BERKELEY

I went to UC Berkeley.  You see, Johnny Talbert, the guy I was in the band with, brought a sightreading book and asked me to help him with it. I didn’t know he was enrolled in Berkeley. I thought he was doing what I was doing.

A bit later, I found out that he was a full- fledged student and I was stunned. I was like, “What?” And he had been going to a community college, but it had been quite a while before he transferred to Berkeley. He’s a jive mofo in certain ways.

The reason I ended up going there, because one day I went up there to find him to hang out and I couldn’t find him, but I knew the admissions person. Stacey was his name and I knew where he was. He was the guy that evaluated you. So I went up to the admissions office and I said, “Stacey, where’s Johnny at?” He didn’t know where Johnny was but he said, “Aren’t you about through with community college?” I said, “Yeah, I graduated”. So he said, “Why don’t you apply up here?”

It was like, every counselor I talked to said, “Oh you can try but you can’t get in there”. That’s all I ever heard from counselors and other people at community college. So that was the first big change. I said, “Really?” And he said, “Go ahead and apply”.

So I went to apply, and there was this black girl that saw me and she sat across from me at the other table and she started looking through my records to evaluate me to see if I could get into University. And I was scared. She was doing the evaluating and I was just sitting there looking at her. She said, “Sit back and relax”.

Then at a certain point she said—I don’t remember her exact words, but she told me that I could go in, I was accepted. So that was stunning to me. I had friends who went there, just various friends I knew. It was the college in the neighborhood, but I didn’t see myself there. They gave us an orientation and, oh my God, it was a completely different world.

And here I was, a little boy from the ghetto. Another boy had also come there from community college, so we got there at the same time. He told me he had to get a counselor cuz the orientation had screwed him up so bad.

It was amazing. The orientation, I don’t know how to explain it. Many people who have an education come from an educated life. But when you come from the ghetto and you go to the University and you see all they know—it was just incredible.

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