in the heart of it- 700 comm ave, boston

in january i switched dorms to a large towering dorm, called 700, for a semester. my roommate here was p.h., who smoked a cigarette the minute he woke up and, after that, was quite friendly.

700 was a place where it could be said that stereotypes came home to roost. whereas west campus had been a drug festival, to me, 700 seemed more of a culture, more of a classic college dorm; unfortunately, i wasn't very interested.

p.h. and i set out for western mass one weekend; another, i signed on to a bus that went down to washington d.c. to protest nixon's inauguration. at this demonstration, we looked on in a haze, as many of us had slept very little on the bus; washington was cold, and police totally blocked us from seeing anything useful or pretty.

when the weather cleared up i spent more and more time going up into new england, canada, new york, anywhere i could.



of my education, i remember several things: i took classes from many famous people, among them howard zinn, an urban historian, and a famous writer, who was a gentle and interesting guy. unfortunately, though i agreed with zinn's radical politics, i didn't want to be a political scientist; i had no real interest in pursuing urban history at the moment, though that was interesting, and finally, though i fancied myself a writer, i had nothing to say, yet. most of all, i felt like i was grasping at straws, wasting my parents' money, flailing around trying to find meaning that wasn't there. my sociology major put me in a statistics course that was a crusher. i could hardly bear to show up and do the homework; in the fall i transfered to journalism.


from my autobiography:



just passing through