Homeless and high.(Lowest Ebb)(Denis Johnson lived penniless in the 1970s)

I arrived penniless in Berkeley in February of 1973, at night, dropped off on Telegraph Avenue by a woman driving around in her commune's Volvo.

By this time, the era of peace, love, and flowers had overripened into madness. Destitute youngsters without any idea of how to take care of themselves, hundreds of them, poured up and down the Ave near the campus in a state of crazed exhaustion, kicking along through rubbish as in the aftermath of a generalized panic or some major disaster, looking hideous in the orange light of street lamps.

Fortunately for people like me, charity abounded in Berkeley. Every day, two churches gave out, between them, a free lunch and a free dinner, without any preaching. Nobody starved who was willing to wait in a line three blocks long to get a cup of reconstituted chocolate milk and a peanut-butter sandwich on white bread. Elsewhere, there was also a free shower. It was a regular single-size shower, but, as long as one more person would fit, you just jumped in naked and started washing, no matter how many were in there or what gender they were.

I was a snob, and refused to beg on the street, but I wasn't above panhandling for the Berkeley Free Clinic, where I was given a small locked coin box each morning and sent out into the streets, for a commission of thirty per cent, which generally amounted to a dollar or two by day's end. Occasionally, I worked for an entrepreneurial hippie with a pickup truck who needed help with light hauling jobs he'd contracted for. He paid a couple of dollars an hour, and gave me any books we happened to find among the junk that we took to the dump. Once, I got the multivolume "A Pictorial History of the World War Two Years" and sold it for four-fifty, the largest single sum I made while living in Berkeley. Another time, I mowed an old lady's tiny lawn in exchange for breakfast, which she cooked and served me in the kitchen of her tiny home. It seemed to me an exotic transaction, but for her it was just like the Great Depression.

My highest ambition was to put together enough capital to get a quart of beer, a joint, a sandwich, and some kind of room for the night, all in the same day. On one occasion, I did grub up enough change to get drunk on discount beer and still pay for lodgings at a ...