"He drives me to Oakland with a cigarette dangling on his lip," she reportedly said. "And he has a history of drugs," she reportedly added with a shiver of delight.

"Today's graduates are too sheltered," Patrick concludes, wiping cappucino foam off his new beard. He read an article in Esquire that said balding men could offset their loss of sex appeal by growing beards.

I ask him what kind of wild things happened to him after he graduated.

"Three of us were sharing an apartment on Cedar St. in 1972," he recalls. "I was sleeping on a raised platform above the back porch for 30 bucks a month. There were six drugheads crashing on the living room floor and shooting up in the bathroom. We didn't want them there, but they were friends of our grass connection and didn't have any place else to stay."

"One night, one of these guys stole an ounce of cocaine. He stayed up three days and nights shooting the stuff every hour or so. On the third night about 3 a.m., I was awakened and looked down to see this guy with an eight-inch hunting knife, cursing and snarling at me. He said he knew somebody was up on the platform with me and that we were talking about him."

That's pretty wild. I tell Patrick, but what happened?

Patrick says he got down off the platform, let the guy have a look, and went to crash at a nearby commune of militant lesbians who kept a stash of rifles in their attic.

Berkeley's not what it used to be. I assure him.

"Yeah," he says as his face lights up. "Remember when we pulled the fence down at People's Park and a fleet of cop cars screeched up and started shooting rubber bullets at us?" He notices I'm staring out the window.

"Well, that's okay," he adds, getting up to leave. "I'm late for my shrink. No time for old war stories today."

The author is a freelance writer based in Sun Francisco.