It was that job that kept me in the Bay Area, when I thought I was just passing through. Your lawyers keep writing to me, they say I was searching for my path, following the angel number, and eventually experiencing an incompatibility between the upper and lower chakras. I can’t really corroborate that. At first, I really liked the Mission — it had the best weather — but something drew me to Berkeley. In college towns you’re less likely to have to explain what being a Catalan is. Not that I bothered anymore by that point. I just said I was from Barcelona; most everybody had heard of that, even back then.
We’re talking 1991, my salad days. Before the dot-com boom and all, when Berkeley was slightly more convincing as a hippie town. Now that I’ve become associated with it as the most famous walk-in since Anwar Sadat, despite my geographical distance I have a front-row seat to some of the city’s more deeply weird elements. No offense. There’s even a whole publishing house that came up around all the theories, but I don’t need to tell you that. My version is that I was fleeing a hairy divorce, ironically from an American named Bob. I was also fleeing Catalonia, in some ways I guess how everybody flees their home, or at least considers doing, at some point. The lawyers call it “overwhelming evidence you were no longer yourself” and the seekers see it as “new approaches to solving unsolvable problems.”
There were things about Bob — being American, from Berkeley, in fact — that made me see my city, Barcelona on the eve of the Olympics, in a different light. And my quick once-around with civil matrimony left me feeling that everyone was thinking, I told you so. Your lawyers still write to explain how I was experiencing an unhealthy soul tie, and should have been wearing hats to protect my crown chakra.
Me, Barcelona, Berkeley, we’re all so different now. I’ll never live down the dramatic reenactments on that episode of Unsolved Mysteries. I came to wish the looks I saw on people’s faces were only saying, I told you so. They should’ve had that actress made up with bruises on her arms and all over her psyche. Because that was how I arrived in Berkeley, back in 1991. A Berkeley that seemed to be still living off the fumes of the late sixties, which were fumes so strong you might just want to breathe them in all your life, especially when you had a car and a redwood hot tub. I didn’t have my own hot tub, of course, but I had a working code for the secret backyard one on Essex, and that made me feel lucky enough. I didn’t have a car, either, but the BART dropped me off on 16th and Mission where I could get burritos as big as a braç de gitano and Salvadorean chicken soup, and back in Berkeley I could binge on new flavors of Vietnamese and Thai, all cheap and nourishing to my little prematurely divorced Catalan soul. The lawyers who want to vindicate me consider this sudden shift in my tastes “consistent, further proof.”
It was definitely true that I’d been having a lot of strange new feelings in America. I chalked it up to a struggle with the identity codes and political correctness. You know, Indigenous Peoples’ Day and all that. I found some of it exhausting, like the effort of speaking English all the time, and there was also a feeling of relief, since I didn’t seem to fit into any of the identity parameters. My Catalan accent was rarely recognized. But Louise noticed it, right away. Her shorthand for Catalan was “someone with a love of language.” Hers was a very sophisticated reductionism, that made me feel I could never surprise her.
At the time I recall feeling I was escaping, getting away both from and with something, hiding in plain sight. The California sun felt familiar, since Berkeley and Barcelona had similar climates for eight months out of the year. And I loved being Cal-adjacent. Near as I could be to the university without being enrolled. I would spend hours on Friday nights at Moe’s Books, up on the third floor where no one would bother me. I know some Núrites feel that space is a portal. I can’t speak to that. I can say that books both saved my life and scared me to death. I wanted to be surrounded by all those books, but I was afraid to open many of them, and indifferent to others. I liked their smell, and the pure abundance of them. And I liked to see Moe at the helm, when I came in during the day, in his hexagonal playpen of piled-up stacks that needed pricing. It was at Moe’s that I first saw the volume Welcome to Planet Earth. I hated everything about that book, mostly the cover because that was as far as I got. I don’t know how much more respectful I can be about this shit, really. That’s why I’m taking the time to explain this, as best I can. I’m hoping you will bring this message back to Berkeley and get them all to just leave me the fuck alone. I do not have the answers you seek.
In those days I would go to the secret hot tub at least once every few weeks. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, a guy who made sets for a Chicano theater company, who also liked weed and acid and was a little bit in love with me so he would listen to me go on about, well, about pretty much whatever I felt like going on about. Not at the Essex Hot Tub, though. The sign clearly read: SILENCE, NO TALKING. Maybe that was what I liked best about it. In the throes of those salad days, I was seeking both quiet and conversation. And sex, of course. I was twenty-one years old.
Núrites describe that period of my life as a major neurological rewiring, in which Louise’s soul was studying my Akashic records and behaviors to master my physical body. I’ve always been honest with anyone who’s come to me, like you have, with these questions. After what I’d been through with Bob, I was just looking for a good time, the very earthbound pleasures of the flesh.
I always made sure to read the Daily Cal classifieds, and consider all the possibilities located therein. That was where I came across Louise’s ad. For someone who spoke Spanish and English, and could use a computer. Definitely did not say starseed with a mission. I forget the exact wording because she always referred to me, once I got the job, as her amanuensis. Which sounded better than secretary, or dictation-taker. It at least sounded like I took dictation in a medieval cloister. I took dictation in her apartment. You know the place, on Spruce Street, in Normandy Village. I remember when I showed up for the interview, thinking it looked like a reproduction of something an adventurous, fabulously wealthy young heir would have had brought back from his travels, piece by piece, and reconstructed. But more modest. Like maybe a groundskeeper’s hut on the Hearst Castle grounds.
Just off campus, Normandy Village was strangely out of time, with whitewashed walls and a cock painted on the front. I had to walk into the courtyard and then up narrow steps that wrapped around a turret to reach her wooden door with its rounded top, and the inscription, You know how little while we have to stay / And, once departed may return no more, from the third verse of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. And open the door she did, into an irregularly shaped space, half cozy and half witch’s oven. It was oddly meta to be fleeing Europe and harrowing memories of a guy named Bob into some Californian architect’s fantasy of a French village, but I got used to it soon enough. The entryway led into a sort of railroad kitchen, which in turn led into the room where we worked, her pages piled up among early American furniture and Oriental rugs that had arrived there on the SS Virginia via the Oakland dock.
Louise’s sleeping berth overlooked the desk she stood in front of to give dictation and the wooden card table where her little cubical Apple computer she liked to address as “Mac” sat. She never touched Mac. Some evenings she would type up pages on her Smith Corona, and then cut and straight-pin passages in edited order so I could transfer them to digital format the next day. Yes, I am aware of the metaphorical readings some Núrites give to these tasks but, really, it was just my job.