Keeper of the Ferris Wheel Book

Late one night, out of idle curiosity, I wondered whether anyone had ever written a book about the Berkeley student housing co-ops, maybe some puffy history published by the University Stundents' Cooperative Association. I found this work of fiction instead. "Huh," I said to myself (ah, that insomniac inner dialog!), and bought the book.

I lived in the co-op system at the same time as the author. As an incoming freshman, I roomed in Barrington Hall, the largest house of the co-op system. On move-in, my roommate from Gilroy ("The Garlic Capital of the World") arrived with her sleep-in boyfriend and the boyfriend's buddy. Neither of these guys was a student, but they didn't seem to have anything pressing to call them away. Anyway, as we were moving in, we noticed that the floor or our room was covered with pills -- a random selection, of various sizes, shapes and colors. Mr. Hippie Buddy-of-boyfriend cleaned this up for us by picking the pills up off the floor and swalloing them. All of them. Eww! He also seemed to think he was invited to sleep there, and that I came with the room, and made a grab as soon as his buddy and my roommate left the room. Double and triple eww!

So that was my introduction to the co-ops. I'm here to tell you that the author isn't lying about the general atmosphere. If my parents had known one-tenth of what went on, they would have dragged me back to Walnut Creek and locked me into my room till I turned forty. The big houses, especially, were party houses. I moved out of Barrington as soon as my first quarter was up -- first to Sherman, an all-women's house that fronted onto the football stadium parking lot, then to Lothlorien, the new vegetarian house where I stayed for the rest of my college years.

All in all, it was a very good experience. For the most part, co-op residents were a diverse lot, coming from humble backgrounds and studying hard. Yes, there were parties, but sometimes those parties were to celebrate when our housemates made it into med or law school, or a prestigious graduate program. I met a lot of very smart people from all over the world at the co-ops. And thanks to the low cost, I also graduated with zero student debt. In fact, I had a few hundred dollars of house-cleaning money left over.

Anyway, the book. It's a basic coming-of-age plot, where the setting and quirky characters provide most of the interest. Of course, for me a lot of that interest had to do with nostalgia. Those murals! I even heard a name or two that sounded familiar, like Pink Cloud (called Red Cloud in the book). He was this drug dealer who lived unofficially on the roof at Barrington. When I worked Barrington's plug-in switchboard, very much like the phone system the author describes at Cloyne, about half the calls were always for Pink Cloud. I used to carry his messages up to the roof-top laundry room at the end of my shift.

There's a lot of sexism here, but it's a kind of sexism true to the time and place being described. As the free-love sixties rolled into the feminist seventies, there was a lot of confusion about women and sex. Many men (and some women) believed that liberation for women meant sexual promiscuity to the max for everyone. It didn't work out for much of anyone. Reading a memoir (well, semi-memoir) about this time now, many people will think, "These men are such jerks! Why do the women put up with them?" And if you think that, you are right. You're absolutely right. It just took us all a little time to learn.

None of the co-ops I stayed in showed anything like the level of homophobia in this book. That's more the type of thing we would associate with the frats. Cloyne does sound relatively frat-like, compared to other houses. Then again, I didn't spend much time listening to guys trash-talking each other on the basketball court, so who knows?

The author's punctuation could use some work. He doesn't seem to know exactly what to do with dashes and commas, especially when using two consecutive modifiers.

One full star taken off for the god-awful sex scenes. Yikes. Not sexy. They sounded as if they'd been written as some kind of biology class project.

I did get a kick out of identifying the "no way that really happened" scenes. Seventies feminists letting a guy listen in on a women's meeting -- ha ha ha! There were also some anachronisms. This didn't bother me, though. All part of the fun.The only fictional addition that bothered me much was the mysterious woman who shows up at the beginning and the end of the book, because something that obviously fake destroyed the realistic vibe that ran through the rest of the book.

Times have definitely changed. Cloyne is now a substance-free "academic-themed" house. I doubt whether today's parents, after spending eighteen years chauffeuring their kids to toddler French classes and soccer academies and advanced-placement astrophysics tournaments, would let their precious ones set foot in the co-ops of the late seventies. Our sixties parents, on the other hand, "parented" by prying us away from the TV set long enough to toss us out the door in the general direction of whatever kick-the-can or prison ball game was going on in the street. We survived that, and most of us survived the Berkeley co-op system as well.