My freshman year started out with a bang, but ended with a whimper. I had fallen in love with, and been accepted to, a notorious university in the most incomparably beautiful setting, perched in the misty redwoods overlooking the cold, blue Pacific of Santa Cruz. Notorious for intoxicating beauty and unbridled indulgence, like a Grateful Dead summer camp that had just kept truckin’ into fall for credit. But there was a dark side to this hippie paradise, also notorious for its own serial killer, Edmund Kemper, aka “the Co-ed Killer”, a university employee who had just culminated his killing spree of his grandparents, six female hitchhikers, his mother, and her best friend. I swooped into this paradoxical, hypnotic, psychedelic  institute of higher education ready to take on the world, only to crawl pathetically home nine months later. At least I didn’t get picked up hitchhiking by Edmund Kemper, hence my ability to tell my sordid tale of freshman year.

            Like most freshman, I was my own worst enemy. What didn’t I do to screw up? I hitchhiked, even though I knew about the Co-ed Killer. I dropped acid in astronomy class. Actually, one of the bright spots in my memory is the night I saw the planets align from the patio of the dining hall. That was also the night I met the object of my obsession, a guy carrying an electric guitar and wheeling an amplifier. How we hooked up is burned in my memory, too. He lived on the cool floor, the party floor, where everyone was either studying film or came from an industry background (i.e. Beverly Hills rich kids). One night they closed off the floor and turned it into an orgy hallway, the college equivalent of the Playboy Mansion. That’s when we hooked up the first time. After that, he barely acknowledged me except when he wanted sex. I was fairly new at this, so I didn’t realize that he wasn’t really my boyfriend and didn’t want to be seen as such. I guess in that regard freshman boys haven’t changed that much.

            I joined furtive, private clubs, such as the Doors Fan Club. I took a class on Dada, where someone’s final project was a topless circle dance in the meadows. I dressed as Patty Hearst for Halloween. Raymond Carver was my poetry teacher. Of course back then, I had never heard of him, and he was still drinking. But he read our feeble attempts at profundity with appropriate seriousness. Baba Ram Dass came to the dining hall with his entourage…hundreds of hippies who crawled out of the mountains to chant. Be Here Now. The incense, the prayer flags, we were all here. I also was here, for the first quarter at least.

            Then the weather turned cold. I drove back to Los Angeles for winter break with my lover. On New Year’s Eve, he invited me to his house, but wouldn’t pick me up. His friend came to get me at my parent’s house, but my lover wouldn’t come out of his bedroom to celebrate with us. Years later I would learn he is bipolar, but at the time I internalized his inconsistent behavior and made it about me. All this wouldn’t have mattered much except I let it start to color my rainbow freshman year, which was starting to turn black.  

            Winter quarter was much darker. My roommate left to work at a ski resort.

I started to stare out the window a lot, into the quad where I could watch my lover go to dinner with other girls.  I cooked pancakes in my room. The rain started, and the banana slugs came out. The slime and gloom were pervasive. Students were stoned all the time. A young man would come to the hall, open a briefcase full of drugs, and deal right there in the dorms. I started to take the free library bus up to Berkeley, just to get away. It was sunny in Berkeley, with protestors, falafel, Telegraph Avenue. The redwoods, which had seemed so glorious, now seemed so ominous. A bright spot- Allen Ginsberg performed in the dining hall. The power went out while he was playing his squeezebox, but he never wavered. However, the center wasn’t holding- my hall held an Electric Kool-Aid party. Acid was burning up some brains fast.

            Finally, spring quarter came. The sun emerged from the fog. My lover would still not acknowledge me in public, but in private we were reaching new sexual heights to a soundtrack of “Abbey Road”. I stopped cooking pancakes in my room. My roommate returned from Mammoth, only to end up transferring.  We went caving in the meadow with naked “Caveman”, who smoked a joint way down in the cave. Just when I was getting it a bit together, we had tequila sunrises at sunrise at the tennis courts, and I got drunker and sicker than I have ever been in my life. I missed class, I missed lunch, I missed dinner. I lost a day of my life which I am still trying to find.

Freshman year ended. Everyone was making plans for the summer; me, working in my father’s company, my lover, studying film editing in London. I was starting to get a less-than-flattering picture of him, but naïve girl that I was, it took me years to get over him. My grandfather had died, and I drove myself home in his old Chevy, packed with my Chinese fans, my oriental rugs, and my Indian bedspreads. Somehow I passed all my classes, including Dada. Well, sorta. We didn’t get grades, of course, just written evaluations- short paragraphs that I’m sure the teachers hated doing.

Working that summer at my father’s company, I was deflated. I had scraped very low emotionally, and the pervasive pot and LSD with all the unstable hormones had created a maelstrom from which I had barely escaped. Some didn’t. Many freshmen transferred out. Some just dropped out. Very few of my cohorts actually graduated from there.  Now, as my own daughter navigates college with grace and aplomb, I remember my psychotic, frenetic, drug-addled freshman year, and wonder how I produced such a sane individual. Here we all are.