More fiction:
Originally, I was going to try to go to Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. The California Conservation Corps had a site there. My job would probably mostly be picking up garbage, but I would have a cheap place to live in the Bay Area, and I had one friend who had already moved to Berkeley and my roommate said she was planning on moving to San Francisco soon too.
My roommate was the one who originally turned me on to the Conservation Corps. She had a sister who had been in it. During her time in the corps, her sister met the son of a famous singer/talk show host at a laundromat in Eureka, and she quit her job to move in with him.
After a year and a half, I had finally dropped out of college. I had a million issues I needed to work on before I could concentrate on school. I didn’t want to be like some of my friends who dropped out and then just worked at restaurants or bars around Iowa City and went to all the local shows and never left town. I wanted to actually DO something. Preferably, I wanted to make a difference, I just wasn’t sure how. Lilith, my roommate told me about the California Conservation Corps, and it seemed perfect. I was nineteen years old and had never learned to drive. I could go to California, and The Corps would provide a place for me to stay. The cost of food and housing would come out of my paycheck. I would only make minimum wage, which back in 1985 was only $3.35/hour, but they didn’t charge a ton for room and board, and I wouldn’t have a lot of other expenses beside that. Lillith’s sister let me use her address in Eureka to pretend that I was a resident of California. I just had to go to Sacramento and apply in person. Then I’d have to wait a month to see if I got accepted and get back to Sacramento, where they would take us to a converted minimum security prison outside of Angels Camp in the Sierra Nevadas, where the training facility was.
Of course, in the mid-eighties there was no internet, so I had to go to the library to research all the logistics. I was lucky enough to work with a dishwasher who was also a DJ at KHAWK radio, and introduced me to Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons. He was originally from California as well. When he came up to the kitchen for his shift meal, I said, “So, say I decided to move to California and I didn’t know how to drive and didn’t have a lot of money. What's the best town or city for me to stay for about a month?
He thought for a minute before he said, “Santa Rosa. It’s North of San Francisco. It’s not a huge city, or too small a town. They have a town square kind of, and I think you could get around there without a car okay. Yeah, I’d say Santa Rosa”. Based purely on DJ/dishwasher’s suggestion, I decided to wait my month out in Santa Rosa. I went through the Santa Rosa yellow pages and found a place called the Redwood Motel. I liked the sound of it, so I reserved a room there. I had no idea where it was in relation to the rest of the town, or if it was nice. All I knew was that it was affordable and had a tree name. Using nineteen year old logic, that’s all I needed to know.
Before I left Iowa City in March, I had a friend of mine buy me some what we used to call ‘truck stop speed” from the back of a punk rock magazine. They were basically caffeine pills. I thought they would keep me safe by making me aware (more nineteen year old logic), but looking at it from where I am now, I can say with confidence that they only made me even more annoyed with the world than I already was.
I left Iowa City at the beginning of April in 1985. I didn’t know anyone in California, I didn’t have a car or know how to drive one even if I did, besides a skeleton, I had no well thought out plan of what I was going to do when I got to there either. In other words, I was an idiot. Back then, the only brave things I ever did were ones where I didn’t think about them beforehand. I would jump off a cliff and worry about how I was going to land once I was already in the air. This was the first flying leap of my adult life.
Remarkably brave move!
In the photo is me, of course, and Jeff Ahrens (who died in 2010), Bart Blaise (his mom is the author, Baharati Mukherjee and his dad is Clark Blaise, who used to be the head of the international Writer's Workshop. Bart died of Cancer a few years ago), Brock Hanson, and Jill Olson (0f the band, Red Meat). Hi, Chris!