1967

by Dana Gurnee

When thinking of more to say about the Life of Mike, I keep returning to 1967. Still the chronological approach, but it’s something. And I write it to put it out of my mind.

I first met Michael in 1962, in biology class at Wilson High School in Long Beach. He and I, along with a girl named Lenore, were the only sophomores allowed to take this “difficult, seniors-only” course. We had to pass a tough test to qualify, and the teacher of the class made a big deal about us and the A’s we always got on papers and exams, hoping to shame the seniors into doing better. Just a tiny morsel of evidence that Michael was a bright, shiny object back then. (As for Lenore and me, someone else will have to make that call.)

Michael and I never “touched” outside of class. He was tall and handsome and debonair and classy and witty, while I was just witty. Maybe. He played trombone in the band and marched in a Rose Parade. He was a cross-country runner who consistently placed second or third, behind a boy who was near Olympian in his speed. Michael always had a job, such as the paper route that John Harding mentions. When Michael could drive, he went all the way to Los Angeles on dates and spent more than $5. He got good grades, back when good grades still meant excellence. And he and his brother handled most of the household chores, while his parents worked full time and enjoyed cocktails. He could do it all. He was the hippest man alive. Hard-working, too.

After high school, Michael attended Long Beach City College for two years, and then transferred to UCLA in 1967. During his LBCC years, he was a pal of Larry Menshek, who put Michael and me together when Michael was looking for a roommate to share the expenses of an apartment.

I was about to begin my third year in a UCLA dorm, but wanted something more grown-up and adventurous — something more conducive to certain forms of recreation and consumption, you might say. And I needed a hip guy to help me get going.

So Michael and I became roommates at 1519 Colby Avenue, in West L.A., about five miles from campus, just around the corner from Shari’s, a wonderful 24-hour coffee shop where hamburgers were 85 cents and coffee had just gone up to 15 cents.

Soon after starting at Colby, Michael had three part-time jobs so that he could pay his way and still go to classes. In the wee hours of the morning, he delivered L.A. Times newspapers to the UCLA dorms, using his motorcycle with sidecar to carry the dozens of thick papers. In the early hours of the evening, he worked in the paste-up department of the UCLA Daily Bruin, with his fast skills doing far more than his fair share of the work. And on weekend nights he worked at UCLA Medical Center doing odd jobs that occasionally included taking bodies to the morgue, using a special code to bypass all the floors. He got in trouble once for miskeying the code, causing the door to open in the lobby while he had a stiff.

Through all this, Michael attended classes and did quite well in them, I think because excelling in them was based not on learning, but on raw artistic talent. His major was graphic arts, continuing an interest he had when he was a baby. He finished all the tough academic stuff at LBCC, so his UCLA grades were based on producing objects of art, and that he did, using his superb skills as a designer, illustrator, typographer, and letterer. He was like the young Bob Dylan writing songs: The output was beautiful and magical, and seemed effortless.

Meanwhile, I was working part-time jobs, too — paste-up at the Daily Bruin and doorman at a theater — spending too little time studying at home, often missing the large classes with hundreds of people in them. In upper division, exams were essay questions, and getting A’s or B’s required little more than legible handwriting, decent syntax, and liberal bias. (I might have had higher grades had my name not been a girl’s name.)

All this was against the backdrop of Vietnam and protest, LBJ and Nixon, acid and pot, the new music, and all the rest. Michael went along with the social movements with great glee and appetite, but he did not haunt political gatherings or carry signs or organize levitations of the Federal Building. But he was a “leftie” on the way to hippiedom.

In those days, I felt — Michael, too, I’m sure — that we were fighting to survive, i.e., to stay out of the war and to stay in the U.S.A. The alternative to our draft deferments seemed like death. We believed that old men with limp dicks were jealous of our perpetual erections, and wanted us out of the way so that they could get the girls. In retrospect, these views are profoundly unfair and naive, but so it goes.

From September 1967 to June 1968, we watched with awe as things got worse and worse, yet also more exciting. Nine months then would equal 10 years today. Maybe 20.

When RFK was assassinated, I was working at McCarthy headquarters in Westwood, answering incoming calls. My first knowledge of what was happening came when a caller accused us at the headquarters of pulling the trigger. Michael came to the place to watch TV with the McCarthyites. A couple of hours later, Michael took me back to Colby in the sidecar. We walked the 200 feet to Shari’s for hamburgers and pints of coffee. Michael said he had extra time to drink coffee because the Times would have to redo its front page, meaning there was no reason to arrive at the usual time to load up the sidecar.

In its way, this was a life’s highlight, aided greatly by Tareyton cigarettes, which, of course, we could smoke anywhere we felt like.