I have a Black history.
Sometime in the late 1960s, the first girl was named Marianne. I was sitting in a class at the old Merritt College Grove Street campus in Oakland when the instructor called her up to the blackboard. I had never seen such great tits hiding behind a transparent top, and I fell in love.
We were together for about a year and had some great adventures.
The next lady came along on July 20, 1969—the day of the Moon landing.
I had finished a couple rounds of tennis, again at Grove Street, and hitchhiked into Berkeley. She picked me up, and we spent the day at her radical girlfriends’ houses. I was her white boy-toy for the day.
She was tall and beautiful, and later that evening I was lying with my head on her naked thigh as we watched Neil Armstrong step onto the Moon on television.
I don’t remember her name, but I never forgot her.
Then, in the early 1970s, one day I met Muhammad Ali.
By then Merritt College had moved from Grove Street to its brand-new campus up in the Oakland hills. The new campus opened in 1971, and I was running the DP shop there with a new IBM System/3 Model 10.
Ali had suffered his first professional loss on March 8, 1971, when Joe Frazier beat him in the Fight of the Century at Madison Square Garden. He was making appearances on the Black college lecture circuit, and one of those appearances brought him to Merritt.
I was backstage running the audiovisual department. As he walked by me, I grabbed his forearm, and I had never felt anything like it.
I needed him to sign the tape case for the college archives—the recording of the speech he was about to give. I was a huge Ali fan, and I was honored to meet him.
The last really good Black friend I had was named Roger.
He lived with his wife and young son in an apartment in Kent, Washington. I was homeless then, living in the field next door.
But before I landed in that field, Roger and I already had a long history. And toward the end, he would come by almost every day, sit with me, and get me stoned on some very good bud.
Marianne. A beautiful stranger in Berkeley in 1969. Muhammad Ali at the new Merritt campus in the early 1970s. Roger, many years later in Washington.
Different times. Different people. Different versions of me.
All part of my history.
And worth remembering.
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