Mickey And Delia (3) “How could you have discussed it like that then?” “I picked up everything from the talk in the class.” At first the teacher looked like he was going to cry but then he laughed instead. In Spanish class Mickey sat like a dummy in the back of the room and looked out of the window at the scrawny tree in the sun lit courtyard. He wished that he was out there in the sun and wished that he were as stupid as the tree so that he would not have to go to school. He decided that the class had progressed over his head and he would not take Spanish next year. The teacher was droning on and on in Spanish and suddenly the teacher called his name and asked him something in Spanish that Mickey could not translate. “You know,” the teacher said in English, “most people in this year of Spanish would have a fluent grasp of the language by now.” Mickey was mortified. “Don’t take this class again next year if you are not serious, it’s not to float through high school, you are not a Spanish major are you?” “No,” Mickey answered flatly. “What is your major?” “College prep,” Mickey stated reluctantly and the class snickered. “Maybe you should think of changing it,” the teacher said with finality implying that Mickey would not make it to college. The class continued and just before the bell the teacher asked an odd question, as he did once in awhile, to test his students intelligence. "Which weighs more, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers?" No one raised his or her hand so Mickey raised his. “Yes?” the teacher was happy to call Mickey expecting him to give the wrong answer. “A pound of feathers weighs more,” answered Mickey confidently. The teacher was crestfallen, the class laughed, they thought that Mickey was a great fool. “That’s right,” said the teacher and the laughter stopped immediately. “Gold is on a different weight measure system and a pound weighs about fourteen ounces, I think. So a pound of feathers does weigh more than a pound of gold.” The bell rang, the students filed out and Mickey left the class in relief. The teacher was puzzled because he did not know that Mickey’s family spent their summers in the gold country and Mickey had developed some interest in the subject of gold. Mickey met Tim after school. “Say, do you want to go to Tea Graph with me?” Tim asked. Mickey smiled at him for saying ‘Tea Graph’ instead of Telegraph Avenue. Tim was always trying something new and Mickey admired him for it. Even though Tim was slow, he could be clever. “Yeah I guess so,” Mickey answered. Tim pulled a folded corduroy Greek fisherman’s cap from his denim jacket pocket with deliberation and put it on his head. Mickey saw that it had a peace symbol button on the front of it. Mickey had never seen this hat before and thought it was very cool and brave of Tim to wear it with the button and wished that he had his nerve. They walked to the bus stop on the San Pablo Dam Road and Tim asked Mickey, "If god dropped acid would he see people?" They caught a bus and rode into Richmond and transferred to a seventy-two bus for Berkeley. The slow moving AC Transit bus took its time going down San Pablo Avenue, one of the longest Avenues in the world. One on which all the stoplights seemed to be red. “I hate bus drivers,” said Tim. “They don’t do anything.” “Oh yeah?” asked Mickey. “Yeah, they kick me off the bus sometimes, sometimes they don’t pick me up. I don’t know, I just hate em. They have like this real authoritarian thing. Like if you’re alone at a bus stop and they don’t like you they just pass you by. Pisses me off.” Mickey hated buses too. The constant stop and go driving made him queasy and he could smell diesel fumes in the bus and that made him ill. The diesel bus engine was roaring loudly in between stops yet the bus was slow and dirty and created a lot of pollution. Mickey remembered the old Key System green buses in downtown Richmond shooting out thick black clouds of diesel exhaust toward everyone who was on the sidewalk. At an early age he had learned to hold his breath so that he would not breathe in the bad fumes. The new buses had front windows that were disconcertingly large as if all of the passengers would be ejected through the front window if the bus ran into a wall at thirty-five miles an hour. Mickey did admire the strong arms on the windshield wipers. They transferred to another bus at San Pablo and University in Berkeley and got off at Telegraph Avenue. The street had an oddly sweet smell, a combination of incense from the boutiques, breads from the Eclair bakery, perfumes and patchouli oil. Mickey sensed an expectation of promises to come in the air. They went into Shakespeare’s books and looked at the buttons with slogans like, 'Peace and Love,' 'Let's legalize pot,' 'Unbutton,' 'Folk You,' ‘Eat The Rich,’ 'Better living through chemistry,' ‘Make Love Not War’ and the ubiquitous peace symbol. Mickey wished that he could buy them all. He bought an underground newspaper called the Berkeley Barb, which had an article about the nude beaches south of San Francisco with pictures of nude and natural women. It was more realistic than a Playboy magazine with its posed and coifed models and it was much cheaper. On Telegraph they ran into Tim’s friend Larry, a streetwise kid, lanky with greasy black hair, protruding teeth and a stupid laugh. He had on cowboy boots with the most worn down heels that Mickey had ever seen. “Hi Mickey glad to meet ya, any friend of Tim’s is a friend of mine.” Larry scrutinized Mickey’s face carefully to remember it, which made Mickey uncomfortable. They were standing in front of the Forum restaurant by the motorcycles that belonged to bikers. Mickey was oddly impressed with this scene, everyone seemed to know Larry and said hello to him. Larry and Tim went off to confab alone for awhile and Mickey watched the occasional braless girl walk by. Tim came back to Mickey shortly and they left and walked down to the other end of the street toward Sather Gate to catch a bus home. They had to get back for dinner or else their parents would question them and the buses running to El Sobrante quit early. Mickey sat in his bedroom that night feeling restless. The room’s only window faced the street, a dead end circle which had little traffic. The room was almost a square and it was painted ‘institutional green’, as his mother called it. Mickey saw the room as being sterile in form and appearance. To him it was symbolic of the attitude of his parents, the neighbors and society in general. There was a whole world out there enjoying itself and he was stuck in this hideous jail cell of a bedroom that his parents told him he was lucky to have. He had done everything that he could to make the square room into an acceptable space. Using tacks he put up record album covers around the top of the wall, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Mamas and The Papas and Simon and Garfunkel, whatever he had. He put the tacks inside of the covers and poked them through the back so they would not show. His father got mad at him for the tack holes but the covers remained up. His mother, as a go between with his father, defended his ‘creativity’. He placed some tacks roughly in a circular pattern in a corner of the room and took regular string and ran it to the opposite tacks and then ran the string around the perimeter of the circle in decreasing circles, creating a spider web. He took the few psychedelic dance posters he had managed to pick up off the telephone poles in Berkeley and placed them around the room. His favorite one was a small poster with psychedelic writing around a picture of a naked girl in lotus position. He took the bed apart and laid the mattress on the floor and stored the frame in the large closet with its three sliding doors. The mattress took up less room without the frame, for one thing and for another, no one would hear the bed squeak when he masturbated. On one of the three closet doors he glued pictures of things that he liked which he had cut out of magazines, creating a collage. During the summer he had read the book Lilith, about a crazy woman who was institutionalized. He had stayed up one night and drawn a picture of the way the institution had been described in the book and tacked that up. He was interested in psychotic people because he did not understand their viewpoint and he felt that their hallucinations were interesting because he did not understand where they came from. He wondered how it was they seemed to live in two realities at the same time. He burned incense occasionally, when his mother was out, so she would not get mad at him, but the central air conditioning kept bringing new air into the room, driving the smoke out. Tim had hipped Mickey to the idea that if he conditioned his parents to the smell of burning incense once in awhile, they would not notice it so much if he ever smoked any grass and burned incense to cover the smell up. Mickey read his Berkeley Barb and found some of the articles very interesting. Stories on how corrupt the federal and state politics were caught his eye, as did stories about the music and dances in San Francisco. At some dances they had supplied LSD to the audience but that had stopped since LSD became illegal earlier in October. Mickey felt that he had missed his chance to take the drug. Gone were the days of buying a sugar cube with a drop of acid on it in a coffeehouse. There was an article on the Tibetan Book of the Dead that he found fascinating. There were schedules of antiwar demonstrations and strange personal advertisements with inscrutable acronyms, things he had never read about in the Richmond Independent that his father subscribed to. The article on the nude beach made him want to go and see one the first chance he got. Mickey felt that he was missing out on everything. He was longing inside to experience life and felt that he was dying in the house. He found this upsetting, it was making him feel feverish and frantic to be pent up. He was burning to experience life, it was like a fever that nothing could quench and here he was stuck in a square green room. He knew everyone else was asleep in the house except for him. He always had trouble going to sleep, even as a child. He was hyper alert because he was very bright and aware and could not shut down his consciousness just because his parents told him to go to bed. After his parents were asleep he would turn on a low light and read books or write poetry or draw pictures when he felt inspired. He started writing a poem: For it’s life, life The world cries, And people live And people die. But I sit all alone, In my sterile home. They say I’m lucky. Mickey decided that he would try to meditate. He had never done it before but had heard about it. He was not sure how to proceed or what to do. He turned out the light and sat cross legged on the mattress with his back straight up against the bedroom wall and stared at the beige curtains that hung over the window. It was late and quiet and there were no disruptions. He sat motionless, stilled his mind and concentrated. He could strongly feel the energy that was around him. He thought and gathered the energy around him and strengthened it. The curtain began to change colors, red, green and blue, odd glowing colors that he could see through. He was surprised at this event and had never heard of anything like it. He got up and lit a candle on a bed stand by the closet doors and sat back down on the mattress. He started to count his breaths, ‘one in, two out, one in, two out’. His eyes were half closed when he noticed a bright rhythmic pulsing on his eyelids. He opened his eyes and noticed the candle was flickering with a high flame that seemed to bounce up and down. As he watched, the flame died down to normal. He concentrated again and again he saw the pulsing light and when he opened his eyes the flame died down. He did it once again. Apparently his state of mind was influencing the candle flame. This time he concentrated with his eyes open and the candle flame got high and strobed, casting jumping shadows on the walls. He stopped concentrating and the flame stopped strobing. He did it again. Was this a form of mind over matter? Obviously the meditation and the flickering were related. He seemed to be enhancing the energy of the candle by locking onto its frequency and acting like a resonator, making the candle burn harder. He found that hard to accept. He got up and walked around the candle trying to feel any draft that might be blowing on it. He could see no outward reason for the flickering. He sat back down and began to meditate again. It took a few minutes but he locked onto the candle flame and made it flicker at will, then he smiled. He concentrated strongly on the candle flame with his eyes open until it was fairly jumping. He made it grow more intense, the flame grew big and fell small. Then bigger and tiny until the flame leaped off the candle, putting it out. Mickey laughed and laughed and lay down and thought about what had just happened until he slept. Tuesday 11-01-1966 Mickey was sitting in the cafeteria alone as usual surrounded by noisy children eating their food off of trays as they chattered. Mickey heard some girls mention how one’s father had promised her a hundred dollars for each A she received on her report card. She had gotten straight A’s and collected but her father did not think he could pay her a hundred dollars for each A in this report period. Mickey could not imagine having that kind of money. The big and tall janitor with the large wart on his nose was grimly cleaning the floor because of some spilled food. Mickey recalled the time the guy had gotten angry with him for reading in the cafeteria. The man talked like a thug and looked like a criminal. Mickey took out his notebook and began writing a poem he called Cafeteria Blues. While sitting amidst The De Anza crowd In the cafe where Overhead's a dark cloud The janitor tall With the wart on his nose Said this to me "Youse ought to knows Dat dis place is fer eating And dats all you can do, So shape up or ship out!" He looks funny too. I gave him a stare And tried with my will To toss him into the food That was left over still But I remembered the words Of a wise friend with sorrow, "What you don't eat today You'll be eating tomorrow." Mickey closed his notebook and walked out to the lawn and saw Ginn. "Hi!" he said cheerfully. Ginn looked disgusted at this familiarity and said acerbically, "You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny," and walked away. When Mickey got home that afternoon his mother asked him, "Do you like the Kinks?" "Well, yeah. I liked their songs Tired Of Waiting For You and Sunny Afternoon," he answered.
Copyright © 2007 Michael Potter |