July 7th 1981

7^th   If we had woken early enough, we could have driven with Bill into Berkeley – naturally we missed it by sleeping on.  However, had breakfast with Meher – very peaceful since Aneema was at school and Salim was sleeping.  I had thought we would be going back to San Francisco in the morning – we were going to stay at Terry’s and work the next day – but time slipped away the way it does and pretty soon it was 12.  Gerry, an ex-pupil of Bill’s and a friend of theirs, dropped around.  He seemed OK, tho’ not the sort of guy one would have thought of as their friend.  Bill turned up, and we all ate lunch, Gerry opting out because he was on a diet.  Gerry was quite into booze + dope, and, to my surprise, it seemed that Meher was quite fond of the latter too.  Val phoned Terry + confirmed that we would be turning up, and she said her partner would be there.  Meher dropped us off at the BART station at 3, and we rode in, tho’ it took us longer than we had thought to walk from the station to the shop.  And then when we got there, it was shut.  A top window was open, so at first we just thought that the guy, Danny, had popped out for a minute.  So we sat down outside and waited.  We waited, in fact, from 4 o’clock until 7.30.  We did break the time up somewhat, with several phone calls, a few walks, and the fetching, preparing + eating of dinner, but it was still a long wait.  And a fruitless one, since at the end of it all we were still outside the shop.  I went along and booked us a room in a rather sleazy hotel along the street, and then we tried to stow the sleeping bags we had borrowed from Meher through the open window.  That was a major operation in itself, with several failed efforts, but eventually we managed to get them through, Val standing on my shoulders and prising one of them off a nail on which it had got caught.  We checked in at the hotel – a seedy hotel’s seediest room – went out for a coffee, and came back early, had much trouble finding a socket for our radio, and then slept.

I don’t think it has been explained in the diary about our sleeping arrangement.  Terry was a friend of Meher, and she owned a barber-shop on Market Street in SF – Terry’s Haircuts.  The shop had a sleeping platform – somewhere for Terry’s small child, Lilith to sit and watch telly when Terry needed to bring her to work – and she had generously offered it to us to sleep on, though we would have to be out of the premises during the day.  An odd, but remarkably generous offer, since it would save us the cost of our major outlay, accommodation in the city, and make our delivering job that much more valuable.  Still, it did need a certain amount of arrangement, and that had clearly broken down at the first hurdle.