By Todd Lazarski

Up and down Telegraph, up and down College, ‘no bars’ suddenly assuming a new, pervasive meaning. Carousing Berkeley began leisurely and languorously, buoyed by Uncle John’s send-off gift and only a notion of creeping thirst. Now though, devolving over the course of hours and a budding new traveler’s chappedness between my legs, that dryness has become a half-depraved, fully-desperate scrounge for a stool, some chest-height wood upon which to lay my elbows, and any amount of distance between my person and all things scholarly or ambitious.

Even the Berkeley hoboes have a slightly studious slant.

“Any idea where I can get a drink?” Me, shoulders shrugging, frustrated but chummy after a long hour avoiding panhandlers and apparently missing any watering hole on Telegraph.

“Hhm.” A black dude in ratty Raiders hoodie, rattling garbage bag tossed over his left shoulder, right forefinger and thumb to his natty dark chin, eyes gazing off to the upper right as if he were trying to remember pi past 4 decimal points… “Maybe a bar?”

Touché.

I imagine finding an alley, back by the dumpsters behind the physics building, perhaps, a bottle of Thunderbird passing between the two of us, that over-compensating phallic symbol in the middle of campus blearily but barely visible in the distance where the studious Asians are bustling by with backpacks full of books and phones full of pretty-girl texts, this guy telling me the secrets of my own life as filtered through the failures of his, enunciating and pointing wildly in his finger-less gloves.

“So you see? So you see!?”

Us, finally forgetting it all, slurping the bottle’s dregs, laughing with our dirty teeth, beginning to count his garbage-bagged cans of coke, students’ for sure, used for all-nighters and not the fun kind, plotting where we can cash them in and re-up our supply. Splurging this time, a bottle of Night Train, some Kools and a seat on wet grass somewhere with a view of the darkening Oakland hills.

In truth though, the need to pee trumps all else. Coffee bars have usurped every corner in town, and though my aspirations and nattily growing beard lean toward wino, I’m near defenseless in the face of Peets Coffee, and my bladder protests. As I wander away from the Raiders fan and through the alternating concrete and woods of the majestic, serene-seeming campus, trying not to gaze up at that tower, whatever it is, least I be discovered as a non-student, I try each building I see. Locked. Head down, unwavering, ‘damn I forgot my key card, har-har,’ I head next door. Locked. ‘Oh man, I’m such an embarrassed freshman.’ Next door. Locked. ‘Look, I know I couldn’t go to school here, I know when I look at the pretty young Asians it’s in more of a creepy townie kind of way than I can currently come to grips with, and I know I’m not even capable of gainful employment. But, please, the dignity of a flushable toilet? At least?’

Fuck it. I find a tree off a beaten path and whip it out. Feeling diseased by degrees, but vindictive. In the brush I gaze unflinching at the tower, Sather Tower, I’ll find out later, wondering…

By the corner of College and Ashby, as yet another potential bar-sighting turns out to be yet another vegan/veggie/bullshit tree-hugging atrocity of fruit drinks or otherwise unhelpful libations, I spot another kindred spirit.

“New student, bro?” He asks after my drink inquiry, unequivocal about the crusted gob hanging from his middle flap of nose skin that gives us each a left and right nostril – as opposed to one magnanimous breathing hole.

“Not exactly.”

“Ahh, a working man…?”

“I don’t want to get into all that.”

In my head, this is about where I nonchalantly pull up my shirtsleeves, exposing the tat as I hand roll a cigarette. The tat: An engorged green-ink bald eagle, red dripping from his chin, cigarette protruding from the mouth, a stick of dynamite in one taloned claw, a severed, bleeding tit in the other. It’s only half visible due to the forest of curly black on my forearm.

“I just gotoutta jail.”

“Ah.” Looking at me sheepishly, unconsciously taking one step back.

In reality, my sleeves are already up, the sparse hair and wispy veins exposed. I offer him a Camel, shrug, and head west. For a second I flash on my pocket contents, not the wallet or my apartment keys (don’t they seem so futile, so benign 2,000 miles from home? Or isn’t there work for them here too, somewhere?), but on the one-hitter and rolled up plastic baggie of Uncle John herb. Maybe me and this one, we’ll find an abandoned car, bus, or God-willing, one of those flaming garbage cans to sit around. Tell him about the time I got gonorrhea in Montana as he hands me back the pipe. Him with a story of killing a scab during a railroad strike… Instead I find myself looping back toward Telegraph.

By the time I again hit campus, undershirt crusted, flannel soaked through too, weary and parched, about to spark some of John’s going-away present for a lift, I’ve settled on the 10:12 to Seattle. No more Berkeley, no more hesitation, and most importantly, no major universities, not there, I assure myself with a smirk… And then, at the precise moment of decision, next to a prospective-students and visiting-parents hotel, snuggled between Telegraph and College, a Sierra Nevada neon light calls me home.

I sit with both palms down on the bar, a sweating pint of Red Hook between. Of all things to happen at a drinking establishment, surely the only one in town, a game of team trivia rages behind me. Perfect, I think, detached, thinking about my guitar strings accumulating dust and cat hair back home. Thinking about John and Hill, already back at their own version of home, already back to work (well, maybe not in John’s case). I think about my workmates, or, rather, former workmates, currently pushing off after a grumpy Monday, the levity rising in the day’s growing shadows. Maybe hitting Jimmy’s for some pickup beers…

Things sure run smooth without ‘Ski around.

Who?

Har Har…

After three or four beers, enough to assuage the growing trepidation of just how many miles away Seattle’s unknown limits lay, the bartender calls me a cab. Stumbling outside, I feel like the last day of high school.

On to bigger and better things, motherfuckers!

Oh yeah? Like what?

(crickets)…

I’m thankful to plop my scabby under-scrotum in the plush backseat, my rucksack beside me. Grateful that the cabbie seems so much less pesky than the degrees, beards and glasses that have been in my face since stepping out of John’s car. Back amongst the everymen, him relating a tale of a North African immigrant living in North Berkeley, the road and his voice comforting as we turn toward the train station in Emeryville… Even though I can hardly decipher a word out of his broken, somehow Caribbean-sounding English and the pulsing Nigerian funk that I don’t ask him to turn down.

“Ride for free,” he seems to keep reiterating, talking about his life, and growing animated. I can’t help but nod along, giddy, half-drunk.

“And you, you have a ride for free.” His voice going up a bit at the end, giving me a half-glance like maybe it’s a question.

But I’m mostly just nodding, dumbly, thinking maybe it’s the refrain of the song. Starting to groove now, seeing the road opening up before me, thinking maybe it’s some kind of African proverb. And it almost goes with the music. Bobbing my head, feeling it, I can’t help but sing along, suddenly and serendipitously finding the refrain for the whole of the journey. ‘Ride for free, ride for free…’

Dreamy, the driver too seems to vibe on it, as if he were waiting for just the right passenger to you know, get it… And that’s me, motherfuckers.

But something rings just a bit differently the last time I hear him say it. And it’s only after slamming the door, of course leaving his smiling black face with a near 100% tip (“woah, man!”), does it occur to me.

Ride For Free wasn’t that at all. It was letters: P.H.D.

The grooving brother, that chance negotiator of vibes and traffic, so rife with African juju, steering me back toward the road and myself, was discussing the attainment of a PhD.