years, he would be class president, associate editor of the campus paper, The Daily Californian, and captain of the gymnastics team.
His father was something in the current Washington Administration, a dollar-a-year man who floated between the Department of Energy and the defense industry. He later became ambassador to Egypt and died in the Matruh massacre that took out Hosni Mubarak and half his general staff.
The younger Pollock and I first shared a class in my freshman year, a survey course in astronomy which satisfied a pesky science requirement in my pre-law curriculum. One sweet spring afternoon, in a roomful of restless young bodies, I heard his high, slightly mocking voice drift down from the rows of seats behind me.
“Corbin is wrong, sir. Johann Kepler enlarged upon the works of Nicolaus Copernicus, and not the other way around. You see, Copernicus had been dead twenty-eight years when Kepler was born.”
The professor smiled up at Pollock. Most people who saw and heard him in those days smiled with a kind of inner appreciation, as if gratified to have so perfect a being on the face of this humble Earth.
“You’re right, Mr. Pollock. Of course. Thank you for correcting the error.”
Right then, I hated Pollock. I glanced over my shoulder and caught him looking down at me. It was not the cheerful face of a fellow scholar happy to have resolved a doubtful question on the side of truth. It was the intent, gleaming stare of a cat that has just mangled a bird.
From that day forward, I marked him. As he rose in the campus politics and athletics, I kept track and took mental notes. Where others saw a young Adonis, the grace of youth, the beauty of such obvious talent, I remembered that gleaming stare of malice. I knew something about Gordon Pollock that others did not: Beneath his smooth pelt there was a were-cat, a fiddlestring madness, and it sometimes needed to lash out. Gordon Pollock was my summertime, Sunday psychology exercise. I collected him the way other people kept odd facts about Napoleon or Ramses II.
But it was not until two years later that we would really clash.
I can’t say my years at U.C. Berkeley were very well spent. There was too much to see and do in San Francisco—which seemed to be Cannery Row writ large—to keep me hunched over a book at midnight. And I was openly a creature of pleasure.
In my first Halloween parade, I dressed as a chimney sweep, a ragged urchin boy in top hat, tails, and soot. The costume fitted my mood—abandoned by the breakup in PAcific Grove. Everyone loved it.
The San Francisco scene was probably a bad place for an adolescent boy. Adults would worry about the risks of violence done to my person, but it never worried me because I had a black belt and could kill with either hand. Venereal infections and AIDS—which had by then reached the sexually active hetero population—were not much of a concern because, as a young stud, I could be fussy about things like condoms. Everyone humored me.
More affecting than death and disease was the terrible loneliness. San Francisco was a city of lost souls. Every man and woman, in the bars and coffee houses, on the street at dusk and after dark, searched your face with that hopeful and haunted look, asking: “Are you the one? Are you my true love?”
Being young and superior, I could take or give, walk or stay. I owed the bars and the street nothing but a good time. On my terms. But for others, the narrow boundaries of the city defined their whole world. They were trapped. It was this creepy loneliness that, regular as the tides, drove me back across the Bay to the pot parties, beer bashes, and golden, bare girls of Berkeley.
Although Pollock and I were both pre-law, we didn’t share another course until my junior year. That was not unusual at a university as large as Cal, with hundreds of students in the same major. The two of us might pass in the computerized list of standings but not meet in the flesh for years.
His father was something in the current Washington Administration, a dollar-a-year man who floated between the Department of Energy and the defense industry. He later became ambassador to Egypt and died in the Matruh massacre that took out Hosni Mubarak and half his general staff.
The younger Pollock and I first shared a class in my freshman year, a survey course in astronomy which satisfied a pesky science requirement in my pre-law curriculum. One sweet spring afternoon, in a roomful of restless young bodies, I heard his high, slightly mocking voice drift down from the rows of seats behind me.
“Corbin is wrong, sir. Johann Kepler enlarged upon the works of Nicolaus Copernicus, and not the other way around. You see, Copernicus had been dead twenty-eight years when Kepler was born.”
The professor smiled up at Pollock. Most people who saw and heard him in those days smiled with a kind of inner appreciation, as if gratified to have so perfect a being on the face of this humble Earth.
“You’re right, Mr. Pollock. Of course. Thank you for correcting the error.”
Right then, I hated Pollock. I glanced over my shoulder and caught him looking down at me. It was not the cheerful face of a fellow scholar happy to have resolved a doubtful question on the side of truth. It was the intent, gleaming stare of a cat that has just mangled a bird.
From that day forward, I marked him. As he rose in the campus politics and athletics, I kept track and took mental notes. Where others saw a young Adonis, the grace of youth, the beauty of such obvious talent, I remembered that gleaming stare of malice. I knew something about Gordon Pollock that others did not: Beneath his smooth pelt there was a were-cat, a fiddlestring madness, and it sometimes needed to lash out. Gordon Pollock was my summertime, Sunday psychology exercise. I collected him the way other people kept odd facts about Napoleon or Ramses II.
But it was not until two years later that we would really clash.
I can’t say my years at U.C. Berkeley were very well spent. There was too much to see and do in San Francisco—which seemed to be Cannery Row writ large—to keep me hunched over a book at midnight. And I was openly a creature of pleasure.
In my first Halloween parade, I dressed as a chimney sweep, a ragged urchin boy in top hat, tails, and soot. The costume fitted my mood—abandoned by the breakup in PAcific Grove. Everyone loved it.
The San Francisco scene was probably a bad place for an adolescent boy. Adults would worry about the risks of violence done to my person, but it never worried me because I had a black belt and could kill with either hand. Venereal infections and AIDS—which had by then reached the sexually active hetero population—were not much of a concern because, as a young stud, I could be fussy about things like condoms. Everyone humored me.
More affecting than death and disease was the terrible loneliness. San Francisco was a city of lost souls. Every man and woman, in the bars and coffee houses, on the street at dusk and after dark, searched your face with that hopeful and haunted look, asking: “Are you the one? Are you my true love?”
Being young and superior, I could take or give, walk or stay. I owed the bars and the street nothing but a good time. On my terms. But for others, the narrow boundaries of the city defined their whole world. They were trapped. It was this creepy loneliness that, regular as the tides, drove me back across the Bay to the pot parties, beer bashes, and golden, bare girls of Berkeley.
Although Pollock and I were both pre-law, we didn’t share another course until my junior year. That was not unusual at a university as large as Cal, with hundreds of students in the same major. The two of us might pass in the computerized list of standings but not meet in the flesh for years.
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