needed was greater care in choosing people to work with.
Gary, Mark and Katy. I credit them for turning my life around after a long stretch of mis-steps.
But it was time to leave them. I had enough saved up to make another run at Hawaii. And there you have it; another chapter with no disasters. Unless I count leaving Katy behind.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
My skin was parchment-thin where it had been burned off. I noticed this when being transported out of the hospital in a wheelchair. My arm brushed against a smooth handrail and it broke the skin. Outside in the direct Hawaiian sunlight, the intense tropical radiation made my skin crawl like a jellyfish decomposing in the sun. I would have to spend most of the daylight hours inside for a few months.
Friends set me up with two house-sitting gigs in Puna. The first was a house in "Vacationland" subdivision, a couple hundred yards from Kapoho Bay. The neighborhood had been built on a flat pahoehoe slab barely 4 feet above sea level at high tide. If you dug a hole down through the layers of lava in your yard, you would have a brackish pond that rose and fell with the tide. Most houses did dig such a pond in their yard like the one where I was staying, and stocked it with little guppy size fish that would eat the mosquito larvae.
It was my job to feed the fish, and to occupy the house so it wouldn't be robbed while the owners were off the island. It had seemed a good idea when the mosquito fish had been first introduced to control the bloodsucking insects, but like so many attempts to improve on nature's balance they became one of the most harmful introduced species in Hawaiian streams' aquatic ecosystems. They prey upon small o'opu, the similar size fish that are the only native freshwater species in Hawaii; as well as transmit disease and parasites to them, and compete with them for food and living space. Their appetites also played a role in causing some species of Hawaiian damselflies to go extinct. They are too widespread now to ever be eradicated.
This was a peculiar time in my life. So many things that I touched had blown up. Just like the sleeping grass fireball, I can trace the source of all my personal disasters to a ground zero at the tips of the fingers of my own hands, now scarred with a pinto coloration, as a reminder.
It's interesting to wander around in someone else's book collection. They had a number of Buddhist books, Taoist books, new age teachers, novels, biographies, and peculiar books about the Baal Shem Tov, a mystic Rabbi, born in 18th Century in Western Ukraine.
In my Religious Studies curriculum, there was no course that delved into Hasidic Judaism. Even if there were, I wouldn't have likely been drawn to it. My interests and the classes I attended were about the traditions of Asia: Hinduism and Buddhism. Now, in 1978 it had been 14 years since I began to adopt the Buddhist perspective as my own in college; and having visited enlightened states so many times and in so many ways, that it has become like a permanent program running in the background, and a tool to be brought forth to gauge every action and apply to every event.
The Baal Shem Tov's teaching, a cornerstone of Hasidic tradition, was to become aware of the web connecting the divine to all human activity in every waking moment. Of course, I could see the parallel with Buddhist thought in this. It turns out his enjoyable fables contain solid advice for living and relating to others, and can be read just for the fun, which I did.
The Baal Shem Tov was a real person, but the stories about him are quite fanciful, and meant to be parables and allegories; quite entertaining and illuminating. The typical Baal Shem Tov story that I recall goes like this: The Rabbi is speaking to his student. There is a wedding to be performed at a village at some distance the following day and the two are going to travel there in the Rabbi's horse-drawn carriage. It's getting late and the student is anxious about having the time to make it, but the Baal Shem Tov is unconcerned. It gets later and later until the excursion has become impossible: a hundred miles to travel in one night. When the student thinks all is hopeless, they climb into the carriage, and start off into the darkness. The carriage is not hurrying; the horse's hooves beat out a slow "clop, clop, clop". The carriage rocks along slowly and as the Baal Shem Tov closes the curtains and begins to tell a story. The story would be about the people to be married, and who they were in former lives, and how the celebration would be a culmination and resolution of their past unfinished business.
As the journey and the story progressed, the rocking of the carriage got softer and softer, and the clopping ceased; to be replaced by the whistling of the wind. The story would induce something of a dreamlike trance in the student who would in time fall asleep, to be awakened by the rocking of the carriage and the return of the horse's slow "clop, clop, clop". Miraculously they had arrived at the wedding site, with time to spare. Then the fateful drama would unfold.
When my brief tenure at the Vacationland house came to an end, another similar situation came up, just a few miles away. This time it was in Wa'a Wa'a, the largely undeveloped jungle area along the road from Kapoho to Hawaiian Beaches, where Dick and Carol lived.
The house sat about 30 yards off the little traveled Beach road nestled into thick vegetation. With no other residence within a quarter mile, this place was even more isolated than Vacationland.
The house had a tricky lockup. The front door had no visible latch when the residence was closed. You inserted a nail into a hole and operated a wooden mechanism that way to open it. The house belonged to a writer who had built it himself, mostly of redwood. I don't remember his name. The housesitting was arranged by somebody else and I never met him. Even so, I was inspired about the cleverness of the structure and the fact that he was a writer.
With the life changing matrix of my injuries, the isolation, and solitude; that, combined with the Baal Shem Tov stories, I was getting kind of wiggy down there. So I began to write; "Art Is A Banana Tree With No Bananas"...3200 words of rather hallucinatory poetry. Today, decades later, it's still a work in progress. But this is where my writing began.
I received a small amount of money from Marsha for my efforts in the smuggling enterprise, but since Winston was in jail, there was little hope of anything more in the near future, if ever. I began to plan my return to the mainland once again.
Before I left, I stayed a short while in the home of a young couple, Jason and Allison (now Iris) in Kaumana, above Hilo. She was very pregnant, so pregnant in fact, that if I delayed my trip to California a few weeks, I could stay around and help out until the baby was born, which I did. Finally a healthy baby boy was born, hippie style in a wicker mamasan beanbag chair in the living room. My role, when the birth began to take place, was to be the cameraman, so that Jason could attend to Allison and the newborn.
I flew to San Francisco shortly thereafter, and with the very last of my money, on to Santa Barbara. I arrived in Carpinteria with literally nothing. I was 34 years old, with a 7-year old son that I hadn't seen in over a year. My father came to town on a planned visit about the same time, having ridden the bus from Las Vegas where he lived. He was broke, too, living on Social Security and in declining health. He had circulation problems in his legs, and as we walked to the beach and back, he had to find places to stop and rest.
For a while there, 1976 and 1977, I seemed to be going through life with a "kick me" sign on my back, with a series of situations where I had done my part, but partners in the enterprise failed to complete their end of the deal and pay me; or they got arrested and could not pay me. Then I blew myself up in a gasoline explosion. Then even another deal of the same pattern: I did my part, but the payday never came through.
A corollary to my Buddhist worldview is to accept responsibility for all. So rather than rue the mindless fates of randomness, I look for the source of misfortune at my own fire-scarred fingertips, and seek to adjust my ways. How is it that so much that had befallen me was of the same pattern? The common element was me!
Now in the summer of 1978, I would be starting all over again. Answering an ad in the SB News Press to manage some student housing in Isla Vista. The job came with an apartment. I got the gig. I appealed to Marsha for $250 to buy a little Honda motorcycle, so at least I was mobile. It was summer and the building was empty. It had been a fraternity house until recently, and the local alumni advisor for the national organization was going to just rent student apartments out to whoever. I had moved in and gotten started getting things in shape, when the guy who had hired me came with some bad news. He hadn't informed other members of the organization about what he was doing, and when he told them, they were totally against the idea, and I would have to move out very soon. Well, I had to laugh; kick me again.
What next? I was demoralized, but still young and healthy, and my skin had begun to return to normal, except for pinto markings on the back of my hands, and it was still a little thin. I had about $300 and a motorcycle. That's it.
I figured I had used up my beginner's luck in 1977, and had come out of that very serious situation unscathed; I could have gone to prison. If I were ever to resume my life with Johnny, risky smuggling adventures would not be the pathway.
I went back to the Bay Area, this time to the East Bay where I knew there would be opportunity. I went to work for my old friend Gary Cohen from the commune, and at last, my habit of choosing to rely on the unreliable was broken. I did work; I got paid. I did work; I got paid. I did work; I got paid. This continued for a year, never a glitch. After leaving the commune, Gary had become a general building contractor like his father had been, usually keeping several remodeling projects going in the Berkeley Hills at the same time. It was everything I needed to learn the craft of home building.
At first, I was living in the rundown Nash Hotel in the center of downtown Berkeley. It was a cheap room with a bathroom down the hall, and it was just what I needed. The best thing about it was that a block away was the Keystone Berkeley, a legendary music venue. In September 1978, Jerry Garcia was playing there a lot, and I took advantage of the situation. After a few months, Gary took possession of some income property in North Oakland. There was a 3 bedroom house that was rented out, and at the end of a long driveway, there was a triplex that was vacant, and that's where I came in. My job was to renovate them one by one, evenings and weekends, and when Gary's other remodeling projects couldn't fill my time. He was going to rent them out as soon as each renovation was completed.
As soon as the first unit was finished, Gary found a renter for it. A single lady named Katy, who had some kind of office job in the SF. Before long, when I was dealing with things around the triplex and helping her get settled, we began to flirt. Then one afternoon when I got home from work she invited me over for a glass of wine after I got cleaned up. So I came over freshly scrubbed. She sat me down on the couch and poured two glasses of white wine on the coffee table. Then she got on her hands and knees at the other end of the couch. She said, "Ummm..." and rolled her eyes as if she was thinking of something to say, and then lunged across my lap and bit me on the left side. Best first date ever, but like my grandfather, I'll "draw the curtain here," on that kind of steamy stuff.
We had a thing going there for months, but finally all three units were renovated, and I needed to move on. As much as I enjoyed working for Gary, I was getting another offer. This was from Mark Taylor, the same Mark Taylor from the one-way bus ride to Mazatlan. In the time since, he had started a hot tub business with a showroom on College Avenue in Berkeley and had a booming business going; and guess what? I did work; I got paid. I did work; I got paid. I did work; I got paid. I did work; I got paid. This went on without a glitch for another year. What do you know? All I had needed was greater care in choosing people to work with.
Gary, Mark and Katy. I credit them for turning my life around after a long stretch of mis-steps. But it was time to leave them. I had enough saved up to make another run at Hawaii. And there you have it; another chapter with no disasters. Unless I count leaving Katy behind.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com