85 Not just knee deep

I just wanted to mention that I saw the chicken lady on a regular basis. She and her man were always headed out somewhere. Her main topic of discussion was always where to get free stuff. I wasn't piling myself up with anything, but if they knew good deals on food I listened. The both of them were always carrying a cardboard box.

LBJ did one gig over in Oakland but came back to Berkeley cause there was just as much to do in Berkeley without the hassle of travel. Everything over there was temporary. So why not? He and another fella got some work at an old house in one of the Berkeley neighborhoods. He worked there a couple of days and said "Why don't you c'mon up? I told the lady there about you and she's real excited to meet you." Huh? Ok.

Alright. I guess they were painting, but they wanted me to help remove the wallpaper and get it ready for painting.

Looked pretty much like this neighborhood but 1972.

This was their first house and they were trying to get it ready for a baby. I can't just call her "the wife" because she would have have wanted to be recognized by her name, but I can't remember it. Let's call her Alice. All the young girls love Alice. The dude wasn't as memorable, so let's call him Paul. They were the "young radicals" of Berkeley. I'm going to have to go into a bit of a description of some of the differences between then and now in a minute.

Chick in the foreground reminds me of Alice.

 

Dude with curly hair and glasses reminds me of Paul.

Nice old house with strange hallways and offset levels. It was basically original with layers of paint and a number of rooms with layers of wallpaper too. The paint had lead in it and the wallpaper had arsenic in it. Now I don't remember exactly but people just started realizing the lead thing. I don't remember the paint deal, what they used. It wasn't banned till 1978 but if they were making lead free in 1972, I'm sure they carried it in Berkeley.

It wasn't work for the weak. I had a big steam machine that I held up on the wall and then took a scraper to the layers. I didn't give a crap about the arsenic. We kept all the windows wide open so as much of the fumes or whatever went outside. I guess they were sleeping in the basement while all this other stuff was going on so that the baby didn't get any of it. We worked for a few hours and then stopped for a while in the middle of the day, but they paid us. Alice left for most of the day, even though she didn't work. But she came home midday to make lunch for all of us. Paul was gone all day. 

What really happened was that Alice spent a couple of hours during the middle of the day at home talking with me. None of the workers minded. We all got paid and the guys went off with joints. Now don't get all pissed off. Everyone is mad at feminists now but I'm going to have to spend a few sentences on that. Alice and I "spoke" mostly about these things. For a while most of my reading back in those days was non-fiction stuff. For a good while. Stuff about Viet Nam, government corruption and feminist issues. Germaine Greer said the most to me. I'm not going to make excuses. I didn't want to live like my mother, and she had more of a free life than a lot of the housewives across America. Oh, don't be rolling your eyes. If you are, you didn't live through it. It has changed so rapidly, the reality is only a faint memory.

Germaine Greer

I don't have the answers and the human race always goes too far with things. We can never be reasonable. All I know is that when I was growing up I wanted to be a pirate and a papergirl. I didn't want to be a boy pirate, I wanted to be a girl pirate. These women existed. I didn't want to be a paperboy, I wanted to be me, delivering papers. I loved riding my bike and I loved going on adventures. I didn't care about the money. "Mom. I want to deliver the paper." "You can't." "Why?" "You're a girl." "But why?" "It's a man's world." Boy did that make me sad. What was I supposed to do when I grew up? I didn't want to sit at home ironing and cooking. I wanted some kind of adventure. Maybe a beatnik? 

I watched a lot of movies with my Mom. Asked a lot of questions and she seemed to have regrets about things she felt she missed out on. Every so often sex came up. Not in so many words, but kind of. Do you realize that when all those TV shows with two beds and Lucy wanting to work at the club were on, sex was a woman's duty... not something to be enjoyed. The wife was the Madonna. Little girl in Catholic school crying that she didn't want to live like that. So Alice and I had a lot of those talks. And a lot of women did in those days. And they loved men. I love men. They just wanted to have as much fun. Is that wrong? As to how the world is now, I couldn't tell ya. There's just so much division and it doesn't have to be like that.

Ok. That's all I'm saying about that for now.

Now to the fun part. One afternoon after Alice left after lunch, LBJ grabbed me and said "Hey, let's go to the basement." It didn't take much to convince me.  The basement had already been painted and cleaned up. One big room and there was a real big waterbed on one end. Doing it in the bushes was ok with me, but let's try this waterbed!

Things were moving along but maybe we put too much action into it. Bounce here, bounce there. Whatever we did I'd always end up bounced into the little gap between the mattress and the railing. It wasn't working. I guess we were going to town not having to muffle noises either, you know... not being in the bushes and all. So we ended up on the floor for the finish.

Pretty sure it was green.

The floor had carpeting, I always call it a rug, but not shag. It had substance to it. Well, to get graphic I ended up with my back on it. And it was anything but gentle. We were traveling in unison all over the room. Ha ha. There were windows of course, but who cared? All of a sudden LBJ said that Paul was watching us through the window. I turned and looked. I said "Should we stop?" "No. He doesn't care. He's watching." So after a few more minutes went by he left. 

That rug was really rough. Somehow the way we were I got the most severe rug burns imaginable. My back had some pretty heavy red marks with blood peaking through. Whew. I got dressed but the halter top I wore didn't really cover what happened. Just went back to working. Didn't see Paul or Alice the rest of the day.

The next day the marks had scabs. Big scabs. And sore. Halter top again. Alice saw them and I'm pretty sure she knew what went on cause she was smiling when she looked at my back and said "Oh... you got some pretty bad rug burns there." She put some kind of stuff on the scabs for me and checked them everyday. Took quite a while to heal. Thank you, Alice. We had a great time.