Year Two

I guess I got fed up with the suspicious clicks and one afternoon I opened the window and threw the phone out and down the cliff and nearly into the street. That caused quite a stir with the people I knew. I grew-up with a party line, which means six families or so used the same single line. One old woman was of a particular problem. She would gossip for hours and not let anybody else use the phone even when a said emergency. She liked to listen as well and when you heard that click, you knew she was on and listening. We as kids liked to cuss her out knowing she could not say anything having to pretend she was not there. So I was perhaps overly sensitive. And of course there was for a time always guys sitting on the telephone poles on the other side of the street. Actually as I recall I don't really think we paid that much attention. We were also indoctrinated in the right to free speech, which is about all that we exercised in a radical aspect anyway.

Ever since I got to San Francisco I kept hearing about the revolution. My friends would talk revolution. However having been where I had been and seen all the serious stuff I had seen, like the Berlin Wall, the frontier between Northern and Southern Ireland, the bob-wire fencing and guard-houses running through the middle of every town in Cyprus, the machine guns on the public buses in Israel, I really didn't understand what they were talking about. I was known as the Profit of Doom. I would tell them their revolution would never happen. Another common refrain was the Ghetto. They would refer to the Mission as the Ghetto. I would say Ghetto ? with all those beautiful Victorians, you don't know what a Ghetto is.

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