When I was at Cal, we had a number of regular crazies who frequented campus. Prominent among them was the Hate Man (supposedly a former prominent journalist), a skinny, grey-bearded and thoroughly camp old man who dressed in tattered women’s clothing of all colors and would ask random people to push up against him with their shoulders. Supposedly he was barred by court ordinance from the activity that had earned him his moniker — walking behind people down Telegraph Ave. and yelling SAY YOU HATE ME SAY YOU HATE ME I WON’T LEAVE YOU ALONE UNTIL YOU SAY YOU HATE ME.
Or, Rare (Rer? Rawr?), supposedly a former pro hockey player, incredibly muscular, long-haired, with a habit of pushing shopping carts from Oakland to Berkeley, filling them up at some shop or another, then pushing them back to Oakland. Named for his eponymous manly roars (Rares? Rers/ Rawrs?) that he would fire off at random passers-by. Rare/Rer/Rawr would walk into cafes and, while he was friendly enough, embark on targeted harassment campaigns designed to get perfect strangers to dare him to do, say, fifty one-handed pushups, or some other amazing feat of strength and derring-do. Punctuated by violent-yet-friendly yawps of savage manliness. RAWR.
Or, Rick Starr; a grizzled-looking gangly 60-something gentleman in a 1970s lounge suit and battered fedora who would belt out Sinatra hits into a broken microphone attached to some sort of pink toy radio, peppering his tunes only with “hey how ya doin’, you’re beautiful” and other comments, to no one in particular; it was rumored that he still lived with his mother. Pink Man also frequented the areas around campus, racing up behind unsuspecting passers-by on his unicycle, pink cape fluttering in the wind, only to run several circles around his victims while shouting HAPPY BIRTHDAY or similar nonsense before cycling off, cackling maniacally.
We also had no shortage of religious nuts, including Chuck, a blow-dried youngish man, vaguely Latino-looking, inevitably clad in a blue t-shirt, standing on a milk crate and waving a bible, lecturing anyone who’d listen (and pretty much anyone who wouldn’t) on the inevitable hellfire that awaited them. Par for the course, of course. He was pretty inoffensive as things go; frequently you couldn’t even hear him over the ruckus from Sather Gate, where the Israel Action Committee and Muslim Student Union were usually busy shouting at each other from their customary recruiting spots at either side of the gate (representatives from both of which groups contributed to so many predictably, pathetically, hilariously ruined lectures in my history of the Middle Eastern conflict class, and which waged an ongoing guerilla propaganda campaign against each other for supremacy over our campus post-it boards.)
The absolutely dominant Southern campus noisemaker, though, was Dave the Yishua guy. I never knew his last name, or whether he really was called Dave, but that’s what we all called him. He was a white-haired, dignified-looking older man, who, like Chuck, was partial to blue t-shirts worn over his regular clothes. Except that Dave’s shirt inevitably read “Yishua” or “Y’shua” in fat white letters.
Nobody really seemed to know what Dave stood for, whether he was a Jew for Jesus or the other way around. The closest parallel I could ever find to his ambiguously directional judeo-christian philosophy is an anonymous graffito in Zurich with a propensity for leaving messages on tram station billboards involving lots of zionist imagery, pop culture references, and cryptic religious insinuations. Dave was no different, except instead of evangelizing whatever it is he tried to convey in the dead of night, he strutted among the rushing students, bringing his message to the world (or that part of the world that would listen to him — generally not a very big part of the world.)
Dwinelle Plaza was Dave’s stage, but his fervent teachings reached most of campus. Rather, his voice did. Because Dave was possessed of a set of lungs to put Pavarotti to shame, matched with a burning fervor to punctuate his preaching with air-raid siren quality yells of YISHUAAAAAAAAAA! YISHUAAAAAAA! while holding his bible (torah?) high above his head and jumping in the air every time he called out to his faithful. Who normally consisted of some poor distracted bastards startled out of their wits while running to class (generally freshmen who hadn’t yet learned when in his sermons to expect the window-breaking muezzin call to erupt, kind of like rookie combat soldiers who don’t know that a shrill whine means “incoming mortar round, duck”).
Dave also had a following, of sorts. A group of students would occasionally follow him around the plaza, as he proselytized to the unbelievers. When he held up his bible/torah, several hands would shoot up behind him, holding aloft physics textbooks, backpacks, or anything else at hand, heads bowed as was his. He never seemed to take notice of his smirking flock, who mimicked his hops in the air and his calls to whatever deity it is he was propounding.
I don’t think Dave ever made any converts.
