I smoked pot before I came to Cal, but I don’t think I really felt it until that fall evening in 1967. Afterward I shared a big fresh peach with Alan, and it tasted more wonderful than any peach I’d ever eaten. Its skin was firm and gently fuzzy and its flesh was sweet without stickiness. I could feel my cells take it in. I remember marveling at nature’s perfect packaging.

Alan was an anti-beau. He was a year ahead of me and we met the day after I moved into the dorm. He wanted us to be a couple. I didn’t. He was a nice guy, and he had some intriguing theories about mathematics, but he was too besotted with me to be sexually interesting, and I was put off by his horrible acne and his stringy brown hair. I liked to visit him, talk about life and the universe, smoke with him. I met his friends and was soon involved with one of them. Even after Rick and I became a couple, a bunch of us tended to gather in Alan’s apartment those evenings, sometimes for most of the night.

I remember the time Alan took acid and I told him to write down the ideas as he had them. I wasn’t yet into hallucinogenics, but we were careful with the serious drugs; if one of us dropped acid at least another of us would stick around and act as escort. His face lit up at the writing suggestion, dilated eyes rounding, and he grabbed paper and pen and turned away from me to his desk. For the rest of the night he hunched over the paper, writing. When he gave me the finished work, he had covered the page in amazingly small print. Everywhere it read: “I am stoned. I am stoned. I am stoned.”

As that academic year progressed, our group of course evolved. Some drifted away. Others introduced new acquaintances. We spent more time in the Spaulding house than in Alan’s apartment. We picked up two Jeffs.

Jeff Connor was thin, with longish blonde hair in soft curls. He looked cherubic but he acted mischievous. He was the kind of guy who would regularly spearhead a prank, like group-dismantling and reconstructing a VW Bug in a dining hall, or the (unsuccessful) attempt to lead a horse up the stairs and into the dean’s office. He drank gallons of coffee and smoked pounds of pot. Connor had gone to the same high school as I, one year ahead of me, had even been a friend of a close friend’s brother, but we didn’t meet till I came to Cal. He cohabitated with a dull blonde named Mary. I never found her interesting, but Rick ultimately did, enough so that she was the catalyst for the hiatus that became our breakup. I don’t know what became of Mary after Cal, but Jeff was one of two friends who died in climbing accidents, the only people I lost in those years, which is odd when I think of how dangerously we lived.

Jeff Kinsey was a different type. Chubby, with lank black hair and a bad complexion, he was ever a businessman. He sold the Berkeley Barb, Fillmore posters, lots of pot and hash. During the summers, he was one of two individuals who could fix cherry-counting machines. On the north coast, where the canneries operate, fruit cocktail is assembled. The most expensive ingredient in fruit cocktail is the cherries. In order to be fruit cocktail, each can must have a minimum number of maraschino halves. In order to be profitable, each can must not have one cherry half more than required. So the cherry-counting machines are important tools. And finicky. I’m sure Jeff did what he could to keep them finicky.

The most memorable event that winter was the party in the Spaulding house. Rick and his old friend Carl rented the little place: a one-story house with a living room in front and a kitchen in back and two small bedrooms and a bathroom on the side. I shared Rick’s bedroom with him about half the time; I knew the place better than my dorm room.

Everyone had just returned from break, and the quarter’s classes hadn’t yet picked up the scary momentum that drove each 10-week academic session. Carl, Rick and I were sitting around the living room, expecting Jeff Connor and Mary to arrive, when Kinsey showed up with a key.

Jeff Kinsey could buy 2.2 pounds of marijuana for around $60. So could anyone. At that price, burns were common. More than one apparent brick was unwrapped after purchase only to find compressed sawdust behind an outer inch of herb. Kinsey specialized in product quality; he didn’t buy at lower prices, and he always acquired good stuff. He packaged manicured buds in small plastic bags, with a card inserted that described the variety of pot within. His bag-work was beautiful and foreshadowed dispensary products by almost 50 years.