Bob Berry obituary in Berkeley Daily Planet

Gar Smith, a friend of Bob Berry, wrote an obituary that was published in the Berkeley Daily Planet on June 15. I did not get to read it before it was published.  It is a very lovely tribute, but I should correct his comment about Bob’s library. He wrote, “Bob’s friends are now hoping to find a new home for this vast collection, many of which are related to conspiracy research. Suggestions may be forwarded to:http://tomyamaguchi.wordpress.com.”  I did write in my announcement of Bob’s death that Bob was leaving many books that would need new homes. I have learned that, as Bob did not leave a current will, we will need to go through probate before disposing of any property. This includes all of his books. We are currently cataloging his collection. I expect we will be keeping them for awhile.

For Bob Berry’s memorial, delivered 6-10-2011

I would like to read a quote from one of Bob’s favorite books, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut, in the role of a spiritual leader named Bokonon, wrote “ Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

My travels with Bob started with a conversation about bicycles. When I met Bob at a party in San Diego we shared our bicycle commute stories. My story was of an 19 mile uphill ride from the beach community of Ocean Beach where I then lived to Kearny Mesa in order to start work at 6:00 am. Bob, a former Ocean Beach resident countered with his own Berkeley to San Francisco commute. Bob was then working as a loader for a small, overnight, freight airline called Zoom Zoom. Bob referred to Zoom Zoom as a hippy Marxist airline, though he wasn’t sure which Marxist faction described the operation, Groucho or Harpo. Each afternoon, Bob rode on BART with his bike from Berkeley to Daly City Station, the terminus of the BART system in San Francisco at the time. Then he rode to SFO to start his job on the graveyard shift. All night, Bob would load and unload Zoom Zoom’s fleet of DC3s that connected to various parts of the west coast. At dawn, he would catch the final flight, with his bicycle on board, from SFO to Oakland Airport. From there, he would ride to BART’s Coliseum Station. If he made it there before 6:30 am, he would take the train back to Berkeley. If he arrived after that time, he would not be able to bring his bike on board, since bicycle access was restricted during commute hours. That meant he had to pedal back home from East Oakland, almost 11 miles. This daily routine continued until the Marxist airline was, at least according to Bob, put out of business by the CIA. But that’s another story.

The dance continued when my then wife Melissa, our pre-school age daughter Dharma, and I relocated from Southern California to live with Bob in Berkeley. It stretched on for three decades. It included buying and sharing a house in West Berkeley, raising Bob and Melissa’s daughter Avila, numerous bicycle rides, weekend long Grateful Dead concerts, anti-war demonstrations, and flea market excursions to find books on obscure history and conspiracy theories. It has been a long, strange trip.

I would like to finish with one of my favorite recent quotes. It is from Joan Rivers who said, “Just laugh at everything. If you can laugh at it, you can live with it.” That describes how Bob dealt with all the insanity of the world. He laughed at it all, taking nothing or anyone seriously, including himself. After reading all those books on conspiracy theories, he finally had the answer. “It is all one big conspiracy,” Bob said, “to keep me entertained.”

Bob, the laughter we shared will live in my heart until I die. So thanks for the dancing lessons. You were a good dancing partner.

Blessed be.

AIDS at 30, some personal thoughts

Today is being remembered as the 30th anniversary of the start of the AIDS epidemic. June 5, 1981 was the day the Los Angeles Times reported on the mysterious deaths of gay men by the Center for Disease Control. I seemed to have missed seeing that article though I was a regular reader of the LA Times then. Being in a house of news junkies, 5 daily papers usually ended up at our house every day. It was actually an article in the New York Times that caught my attention. I do not remember the date, but I know it was not long after I moved into my West Berkeley house on June 24 of that year. I was regularly riding my bike to a job I had in Point Richmond and stopped every morning at a newspaper rack on San Pablo Avenue in Albany (that’s Albany, CA) to pick up the national edition of the New York Times. Then I would browse it a bit when I got to work and read it more thoroughly during the morning break.

I was in the closet then and was debating coming out. We had just moved to the Bay Area, and I saw attitudes toward gay people beginning to change. I had a wife and young daughter and did not want to hurt or abandon them. Then I saw the article about a mysterious gay cancer and wondered if living openly as a gay man was such a good idea. As the weeks and months past, I read more stories and became more frightened. I was frightened enough to stay in the closet for the next decade. Keep in mind that how the disease was spread among gay men remained a mystery for several years. No one knew how easy it was to transmit. Staying closeted for me meant staying alive.

The first AIDS death of someone I knew was a neighbor who had worked as a nurse. I am sad to say I did not know him well. Years later, a former housemate died of AIDS. She had serious substance abuse problems, including severe alcoholism. When I started attending New College in 1991, one of my classmates was in the last stages of the disease. I was able to get know him in the last few months of his life. He was one of the founders of the Radical Faeries. When he died, there was a lovely memorial at his flat in the Haight where his ashes were passed around for everyone to hold.

The year before I returned to college was the year I finally had the courage to come out as a gay man. Though I regret my decision to not come out earlier, I have had no regrets since then. In this month of Pride, 2011, it is good to reflect on how far we have come. AIDS still exists, but it is no longer the death sentence it was 30 years ago. It is 100% preventable and eventually will be curable. Of equal importance is the change in social attitudes toward gay people. Both public figures and everyday people are coming out with increasing frequency. Being gay is no longer controversial. Same sex marriage is slowly becoming legal, state by state. What a joy to see this happen in my lifetime.

A Rainy Day in Berkeley

Rain in June is a rare event in the Bay Area. This has been a good opportunity to sit down and catch up with writing projects I had previously promised to myself and others.  One is a statement I plan to read at the memorial for my deceased housemate Bob Berry this coming Friday. I will print that here later. I am reminded of some rainy days past.

In January of 1980, Melissa, my wife at the time, and I were in the process of making the final decision to relocate to the Bay Area. We decided to take a week’s vacation to stay with Bob in his South Berkeley basement flat. I had just finished my first full-time political job.

The previous summer, I quit a job at a contact lens factory and went to work for Bill Press. Press had left his job for Governor Jerry Brown and was wanted to qualify a ballot initiative to create a tax on the profits of oil companies. I was drawn to the initiative campaign because the money was intended to fund public transportation and alternative fuels. I was sick of seeing support for buses dwindle in San Diego, especially after the passage of Proposition 13. I wanted to live without a car, which was I found to be a heavy financial burden with my minimum wage factory job. I was happy that I was a able to ride a bike to work every day because no bus could get me there that early in the morning.

Ironically, the job of gathering voter signatures all across Southern California forced me to drive hundreds of miles each week. The job took longer than expected, as well. We stood out in front of shopping centers over Thanksgiving and then the busy Christmas shopping season. We finally finished after New Year’s, and I was exhausted. I needed a vacation and a chance to get away from the Southland.

Bob said we could sleep on his floor for a week. He knew we were seriously considering a permanent move. When we got there, I planned to just park my truck to walk and ride the bus the rest of the week. However, there was one damper to our vacation I did not take into consideration. January is the start of the rainy season, and the Bay Area gets a lot more rain than San Diego. It was raining when we got there, so we decided to wait to go out until the weather cleared up. We sat around, listened to KSAN, and read Bob’s books while he was at work. After a few days, we realized the weather was not going to clear up. We were starting to get cabin fever.

Our daughter was four years old, so we decided to take her to the San Francisco Zoo. We stopped in Chinatown and bought umbrellas that were colorfully painted and made of bamboo. We took the streetcar to the zoo where we walked all day in the pouring rain. I remember having a good time, although I learned something about the lacquer on those umbrellas we bought in Chinatown. When they get wet, the umbrellas have a strange and unpleasant chemical odor. They don’t last very long either.

It rained the entire week, but I had already decided before we left that we would be returning to Berkeley to stay. We loaded up all our possessions in our Datsun pickup and completed the move in one day. That was February 29, Leap Day, 1980.