by Paul Auster
Your letter today—the phrase: “I do not want to write to you, in fact, but only to see you again”—applies to me as well. Therefore, I have decided, no matter what, to come to England. I won’t tell you the exact date—I want to make it a surprise. Simply, I’ll be there sometime between July 18 and Aug. 1. So don’t go away during that time.
This, therefore, will be my last letter. You needn’t write again either, if you don’t want to. Just wear a pretty dress each day until I come; smoke as many cigarettes as you wish; and be kind to everyone you meet.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
It seems that she wanted more precise information about your travel plans, which would account for this short note, the last letter written before you left New York and went to London:
JULY 23: I succumb to your request with the humility of a monarch, who, on the advice of his magician, has abdicated his throne in order to join the revolution being waged against him.
30 July. BOAC—flight #500. Arriving, London airport: 7:40 A.M.
P.S. I won my case in court—that is—the hearing: charges were dropped because of insufficient evidence. A technicality. But, under a system in which the LAW is more important than JUSTICE, it would only be naïve to feel cheated.
Thirteen months went by before you wrote to her again. The long separation was over, and once she returned to New York to continue her studies at Barnard, there was no need for letters anymore. Out in the big world, the apocalypse was looming. The war had grown ever larger and more savage, the country was split in half, and new political battles kept breaking out at Columbia during your senior year, with another all-university strike in the spring. The student left had fractured, armed struggle was being plotted on the extreme fringe, and NASA was preparing to send American astronauts to the moon. You graduated on a clear blue morning just before the summer solstice. The following month, you took your army physical at the draft board center in Newark, and when you sat down to write to Lydia on August twenty-third (she had gone back to London for a family visit), you had no idea what would happen to you, no idea if and when you would be called up to serve, no idea if your next address would be a federal prison or an apartment in Morningside Heights. With no fixed plans for the future, you had decided to spend a year as a graduate student in the Comparative Literature department at Columbia. A PhD was out of the question, but you would be able to earn a master’s in that year, and because there would be no tuition to pay and the university had offered you a small stipend (two thousand dollars, about half of what you needed to live on), you figured you would stick around while your fate hung in the balance and Lydia finished her last year at Barnard. For reasons that had everything to do with your indifference (or contempt) toward middle-class life, you planned to supplement your income by working as a taxi driver.
In the long letter that follows, which was the longest one you ever wrote to her—and the only one composed on a typewriter—you were consciously trying to entertain her, turning a series of mundane events into a kind of low-life adventure story, and the ebullient spirit of the writing shows that you were in a happy frame of mind, in spite of the uncertainty you were facing. Still, you find the letter a curious document, since most of what you recount shows you to be a person who does not resemble the person you normally were, doing things you did not normally do (going to a burlesque show on Forty-second Street, sleeping with a girl you picked up in a bar, chatting with tattooed drug dealers), and yet the strangeness and unknowability of that young man interests you now—for that was probably the only time in your life when you made an active effort to let go of yourself, to act with a certain brashness, to shut your eyes and jump—without worrying about where you landed.19
You were spending some time with your mother and stepfather while you searched for a new apartment. The letter was written from their house in Mendham, New Jersey.
AUGUST 23, 1969: I write to you with a heart filled with affection, hands stumbling for the proper keys, a bit of joy, a bit of fatigue. Lately I have taken to writing on the typewriter … Less hesitation, more flow, a quicker discharge, which, despite the mechanical mediation, seems to come closer to the immediacy of my thoughts. I am lying in bed, the typewriter on my legs. It is nearly midnight. I returned from New York about two hours ago, New York … a festering cauldron of human misery, where I had been looking for an apartment and trying to get myself established as a taxi man. First things first. The motor vehicle agency is located at 80 Centre Street, not far from the enormous courthouse where I have spent many an afternoon, both as observer and defendant. (Did I ever tell you of the Fridays I spent with Mitch watching the trials, along with the somber Hasids and the drowsing bums who make a habit of going to those stark air-conditioned rooms every day, as if it were the theater, perched intently in their seats watching the operations of “justice,” the true judges, the indifferent ones, the ones who bear witness to the destinies of countless anonymous others, differentiated only by their docket numbers or by a technical distinction in the nature of their crimes, who watch the way an aesthete looks at a painting or a drunk at television? If not, I will.) The motor vehicle agency is another one of those oversized marble refrigerators, filled with bureaucrats of every sex, size, and gaze, who generally … fall into three categories: tired, irritable old men, tired, cheerful old men, and suspicious women with … painted faces … The procedure for becoming a cab-driver is comprised of several stages: obtaining a chauffeur’s license, obtaining a hack license, getting a job with one of the several hundred companies in the city. My visit to the M.V. department was for the single purpose of fulfilling the first of these requirements. Was I in for a surprise. I had thought I merely had to show up, make an appointment for the written test, and then come back in a day or two, take the test, and get the license. In essence this is what happened, except for one significant detail: the test will not be held until October 6. Yes, yes, once again it is red tape, long waiting lists, confusion, numbers, and forms. I had hoped to be a veteran of the streets by the time you returned … filled with a hundred amusing stories to tell you about my clients to help ease the burden of going back to school. Hélas, it will all have to wait. In the meantime I am forced to dip into my ever-dwindling resources to keep going. In spite of all, as I walked away from Centre Street, past the gate of Manhattan—a monstrous arch gratuitously placed at the end of Chambers Street—I tried to look at the good side of this little setback. If I couldn’t think of a good side, I was determined to invent one, such was my mood that day. I said to myself, well at least you can remain a free man a little longer, at least you can spend time with your writing, at least you can get settled at school first, at least you can find an apartment … So I set out to find an apartment. The odyssey lasted no more than two or three days (I honestly can’t remember, though it only just happened), but it might as well have been two or three years. Before I go into it, however, I should preface my remarks with some background information so that you can better understand the precise quality of the events, the precise state of mind in which I found myself, and the bearing this state of mind had on the events. The day after you left for London I drove into New York to see S. Another one of those exotic trips in the 2CV, a romance of gas fumes, trucks, and sweat, melodies of concrete, viaducts, propane, and steel, the luscious scenery of factories, miniature golf courses, drive-in theaters, used car lots, all the infinitely diverting bagatelles of the northern New Jersey landscape. I met S. at the fluid cleaning house on Fifteenth Street, found him at a metal desk in a little partitioned cubby-hole situated in a type of warehouse, reading the New York Post, a copy of Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind on the corner of the desk, found him in typically buoyant spirits. He was determined not to be destroyed by New York, although he confessed to be already feeling somewhat worn around the edges. We hopped into the car and drove uptown, up Sixth Avenue through the rush-hour traffic, and almost got killed when I manipulated my way alongside another 2CV, driven by an elderly man, who responde
d to my tooting with comradely smiles and frantic waves of the hand. When we got to S.’s apartment, we sat down to wait for a girl he had met on the plane. Someone who had spent the last two years on a commune in Oregon, who was about to leave on a visit to Alpert’s house in New Hampshire, Alpert, Timothy Leary’s sidekick … I asked S. to fix me up with someone so we wouldn’t be a triangle, which he did, or at least tried to do, but with no success. The girl arrived, proved much more amiable than I had expected. We went out for a Chinese dinner, then took a drive over the Brooklyn Bridge—a first for me, which excited me no end. We walked through Brooklyn Heights for a while, then along the Esplanade, looking at the ships, the tugs, and Manhattan across the water. We sat in a pleasant outdoor café for about an hour, S. and I vaguely engaged, or so it seemed, in a half-hearted competition to impress the girl, who went by the name of Suzette. All in all, I would say the three of us got along very well. We drove to S.’s [mother’s] house in Brighton Beach and then walked down the boardwalk to Coney Island, passing several large clusters of old Jews, huddling in the darkness around “Old Country” singers. For some reason these quiet spectacles, these dottering old people … speaking nothing but Yiddish and Polish, filled me with a dumb despair, which I tried to ignore by laughing. It was like walking into a dream of one’s past, a past seen for the first time, which previously had only been sensed, in the same way twentieth-century Americans sense what the old frontier was like. We came to Coney Island, another first for me. The whole night was like that: stepping among corpses, dead things which I had known only from hearsay, now confronted for the first time in the flesh. It was late on a drizzling weekday night and not many people were about, none of the enormous crowds that one expects to see at Coney Island. A desolation peopled with sleepless perverts, the decay of what is not yet old, blaring radios in empty, metallic arcades, a faint but ugly stench from clattering machines. We did not have much money and … participated little in the festivities, ignored the delights that could have been ours for a quarter. Only a desultory ride on the bumper cars … a fat sadist who rode with one leg hanging out of the car, who smashed us mercilessly time and time again without the slightest smile or grimace, as if he were merely executing an ancient duty, fulfilling the task that had been assigned to him in the earliest days of his youth. We played skee ball and each won a tiny aluminum sheriff’s badge, which we pinned mockingly to our breasts, then walked back to S.’s along the boardwalk, gliding our hands on the rain-slicked metal railing, peering through the slats in the wooden fence of the Aquarium, watching the desperate efforts of an old penguin to hop from one rock to another, stopping for a while beneath a tile-roofed shelter for a cigarette. We drank coffee at S.’s, discussed the infinite superiority of Henry Miller over Kerouac, then drove the girl back to … Queens. It was about three o’clock in the morning. For some unknown reason, S. and I returned to Coney Island. I think it was hunger that brought us back. We ate hot dogs and clams at Nathan’s, a fluorescent receptacle of weary insomniacs. An old bum, a toothless black man, whose voice I could hardly understand, engaged us in conversation for a little while. He was having trouble standing on his feet. We gave him a nickel, told him the time, and he whispered garbled confidences in our ears. Leaving us, he accidentally brushed past a well-dressed young black man, standing at the counter with his brothers and their families, and he, the old man, half in a stupor, half in a rage—a habitual rage, so it seemed—accused the younger man of having pushed him on purpose. Who did he think he was picking on people like that? The younger man would have none of these insults. Furthermore, he was respectable … and would have nothing to do with this old man, this worthless tramp, who might well have been his father. He began to push in earnest, thrusting out his chest like a ruptured peacock, then brought him over to the white policeman standing outside on the street, spewing forth a list of fabricated accusations to this white confessor, as if to say, it is trash like this that gives me my bad name. This little scene seemed significant to me, if only to demonstrate the rift that separates those who should feel closest to one another … The affair ended here, for the cop could not muster much enthusiasm over the case. S. and I went back to his mother’s apartment. We talked about writing until six o’clock, on the verge, I thought, of a real argument. He spoke of order, precision, limited tasks, I of chaos, life, and imperfection, unable to agree with him about the imminent annihilation of the individual. For me the problem of the world is first of all a problem of the self, and the solution can be accomplished only by beginning within and then … moving without. Expression, not mastery, is the key. S., I believe, is still too much of a critic, too absorbed in abstractions that are not counterbalanced by the brute facts of gastral pains. Stick to life, I say. I will make it my motto. Do you agree? Stick to life, no matter how fantastical, repulsive, or agonizing. Above all freedom. Above all dirtying your hands. I was ranting at him like a madman, at once filled with anger and joy, angry that he did not see what I saw, joyful that I had once and for all broken the bond with … academic prattle, with the seduction of neat ideas, with literature spelled with a capital L, elegantly embossed in fancy leather bindings. I’m all right, Lyd, let me assure you, I’m all right. I’m discovering what it … means to be an artist, to be the man who becomes the artist by turning himself inside out. Let me kiss you good night. S. was too tired, he couldn’t keep up with me, we turned in. I slept in his mother’s bedroom, in her nuptial bed of the night before. An odd sensation. I awoke to find my left forearm inflated with an enormous swelling, apparently from some bug, or a bee. Another rainy day. I spent the entire afternoon hunting for apartments in Brooklyn Heights. The St. George Hotel was like a prison; I didn’t hesitate in making my decision. Another hotel, a talk with the black manager about sunlight, windows, breezes, life in the South fifteen years ago, but no vacancies. Agencies, forms, fees, hunger. A series of overpriced, undersized apartments, climaxed by a slow twenty-minute walk with an old Orthodox Jewish broker to see yet another unacceptable place. I told myself to forget about Brooklyn, at least for the time being. Returned to Manhattan, linked up with S. once again. Desperate for girls, for companionship, for the succor of a sympathetic glance. Always futile, these sudden forays into the realm of desire. We spent the entire evening calling up, looking up friends, even the most casual acquaintances, but with no success. A call to Julie was answered by a girl named Aida, who said that Julie had gone to California, or some such place. But her voice was … soothing, and I decided that we should go over there anyway. When we arrived, the door was opened hesitantly by two giggling black fairies, stoned out of consciousness, who said they knew nothing of Aida. Perhaps she was there, talking her heart out in the back room, with her honeyed voice, perhaps breaking into a song or a murmur, but if so I never saw her or heard her again. Midnight. We rouse L. from his bed, nearly asleep, a copy of The Lean Years on his pillow, yank him from the sheets with boisterous greetings and take him to the car, promising him a visit to an East Side bar. We are slovenly, unshaven, and bedraggled, hardly the ideal men for the mythical East Side cuties we have concocted in our desperation. Besides, we have scarcely ten dollars among us. By the time we arrive the bars are dead. We don’t even bother to go in. What to do? The absurdity of the night is all too glaring to us. We decide on a burlesque, but they have all closed down, so we finish off the misadventure with sandwiches at Ratner’s. Perhaps you understand the peculiar nature of the subterranean attitude. It is absolutely uncaring, absolutely ready to meet any challenge, to suffer any consequences. It is beyond worry, beyond exhilaration, beyond boredom. A total equilibrium, founded on rootlessness, acceptance of oneself, and an unquenchable curiosity. I find it easier and easier to put myself into this frame of mind, to look at everything as if for the first time. This is how you discover the mystery of everything that surrounds you. I was in this frame of mind, am still in it, ready to appreciate even the tiniest things. After I left the M.V. agency, I returned to my grandfather’s apartment, wh
ere I had deposited my things, called S., and went uptown to meet him for dinner. We decided, finally, to take in the show at the burlesque theater on 42nd St. between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Outside, a bum nabbed us for seven cents in order to buy a bottle of wine before the liquor store closed, before that little neon sign went out, he said, and promised to drink us a toast. Walking toward the theater, S.’s nerve had already begun to fail him, and he had talked of going to a movie instead. The bum’s interruption only prolonged his waverings. The four-dollar price for a ticket seemed to decide it, and had I not insisted that we go in anyway, in spite of the cost, I am convinced he would have turned around and walked away. I don’t mean to deprecate S. His attitude is fully understandable. I was persistent only because I thought we shouldn’t back down on our plans. It’s a bad habit to get into. So we went in and paid our four dollars to the black woman in the cashier booth, whose little boy sat next to her reading a comic book. The theater was dark and sparsely filled … Middle-aged men mostly, not too disreputable-looking: one even wore a baseball cap with a big B on it. There were forty-five minutes to wait for the next show, and in the meantime movies were being presented, stag films I supposed they’re called, of little or no interest, being nothing more than films of a naked woman writhing on a bed, with frequent full-screen closeups of the cunt. The whole thing was rather boring and lifeless, and the audience showed little interest. There was much coming and going in and out of the theater, and I even heard some snoring from up front. Finally the films stopped, in mid-reel (there is no beginning, middle, or end, and consequently it hardly matters when the projector is shut off) and a woman’s voice with a French accent announced that the show would begin in five minutes. This is what we had come for. Our spirits became somewhat more cheerful. From backstage a live band began to play, with heavy emphasis on a monotonous drum-beat. Again the French voice, this time announcing “the very lovely and very sexy Flaming Lily.” Among the other names that I remember, Amber Mist, Kimono Tokyo, and Sandra Del Rio are the ones I like best. Each girl performs separately, each with her own act, her own costume. Some speak lasciviously to the men in the first row, others do not. Some wear earrings, some wear gloves, some wear stockings. Each body … is different. Some plump, some lean, some juicy, some arid, some pretty, others not. Success, I believe, is not determined by good looks or by dancing skill, but by the ability to communicate with the audience. There is nothing so depressing as to watch an uninspired stripper. It is the lowest form of degradation. The good ones, on the other hand, are a pleasure to observe. Nothing can stop the richness of their souls from coming to the surface. It almost gives you an erection to be in the presence of a woman who so fully appreciates the power of her sex. She can transcend, during her most exalted moments, the demeaning restrictions of her art and establish a startling rapport with her audience, an almost motherly understanding and indulgence of the men before her. I am convinced that the good stripper must be possessed of infinite wisdom and patience … I would like to get to speak to one of them, in particular the French woman, by far the oldest of the lot, who was also the announcer. I was impressed by the way she left the theater after the show, a departure I witnessed only by chance: her arm in the arm of her stocky Puerto Rican boyfriend, her hand holding the hand of her tiny blond-haired daughter. The ladies who inhabit plush air-conditioned apartments and strut in and out of expensive East Side shops, wearing their well-tended beauty like a badge of wealth and prestige, the ladies who dabble in charity, who speak with finely educated voices, who hold responsible positions, drive cars, discuss art, command servants, all these rich American ladies will never hold a candle to this faded-out, heavily painted woman of forty. Though the burlesque show had somewhat repulsed me, I slept well for having seen this woman. The next day I met up with F., and we went out to hunt for apartments. First to the Columbia registry. Nothing. Then to inquire about graduate dormitories. A waiting list of five hundred. Then a vain perusal of the newspapers. It’s getting desperate. Even the residence hotels are filled. I get an application for the International House, begin to complete it, and then rip it up in disgust when I see that they want recommendations from professors, a record of my accomplishments, and a statement of my financial situation. The day passes. I don’t even get to look at an apartment. But F.’s company has been pleasant and my confidence remains intact. S. joins us for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The talk is good, the food is good, and once again I am eating à la chinoise. Afterwards we begin walking up Broadway and S. says he thinks he would like to take a walk. This statement strikes both me and F. as ridiculous, as it is apparent that we are already taking a walk. A round of laughs, chortles for the passersby, the Dapper Dans and their Sweet Susies, the Happy Harrys and their Giggling Glendas, the old ladies and their dogs. We enter the West End with nothing particular in mind. F. and I sat down at the bar with Hugh S., and S. repaired to a table where a friend of his, a girl, was seated. I waved to Claudia T. across the way, talked to Hugh about California, apartments, and typewriters, and F., growing weary, decided to leave. After a while S. came up to me and asked if I would like to take the two girls to the movies. (His friend was sitting with a friend.) I was in no hurry to make any decisions … for I was still drinking my beer and feeling rather tired. I agreed to go over to the table after I had finished my drink. I finish languidly, too interested in my conversation to move with haste. Indifference is perhaps the word I am looking for. S.’s friend turned out to be a chubby girl with a lovely face who went by the unlikely name of Sam. The other girl, J., was from Detroit—accent on the first syllable—and was the owner of a folksy accent, which appealed to me … The girls did not want to go to the movies, which was all right as far as I was concerned. Instead, they wanted to bake a cake, and we were cordially invited … We bought the ingredients in a market several blocks down the street. The checkout girl’s name-plate read: PeeWee T. Their apartment, which was situated above the Japanese restaurant on 105th St., next door to the parlor of Madame Rosalia, had been occupied, we were told, by a strange trio of dope peddlers for the last month. The girls had been away for most of the summer, and the subleasing arrangements had obviously gone awry. Allow me to describe the three of them. First there was Bill, the most talkative and psychotic of the lot, apparently the leader. He was about twenty years old, I would say, wore his hair in the manner of the motorcycle hoods of the nineteen-fifties—DA style—wore a big gold earring in his left ear, and had several tattoos, one of which read: Born to Raise Hell, had been in the army and had been shot in the leg in Korea. Eyes like razor blades; a friendliness that could verge at any moment into violence. We got along splendidly. He told me the story of how he had lost his medals by going AWOL. The story of how his brother had gotten into a motorcycle gang. The stories of drinking and drugs; how he liked nothing better than to get “destroyed” with somebody else. Many stories, too numerous to recount. There was also Ken, the pretty boy of the group, who each night put up his hair in curlers in an effort to undo the effects of a hair-straightening episode. I gathered that he knew the famous Murph the Surf and was wanted in a variety of states for assorted petty crimes. Finally, there was Gary, a quiet, dissipated fellow, who was either the dumbest or the smartest of the three, I could never tell which. We all sat around, waiting for the cake to bake. Henry K. arrived with a friend, having just hitch-hiked from a forestry camp in Michigan, where he had spent the summer in preparation for entering the University of Michigan School of Forestry. The time was passed by filling out a Playboy questionnaire on sex, eating the cake, carrying on. There must have been about ten people there. Finally, Henry K. left. Then his friend left. S. wanted to leave, and I was about to go with him when the girl from Detroit said she would like me to stay. Just like that. So there we were, the two of us sitting on the couch, drinking bourbon, listening to Bill’s disquisition on the drinks of the Orient. He spoke endlessly, I thought he’d never shut up, and my impatience grew in drunkenness, knowing with half-light
intuition that the girl was thinking the same thing I was. Finally, he offered to go out to buy some beer. We took this opportunity to begin kissing on the couch … I was surprised to discover that she wore no underwear. Bill returned. I drank a beer with him to be polite, then the girl, who was little and ferocious … took me to her bedroom, and we lay down on the mattress. We made love until dawn, lustily and with no inhibitions. It did me good. I woke refreshed and happy after only four hours sleep. We set out to look for apartments. Another total failure. Late afternoon, we went to the movies, returned to her apartment at about nine to make some dinner. Bill, Ken, and Gary were there, celebrating what they claimed was a big sale of LSD. They wondered if we would mind eating dinner in a restaurant, as they were expecting a visit from another “business associate.” They gave us ten dollars, and we went without any complaints—to the Indian restaurant on 93rd St. for an overpriced meal twice interrupted by a newspaper hawker who uttered only three words, with the voice of a punch-drunk boxer: Screw, Kiss, Fuck. Screw, Kiss, Fuck. Screw, Kiss, Fuck. After dinner we visited L. and stayed until about one-thirty. On the way back to J.’s apartment, we stopped at the house of someone she thought might know about a place for rent. A thirty-eight-year-old Dominican Republic woman, named Isabel, who worked as a Spanish dancer, who never stopped laughing, fat, robust, a sheer joy to talk to. Unfortunately, she had just sublet her place to a pair of seventy-eight-year-old newly-weds. She would be leaving in a few days for Idaho, to live with her nineteen-year-old boyfriend, a farm boy who had gone to Columbia for a year. We got back to 105th St to find the apartment empty, except for a not-too-bright young girl, Anna, who was also living there. She was sitting on the fire escape, visibly upset. She said that the three of them, thinking the guy who had come to the apartment was a cop, had beaten him up—but good—and had then high-tailed out by way of the fire escape. A little later the phone rang and I answered it. It was Joe—the guy who had been beaten up—swearing vengeance on Bill, Ken, and Gary. He had just been to the hospital, gotten ten stitches, and was going to come back tomorrow with his brothers to get even. He told me to give them warning. The girl Anna now changed her story. She said that they knew Joe wasn’t a cop and had invited him up to the apartment—on the pretext of selling him drugs—only to beat him and rob him. A cheap trick. Fortunately for him, he hadn’t brought any money. J. became very frightened and I tried to calm her down. I told her that they probably wouldn’t be coming back, and even if they did, we didn’t have to let them in, and that they wouldn’t want to come in anyway if they knew the others were after them. The next day, Joseph and his brothers took up a constant watch outside the building, but the three musketeers failed to return. Another day of apartment hunting. This time in a car, driven by Sam, from one end of Manhattan to the other, from the Lower East Side to Washington Heights. Another meal at Ratner’s. Knowing that I had no money left, seeing that I had just run out of cigarettes, J. got up from the table and came back with a pack of Luckies. A tiny unsolicited kindness that touched me deeply. Trucks, hippies, sweatshirts, highways, traffic, dusty hallways. In Washington Heights I spoke with a woman about her daughter’s apartment on Claremont Avenue. The daughter, now divorced, was living in St. Thomas and trying to make a new life by opening a dancing school. I would have to wait several days for an answer. J. and I walked around Washington Heights, a blighted, forsaken area … then took the subway one hundred and forty blocks to the Port Authority terminal. There was an hour wait for the bus. I had the runs, and during one of my several trips to the toilet—a harrowing business in that place, because all the queers look through the openings in the stalls to watch you shitting—in this strange public toilet, as big as an emporium, I once again met Henry K. He was just returning from an outing in New Jersey. Seeing him again gave an uncanny symmetry to my brief stay in New York. I had expected never to see him again, and now, within three days, I had seen him twice. We rejoined J. in the waiting room, went to the drugstore where I had a Bromo at the counter. Are you supposed to take them for headaches or stomach aches? Whatever, it was the foulest stuff I had ever tasted, a chalky volcano of vomit. The old black man sitting next to us got a big kick out of the sight of it and couldn’t control his laughter. We went up to the platform, said our good-byes. They were going to go to the movies, I think. I got on the bus and suffered through a ride with a bunch of giggling high school girls who talked of nothing but their grades. During the trip I read an essay by Henry Miller: Letter to All Surrealists Everywhere.
