Then when our lunch-hours came, we might walk out into the Plaza and catch the last part of The Zucchini’s show if it was still going on, before getting lunch along Telegraph Avenue or Bancroft Way, or at Kip’s on Durant around the corner.
Then that incredible springtime passed, and we stopped seeing The Great Zucchini except for once in a while.
By this time, my best friend in Berkeley was a Financial Aid Counselor. And we had become good drinking buddies. But to cut to the chase: the two of us were upstairs in Kip’s one night drinking pitchers of beer and shooting the breeze, when we spotting a guy who looked a lot like The Great Zucchini himself, drinking alone at the bar. And of course, it was The Zucchini himself, and when we offered to share our pitchers with him at our table, he ambled over.
The Zucchini was burned out on Berkeley, and he told us he was heading north, to join a commune he knew about in Washington, and we’d probably never see him again at UC-Berkeley. And so it was. And ever will be. I never saw The Great Zucchini again, and later that year I moved to southern Marin County, to work in a restaurant-business partly owned by a dark Italian fellow who was also a Financial Aid Counselor during the Watergate Months, in the Financial Aid Office in the Main Administration Building, in Sproul Plaza at UC-Berkeley.
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