We found a ride to California with a friend and took it. The drive was insane as our driver was a total stoner and was a terrible driver. He insisted on doing all the driving too. I offered to drive but he would not allow anybody to drive his van. We made it safely despite his driving. We settled in Berkeley and rented and apartment in the flatlands on Francisco Street.
Berkeley is a good town. There are a lot of crazies there but there are also a lot of really good hearted people. With the university in town there was no shortage of intelligent well rounded people around to talk to and hang out with. Berkeley was the opposite of homogeneous Janesville with so much diversity in Berkeley it was mind boggling.
We needed money by now so we went right to work making and selling bikinis. We did pretty well sales wise but again I could not stand the American women's attitudes toward themselves. California was only marginally better than Janesville was. American women need some serious liberation from their uptight views about their own self images. I ended up letting Sue do most of the sales and I just made them instead of selling them myself, at least that way I had minimal exposure to their attitudes. we made decent money but it was not easy street like in Australia.
Our plan was to work for about six months and then go to Central and South America for a few years. The plan was going fine. We were saving money and enjoying ourselves. The money wasn't rolling in as fast as we hoped but it was ok.
A few of our friends from Australia came to visit. We shared our bed with them for a few months. It was fun. I like the Australian attitude so much better. They were refreshing to be around. One of them liked me to take her to the bath houses so that she could watch and be watched. She did not want to participate in the group sex scenes at the bath houses but she really got excited being there. To each his or her own I guess. To make more money Sue took a job at a bar as a cocktail waitress. She met some boyfriends there while working. We were not monogamous. We were still just enjoying life.
I played a lot of chess. I usually played 8-10 hours a day. We played up on campus at the student union. Mostly we played speed chess with games limited to either 2 or 5 minutes for each player. We used a chess clock. I was addicted to playing it. Some of the other players were masters, grand masters and even some international grand masters. I got time odds when I played them and still usually lost but I always learned more playing them than when I played people I could easily beat. I played in some chess tournaments but found them to be too time consuming for me to enjoy them. I preferred the speed chess with my friends.
Then we talked about having a kid. I wanted one but Sue was not real keen on it. We talked about it and decided we could have a baby and travel with the baby in Central and South America because we knew the people down there loved kids. So we gave up birth control. It took a while but then Sue got pregnant. I went out and got a job right away selling cameras in San Francisco.
We decided to have a home birth and found a good midwife. Then at the last minute one of my friends who was a television news personality asked to film the birth for TV. We talked about it and agreed to allow the TV crew to film our home birth. Valerie Coleman was the news anchor and the film crew was great. They ended up showing the birth Nationally on the main five o'clock ABC news for over fifteen minutes. The reason they wanted to put the birth on TV was that we did a drug free birth and there were some studies at the time that showed that babies born when the mother took drugs were testing lower on IQ tests. They wanted to show that a natural drug free birth was possible. Good thing they didn't do a long term follow up to the story.
I was instantly in love with being a father. I love babies and children. They are so natural and without the usual social hangups that adults all seem to end up with. I was determined to allow my kids to grow up different. Dreams are good motivators but they do not always turn out the way you want them to.
I started a new business since I was home so much now taking care of the baby. I had quit the job at the camera store. The new business was writing, editing, and word processing. Computers were something new. I bought a Xerox 860 word processor and we started to do some business secretarial services and some student papers. We ended up doing a lot of student thesis. I would help the student get the facts collected and down on paper and then Sue would word process the end result. She is a great typist. It worked out well with me writing and Sue entering the data on the computer. We made a lot of money. We had to hire a few more people and buy a couple more computers. Three computers that used 10 inch disks that held about ten pages of double spaced 10 pitch type per disk and the computer had 75K of memory. Wow. State of the art. They cost almost a million each with the service contracts included. Kind of pricey by today's standards right. But we were making tons of money.
Before we were able to pack up and go South Sue got pregnant again. Ok we could each carry a baby and still travel. We decided to have the second one and then go traveling. So we delayed our departure again. This time I came home from playing chess one day and there were two polaroid sonogram pictures labeled twin A and Twin B on the refer. Ouch. There went our travel plans for at least a few more years. We would have to wait until at least one of them could walk well before we went traveling now.
No comments:
Post a Comment