Michael Crichton: Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues

“Well, sir, I was going to do just that, but…” I pointed feebly at the massed cop-cars, which blocked the road.

“Well, then put the car in reverse, goddamn you, and git out of here!”

“Yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir,” as I started the car up again and backed out of there as fast as I could, and at the end of the street, moving off at good speed, I leaned out and shouted “Fuck you!” as loud as I could. It didn’t make much difference.

I WAS BACK OUT ON the Avenue again and hot-assing it up toward the campus before I realized I was still hungry. So I pulled into the first place I saw, which was a Peter Piper. Like everything else in California, Peter Piper is designed strictly for cars. You drive up in your car, order from your car, pick up the food in the car, and then park and eat in the car.

While you wait in line—in your car—you read the large sign that tells you what Peter offers in the way of nutrition. Finally, as the line progresses, you arrive alongside a large, maniacally smiling being, who is Peter. BE READY says the sign above his head in bright neon colors, PETER WILL SPEAK TO YOU. About the time you think you’re ready to punch Peter in his gleaming polished plastic snout, a thick intercom voice barks “Yeah, what’ll it be?” And you tell Peter, and he repeats it back to you, grinning his fixed, idiot smile. And then you nose to the front and wait for the food.

If you can drive a car, you can go see Peter as often as you like.

I FELT BETTER AFTER eating, all primed and ready to go. Where I was going to go was another question entirely. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was going to do next—all I really knew was what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t find Musty. I didn’t know how even to begin to look for him. He was John’s connection, not mine.

And I couldn’t call John in Cambridge, because he had become convinced his line was tapped and had his phone taken out. I could try to reach him at Sandra’s place, on the phone we always did business on, but John wouldn’t be with her at this hour.

And I couldn’t go back to Cambridge without scoring something, because that would be a hundred and sixty bucks in plane fare down the drain and, more important, all our timing thrown off.

Which left me with no leads, no place to crash, twenty-five hundred bucks in my sportcoat, and a connection who was probably busting ass for Mexico, unless they’d already caught up with him. Not a particularly cheerful prospect. So I just drove around Berkeley, looking for somebody I knew and trying desperately to remember a single street address out of the dozens I knew in that town. I’d spent time in Berkeley before—mostly on three-day dope trips like this one—but one trip last spring had lasted a month. It hadn’t started as a month trip, but that’s the way it had worked out. And I’d met a lot of good people—I’d been things and seen places, as the saying goes.

But now, just when I needed them, the addresses and names wouldn’t come back, and I wound up parking the car in the municipal lot off Channing, so I could walk up to campus and look around. It was late in the day and the Avenue was jumping. The freaks were out in their usual positions: stoned hostile funky greaser freaks on the west side of Telegraph and stoned outasight panhandling peace freaks on the east side. The bikies were lined up in full formation in front of Pepe’s and I could hear some pickets up on Sproul Plaza. I hurried on to see what they were putting down, forgetting that I still had on my Weejuns and jacket. That was a mistake, because I looked like I should’ve been up on the hill drinking keg beer with the jolly mindless frat brothers, and since I wasn’t… The street punks jumped into action, edged toward me; all around me their soft liturgical drone filled the air: “lids, speed, acid; righteous lids” as the street people decided they had me figured. What a drag.

Up on campus a heavy scene was under way. The Berkeley police were huddled like sullen refugees under Sather Gate, looking as if they were just waiting for the word to come down swinging. And on Sproul Plaza there was a slowly circling ring of picketers, chanting and stomping. Most of them had helmets on; anyone who exercised the right to assemble and petition in this town knew what to expect.

In the center of the ring a heavy-set, shaded and leathered black man, beret tilted to one side and covered with buttons like a war hero with medals: “Brothers and Sisters, the time has come for us to act. There is no longer a defensible middle of the road. And by that I mean the middle of the road, man, that sit-on-the-fence shit. ’Cause when the long knives come”—it was not a threat, but logic—“when the long knives come, they aren’t gonna ask where you stand, and where you been standin’. They’re gonna know!” He was rapping and flapping his arms, talking to the picketers, turning away to speak to the crowd. Trying to get that old group-solidarity number down before the heat did. There was no middle ground, he said again, no fence left to sit on.

“You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution!” He shouted at passersby, fringe observers like me. “Part of the problem or part of the solution. The time has come to act,” he went on. “Join the Third World Brothers and Sisters, in support of their legitimate demands for Third World Faculty and Curriculum. And join them now.”

There was a lot of energy running through the crowd, and I was suddenly uncomfortable, standing there in my Hahvud Yahd monkey suit. The lines were sharply drawn in Berkeley, and everyone understood what they meant: the fight had already begun. Nobody said you had to get on the battlefield, but then… it wasn’t hard to put yourself in No Man’s Land. I looked back at the cops, who were starting to move toward the picketers.

…or Donald Duck Reagan or Mickey Mouse Rafferty. And we can’t relate to seeing our black brothers dying to support this pig fascist system in the rice paddies of Vietnam. We can’t relate to that and we can’t stand by and watch it happen no more neither. The time has come to act. Join the pickets now.”

The pigs were bearing down, and I beat a hasty retreat back across the street. The pickets had picked up on the energy now, and were stamping their feet as they marched, chanting Who are the people, We are the people, Power to the people. Yeah. Get that ball. Fight, team, fight. Push ’em back, push ’em back, waaaaaaaay back. I began to think about how nobody had ever really figured out what four years of high school did to a reasonably healthy mind. Then I saw somebody I knew: Steven.

STEVIE’S PLACE WAS PEACEFUL AND quiet, in the back of a house on Dwight Way. It looked onto a lot that had once been used for parking but which had, miraculously, fallen into disuse. Someone had planted a small garden and there were people all around, sitting out on their back steps, smoking dope in the sunset and laughing quietly. I remembered my dorm room in Cambridge, which had a generous view of all four lanes of Memorial Drive, complete with traffic jams twice a day, and wondered again why I hadn’t transferred to Berkeley when Stevie did.

You never realize what you’re missing until you come to Berkeley—and when you leave, it’s easy to forget. The air is light, the sun bright, and you feel tremendously energetic and strong. You also experience a sudden resistance to credibility gaps, realities of life, overdue bills, and other pitfalls of the American way. That’s why the “campus revolt” began in Berkeley, and that’s why it has never made more sense than it did, and still does, in Berkeley: because the people who are striking and picketing are picking up their energy from the land. When the sun shines in that town, life is so outrageously beautiful that a black man shot in Oakland the night before, or a zillion tons of bombs dropped on Quongquong in the last week, doesn’t seem wrong—it doesn’t seem like anything. It is inconceivable, and totally ludicrous. Which is what it would seem like to intelligent people anywhere. The difference is that in Berkeley, at least, the need to rectify the ludicrous offense is as obvious and natural as the presence of the sun in the sky.