That's what my friend Ward calls Berkeley, California, where I visited Paul this past weekend. Late Friday night, arriving from the airport on the train, we ascended the subterranean stairs and stepped out onto Shattuck Ave. We hadn't gone ten steps before a wild yell rang out into the air, emanating from some window on a side street nearby. "Welcome to Berserkely," commented Paul, and on we went.
Paul's room in International House sits squeezed onto the end of a long hall of equally tiny dorm rooms. We slept squashed together on his single bed, despite spending at least 45 minutes acquiring a cot so I could comfortably sleep alongside. Other than sleeping, we spent little time in that spare, practical cell, preferring instead to walk IHouse's wide halls and drink in its activity. I arrived to Friday night's "Skirt Party," for which Paul and I donned two of my skirts - one each - and wandered downstairs to join a vista of hairy-legged, broad-chested young men in ruffled, hot pink, flared or patterned skirts and sarongs.
On the elevator, descending, we encountered a friend of Paul's, a mild-faced and chubby Hispanic-looking fellow.
"Nice skirt," said Paul.
"Thanks," he said. "It's from Guatemala."
"Oh, I don't know where mine's from," laughed Paul, at which point I chipped in: "Yours is from Brazil."
"Ah, see?" said Paul, and "Nice," said his friend; then the elevator doors opened and he strode out, the fronds of his patterned sarong swinging cheerfully around his burly calves.
We danced on the beer-slickened dance floor, watching the couples wriggle and jive in front of the strobe lights. The intermittent white light, capturing their movements in a thousand instant snapshots, rendered them glamorous even in their preposterous outfits. We joined a great big mosh circle that swayed and swung drunkenly around the room, arm linked to waist linked to arm. I struggled not to get squashed, kicked my feet joyfully, pulled Paul in with me. Earlier, we'd stood on the steps outside of IHouse, talking to several of Paul's friends among a milling crowd of beskirted party-goers. Disdainful of the skirt theme, these friends had dressed as Ninjas. When challenged by passers-by on their attire, they brandished their plastic scimitars threateningly, and explained drunkenly and irrefutably that they were Ninjas and didn't need any kind of silly skirt.
IHouse teems with life and irreverency, much like Berkeley itself. Its walls seem to breathe an acceptance of oddity. Residents smile readily; the elevator walls are papered with posters such as one advertising the loss of a giant bubble wand shaped like a sword, and offering a reward for news of its whereabouts. "Don't let the young whippersnappers get away with it!" it admonishes. In the basement laundry room, four or five IMacs are arranged on the tables alongside the laundry machines, offering internet access while your shirts dry. There's a sense of tradition, time, and hilarity reverberating through the whole building.
From the women's bathroom on the 6th floor of IHouse, where Paul's room is located, a large window opens out onto a beautiful view of Berkeley, of the shining skyscrapers of Oakland to the south, and of sailboat-speckled San Francisco Bay straight ahead. Berkeley is built of wood and brick and limestone and plaster, topped by shingle roofs that descend the hill from IHouse towards the bay. Directly below the window, one of IHouse's long stucco wings stretches forward, covered by red, rounded tiles. To one side, framing the view, a church steeple rises upward alongside a tall pine.
In the morning, all is misty and grey; a cool breeze slips damply in, and one brushes one's teeth alongside the panorama of the delicate California coast. Waking early on Saturday, I put both hands on the sill and thrust my head out the window, half-tempted to lower myself from the sill to the crisply-tiled red roof below. Sucking in draught after draught of high, clean morning air, I woke, or so it felt to me, from a deep languor.
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