At the prompting of a list mate, I wrote up a little recollection-type story and then thinly disguised the real names and posted it to Medium.
Here’s a teaser:
It was the summer of 1987. A year earlier I had driven most of the way across the country (before driving off the road near Gillette, Wyoming), and flown the rest of the way to start my post-graduation life in San Francisco, crashing with a bunch of friends of mine, known as the Geebens, who had graduated, or dropped out, the year before me and were at the time crammed into a tickytack rental in Diamond heights.
Since then the Geebens had rented two houses a block apart from each other in the neighborhood of UC Med, near 9th and Judah, in the inner Sunset. Our two largish Victorians had become crashpads and launchpads for a wave of friends visiting California for New Year’s shows or on wanderjahrs or on graduation. We eventually instituted a two-week rule to prevent permanent occupations by the less well motivated.
We really learned this lesson after NYE ’86 when some friends of friends were still staying with us in February. You know the old joke about “how do you know a Deadhead has been staying in your house?”
So, back to summer of 1987. One of my friends who had taken a year off or otherwise contrived to stay another year at Princeton after I graduated in ’86 was coming out to SF. I forget how or whether I knew this, but I probably had some kind of heads up. One way or the other, I got a call from the airport from Steve Capacole, a rotund, balding redheaded Italian-American from Philly whom I had met the first week in college when he found the grand piano in the lobby of my dorm and was casually rehearsing classical pieces while hungover and stoned kids lounged on couches grooving to it.
