EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION Geography is fate.In the fall of 1964, a year after my parents left a hamlet of two thousand souls in central Oregon for the cosmopolitan seductions of Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement burst forth. A kid on the cusp of adolescence, I learned to run a Gestetner printing machine from David Lance Goines, the printer for the Free Speech Movement, a former student of classical antiquity who'd been kicked out for his activism. (Goines would go on to design the original poster for Alice Waters's restaurant, Chez Panisse. And in that trajectory, perhaps, the odyssey of an entire political and cultural movement is inscribed, from militants who used to debate with alarming intensity how many Trotskyites might dance on the head of a Stalinist pin to very often the same folks who decades later argued with similar passion which street-corner bakery had the best croissants.) Although the media largely chose to report Berkeley's irruptions of dissent as singular, the truth was that Berkeley had a long history of protest. Even Robert S. McNamara, who graduated Cal in 1937, a principal architect of the Vietnam War, later would recall with considerable affection the heated political ferment of the university he knew as an undergraduate. But Berkeley, the city, was more conservative. Many of its residents regarded the political passions of students in their midst as dangerously provocative. Not so my parents. They sought out the friendship--dare I say comradeship--of malcontents and bohemians who had made their way over the years to the town, whose early boosters had dubbed it the "Athens of the West." Jessica Mitford, the quixotic muckraker with the aristocratic English pedigree, regularly punctured the pompous and the duplicitous with her instinct for the jugular and her unerring wit and withering irony. Fred Cody was another. A stand-up guy with an unabashed and unapologetic love for the unfiltered cigarettes that one day would kill him, he had made his way west from the impoverished hill country of West Virginia by way of Columbia University on the GI Bill. He and his wife, Pat, started a bookstore, which he named after himself. He banished the distinction between paperbacks and hardcovers and, like Ferlinghetti's City Lights in San Francisco, championed the independent press, the neglected, the offbeat, and the marginal writers, poets, and other misfits who gathered in the Bay Area. Cody's radical patriotism and socially conscious literary aesthetics had much in common with the ethos that informed James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . His best friend, John Dunbar, who'd been at Columbia with him and found a job teaching English at the California College of Arts and Crafts, had survived being shot down by the Germans over Nazi-occupied France, and had published a memorable account of his harrowing trek alone over the Pyrenees. His son, Robbie, a precocious guitarist with a high school band called the Purple Earthquake, inspired by the English rock 'n' roll of the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones, became my best friend. [...] It was impossible to grow up in Berkeley and not be drawn to the archipelago of bookstores that shaped the era. Despite California's fetish for the new and its widespread disdain for history, the reverence for old books among some was palpable. Used bookstores were as ubiquitous as they are now few and far between, many owned by ersatz bohemians who'd migrated to the Bay Area, feeling at home in the region's cosmopolitan maritime mash-up. They often resembled hoarders reluctant to part with the treasures they needed to sell to stay in business. You'd enter their shops, often musty, woody places with dim lighting, chockablock with mysterious tomes in leather bindings, some behind locked bookcases, others displayed in glass vitrines. You felt you had to pass some secret and invisible test to pass muster as a potential buyer. This breed of bookseller was not only to be found in Berkeley. Years later, in my mid-twenties, Susan Sontag told me of a renowned secondhand and antiquarian bookstore on Amsterdam Avenue across from Columbia University. Called the Ideal Bookstore, it was run by an erudite Romanian Jew, a Holocaust survivor. Specializing in literature, philosophy, antiquity, and the Middle Ages, with a fine selection of poetry, the shop attracted scholars and writers and collectors from around the world. Susan told me that, upon entering the store, I should be sure that the proprietor saw me as he was deaf in one ear, and God forbid he wouldn't know you were there and then, startled by your presence, have a stroke. The guilt for killing off the last living remnant of Romanian Jewry would be unbearable. I wandered among the shelves and after an hour or so made my selection. I came to the cash register and placed my small pile of books on the counter. The owner examined each of the books and then looked me full in the face and said he couldn't sell them to me. I said I had enough cash to make the purchase if he didn't want to take my credit card. No, he said, it's not your money. What was it then? "You're not ready." It was a familiar feeling. All my life I had wanted to be a grown-up. I remember as a young boy of eleven stealing out of my bed to huddle, shivering, in the hallway of our Berkeley apartment, trying to make sense of the murmured conversation at the dinner parties my parents would occasionally host. In Berkeley, I was soon surrounded by people, not much older than myself but who seemed impossibly sophisticated, who had decided to tilt at the status quo, to live the future they tried mightily to create. I was swept into the vortex of heated debate and perfervid efforts to make history. The French student slogan of May 1968--Be realistic, demand the impossible--was especially compelling. Excerpted from Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie: A Memoir in Essays by Steve Wasserman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
