I had junked my Chevy and bought a 1950 Studebaker before my father had died. I knew when I bought it that I would have to get a ring job for it, since it burned a quart of oil every 40 miles. After the ring job, it got 150 miles to a quart of oil, which was manageable. I bought oil in two-gallon cans from Sears or Western Auto, and always kept a can in the car.
I set off in the Studebaker in the summer of 1959 to drive first to San Francisco, to see my friends Gilbert and Sheri, who had moved out there from Washington to live among the beatniks. I'd always wanted to see San Francisco, and although it wasn't exactly on the way to Tucson, it seemed close enough.
This was before the days of freeways. Driving across country was a very interesting experience. For one thing, it was interesting to notice how different the people in Indiana were, when I stopped at a restaurant, from the people in, say, Wyoming. I thought that it was really neat to be driving a convertible, like some attractive popular young guy who would have lots of girl friends, and so of course I put the top down. When I woke up on the second day of the trip, my face was blistering from sunburn. So I had to keep the top down for the rest of the trip.
I would get off the highway and drive around, seeing what the countryside and the small towns were like. I remember in Iowa, I asked a farmer how to get back to Route 40 (or wherever) again. He asked me where I was going and I said, ``San Francisco.'' He looked at me like I was out of my mind.
Sheri and Gilbert were living in a two-room cottage on a little alley named Lynch Street near Pacific and Hyde Streets in San Francisco. I guess you'd call that the Russian Hill area, getting close to Fisherman's Wharf.
There's much much too much to say about Sheri and Gilbert for me to write about them here. But I should say that Sheri Martinelli was forty-something and a very severe alcoholic and former heroin addict. Gilbert was at least ten years younger, and Chinese.
I got to see some of the Beat scene, even though I was taken through it so fast it was mostly a blur. (Click here for some for some great photographs of Beat poets and artists.) The main beatnik that Sheri and Gilbert hung out with was a guy named Robert Stock, who doesn't seem to be much remembered in the histories of the time. I never got to spend enough time with any of the more famous beatniks to keep them straight. I remember briefly saying hello to Ferlinghetti and his wife at a cheap Market Street movie theatre which showed triple features all day. Sheri later explained that Ferlinghetti didn't like her.
I guess basically everyone that wasn't in love with Sheri hated her, since she got so loud and uncontrollable and obnoxious when she got drunk -- something she could do on half a bottle of beer. (For an account of an earlier part of Sheri's life, see Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard.)
After about two weeks, I reached the point where I wasn't willing to put up with Sheri's rage any more, so I called up my friend Pat (the former Spanish teacher at my high school back in Maryland who'd been kicked out for having an affair with my friend Eric), who was now living in Santa Monica with her two daughters. I went down and spend two weeks with her before going to Tucson.
When I got to Arizona, I sent Sheri my address but soon decided not to answer her letters any more. After a while, they stopped coming. I later learned that she had sent more letters to my home address in Takoma Park, where I had assured her that my mother would forward everything. But my mother didn't forward any of them, explaining years later that she assumed that I wouldn't care to hear from that woman.
About four years after this, I would again come across Sheri in San Francisco.
The desert was truly a marvelous place to experience for the first time. I'd been warned so strongly about the heat and making sure to have enough water along while driving in the desert that I first I thought of it as a much more dangerous place than it was. When I drove to Tucson from Santa Monica, I made sure not to get to the desert until after dark, although I later drove across the desert many times in the middle of the day. I remember what really impressed me more than anything else on that first drive was stepping out of the car for a few minutes and looking up and seeing how thick the stars were in the sky. And then the next morning when the sun came up, for a long time it was behind some tiny mountain or huge rock or whatever, so that I experienced the complete sunrise before ever seeing the actual sun. A sunrise without a sun seemed liked a marvelous piece of slight-of-hand from mother nature.
It's incredible to me now to remember my sense of wonder not only at the desert, but at the whole Rocky Mountain region, at the amazing mesas and other rock formations. After I got older, I lost this capacity to be amazed. Years later, seeing the redwood trees in California, (or even later, experiencing the oriental culture in Honolulu), I could note intellectually that they were impressive, but I never had that sense of ``Wow!'' that I got when first driving through the Rocky Mountains and the Arizona desert.
For my first year in Arizona, I lived in a dorm. I remember very little about that, except for having two roommates that I got along with very badly, a country boy from Arizona the first semester, and an exchange student from Cambodia in the spring.
According to campus rules, students under the age of 21 were not allowed to live off campus. But as far as I could see, nobody bothered enforcing that rule, so for my second year I rented a very tiny apartment about six blocks off campus.
Most of what is memorable about Tucson for me has to do with the University of Arizona, but I should certainly mention finally(!) getting a girl friend, an Art student, marrying her, and leaving Tucson with a wife and a daughter.