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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 22-APR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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...

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