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BN: And then is this the time period when, we talked about earlier, you were also using the GI Bill also to fund your living expenses and kind of going to school?

NN: Once I got, became active, I guess you could call it the movement or the revolution, that all this other stuff that I was going through the motions with the doing, like going to school and all that, it became not even secondary, became somewhat irrelevant. Because I actually viewed everything that, mostly, but I've looked, what they tried to teach me, especially history, as any relevant education. And there's things like math and all that, very relevant, that I never was a good student to start, a willing student to start with, but I just kind of totally shut off to all that, and wanted to learn, more or less, things that were meaningful to me. And there was a lot of information out there that was available, that I was finally interested in learning, with my train of thought, the GI Bill. I used the GI Bill to help with my expenses. And I guess how the GI Bill worked was every month you get a check for going to school, and you get more for being like a full-time student. So I guess the statute of limitations is run, so I enrolled and signed up for twelve units, and get the max, and somewhere along past the halfway point where you're still able to drop out without getting penalized that I submit my resignation, or I would just tell the teacher, "I'm not coming to class." And, "I'm not coming to class, and I need the money," and, "Are you willing to carry me as a student?" and a lot of the classes are based upon enrollment. So a lot of them were open to that arrangement. So they would just say, "I don't know how I'm going to grade you," I really didn't care at the time. I would just say, "Well, how about you just give me an incomplete?" Okay, so I was able to do that at different schools.

So I think I went to Cal State L.A., Long Beach State, there were teachers there. I went to, maybe back to LACC, but I also did some Trade Tech, but I was doing this for a few years. I would also, they would have unemployment at that time where if you worked for so many months, and then if you got laid off, they called it, maybe that's, meaning fired, but if you got laid off, that you were eligible for unemployment. And this may have been during the Reagan era, or whoever was president, that they didn't want to flush people out there without no money, so they kept extending the unemployment. So sometimes it could last for like eighteen months, and then you'd get... you want to hear all this?

BN: Yeah.

NN: Okay. So you get a job at a liquor store, and then you'd get fired or you'd get laid off. You get laid off, and you filed for your unemployment, and you'd get an unemployment check for like eighteen months or whatever. And then in the meantime, there's the GI Bill. So I don't know if that's double dipping, but I guess you have welfare queens, you have the welfare king. [Laughs] And at the time that my, the way I looked at it was it's coming from the government, and "fuck you very much."

BN: But that was sort of funding your activities at JACS and the other stuff that you were doing?

NN: Yes.

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