Savages - Judy Radin

Eileen Savage was my best friend for most of the fifteen years I lived in Berkeley. When we met she was a graduate student in anthropology and I was a junior. With an eight year age difference between us we were unlikely friends, but somehow we fit. Somehow we hit it off.

Eileen treated me like a kid at first – but I was a kid! She came to my twenty-first birthday party. She took me to Ledger’s Liquors on University Avenue to buy my first beer with my newly-legal ID, but for the first time ever the clerk didn’t ask. We had a big laugh about that.

It took a few years for my friendship with Eileen to take off. I couldn’t believe she actually wanted to be friends with me. We didn’t have much in common. She, a San Jose WASP, myself a New York Jew. But when a flat in her duplex on Southside opened up, she suggested I call her landlord and rent it.

Eileen was writing her dissertation in those days, but she was taking a short break when I moved in. It was the summer of 1975. I had just graduated, sort of. At the last minute, halfway through Spring quarter, the College of Letters and Science informed me that I was a half unit short for graduation. Unless I make up the unit I can’t graduate. I’d already been admitted to the University of Chicago graduate school and they said they would take me anyway. All they wanted was for Berkeley to certify my graduation. But the dean of Letters and Science wouldn’t cooperate – even though I was graduating with a 3.9 grade point average, with several A+ grades on my transcript, and Phi Beta Kappa to boot. A half unit is a half unit. My professors in the anthropology department let me go through the ceremony, and but it was pretend.

I never really wanted to move to Chicago. After growing up in New York I had no interest in returning to that kind of climite. Also, when I visited Chicago several months earlier, I learned from the students I met that there were frequent shootings across from the anthropology building. The south side of Chicago didn’t sound like a place I wanted to be. But how could I turn it down? It was such a good school.

Then I had a loophole. I wasn’t graduating. I took it as a sign from the Universe that I should hold off, take another year of classes, learn how to use a computer, then figure out what I was going to do. The half unit was giving me a chance to have another look at my future.

Eileen and I had a lot of fun that sumer, most of which revolved around drugs. We dabbled in peyote and mushrooms and speed, but mostly we smoked pot. Occasionally we drank gin or something, but we both considered alcohol of our parents’ world, so we mostly avoided it.

At the beginning of that summer, the summer I graduated but didn’t, I started getting strange sensations in my body. My fingers would get pink and puffy, or one of my feet would swell up. Sometimes I’d get a bumpy red rash on my face. I felt okay, and I mostly looked okay, but something weird was going on. That’s when I started to use the skills I learned in college, in archaeology classes, to dig into what was going on with me. Eileen was my companion and assistant on that journey. She almost had a Ph.D so she was a master at doing research.

I went to see a doctor, but he told me I was imaging it. “You crazy Berkeley kids,” he said. “You’re probably hallucinating.”

I studied everything I could find on food allergies and nutrition. “Diet for a Small Planet” was my favorite resource. Eileen was really into Adele Davis, a nutritionist who wrote about the interaction of food and illness. I changed my diet drastically. I stopped eating meat, drinking diet soda and coffee, and I tried to keep my food as clean and free of additives as was possible in the seventies. I tried to pretend that it was helping, but Eileen and I both knew that it wasn’t.

At the end of summer I had to start classes and Eileen had to get back to her dissertation. My symptoms subsided. I even forgot about my crazy body for a while. I took classes in computers and geography, subjects I knew would help me in graduate school. I wrote papers about climate change and animal extinctions during the Stone Age, and I learned to illustrate stone artifcats in ink. It was my favorite Fall quarter ever. To think I almost missed it.

Just after the Christmas holiday, though, my hands started to hurt again. It became difficult for me to hold a pen. Fortunately I could write my papers on a typewriter, but taking notes in class became impossible, as did my job working for my professor illustrating his finds from a recent dig in Kenya.

By then Eileen was becoming impatient with my complaining and constant pain. I didn’t know what was wrong with me and I was terrified. My fear frequently spilled over onto Eileen. She was my best friend. She had to listen to me. And she was too polite to tell me she couldn’t take it anymore. So she listened beyond her limit, tried to be supportive, but it didn’t take long for our friendship to be strained.

It was eight years before I was diagnosed with lupus. By then Eileen and I didn’t hang out as much. Sometimes when I knew she was home I’d knock on her door but she wouldn’t answer. That really hurt. But she had a dissertation to write. She had a life to live. I understood.