Tony Jackson and the bay (long but good?)

The Average reader reads at 200 wpm. There are a little over 2900 words in this post so it might take you about 15 minutes to read it. I think it’s a good story, and I had to write it. It took me about 2 1/2 hours to write it and proofread. So enjoy if you will. Maybe start with the begining and see if it’s the kind of tale for you. Unfortunately this intro I’ve written adds about a minute to you slow pokes.

Tony invited me to go with him to UC Berkeley (aka CAL) (aka most famous liberal college in American history) to see Richard Dawkins give a lecture on his latest book. Now I didn’t know we were going to Cal to begin with, I just thought we were going to Berkeley. Also I didn’t know who Richard Dawkins was. He’s apparantly notoriously anti-religion and was spoofed as a character on a two part episode of South Park where Cartman goes to a future controlled by Atheists (Dawkins’s the guy banging Mrs. Garrison).

Tony lives in Fairfield which is about a 2 hour drive from Stockton in the bust ass truck I’m driving. Now the truck isn’t completely street legal so I had misgivings about driving it there and especially didn’t want to go into Berkeley with it. So we got a ride from Tony’s Mom to the Vallejo Ferry. There we wandered the hard streets of Mac Dre’s town and admired the black people and crossed streets against the lights, because Tony asserts that’s what people do in the ghetto, jaywalk. Then we went back to the ferry and went into the bar across the water from where my Grandpa Wise was stationed for a time in the Korean War while my Grandmother lived in Stockton attending UOP. This isn’t really important except that Tony (who is from Colorado) was trying to tell me about Vallejo like I didn’t know the life story of the man who founded it. Anyway, we got drunk.

After a couple hours the ferry was ready to depart and we hopped on. I got a really cool seat outside on the second deck and saved a spot for Tony, meanwhile I was asked to photgraph some hot latinas.Tony came up with a beer and I wanted one too so I switched spots with him, told him to hold me a seat and went down to the ferry’s drink man. While ordering my beer ( a local brew you will never get to drink, whoever is reading this) Tony pops his head up and asks for a glass of whiskey. Thus establishing us as completely drunk and without sweet seats next to hot latinas. So we went back outside and stood and drank while Tony explained about the Nautical Academy he’s aiming for and how he participated in yacht races out in the bay every week before he started school. The North East San Francisco Bay is breathtaking. You have to see it to know. It looks like another country. It is about as beautiful as any place can be.

The ferry went ridiculously fast, in fact I think it’s the fastest I’ve ever experienced on a boat. The wake was unbelieveable, a skiff would disappear in that spray, the center maintained a water wall at least 10 ft high with a side waves a skier would kill for, or die jumping. The wind got bad with the speed and we retired to some comfortable seats inside up forward and talked as we watched the ship scream across the San Francisco Bay.

It pulled right into pier 39, with Tony explaining the old Navy tender nearby was the "USS Jerimiah O’Brien" which as you might know is a precursor to Tony and Mine’s first ship the DD USS O’Brien. It being a tradition in the Navy to keep names "alive" through generations of ships, like "Enterprise". O’Brien as I recall had at least 5 ships of the same name through the years, all named after an Irish soldier from the Civil War or maybe the Revolution, I can’t remember now. Anyway we were still a bit drunk and walked onto the pier with at least 100 people waiting in line to board the ferry. The sobering came when we had to walk from Pier 39 to the Bart station at Embarcadero and Market. I told Tony about 7 times that there was a street car that went right to it, but he insisted we walked. The weather everywhere was perfect that day. Though the walking got tedious as I watched us encircle Coit tower on Telegraph hill by about 90 degrees.

Eventually we made it to Market Street, where I’ve been literally hundreds of times in my life and went below the street, below the subway, to the BART station deep within. We got the Train to Richmond which was completely packed and rode under the bay about 5 times faster than the Ferry went over it. When we started hitting Oakland stops I whipped out my iPod and we listened to "California :Love" by 2Pac and Dr. Dre. "From Oakland to Sac-Town, the Bay Area and back down" seemed appropriate enough if not completely silly to anybody standing near us, 2 white guys sharing ear phones jamming to 13 year old rap/techno.

Awesomely the BART stops off in Downtown Berkeley about 1 city block from Cal. I have been to Berkeley many times in my life but I’d never been to Cal till this day. College kids abound we walked up hill into the wooded outer perimeter (stopping for a burrito first) I noticed there were emergency phones about every 25 yards. I joked that a rapist would have to be pretty crafty to get a girl in the "point of no return" middle areas that are over 10 yards from any rape phone. "Perhaps he could hide in the gully by the creek and call to women and lure them with his voice away from the safety of the rape phones" or "Perhaps he could hide behind that log" were the jist of it. Not that I encourage sex with Cal girls in any capacity, just noting the absurdity of the frequency of the phones.

Onward and upward we went. The pulse of the heart of Berkeley beating louder as we neared it. One by one the left wing cliche’s began emerging, a group of old white haired scientist looking guys, an over the hill big banked couple ’touring’. An old professor in a brown cordoroy suit. As we passed the great East Gateway there were signs everywhere for various clubs, including I noticed the "UC Berkeley Objectivists Club". The ground was rife with colored chalk propaganda, anywhere from "Bush is evil" to "Living wage for Custodians" At the center of the scrawlings a group of reasonably young hippies. I call them hippies in the scrictest sense for they wore the traditional hippie cloth, and were gathered around in a drum circle, playing drums.

We managed to round these odd creatures following the papers taped to the ground "Dawkins lecture" with arrows to guide to the hall. Upon entering the hall we see a great line that went around the corner. So we walked around the corner, and it went around the next corner, so we walked around that one as well. It further continued to wrap around and we chased its tail to the fourth side of the building. In a matter of 10 minutes the line had passed us and went back to the first side and out the door. We were over an hour early at this point. The lecture was scheduled for 7:00 pm. Around 6:30 and between Tony’s 4th and 5th smoke breaks we recieved our tickets, curtesy of student club SANE (Students for A Non-religious Ethos). Nearing 7:00 pm the doors to the lecture hall were opened and we found our seats luckily about 15 ft from where Mr. Dawkins would give his entire lecture. About 750 people packed into the hall, but for reasons unknown to me they waited a long time to start and the 40 minute lecture didn’t begin until about 8:20 pm. This marked the first time in my life I was completely surrounded in a room of Atheists, and weren’t afraid to be so. Here is where I learned that Atheists are most definitely not necessarily Objectivists, or even particularly rational or moral.

Mr. Dawkins said some interesting things, but since he was focusing the entire lecture on subjects covered in a book I hadn’t heard about until about an hour before I was more absorbed in everything but the details (also I was still a bit drunk and Tony was so bad that later he told me he tried to prevent the woman to his left from smelling the pure alcohol vapors from his breath). He made one interesting point about how no child is a religious child, that there is no such thing as a 5 year old Catholic boy, or a 7 year old Muslim giril. There is a 5 year old boy with Catholic parents, but if the parents were sailors you wouldn’t call him a 5 year old sailor. Somehow religion is given a free pass on personal accomplishment or will. Mr. Dawkins made a lot of jokes about religion, mentioned the teapot theory all the while the audience was laughing and cheering. It was beyond bizarre for me, for in my life I have only known 2 passionately anti-religious people, and even though I myself refuse religion as a concept I don’t really take any particular pleasure in being derisive about it. Maybe because beyond my youngest years I wasn’t told to believe one thing or another and even in my younger years was only expected to attend religious services, not explicitely learn anything from my attendence. Though I suppose I did laugh a little and any jokes I missed were entirely the cause of the day’s sun, walking too much, and beer.

For me religion is an odd juncture. I was born a Catholic. My Father a born again Christian (his parents Atheists) and my Mother the full blown Catholic. My great Uncle or something along those lines on my mother’s side was the top Bishop of San Francisco back in the day. My Mother’s Mother went to a hard core Catholic High School in San Francisco and I assume a Catholic elementary. My Grandfather was a teacher and Councellor at St. Mary’s High School in Stockton for over 30 years. My Mom went to St. Mary’s, as did my uncle. I was baptized at my Great Grandfather’s (mother’s mother’s father) funeral as a baby in what my Grandfather called a "2 for 1 deal" for the priest, who he personally had the priest perform the baptism in a bathroom sink at the cemetery. This went down as a merely informal, though spiritually binding, baptism as I was baptized again at age 12 after proper Catholic classes were taken. I have the distinct pleasure of having only once cheated on any test in my life, during a Catholic class test for the "Our Father" prayer. Also a Sunday Mass marked the only time in my life I literally stared at a clock, and no where else, for an entire hour. I can’t tell you exactly when I became Atheist, only that I thought I knew God existed throughout most of high school, and was definitely unsure by the time I joined the Navy in 2002. My Atheism was solidified by the time I first read Ayn Rand in January of 2004. Though I must point out at this time and not elaborate (as I’ve already done it in previous posts) that technically I am not an atheist by its definition. That is one who wholly rejects even the possibility of a god. Being a creature of logic, this would be a silly and unnecessary leap.

Mr. Dawkins told us that he himself isn’t a complete Atheist either. He introduced a scale of ’knowing there’s a god’ to ’knowing there isn’t a god’ where everything in the middle is agnostic on varying levels. By his scale I was 9/10 10 being Atheist. Then he said he was a 9/10, so I guess we’re on the same page. He described 9/10 as being ’Not being exactly certain there isn’t a God, but living life with the assumption that there isn’t, and equating the possibility of God with the possibility of unicorns and fairies.’ That’s where I am.

When the lecture was over and Mr. Dawkins got a standing ovation we walked out into the night. Wandered the bar scene a bit but did not partake and instead went to the BART. We had been screwed from the begining as the ferry stopped running at 7:00 and never planned on going back to Fairfield that way. We took BART to Richmond which is a ghetto town north of Berkeley. Poor old Berkeley book ended by Oakland and Richmond. Richmond as you may recall is the town featured in the film "Coach Carter" with Samuel L. Jackson. The city where no one graduates from school and kids get capped in the streets for selling shit. Well we made this our destination and right off the train bums were hitting us up for cash. Outside the station there was one bum on a bench singing to himself very pleasantly but from a distance became ominous. Tony for some reason was scared shitless of this town. I tried to explain to him that I lived in the most violent areas of S.F. and Stockton growing up, and had just left an apartment in San Diego that was completely surrounded by the most crazy houses, halfway houses, bum empires and police sirens you will ever see in any place on earth, but this didn’t calm him down. He insisted I hide my headphones which he didn’t know I was using to ironically play to myself Filter’s sugar sweet song "Take a Picture". Apparently he’d been reading about all the killings and thefts going down in Rich town and that just the implication of white headphones being attached to a $300 iPod could get us mugged. I wasn’t so worried, and even somewhat desired a confrontation so I could establish myself as king of Cali and maybe kill a thug in the process. I saw one group of thugish looking kids all hooded and waiting for a bus. Tony got so paranoid he went to the taxi area and wouldn’t move. I told him the taxi drivers were all sleeping and their doors were locked, so that even if he did plan on using them to escape something he’d get shanked long before he got in the cab. There was a sign stuck in the grass that read "I support Not Today www.not2day.org the sign had a silhouette of what appeared to be a dead man. I checked out the website days later, it is a Richmond initiative to go 1 day without a violent crime. We sat on a bench by the taxis and waited about 20 mins. for Tony’s Mom to pick us up.

She came, we rode and got back to his place. I was tired as all hell but Tony is on a night rotation for work, and we ended up staying up to watch a movie from 1983 called "Max Dugan Returns" a woman and her son (Mathew Broderick) who are visited by the woman’s father who hasn’t been in her life since she was 10. He had a couple hundred thousand dollars he scammed off his employers in Vegas and they were after him as well as the feds. The woman is incidentally dating a cop (Donald Sutherland) who gets suspicious as this broke as shit teacher starts getting a lot of undesired gifts from her dad including wads of bills, luxury cars, big stereos, and a whole new house in the place of the old one. I jokingly guessed that Keifer Sutherland also known as SUPER BADASS JACK from 24, might be in the film, and was surprised to spot him in his 5 second appearance in a group of people at the high school where the woman taught. All together the film was oddball. Not stupid slapstick like much of the turn of the 80s comedies it was as serious as it was funny, almost depressing towards the end which is open ended only letting you know that the great Max is gone for good, the woman is broke as shit again, and will probably be going on trial for accessory to larceny or whatever, with most of the police work against her done by her cop boyfriend who she simultaneously kisses, and begs leniency. Quite twisted. Tony believed this to be one of the best films he’s ever seen.

That’s it. I went to sleep. I woke up in day lights savings. I drove home to Stockton around 12:00 on Sunday and didn’t do shit.

Somehow in this entire comprehensive overly detailed story I am not able to capture who Tony is, or why he is so awesome. I guess I can only say, he is a very funny and witty person. He made me laugh all damn day, and every person that we spent even a minute near was in tears laughing at the shit Tony would say. I’m remembering us on the ferry waiting for a toilet to open and Tony just going at it like a stand up comedian just ripping on half the people walking by while anyone listening is laughing their ass off. He wasn’t even rude or personal, just pure tact. Calling on little known stereotypes and idiosyncrasies from people of a specific city and state he noticed were prevalent on the ferry.

This man crush I have on him I guess can be summed up with the name I have in previous blogs (back to the begining since Tony lived with me for 3 weeks while I began my assent into extreme blogging) used to preface his given name; "Legendary".