Big Dreams (30 page)

The revolution never came, of course, but the war in Vietnam had ended. There was that to consider when it seemed that Berkeleyites worried too much. Now those days were being raked over and codified, their fragments laid claim to, the mythic Berkeley of intellectual dissent and fervent opposition and too much hair and baggy clothes rising into the pantheon of mythic California.

Where Telegraph Avenue stopped, UC Berkeley began. Sather Gate was the entrance to a campus that stretched over 1,232 wooded acres. Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of Manhattan’s Central Park, had done the landscaping and had given the campus a parklike atmosphere. There were gnomish grottoes, rippling creeks, and charming fieldstone bridges that carried you to secluded footpaths through the shrubbery, where the odd marijuana joint could be smoked and the odd kiss exchanged.

Berkeley was the finest public university in California, the crown jewel in the UC system. It had twenty-six libraries, scads of Nobel laureates, and about 22,000 students. Established in 1873, it was the oldest of the nine UC campuses, which had an aggregate enrollment
of about 163,000. Most students were California residents and paid a very low tuition, so Berkeley was severely strapped for cash, like its fellow institutions and like California itself.

The University of California had its fingers in many pies. Its Board of Regents read like a corporate Who’s Who. Its scientists and its researchers still had a strong bond to the military-industrial complex. Other branches of the UC system counseled farmers, ranchers, fishermen, the timber industry, and so on. The Davis branch handled agriculture and viticulture, the San Francisco branch did medicine, and the Scripps Institution in La Jolla did oceanography.

A Berkeley grad was inducted into a worthy and valuable club. Students toiled under that tension, but you’d never guess it by watching them at play in Sproul Plaza. They were strumming banjos and zooming by on Rollerblades, passing Hacky-Sacks from toe to toe and flipping Frisbees in looping spirals, eating tacos and falafel and chow mein from carts, and soaking up the suds at the Bear’s Lair, as though the very idea of cracking a book were laughable.

Even the faculty seemed absolutely above any academic concerns. Whenever I saw a bearded, graying professor amble through the plaza trailed by a gaggle of female admirers and beaming in tenured delight, I felt a stab of envy and wished that I’d done all my homework on time and had never cut a class, hewing instead to a straight and narrow path that might have led me to a similar Olympus.

B
ERKELEY WAS A SMALL CITY
, but it held a large sway in matters Californian, being the cradle of a
haute bourgeoisie
style of living that had later spread around the state. The style had its origins in the British Arts and Crafts Movement, which was sponsored by William Morris and John Ruskin in an attempt to provide an antidote to the dehumanizing effects of industry. An Arts and Craftser valued simple, organic things and tried to stay attuned to and in harmony with nature.

A Swedenborgian minister, Joseph Worcester, introduced the
principles of the movement to the East Bay. He built a house for himself in Piedmont, near Berkeley, in 1876, that broke with all the contemporary modes of design. The house was open, airy, and light, and drew its elements from the environment. The interior walls were rough redwood, while redwood shingles covered the exterior walls. It could not have been conjured up anywhere else. The essential physical properties of northern California were imbedded in its bones.

Soon the architects around Berkeley were casting away their traditional pattern books and meeting to discuss the theories of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Bernard Maybeck plunged into the new world with particular abandon and made redwood his building material of choice. He so disliked the look of raw plaster that he started using stucco instead, imitating the straw and adobe walls of missions. Sometimes in a Maybeck house the dividing line between a parlor and a garden appeared not to be there at all.

Another architect in the circle, A. C. Schweinfurth, designed a Unitarian Church in Berkeley in 1898 that was an Arts and Crafts monument. It had two porches beneath its pitched roof that drew their support from unpeeled redwood logs. The church became the locale for meetings of the Ruskin Club. The club had such members as the architects Maybeck, Schweinfurth, Charles Keeler, Louis Christian Mullgardt, and Willis Polk. Keeler’s
The Simple Home
, published in 1904, was their handbook.

The Ruskin Clubbers had a women’s satellite in the Hillside Club, whose members fought to save the “wilderness” of the north Berkeley Hills. The women were fanatically pure. They slept in the fresh air, showered in cold water, and worked out to keep fit. They wouldn’t touch coffee, tea, or meat and believed that any house was merely “landscape gardening with a few rooms to use in case of rain.”

Precisely at this historical moment, the cultural elite in California, all centered in the state’s great university, began turning its collective back on the beaux arts of Paris to appreciate the natural wonders in front of them—the light, the trees, the air, and the ocean.

The Ruskin Club’s knack for transforming the specific attributes of a place into something special, borrowing as necessary, would be recapitulated more than seventy years later when a young woman in love with Provence and the stories of Marcel Pagnol opened a restaurant in a shingled Berkeley house. She grew her own herbs and lettuces in a backyard garden, bought free-range chickens fed on organic grains, and relied on local ingredients that were fresh, aromatic, and pure.

“I am sad,” she would write one day, “for those who cannot see a lovely, unblemished apple just picked from the tree as voluptuous, or a beautifully perfect pear as sensuous.…”

In Berkeley, she had found an armada of kindred souls. The little shingled house, Chez Panisse, filled with gourmets and gourmands clamoring for a taste of her spit-roasted capon or her rocket salad with goose fat and garlic-rubbed croutons. So it was that Alice Waters paid an accidental homage to the Ruskin Club and struck it rich by launching California cuisine.

O
AKLAND, SOUTHEAST OF BERKELEY
, was orbiting in still another solar system. It was a tough, drug-wracked city, the fifth-largest in California, anomalous in the suburban landscape and almost out of control.

In the Oakland hills, there were pockets of gentility and many people of a liberal conscience, but down in the infernal flats you came upon decaying old houses and horrid housing projects that had been burned and gutted, where crime was taught in busy tutorials. Gangs of Crips and Bloods plied their trade there and distributed crack cocaine and heroin, with boys sometimes no older than ten hooked into service and outfitted with beepers.

The gangsters and their wanna-bes dressed as if to advertise the fact that they were dealing, hip and nonchalant in Raiders’ paraphernalia with its piratical emblem and its buccaneerish colors of silver and black, or in FILA T-shirts, baggy pants, and pump-em-up
Air Jordan sneakers. There was something of the clown or the fool in the mix, at once streetwise and heartbroken, but that changed when the gangsters were in their late teens and understood that they were in the life for good, with no chance of escape. Then their eyes grew hard and cold and murderous.

Friends kept vanishing, that was part of it. They got busted and were shipped off to prison, gone to Susanville or Pelican Bay, locales as exotic to an inner-city kid as Bucharest might be. Or they turned up dead, stabbed or shot or overdosed. A young person in the worst sections of Oakland became intimate with death in early childhood, and with sex not much later, as girls just beginning to menstruate gave birth to infants out of wedlock, babies making babies.

I walked around Oakland and saw the young mothers as they waited at bus stops for a ride to a clinic or a hospital or maybe to a relative’s house. They put on a brave front while they clutched their children to them, looking proud and loving but also terrified and overwhelmed, barely managing to hang on to their squirmy bundles.

A curious look of annoyance sometimes crossed a mother’s face, as if it had just dawned on her that she’d be stuck with her infant now and forever—that she’d been tricked into playing a game without knowing all the rules.

Oakland wasn’t unattractive. It had handsome lakes and parks. The architecture had a distinctive 1930s sturdiness, spared from the glass-and-steel skyscrapers that were interchangeable among California cities. It had a good museum, a good zoo, and a fine sports complex for baseball and basketball. Its port continued to grow, earning substantial revenues from two big military tenants on its waterfront, depots for the army and the navy.

Yet Oakland still fought against every attempt at redevelopment. Millions had been sunk into renovating a downtown area around Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, but the shops and the restaurants couldn’t stay in business, because nobody wanted to be on those streets at night, although a project to construct a new Federal Building was supposed to change all that.

Gangs appeared to be the true bosses in Oakland. The city had a murder rate that had blasted right off the scale. Drive-by shootings were an everyday affair. Often the killers—teenagers acting out of a warped sense of honor—were too stoned or dumb or inept to hit their target and instead sprayed bullets from their Uzis, the modern equivalent of the sawed-off shotgun, into homes or apartments where grannies snored before a TV.

The Crips and the Bloods weren’t the only ones in business. Tongs ruled the roost in Oakland’s thriving Chinatown and banged heads with the gangs of Vietnamese immigrants who were closing in on them. Hell’s Angels were also partial to the city. They did their usual trading in weapons and speed and buried their dead at Evergreen Cemetery.

Whenever an Angel was blown away in the line of duty, or got wasted in a crash, or relinquished himself to premature liver failure, his fellow bikers turned out for a slow ride to Evergreen. Such honchos of the club as Charlie “Magoo” Tinsley, Doug “The Thug” Orr, and James “Fu” Griffin were all pushing up daisies there. A heavy-duty Angel like “Irish” Mike O’Farrell, sent to his maker by four gunshot wounds and seven stab wounds outside a bar, had earned a black marble tombstone and a floral arrangement in the shape of a flying skull.

Sometimes it seemed that Oakland was laboring under a curse. Its public schools were a shambles, so bankrupt and mismanaged that they’d been taken from the hands of local educators and put under the auspices of an overseer from the state. In a way, the schools were at the heart of the matter, as they were everywhere in the suburbs, in every DMZ. The old notion that hard work and studious behavior were a path out of the ghetto held little credence among California youths these days.

The kids in Oakland sat in their grungy classrooms and spun their eyes to the heavens when confronted with
A Tale of Two Cities
or some other relic bit of literature, and they drag-assed home after class and saw before them what hard work would bring them—a
cramped bungalow on a seedy block. The bungalow and the life that went with it, those were your rewards for thirty years at a Ford plant or thirty years as a domestic. The kids in Oakland saw all that daily, and they rebelled, silently or otherwise.

There was no denying the truth. The adolescents in Oakland’s rundown high schools, and in rundown high schools all across the state, knew that they were being monitored and contained, not prepared for advancement. In California, only the prisons were as overcrowded as the public schools.

Harsh realities were the real music of Oakland, its rasp and its resonance, the Oaktown Sound, with rappers and hip-hoppers spelling out in big, bold words what everybody felt in secret. Frustration and anger were the city’s juice, the very source of the energy that primed the pump for the graffiti artists who sprayed walls and boarded-up buildings with slogans like the one I saw on a concrete highway abutment as I drove away, the one that said, Oakland
Is
South Africa.

O
AKLAND OUT
. I crossed the Bay Bridge, some eight-and-a-half miles of steel, the longest such span in the world. There were frenzied gulls winging about in a clear blue sky. Past Army Street, the freeway split in two, with the right fork, Highway 280, branching off to Daly City, where about thirty thousand Filipino-Americans lived close by the shopping paradise of Serramonte Mall.

Daly City was fogged in from May until September, but those who remembered Manila claimed not to care. Around Serramonte, even the streets are air-conditioned, they liked to say.

The left fork, Highway 101, ran down through the suburbs of the San Francisco Peninsula. Near Candlestick Park on the bay, home of our amazing Giants and forty-niners, the same wind that made outfielders pine for thermal underwear was whipping up a froth and propelling sailboarders forward at breakneck speeds. I had a vision of Willie McGee commuting to work, Hercules to the baseball stadium, Hercules to the baseball stadium,
ad infinitum
, calculating his batting average while listening to his Bradshaw tapes.

Farther on came Redwood City. People didn’t usually connect it to Silicon Valley, whose epicenter, Sunnyvale, was about forty miles
away, but in a nondescript building there, Jaron Lanier of VPL Research, Inc., was refining his contribution to Virtual Reality, which had the potential, its disciples believed, to be bigger than Nintendo by the millennium.

Lanier had all the hallmarks of a techno whiz kid. He was under thirty, eccentric, and brilliant in the way of certain mathematicians and divines. When I called on him at his office, he gave me a doughy handshake that seemed to be a metaphor for his entire being. He did not walk so much as pad softly, a person born to go barefoot. His eyes were cool and translucent, and his hair was coiled and braided into massive dreadlocks.

Lanier’s pale white skin spoke of countless nights spent wandering in the stratosphere of computer syntax, where the oxygen gets thin. He conversed with a dizzying cerebral energy, selling both the sizzle and the steak.