Tender at the Bone (32 page)

We packed everything we owned into the van: Doug’s tools, my
quilt, and a thousand dollars. We were headed to California and I sang all the way West.

It was early spring when we got to Berkeley, and when I stepped out of the van I was surrounded by the scent of night-blooming jasmine. I had never smelled it before and the aroma was so powerful that I reeled. Even now, after all these years, the scent of jasmine reminds me of how free I felt.

We set up our tent in a friend’s yard and started looking for a place to live. We didn’t try very hard; Nick was part of the rolling coast-to-coast party of the early seventies and staying at his house was fun. People started showing up around nine and often stayed all night, drinking, debating art, and talking politics. Some mornings when I came into the house to watch the Watergate hearings at 6:00
A.M.
I’d find Nick and his girlfriend Martha still drinking cheap wine, eating cheese, and talking to a motley crew of guests.

Usually they’d go right from wine to coffee. I’d make toast and we’d all pile into the living room to watch the grainy gray television Doug had bought at the flea market for three dollars. The images on the screen were so vague we could barely make out Gordon Liddy and John Dean, shadows who were trying to steal the government.

When did we start talking about getting a house together? Whose idea was it? I don’t remember. But we had only been in Berkeley a little while before we decided to pool our resources.

We soon found that nobody would rent to a group—that’s what they called us—so we decided to become homeowners. We marched into Mason-McDuffie Realtors, such poor prospects that the nice old man who took care of us shuddered visibly. I could see myself reflected in his big round glasses, a Gypsy with abundant black curls tossed over my shoulders and a multicolored skirt that swept the ground. Nick, standing next to me, had a beard so full he looked like the prophet Isaiah. Martha was pale, with long blonde hair and a moon-shaped face; in the striped clothes she had constructed
from natural materials she looked about twelve. Even clean-cut Doug now wore his hair below his shoulders and had a metal stud between his front teeth where a cap was missing.

The old man sat us down and asked us to fill out papers. We were outraged. What business was it of his, we wanted to know, how much money we had? We rolled our eyes and sighed and complained about bureaucracy. He explained, gently, that he needed to know about our finances before he could help us buy a house.

We put down the usual lies. I said I was an author; I was actually writing term papers for a living, sometimes three or four in a day. It was challenging and paid very well if you promised good marks. Doug said that he was a carpenter; he had put up signs all over town offering his services. Martha listed herself as a student. This was more wishful thinking. She had dropped out of school to live with Nick and occasionally talked about going back. Nick was the only one with a real job and even that did not look very impressive on paper: he built electronic instruments for avant-garde musicians.

The old man sighed and took us to see a few houses. The first was a fine old place with a view of the Bay from the window seat at the turn of the stairs. I loved it but Nick objected to the neighborhood. “I will not,” he said, “live on a fancy-ass street where people have maids and drive Mercedes. I’d be embarrassed to give people my address.”

Doug vetoed the next house because it had no garage. “Nick and I are going to combine our tools and set up a shop,” he said. “Otherwise, what’s the point of buying a house together?” Martha rejected the next three houses because they didn’t have room for the compost pile she was planning to take along.

Channing Way had everything: a garage, a basement, and a big backyard. Even Nick could not call the nondescript neighborhood in the Berkeley flatlands bourgeois. Best of all, the funky old Queen Anne cottage with its seventeen rooms each painted a different
color was listed at $29,000; split four ways the mortgage and taxes would be $45 a month. “We’ll never have to have real jobs again,” Doug exulted. “Never!”

The plan was to grow our own food; it would be cheap and we would not be dependent on evil agribusiness. Meanwhile Martha and I baked bread every day and learned how to stretch a single chicken to feed fifteen. We discovered the joys of the cheaper variety meats and experimented with tongue and squid and heart.

Then everybody in Berkeley started reading
Diet for a Small Planet
and learned that eating at the top of the food chain was morally indefensible. Meat completely disappeared from our lives.

Martha and I dutifully cooked our way from one end of the book to the other, through garbanzo pâté (11 grams of usable protein) and peanut-sesame loaf supreme (12 grams). The recipes were nutritious, politically correct … and dreary. We began making secret modifications, changing the recipes to make them more appealing.

Our greatest success was Con Queso Rice; by using twice the cheese and three times the garlic of the printed recipe we managed to make a dish that was delicious.

CON QUESO RICE

(WITH APOLOGIES TO
FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ)

1 cup black beans

1 ½ cups white rice, uncooked

1 teaspoon salt

3 cloves garlic, peeled and diced

2 small onions, chopped

1 4 oz. can green chiles, chopped

1 fresh jalapeño, chopped

1 pound Jack cheese, shredded

1 pound cottage cheese

Soak beans overnight in water to cover
.

In morning drain and cook beans in 4 cups fresh water for about an hour, or until tender. Cool
.

Meanwhile, cook rice: bring 3 cups of water to boil, add rice and salt, cover, and lower heat to simmer. Cook about 20 minutes, or until water has evaporated. Cool slightly
.

Mix rice, drained beans, garlic, onion, and chiles in big bowl
.

Preheat oven to 350°
.

Butter a large casserole. Cover bottom with a layer of the rice-and-bean mixture. Cover with a layer of Jack cheese and cottage cheese. Put in another layer of rice and beans, and keep layering until all the ingredients except for the final ½ cup of cheese is used up. End with a layer of rice
.

Bake for 30 minutes
.

Add final sprinkling of cheese and cook 5 minutes more
.

Serves 6
.

“Broken” was not in Nick’s vocabulary. He could fix anything; he was a plumber, a carpenter, an electrician. He could wire houses and repair cars, clocks, and video equipment. As he went through town he was always rescuing things from the garbage and bearing them triumphantly home.

This was very nice for his friends, who could count on him to lend them any kind of equipment. And, it was certainly the morally correct position if you believed in protecting the earth. But for those of us who lived with him, surrounded by growing piles of salvaged stuff, it had definite drawbacks. Within a year our old house was overflowing with Nick’s treasures, and he was still collecting. I could live with that, but when his rescue missions came into the kitchen we finally went to war.

The first skirmish was over the kitchen sink. One day Nick came home toting a six-foot-long metal sink he had found in a restaurant that was being demolished. As he lifted it out of the back of his truck he said gleefully, “Solid stainless, and it was free.”

I came out to look. The old woman who lived in the ancient cottage next door was perched in the branches of the apple tree along the fence. At ninety-three she still did her own pruning, dressed in an ankle-length black dress. I waved up at her. She did not wave back.

“The sink has no legs,” I pointed out.

“I found those too,” he said, hauling a pair of elaborately turned mahogany table legs out of the truck. “Aren’t they beauties? They came off an old library table. We just put the sink on top.”

“Doesn’t it need four legs?” I asked.

“Oh, we can make the others out of two by fours,” he said dismissively.

“It’s going to look weird,” I protested.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Besides, I’ve come up with a great idea.” He sat down at the kitchen table Doug had built and started drawing his combination shelf and dish drain. “See,” he said, sketching rapidly, “we build the shelves right over the sink with slatted bottoms. Then you just wash and stack.” He looked proudly down at the paper and added, “They drip dry and you don’t have to put them away. They’re already away!”

“It takes up so much room!” I said.

“What do you want,” he asked contemptuously, “a dishwasher?”

We didn’t approve of dishwashers, of course (bourgeois and energy-inefficient), but in my secret heart I longed for one. We were feeding more people every night. Nick considered everyone he met a potential friend and he was constantly crying: “Come for dinner!” Martha and I would count heads as we set the table and then stir more water into the soup.

We hadn’t meant to be a commune, but the house was so big it seemed selfish not to use the space. Martha and I both liked cooking, and what difference could a few more mouths make? Friends visiting from New York would come for a week and stay a few months. Jules came the night he broke up with his girlfriend; he was there a year before we understood that he was actually living with us. Then Bob, the graduate student next door, started showing up every night just as we sat down to dinner. Doug built a bigger table.

One day Nick found Francesco and Elena, two Venetians on a Fulbright, wandering around campus and offered them a place to stay while they looked for an apartment. “Living here is so intense, so filled with life,” said Elena approvingly and they moved in too. This was fine with me: they all offered support in the escalating war with Nick.

“Do you really think we need eight bags for recycling?” asked Jules one day, looking at the bags lined up beneath Nick’s sink.
There was one for clear glass, one for green glass, three for different kinds of metal, one for plastic, one for compost, and one tiny bag for the things that resisted our earnest efforts at recycling.

“Don’t talk to me,” I sighed, “talk to Nick. I think they’re an eyesore and I’d love to have them out of the kitchen.”

But Nick would not be moved. The bags were ugly and recycling was annoyingly time consuming, but it was the right thing to do. We grumbled; we recycled. We could also agree that Nick was right when he asked us not to buy Nestlé’s products, although I no longer remember why. We agreed with the ban on Welch’s (they supposedly supported the John Birch society) and Coors (fought with unions). Grapes, of course, were completely forbidden, but it was a moot point: the farm workers had such strong support in Berkeley that grapes were simply unavailable. But the day Nick came home saying that coffee was unhealthy and henceforth we should all drink tea we went into open revolt.

“We are Italian,” said Francesco and Elena, “we must have coffee.”

“I am American,” said Doug, “and I must too.” Jules was equally adamant about coffee being a necessity of life. The four of them immediately went to the Whole Earth store and bought a new coffee grinder.

Nick retaliated by filling the kitchen with little brown sacks of assorted weeds and herbs for tea. These soon became so prolific that you couldn’t open a cupboard without having chamomile flowers rain down on your head.

Next Nick discovered biorhythms. He made charts for everyone in the household and put them on the bulletin board in the kitchen. If anybody was in a bad mood he’d look significantly at the chart and say, “See?” It got annoying. But not nearly as annoying as the big messes of millet and barley that were now taking up most of the space in the kitchen.

Nick had discovered grains. He would come down in the morning, scoop up a bowlful of millet, cover it with Dr. Bronner’s Balanced Mineral Bouillon (the label urged us to mineralize all food), and pronounce it delicious. “Just try it,” he’d urge, reading the bottle’s warning: “Astronomy’s eternally great all-one-God-faith unites the human race! For on God’s spaceship earth, with bomb & gun, we’re all-one or none!”

Actually, with enough butter melted across the top I found the millet sort of appealing.

I could live with the grains. I didn’t mind when Nick started sneaking bee pollen and nutritional yeast into our food. It was all right with me when he began growing bean sprouts, even though they took up all the space on the counter not already occupied by towel-wrapped bowls of milk being turned into yogurt. I could even support his interest in a new book called
The Lazy Colon
. But when he started in on sugar I drew the line.

One day he came in muttering, “White death!” and dumped it all into the garbage.

“I need that for baking,” I shrieked.