Tag: Linda Boroff

Berkeley attracted fugitives, Katie was beginning to realize, whether from the law, from failed relationships, or from the person one had once been. A young couple, Brigit and Tony, had just moved into the flat across the hall in the gray Victorian where Katie lived with her roommate, Cherie. Cherie believed in getting to know one’s neighbors, so she had invited Brigit and Tony to dinner. In the course of their conversation, Katie learned that Tony had done prison time in Georgia for robbery, burglary and car theft, and that Brigit had run away from her studies at Georgia State with this prize catch.

Brigit wore a short black skirt, scuffed loafers and no hose, revealing perfect legs, a grimy band-aid clinging to one knee. Though her ratty blue angora sweater had come from a Salvation Army bin, it did not conceal the fact that God had paid close attention when he put her together.

Tony was about thirty, a tall, lanky blond redneck with amused, larcenous blue eyes, an immaculate dresser and pathological liar who had also developed the bad habit of bigamy. For Tony, the law just kept breaking like a rotten shoelace. Neither Tony nor Brigit had any source of income, but masterful shoplifting kept them well provisioned.

At sixteen, Katie was on her own for the first time. Two months ago, she had arrived in Berkeley on a busload of Vietnam antiwar protestors from Santa Monica. When she called home to announce that she was staying there, her mother had not tried to dissuade her. Katie had joined a crowd at school that drank, used drugs, and had sex. She was truant and had been caught forging attendance excuses. Time and again, she stayed out all night. Her best friend, Erin, carried on with a married man. After school, Katie and Erin would get into Erin’s alcoholic mother’s vodka and call up boys and men, even teachers. Like her absent, errant father, Katie was tall and blue-eyed, curly-haired, and argumentative. The very sight of her seemed to infuriate her mother.

From day one, Berkeley had burst upon Katie, overwhelming and embracing her. This was not “another Berkeley,” or “a little Berkeley.” This was the real thing. Standing before Sproul Hall in a crowd of protesters, Katie had looked up the stairs to its Greek colonnades with a euphoric premonition that her life was at last beginning.

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