Chapter Eleven (Listen) Farmer's Market After my ambivalent date with Ginny Good, I kept working at Kinney's in San Bruno until my gorgeous white Lincoln finally fell completely apart on the freeway and I had to get a job I could walk to. The job I got was at Kay Bee Toys in the Hillsdale Shopping Center. That was where I was working when Kennedy got shot. Anyone who was over the age of six at the time remembers what he or she was doing the day Kennedy got shot. I was having lunch with Ralph Wood in Farmer's Market, the food court at the Hillsdale Mall. We were over by the Mexican food concession. Ralph was drinking a cup of black coffee. I was scraping the last of a scrumptious side order of shell macaroni and tomato sauce into a warm, buttered tortilla when we heard the news. A pimply-faced kid in a SF Giants baseball cap at the table next to us turned the volume up on his transistor radio. Other radios went on. The more radio voices there were, the fewer real voices we heard. A crowd gathered around the portable TV at the Bavarian Hof Brau. Ralph and I just sat there. We hadn't been talking much to begin with. Ralph was tall and skinny and ten years older than everyone. He looked like a bird. He made his living as a thief. He cocked his head, trying to hear the news above the crackles of static coming from the kid's cheap black and yellow radio. "...earlier this morning, in Dallas, Texas..." "Is he dead?" I asked. "They don't know, man. Shut up and listen." He snapped at me, biting the words between his teeth like a vulture. We weren't exactly friends. We just hung out with each other. My mother liked him. She was always trying to get him to eat some food, for heaven's sake. He never did. That used to hurt her feelings. Ralph had no chin and a long, thin nose that had been broken so many times there wasn't anything left inside it to break anymore. It was like Playdoh—like if you squashed his nose over to one side it would stay there. He wore thick glasses with black rims. When they got broken, as they often did, he taped them together with black electrical tape or, in a pinch, with flesh-colored Band-Aids. The way he slicked back his hair was the last straw. His hair was black and spiky and always seemed to be trying to stick up in a ridge along the top of his scalp. He was a bird; an angry, intense, scavenger bird of some sort—a raven, say, or a buzzard—with watery, magnified, red-rimmed eyes that always seemed about to pop out of their sockets. This was especially true when you got him on the subject of Henry Miller. Ralph loved Henry Miller. He worshipped and adored Henry Miller. He had stolen every book Henry Miller ever wrote, some of them hundreds of times over. I don't think Ralph actually read any of the books; I think he just liked what he'd heard about Henry Miller—that he lived in Paris, fucked a lot of cool chicks and didn't take any shit off anyone. Well, I take it back. Ralph may at least have skimmed a copy of The Books in My Life, but only to find out what other books were worth stealing. What Ralph liked about books was giving them to people for presents. He used to break into his friends's houses and leave stolen books all over the place. My mother caught him in the act one Christmas Eve. She woke up and found Ralph crouched in the living room, arranging hard cover copies of Death on the Installment Plan, Naked Lunch and To the End of the World in a semicircle around the darkened tree—scared the Bejesus out of the both of them. Ralph wasn't a healthy person. He didn't want to be a healthy person. He cultivated ill health. He wanted to look like a bird. He wanted to look like the guys who wrote the books in Henry Miller's life. He wanted to look like Celine and Beckett and Burroughs and Bukowski and Blaise Cendrars. He never ate and never slept but just wandered the aisles of all night grocery stores, slipping paperback copies of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn into the deep pockets of a floor length herringbone coat. Well, either that or he drove around in his faded tan Corvair, getting into fights. Ralph got into at least one fight every two or three weeks, year in and year out. He picked fights on purpose, for no apparent reason. He went out of his way. He'd drive up and down the Peninsula at three in the morning, just to pick a fight with someone he'd heard was a good fighter—Spike in Millbrae, or Tony Rapaglia up in South City, or Jojo Chaplinski down in East San Jose. And Ralph wasn't a good fighter. He was a bad fighter. He had good form; that was about it. He was too tall and too skinny and too unhealthy to be a good fighter. With him it was philosophical. He'd go screeching up to wherever the guy lived and blow the weak horn of his Corvair and shine his spotlight into the guy's windows and yell his name and get out of the car and stand on the guy's lawn, bobbing and weaving like a cross between Ichabod Crane and the Marquis of Queensbury—until Spike or Tony or Jojo came out and popped him one in the mouth. Then Ralph would prop himself up on one elbow, feel around in the grass until he found his freshly broken glasses, fit the pieces painfully down over the bridge of his freshly broken nose, shake his head admiringly and compliment the guy. "Good punch, good punch," he'd say, and that would be the end of it. Well, until the next time. Which is what I mean about philosophy. Ralph didn't exactly enjoy getting the crap kicked out of him every two or three weeks; it was necessary. He simply wanted to have whatever bad could possibly happen to him to just hurry up and happen and get itself the hell over with. Years later, he got strung out on morphine for the same reason. He wanted to become the biggest junkie in Northern California so he could go over to England and take the same cure William Burroughs took. He stole morphine from Veterinary Hospitals up and down the El Camino and succeeded in becoming a pretty good-sized junkie, but never made it over to England, never took the cure. The last time I saw Ralph, he had imaginary flukes in his veins. He was sitting on his couch, busily stabbing a needle into his forearm, trying to kill them, one at a time, trying to impale one of the wiggly little critters on the end of the needle long enough to squash the life out of it between the yellow nails of his thumb and forefinger. Everything I know about him after that is apocryphal. I heard from Dick Joseph, for instance, that Ralph's father died and he got back to Ohio just in time to sabotage the casket. His father's body fell out onto the steps of the church. Ralph sued the funeral home and the casket company. Next I heard he was in the Ohio State Penitentiary for insurance fraud. Then I heard he was dead. I had a hard time believing the one about him being dead. He would have been a hard guy to kill. What could have killed him? A gun? A knife? He was made entirely out of chicken gristle, for God's sake. A bullet would have bounced off. A knife would have bent. Cancer, maybe. Cancer can kill anyone. Or maybe I just have a hard time believing anyone's dead. But, back when black coffee was still his drug of choice, Ralph Wood was just the guy you wanted to be hanging out with when you heard the news that Kennedy got shot. Not because he could put it into perspective, no, anyone could put it into perspective—what Ralph knew was how to capitalize on it. He was deep in thought, biting the inside of his cheek. "You know what this means?" He looked over the rims of his glasses at me and slicked down his quivering coxcomb. "Johnson's President? Jackie's a widow? John-John's an orphan?" "No, man. Jesus." His eyes popped farther out of their sockets. "Get serious. It means it's going to be a good time to pick up chicks, that's what." "You think?" I said. "Sure. Chicks are gonna be sad that Kennedy got shot, man. Sad chicks get all vulnerable and shit. They want someone to come along and comfort them." So we went off to do that. We walked over into the Emporium and strolled up and down the wide ceramic aisles between the cosmectics department and the lingere section, stopping sad, vulnerable chicks to see if they might want to be comforted. We didn't actually succeed in picking up a single sad, vulnerable chick, but we did try. Ralph thought Henry Miller would have done the same thing under the circumstances. Guys are idiots. Chicks are idiots. Henry Miller's an idiot. How the human race continues to thrive is beyond my ability to comprehend.

Chapter Twelve Clayton Street Kennedy got shot in November of 1963. Then came my Christmas with the Mafia girl. My Christmas with the Mafia girl lasted until March of 1964. I don't remember her name. I always just think of her as the Mafia girl. She wasn't even Italian; she was tall and thin and droll and Irish, with lots of freckles everywhere, even on her lips. She had short red hair I could mess up whenever I felt like messing it up. I liked that about her. Apropos of nothing, I'd just reach over and mess up her hair. Ha! Sometimes I messed it up with both hands, as hard as I could. She liked it—the harder I messed up her hair the better she liked it, but the funny thing was that her hair never really got very messed up at all, no matter what we did. She had green eyes...bony thighs...narrow feet. She licked her lips before she kissed me and kept her eyes open. There was a smell about her, too, a smell I still conjur up unexpectedly sometimes: baby powder and diapers and her sister's expensive perfume, all mixed together with the taste of tangerine lipstick—Marnie! Ha! Marnie McCracken! Marnie came into Kay-Bee's to buy presents for her sister's kids with a fistful of fifty-dollar bills her brother-in-law had given her. I carried the boxes out to her car for her. That was my job. One of the presents was a tricycle. We came into some slight contact with each other while we were trying to get the tricycle box jammed into the back seat. She was driving her brother-in-law's black two-door '62 Chrysler Imperial. He hadn't gotten around to trading it in on a new one yet. Minuscule sparks of static electricity crackled between the hairs on our arms. We caught each other's eye and smiled. One of her breasts brushed my cheek. My elbow pressed against her bony ribcage. She didn't move away. I said something about the weather. She looked bored for a second, then her expression softened. She shrugged her shoulders and looked right into my eyes like she was trying to tell me to shut the fuck up and stick my hand up her dress. It was a compelling expression. She might have used it a time or two before back in New Jersey—or maybe she practiced in front of a mirror. "Hey," she said. "What's this mean? 'Some assembly required?'" "You have to put the thing together," I said. "Screw in some screws." "Fuck," she said. "They probably don't even have a screwdriver." She shaded her eyes from the setting sun and wet her tangerine lipstick with her slightly quivering tongue. "Who?" "Oh, my sister and her husband. He thinks he's Johnny Potatoes. If a light bulb burns out, he calls in an electrician." "I might have a screwdriver." "You might?" "No, I do. Definitely. There's one in the stock room. I could bring it over." "When are you off work?" "Right around now." I looked at my watch. "I'd have to go punch out." "Go punch out," she said. Then she shot me that same shut-the-fuck-up-and-stick-your-hand-up-my-dress look and lowered herself sort of sideways down into the driver's seat with her bare, freckled legs spread apart and waited there with the door wide open. Marnie was staying in a big house up in the hills, around where Elliot used to live, with her older sister and her sister's husband and their two kids. They were all originally from New Jersey, but Marnie had only been in California for a couple of weeks. She had a little bit of a Joisey accent; I made fun of it, but only very gently. She complained that there wasn't any snow and liked it that I was from Michigan. That was what we had in common—the lack of snow. She was looking for a job as a cosmetologist, but in the meantime, she helped take care of her sister's two sons. After we got the tricycle put together out in the garage, I stayed for dinner. The four of us played Monopoly. Her sister's husband was the Mafia guy. I didn't know he was even Italian. I thought he was Jewish. I had hotels on Connecticut, Oriental and Vermont before anyone else had anything on anything. He was pissed off that I was kicking his ass. "You from here?" he asked. "No. Michigan." "Detroit?" "Near there, yeah—a place you probably never heard of." "Try me." He flexed the muscles under his eyes. "Huntington Woods," I said. I knew a lot Jews lived in Huntington Woods. "Never heard of it." He rolled the dice. "Seven," I said. "Connecticut. Ha! Pay me." I found out later that it was more than just that I was kicking his ass in Monopoly that was pissing the guy off; I found out later that he was trying to fix Marnie up with a guy he knew back in Jersey, some other Mafia guy. I never seem to know it when people hate my guts. I think we're getting along great, and the fact is, it's all they can do to keep from popping me in the mouth. But the only really pertinent thing about my Christmas with the Mafia girl was that it coincided with Ginny's Christmas with her Negro poet. His name was Jim Moss. All I really know about him is what Ginny told me, but that was plenty. She told me everything. Sometime in October, she moved out of her place on 45th Avenue and into Jim Moss's apartment up by U.C. Hospital. They lived together until she got too nuts around the end of January of 1964. Ginny always went increasingly crazy around the holidays. It had something to do with her father taking off the day before Christmas when she was five. Well, either that or the influence of the planet Neptune in her astrological chart—and getting drunk a lot didn't help. From November until March, Virginia Good drank too much and when she drank too much she went completely crazy. The Christmas of her Negro poet was no exception. They fought; physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually—you name it. They fought about her being rich and him being poor, about him being black and her being white. His grandmother had been born a slave. Her grandfather had owned slaves. She called him every nigger name in the book; he called her every kind of honky slut cunt bitch name he could think of. They fought about poetry and music and art and what to have for dinner. Then there was all that making up to do. They wore each other out. She broke his windows. He threw the contents of her shrine through the broken window—Virginia Woolf, Gurjieff, DuChamp, the whole works. She tried to kill herself by turning on the oven and all the gas jets on the top of the stove, playing Bach's Mass in B-Minor on the record player and reading The Confessions of Saint Augustine at the kitchen table. That really pissed Jim Moss off—the last thing he wanted was some dead-ass white chick reading St. Augustine when a couple of Irish cops came around to see what all the shouting had been about. He kicked her out in increments, beginning in the middle of January. She stayed with her sister Sandy for awhile, then moved into a flat on Clayton, four or five blocks up from Haight Street. She and Jim Moss continued to see one another and continued to like each other despite their irreconcilable differences. It lasted until March of 1964. I was there when it finally ended—well, almost finally ended, I guess would be more accutate. I'll get to all that. Ginny called me up. She was hiding out. She was sick. She needed to be rescued. Her voice was low and mysterious. I told her I'd bring her things to make her feel better. It wasn't a date. I brought her tea. I changed out of the shirt that smelled like the Mafia girl, put some Lipton tea bags and one of my mother's fancy tea cups into a paper bag, walked up to the El Camino, caught a Greyhound bus to Seventh and Market, hopped on a Number Seven Haight Street bus and got off at Clayton. Haight-Ashbury was like downtown San Bruno—there may even have been a Kinney's nestled among the Asian and Palestinian mom-and-pop grocery stores. There was a bowling alley and a movie theater and plenty of parking everywhere. The streets were clean. The only stoplight was at the corner of Haight and Masonic. Usually no more than two or three cars at a time ever had to wait for the light to change. Clayton Street was crowded with tall, skinny Victorian flats, going ever more steeply up toward the address Ginny had given me. In the valley by Frederick Street, I stopped to pick some wild flowers, daisies and bachelor buttons and whatever else was growing there. I remembered I'd said I wasn't ever going to get a girl any god damn flowers again, but that had been a long time ago. Across the valley and up toward Parnassus Heights, lighted houses glittered through wisps of fog among dark hills. A dog barked. Telephone wires crackled. Golden Gate Park was a rectangle of black. The panhandle was bordered by streams of headlights from the traffic going up Fell and down Oak. The spires of Saint Ignatius Church were lit up in the background. It was peaceful and serene and unreal, like a picture on one of those big glossy San Francisco calendars. Another block or so up the hill, I came to a huge brown-shingled house with ivy growing all over it. The porch light was on. The address I'd written on a scrap of newspaper was nailed in brass numbers into the shingles. I combed my hair looking at my reflection in one of the windows by the door before I rang the bell. A guy named Bud showed up. He was from Madison, Wisconsin and had a spindly goatee. Lots of people lived there. Ginny had found the place in an ad on a bulletin board at San Francisco State. The people who lived there were communists. It was a co-op. None of the cups or saucers or plates or knives or spoons matched any of the other cups or saucers or plates or knives or spoons. Nobody seemed to know who, if anyone, had actually rented the place. Ginny was sitting on a rug in the middle of the floor in her room, wearing a plain white flannel nightgown—no little blue flowers. There were lit votive candles in a semicircle and books scattered around—open books, closed books, fiction, nonfiction, kid's books, school books, books of all kinds. Her room had a sort of bay window balcony that looked out over the front porch. I worried that she might have seen me combing my hair, but the shades were pulled down. I gave her the flowers. She laid them on her new shrine, which was made up all of Vedanta stuff this time: sticks of incense and a fat Vivekananda book, surrounded by pictures of Jesus, Buddha, Sri Ramakrishna and the Reverend Mother. I made us tea in the community kitchen. We talked and talked—primarily about her Negro poet. She was trying to ditch him. He was stalking her. She showed me pictures of the guy. He didn't look full of shit. That's the first thing I notice about a person. Even in pictures you can tell whether somebody's full of shit or not. He had on a cap in one of the pictures, but it wasn't a full of shit cap. It was a cap like my grandfather used to wear, the kind of cap Henry Miller used to wear. I liked the look of the guy. He was all twinkly and smart looking. You could tell he and Ginny had liked each other when they hadn't been fighting. Ginny got out an old green Webcor tape recorder with "Property of Sarah Lawrence College" stenciled in black letters on the cover and played me a tape she and Jim Moss had made. It was a conversation they'd had when they were first getting to know one another. He did most of the talking, but it was pretty palpable that Virginia was there, hanging on his every word. His vocal cords seemed to get thicker and thicker as the tape wound slowly from one reel to the other. My own vocal cords felt like they were swelling some, just listening to the way Ginny had been listening to the guy. The tape was pretty much a monologue. Ginny didn't have much to say. It was mostly him talking about jazz, about how jazz and sex and seduction are all the same thing. He interspersed the monologue with nuances of different musical instruments he had the uncanny knack of reproducing with his voice, like a scat singer: clarinets, a saxophone, brushes on a snare drum. Of course it was all just sweet talk to get into her pants, but it was good sweet talk, really sweet sweet talk, and it sure was working. You could tell that too. "Jazz means fuck," I heard Ginny's voice say in the background. "Yeah? Where'd you hear that, sugar?" "In music history." "You're pretty educated, ain't you, baby?" I could almost see them. They were in her apartment on 45th Avenue. She would have been in one of her flannel nightgowns; he would have been sitting across from her. There would have been a bottle of Beefeater Gin on the floor between them. The tape recorder would have been off to one side. She would have had nothing on under her nightgown but a pair of white cotton panties. Her hair would have been hiding her face. I could almost hear it in the tape when his thick black index finger brushed the inside of her upper thigh. I could almost feel her squirm, could almost see his hand moving slowly, deliberately, up toward her pretty face, touching the tiny, erect little nipples of her breasts, pushing her hair out of her eyes, touching her cheek, holding his hand under her chin, touching her mouth, leaning toward her, kissing her forehead. "How about we turn this off now?" Jim Moss said. "Uh-huh," I heard Ginny sort of moan. Sure, I was jealous. What do you think? You'd be jealous too. The guy's voice was mesmerizing, mellifluous. He was saying things I wish to this day I could say. He was a poet. And, yeah, absolutely, of course I knew he fucked her brains out the minute I heard the tape recorder click off. Hell yes, I was jealous—but it was still that delicious kind of jealousy where nothing's any skin off anyone's nose yet. It wasn't a date. I was her buddy. We'd been hanging out. Going to movies. Talking on the phone. Writing letters. I had brought her tea and flowers. I heard the whole story, how she moved in with him, how it deteriorated, how they fought, how she got drunk and blacked out and broke his windows...that it had been Christmas, that she'd tried to kill herself, that they were too much for each other, that they'd worn each other out, that it had been the same with all the men she'd ever known. We kept talking. I told her about the Mafia girl. She was jealous. I liked that. She thanked me for things. The tea. The flowers. She was fragile and tough and spoiled and endlessly entertaining. Her hair fell in her face. Her eyes peeked out from under her bangs. I touched the inside of her thigh. She squirmed. I unbuttoned her nightgown and touched her little nipples and held her hands and ran my finger across the scars on her wrists. We laughed and got tears in our eyes, but mainly we just talked...talked and talked. We talked until the sun came up and kept on talking. ... Around nine, I got us coffee. Some of the communists were in the kitchen. One of them was hunched over a brown spiral notebook, writing down the particulars of that morning's bowel movement. He'd been recording his bowel movements every day since he graduated from the University of Washington a few years back—color, shape, consistency, etc. I don't know why. I thought about asking, but didn't. The rest of the communists had some idiosyncracies of their own, but for the most part they all seemed pretty normal. They were just kids going to school, letting their whiskers grow, reading Karl Marx...and Lenin and Trotksy and Paul Goodman, wearing clothes that didn't quite fit right or go together well—due, no doubt, to the relatively recent absence of mothers in their lives. They made coffee by pouring boiling water through folded chemistry paper stuck inside a glass beaker. I thought that was slick. What they all seemed to have in common was Bob Dylan. They listened to Bob Dylan all the time, morning, noon and night. They had the same two albums everywhere—Bob Dylan in a sheepskin coat holding his guitar and Bob Dylan in the same sheepskin coat with his girlfriend's head on his shoulder. It was a hard rain that was 'a gonna fall. They all seemed to know that. They were expecting it, counting on it, waiting for it, hoping. I may have had a vague inkling that there was a shower or two on the way, myself. "Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? Where have you been, my darling young one?" When I got back to her room, Ginny was on the phone with Jim Moss. "Well, no, actually. It's not a good time. I have a friend over." She looked up at me, then held the receiver out so I could hear what Jim Moss was saying. "Tell him get stepping. Say I'm coming by." "He says I should tell you to leave," Ginny said, without covering the receiver. "Do you want me to leave?" I asked. "No." "Say I'll kick his motherfuckin' ass!" "I don't want to do that," Ginny said. Her voice was sad and emphatic, like a cello, and somehow, from that point on, in the space of about a tenth of a second, she was my girlfriend, and I was her boyfriend. One minute I was the Mafia girl's boyfriend and she was my girlfriend and the next minute she wasn't my girlfriend, Ginny was. It was like getting run over by a truck. "It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe It don't matter anyhow. And it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe If you don't know by now."

Chapter Thirteen Stockton Street The day after Ginny and I spent the night talking our heads off on Clayton Street, I ditched Marnie McCracken, quit my job at the toy store without saying anything to anyone and moved up to The Navarre Guest House on Stockton Street next to the south end of the tunnel between Union Square and North Beach—just down the hill from the historical plaque marking the spot where Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, was shot and killed. I washed dishes and waited on tables in exchange for room and board. When I wasn't working or over at Ginny's, I wandered around downtown San Francisco—North Beach, City Lights, Chinatown, Macy's, the Emporium, the St. Francis, the cable car turnaround at Powell and Market, the Tenderloin, Maiden Lane, Lefty O'Doul's, the burgeoning topless joints, you name it. A few of the guys I used to know in San Mateo came up now and then—Thulin, Ralph, John White, Murph. In fact, the first time Ralph Wood ever smoked dope was in the elevator at The Navarre Guest House. There ought to be a plaque. Thulin got us the dope from some beatniks up in North Beach; Thulin got everyone his or her first dope. Ralph and I ended up on the floor of the elevator, laughing ourselves silly. We couldn't stop. Even when it wasn't funny anymore, it was funny that it wasn't funny anymore. John White had been one of Elliot's friends at Hillsdale, before I got there. He was an actor. He was always playing some different character or other, always taking on new roles—Lee Marvin in The Killers, Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker. He was always anyone but himself. Oh, and as for Murph, he's my brother-in-law. He ended up marrying my sister Nicki. They met at Ralph Wood's apartment by the railroad tracks in San Mateo. I told her I didn't want her hanging out over there. She hung out over there anyway. But the main thing about the Navarre Guest House was that it was where Ginny and I finally got around to consummating having become boyfriend and girlfriend—in the squalid little roach-infested room they gave me in exchange for washing dishes. It wasn't nearly so romantic as it would have been with all those candles blazing back at her apartment on 45th Avenue, but it was where we were. The room had a single small window looking out at a box-canyon of sooty brick walls. The mattress still had the impression of the dead body of the disabled World War II Vet who'd lived there for decades before I moved in. He'd also been an alcoholic. There were cigarette burns and whisky circles on the windowsill. The smell of his deadness mixed with the smell of the thriving nests of cockroaches in the walls. She sat on the edge of the bed wearing a pair of faded, tight-ass Levi's. They buttoned up the front and were loose at the waist. I unbuttoned them one button at a time while she pulled her white gauze Mexican peasant blouse over her head. She unclasped her bra and tossed it and her blouse over toward the chair on the other side of the room. I pulled her pants and her panties off, both at the same time. She got under the covers. I got undressed and got under the covers with her. We tried to make ourselves comfortable and got as romantic as we could get around the edges of the indentation the dead guy's body had made in the mattress, but we weren't able to get very comfortable or very romantic, either one. At that point it was more philosophical than anything—like Ralph Wood picking a fight with Jo Jo Chaplinski—something we just had to do and get the hell over with. We were in a big rush. She had a date with Tom Piper. We had to hurry. We hurried. We got it the hell over with. Then the phone rang. Tom was in the lobby. Ginny freshened up in the bathroom down the hall. I walked with her to the elevator. Every Wednesday she and Tom went to the symphony. Tom was one of her suitors from San Francisco State. Their relationship was Platonic. She had all sorts of suitors. She was charming and cute and smart and had a really extra nice ass, as I've said. Hank Harrison was another of her suitors from school. He had a big nose and little eyes and never quite fit in. Later on, when everyone else was wearing buckskin jackets, Hank would be the guy in the seersucker suit. He was sort of semi-famous in the sixties and seventies—first as manager of The Grateful Dead, back when they were still some little jug band down in Palo Alto calling themselves the Warlocks, then as the founder of LSD Rescue, which, according to Hank, became The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. He wrote a book or two, too. Now the only thing famous about Hank Harrison is that he's Courtney Love's father. I can't begin to remember all the guys who had the hots for Ginny back then. There were lots. The guy with the spindly goatee who had answered the door at the house on Clayton Street the first night I went over there was another one—that Bud guy. He was also a Baha'i. Ginny liked spiritual guys. Ron Silverstein was another one. He was an older guy with a bunch of doctorates who taught philosophy at St. Mary's. He had also converted from Judaism to Catholicism because it was so god damn mystical. Ginny especially liked that. He had her all talked into thinking she was Heloise and he was Abelard. She was a pushover for all that dark, secret, forbidden love stuff...and there were still all her so-called ex-boyfriends hanging around: Jim Moss and the garbanzo bean guy and Charles and that whole college kid contingent. What she was doing with me, none of them knew. All I distinctly recollect of the next few months is Ginny reading The Alexandria Quartet out loud to me on the roof of the house on Clayton Street while I rubbed Coppertone into the perfect small of her muscular back. Ginny thought she was Justine. Tom Piper was Nessim. I forget who I was—Laurence Durrell, I guess. She had high hopes for me. She loved finding herself in the characters of books and thought I was going to make her one some day. I loved rubbing her back while she read to me. That was the only education I ever got. It was the only education I ever wanted. The backrubs never stayed confined strictly to her back. Toward the end of June, Ginny started getting antsy about me saying I was going to be a writer. I mean, here she was, the belle of the ball, with all these substantial guys chasing after her, and it got harder and harder for her to justify why she'd chosen to be with me. Who could she say I was? What could she say I was? A dishwasher? A waiter? A former cart boy at a toy store? An ex-shoe salesman at Kinney's? No. She had to think I was a writer. That was what I'd said I was, after all. That was what I'd told her I was. She was all set to be Zelda Fitzgerald. I wasn't doing my part. I had to get a move on. Somewhere around in there I made it easier for Ginny to convince herself that I was at least going to be a writer someday by taking off to go get things to write about. Around the first week of July or so, I hitchhiked down to Mexico, over to New Orleans and up through Mississippi to New York, thinking I might find some stuff to write about along the way...so I could write some god damn books and get rich and famous like Scott Fitzgerald and Ginny could be Zelda to her heart's content. In Tijuana, I got thrown in jail along with some guy I'd gotten a ride from. We'd left his car and his wallet on the U.S. side and had walked across the border. He had a lot of money and a nice car—a little yellow Porsche. He was worried that his car might get stolen or he might get robbed. A cab driver was showing him pictures of naked Mexican girls. Plain clothes Mexican police arrested both of us. I was just standing there, not doing a darn thing. I barely got a glimpse of any of the pictures. We ended up in the Tijuana jail. There was feces all over the floor. A drunk Marine from Camp Pendelton grabbed a drunk Mexican by the back of his shirt, picked him up from one of the benches and threw him into the shit on the floor. Then the drunk Mexican got up and grabbed the drunk Marine by the back of his uniform and threw him into the shit on the floor. That happened a few more times. They were both so wasted it looked like it was all in slow motion. As soon as the Mexican got comfortable on the bench, just as he was about to pass happily into oblivion, the Marine managed to pick him up by the back of his shirt and throw him down into the shit again. I leaned against a wall and watched. After a while one of the guards let me out and walked with me down to an interview room. There were kids sticking their hands out toward me from between the bars of their cells—big-eyed Mexican kids who looked like they hadn't done anything wrong, either. A Police Lieutenant threw my comb into a trashcan and turned me loose. I walked back across the border, found the guy's car, got his wallet from under the seat, and went back to the Tijuana jail and bailed him out. He was grateful. I could have left him there. I had his car keys. I had his wallet. I could have taken them both and split. I didn't. Whether that was worth writing about or not, I didn't know. I liked being on my own, being free—having no money and only what clothes I was wearing, standing in a hot desert as it was starting to cool off, with no cars coming from either direction and a huge orange moon rising above the horizon. The sun went down. The moon came up. A prairie dog barked. Nobody expected anything. I had no one to worry about but myself. In Yuma, Arizona, I shoveled horseshit from one pile of horseshit to another pile of horseshit to make some money to get something to eat. In Texas, a trucker put his hand on my dick. I was asleep. I'd been having a dream about this cute little Mexican chick at the diner where I'd spent most of the money I'd made shoveling horseshit. She was going to come with me to New Orleans, but didn't. Whether that was worth writing about or not, I didn't know. Maybe so. In Jackson, Mississippi, three guys in a red pickup thought I was a freedom rider. I wasn't. They were members of an organization called "Americans for the Preservation of the White Race." One of them held a shotgun under my chin. He held it steadily, like he'd done it before. I told them in my best Southern drawl that I was on my way up to Memphis, looking for work. I was all for Negroes being able to eat at white restaurants and drink from white drinking fountains and go to school with white kids and not get themselves lynched every five seconds, sure, but the way I figured it was that Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy were doing a fine job of fixing all that. I simply did not see how getting my head blown off would have helped. The guys in the pickup dropped me off at the north end of town. That might have been worth writing about, but I doubted it. In New York, some guy dropped me off near the World's Fair. I took a look at the big brass sculpture of that empty world that was supposed to be the symbol of it all and noticed a lot of pigeons pecking at the cement. Their feathers were iridescent in the sun. It was hot and humid. I stopped off at Washington Square, got whacked on the shoe by a cop for lying on a bench, and heard Bob Dylan singing in the basement of a brick building. People were lined up going down a stairwell. You had to pay money to get in. I didn't have any. A guy on the sidewalk told me Dylan stole everything he did off of Woody Guthrie. I told the guy, "No shit." I knew all about Bob Dylan from the communists on Clayton Street. I wondered what was going on back in San Francisco. I missed Ginny. Was that worth writing about? Fuck if I knew. Fuck if I know. Who knows what's worth writing about? Not me. I know that for a total fact. The next morning, I called Ginny collect from a Chock Full O' Nuts that was next to an advertisement for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in which Donna McKechnie's name appeared in small print. I thought about giving Donna a call, but that would have been sort of stupid, so I called Ginny instead. "I've been somewhat...promiscuous," Ginny said in that inimitable way she had of making it sound like it wasn't her but some naughty next door neighbor girl who'd been fucking everybody and his brother while I'd been gone. She was schizophrenic. She and that naughty neighbor girl did everything together. And if it wasn't that little slut, it was someone else. Ginny was never alone. She always had imaginary playmates. She talked to herself in different voices and read books out loud to herself—wait, wait, here's what I mean. Here's another part of another letter: "How absolutely wonderful I feel today. Alone. Sitting in intense chaos with piles of poetry books all over and getting very hung up on T. S. Eliot—my God—here we are, me and Dylan and T. S. and Edna and Emily and Wallace. We are having a PARTY! We are! Have you read, beside all the serious decay poems, "Practical Cats?" The neighbors must think I'm off again because they (cats) have got to be read out loud—so they are being—and there are parts which if aloud must be allowed to be loud and then when they are, laughter is provoked so must be evoked—Loud—hee, hee, HA HA HA—like that. So what the neighbors hear is cats, loud and huge laughing cats. I love and am good." Loud—hee, hee, HA HA HA—like that. Ha! She used to laugh so hard sometimes she squealed. She peed her pants. Then it was so funny that she peed her pants she squealed again and peed her pants some more. Fuck. Where was I? She'd been "somewhat" promiscuous. "Somewhat?" I asked. "Fairly." "Like, who with?" "Oh, dear. Just Jim, I guess." "Jim Moss? I thought you didn't want anything to do with him anymore?" "I thought so, too. Oh yeah, and Bud. I forgot." "The guy who lives there? I thought that would be a bad idea?" "It probably was. Oh, and Ron Silverstein, of course." "What do you mean, of course?" "Well, that was pretty inevitable, don't you think?" "Who else?" "I'm not sure. I was blacked out some." I hitchhiked back to San Francisco as fast as I could hitchhike. I had visions of the love of my life up on the sunroof with Jim Moss—his shiny black hands rubbing squirts of Coppertone down the small of her back and up the sides of her sturdy rib cage. "Oh, yeah, and Bud." Bud's goatee tickling the tips of her pretty nipples got me through Kansas. "Oh, and Ron Silverstein, of course." Visceral visions of her and Ron Silverstein grabbing at each other like animals, tearing each other's clothes off, like Heloise and Abelard finally released from their vows, got me through the Rocky Mountains in no time flat. "I was blacked out some." Holy shit. That could have meant most anything. Pictures of Ginny and a bunch of Vedanta swamis and Buddhist monks and Catholic priests all in one great big huge sweaty, heaving, mystical pile of naked flesh frolicking up and down the aisles of Grace Cathedral sped me the rest of the way to San Francisco. While I'd been in New York, my parents had moved up to Oregon, to Ashland, Oregon—where I am now, where I've finally quit playing golf long enough to sit down with my little stack of letters and things and say this stuff. Ginny wasn't in San Francisco when I got back. She was visiting her aunt in Laguna Beach. No one was around when I got back. I was on my own. Sometime during the next week I got a job in the Industrial Relations Department of the State of California, rented an apartment on Bush Street and got married to a woman named Sabine. It was a fake marriage. A newspaper vendor I knew from the Navarre Guest House introduced us. Sabine was from Austria on a tourist visa and needed to get married to an American in order to stay in the country. I needed to get married in order to stay out of the army. They were drafting people right and left by then. Staying out of the draft was a full time job. I did all kinds of things—getting married was just the beginning. I called Ginny at her aunt's house in Laguna and asked her if she thought it would be okay if I got married. She said, "Sure." Ginny didn't want me going to Vietnam any more than I wanted to go to Vietnam. The ceremony was at City Hall. The newspaper vendor was our witness. Sabine kept his change machine in her purse during the ceremony. I kissed her on the cheek when the judge said I should. She was pretty cute, too, but it was all strictly business. Nobody wanted to go to Vietnam. Well, except for Elliot, I guess, and he had reasons of his own. He had reasons of his own for everything he ever did. Reasons I never understood. Reasons to this day I don't understand. Reasons I'll never understand.

Chapter Fourteen Pacific Heights In September I moved into a huge Queen Anne mansion on the corner of California and Octavia in Pacific Heights. The owner had converted what used to be her private residence into eleven separate apartments. Her name was Carrie B. Rousseau. She had lots of cats. Her apartment was on the first floor. When she opened the door all you saw were cats—on couches, in chairs, rubbing lovingly around her swollen ankles, everywhere. The place reeked of unchanged kitty litter. She didn't charge much rent—forty-five bucks a month, which even back then wasn't much—and the place was completely furnished with all kinds of antique Japanese silk screens, English China and Chinese rugs that Mrs. Rousseau and her husband had picked up on trips to Europe and Asia before World War I. Maybe it was because of the cats that she didn't charge much rent. She and her husband had both been architects. They'd had a hand in the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire. He was dead. She was lonely. She may also have been slightly nuts. I remember sitting with her out in what used to be her living room. It had been turned into a parlor. There were couches and floor lamps and end tables. Anyone who lived in the building was welcome to sit around down there, but not many people did. Mrs. Rousseau and I talked about as much as we didn't talk. She ended most of her sentences by saying, "Don't you know." It wasn't a question. I'm not sure what it was, but she looked right at me when she said it. Her eyes were still blue and sparkly, and the way she put on makeup was probably the same way she'd put on makeup the day she got married—circles of rouge, puffs of flesh-colored powder. She looked so innocent, so sweet, so like a blushing bride shortly after the turn of the century, with her mouth painted into a pert little pucker of bright red lipstick like Betty Boop. She had to have been in her late eighties by then. "I went down to Grant Avenue this afternoon, don't you know," she said one night. "I had to order a funeral arrangement from Podesta Baldocchi, don't you know. Another day, another funeral...they're dying like flies, don't you know." Her voice trailed off. She reminded me of my grandmother. Mrs. Rousseau knew a song my grandmother used to sing to me: Hello, Central, Give me Heaven (Because My Mother's There). I used to lean my head against the prickly arm of my grandmother's maroon overstuffed chair while she soaked her feet in Epsom Salts and sang me songs from the olden days. When I found out Mrs. Rousseau knew the words to the Hello, Central song, I got all excited. She wouldn't sing it, no. She didn't like to sing. "I have a terrible singing voice, don't you know," she said. But I got her to say the words out loud to me. It was a real tearjerker of a song...all about a kid calling the operator after his mother had died, probably not long after the telephone had been invented. "Central" was what they used to call the operator. The kid says, "Hello, Central, give me heaven, for I know my mother's there. You will find her with the angels, over on the golden stair." Then at the end he says, "Kiss me mama, it's your darling. Kiss me through the telephone." I forget what the operator said. What could she say? After Mrs. Rousseau died, I read in The Chronicle that some quasi-religious New Age cult bought the place. They were going to turn it into an ashram or a monastery or a cloister of some sort, but then they tried to back out of the deal. They claimed the house was haunted by the ghost of Carrie B. Rousseau and the everlasting souls of dozens of dead cats. I'm sure it was, too. It more than likely still is. Mine was the smallest apartment in the building. There was a breakfast nook in the tiny kitchen and a bedroom and a big closet—that was it. The door off the kitchen opened out onto a patio, half a block down from the Hayes Street Hill. There was a park up there. I was happy. I was making money. I was writing stuff. I was reading stuff. I was living in an opulent mansion full of silk screens and Chinese rugs and English China for forty-five bucks a month, and the love of my life stayed with me most every night. What more I could ask for, I did not know. Then it started getting close to Christmas again. I'd heard about Ginny and her Christmases, but I'd never actually been privy to the whole phenomenon in any kind of day-to-day way. I didn't believe much I hadn't seen for myself. I still don't. Ginny and her Christmases you had to see to believe. I saw. I believed. I believe. The first indication I got was that one night, probably around the middle of November, she came crashing through the kitchen door, laughing, out of breath, drunk off her ass, and told me not to let anybody come into the apartment. "Lock the door," she said. "Don't open it, no matter what." She jabbed a finger at my chest and ran into the bedroom. I closed the door behind her. Not long afterwards, four or five huffing, puffing policemen showed up. I opened the door a crack but kept my foot behind it. "We need to talk to the girl who came in here," one of the cops said. "No girl came in here," I said. By the expression on his face, the cop knew I was lying, but then he seemed to be trying to think what it was that Ginny had actually done wrong. Yell? Run? Hide? Laugh? Were those things against the law? He couldn't exactly put his finger on it, but whatever it was, he'd better not catch her doing it again. Ginny was ambivalent toward policemen. It had something to do with getting raped by that cop after she stole the bulldozer back in high school. One of the things that characterized her Christmases was that when she got drunk she pissed off cops for no apparent reason. She used to play with them, to toy with them, to ruffle their feathers. She'd see a cop across a street, wave to him, call out to him in that same confident voice she had used to get the waiter's attention at Ripley's, "Yoo-hoo, Mr. Policeman!" That was it. That was all she ever said. Then she'd laugh and take off running...and when the cop saw her running, he chased her. She didn't know why she ran. He didn't know why he chased her. But when other cops saw her being chased by a cop, they all stopped whatever they were doing and chased her, too. It was a game, like cop tag. They hardly ever caught her, and even when they did, they didn't know what to do with her. What could they do? Arrest her? For what? Waving? Laughing? Running? She was like the Pied Piper of cops. She ran and ran. They chased her and chased her. This was my first crack at getting her from November to March in one piece. Other guys had had their chances. Roger Singmaster had had his turn. She ended up in a loony bin in La Jolla with bandages on her wrists. Ronnie and the college kids had their turn. Jim Moss had his turn. None of them had made it past February. I was determined to make it forever. I thought I was up to it. I wasn't. Nobody was. It always started with just a drink or two. During the rest of the year she was fine with a drink or two. She just got giggly and cuddly and talked too loud and went to sleep, but once she started drinking around Christmas, she simply never stopped. Even when she was blacked out, she kept getting more blacked out. It was an amazing thing to see. When she was blacked out, she didn't have any fear or shame or guilt or pretense, which opened her up to all the sin and sickness and misery and sadness in the world, to all the joy and beauty and charm and affection and love. She felt too much, knew too much, absorbed too much all at once. She ran into traffic. She rolled in gutters, laughing and crying simultaneously. It was really just your basic vicious circle. She'd drink a bottle of gin, black out, know everything, love everyone, be loved, pass out, wake up the next day, drink Fizzrin, hear what had happened the night before, feel contrite, know nothing, love no one, be unloved, take sole responsibility for all the sin and sickness and sadness in the world, feel empty, want to die, drink a bottle of gin, black out, know everything...on and on, over and over, at least once a week from November to March. Some years she went into mental hospitals. Other years she managed to get through the whole rigmarole with whatever guy she was with. Not many lasted more than one Christmas. I lasted five. That's the all-time record. I'm not bragging. It wasn't exactly something to brag about—well, you know, unless you think beating your head against a brick wall is something to brag about. It breaks my heart sometimes still after all these years to know what Ginny would have been if she hadn't been such a schizophrenic drunk. She would have been a god damn icon. She would have had followers, worshipers, acolytes, an entourage. She would have given Zelda Fitzgerald and Anais Nin and Isadora Duncan and Josephine Baker a run for their money in the memorable chick department. She was the first hippie, for one thing. I've mentioned that. Yeah, well, she was. I have proof. Documentary evidence. You could look it up. There's a picture of her in the school paper at San Francisco State: The Gater. The picture was taken in the spring of 1963. Ginny's dancing on the lawn across from the library; her hair's kind of in her face, but you can still tell it's her. Jim Moss is in the background, egging her on. And the first time the word "hippie" was used to describe the sort of person who we all know now as a "hippie" was in the caption to that picture. She may even have had some flowers in her hair—which, in my book, makes her the first hippie. Merriam Webster may wish to quibble, but hey, she's got her own damn book. In my book, Ginny Good is the first hippie. Ha! It wasn't just the picture, either. She was an icon in all kinds of other ways, too. She ironed her hair and put cucumber slices on her eyelids at night. She ate alfalfa sprouts and Northridge Farms Honey Wheatberry Bread and tofu and great vats of zucchini, parsley and green beans, all on the personal recommendation of Dr. Henry Beiler himself. He hung out with Ginny's aunt and the Vedanta Swamis in Laguna Beach and literally wrote the book on hippie food. Check it out. Food is Your Best Medicine, the book was called. While everyone else was still drinking Nehi Grape, Ginny Good was guzzling frothy concoctions of Tiger's Milk, Brewer's Yeast and Blackstrap Molasses. While everyone else was just beginning to catch on to the idea of eating Big Macs and Round Table Pizza, Ginny Good was the first one on her block to cook brown rice to perfection. Nor did it end there. She was the hippiest little hippie chick who ever lived. She defined the whole idea in about a billion ways. Later on, she carted boxes of her old clothes down to the Digger's store so other chicks could become hippie chicks too, then so did they and so on and so on. It wasn't just a matter of appearances, either. Ginny was all up into astrology, astral projection, past lives, psychic this and New Age that, the I-Ching, Eastern Philosophy, Paul Reps, Alan Watts, Fritz Perls, R. D. Laing, Arthur Koestler, Wilhelm Reich and Sam Lewis—Sufi Sam. Ginny and Sufi Sam liked each other. We used to hang out at his house over by Precita Park. She was one of his favorites, one of his devotees, an acolyte, a disciple. Sufi Sam gave her a special disciple name, a devotee name, an acolyte name: Mumtaz. Ha! She went around calling herself that for years. Mumtaz was the gorgeous mogul chick in whose memory the Taj Mahal was built. Sufi Sam thought Ginny was some kind of budding Sufi saint herself. He didn't think as much of me as he did of her, but he thought enough of me to have me help him fiddle with a translation he was working on of some of the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi. I tried to get him to make it more modern. Sufi Sam gave me a funny look and said that would be stupid. Who was I to disagree? I still have part of one of the poems in my little stack of letters and things. It sounded like Ginny. That's why I kept it: "I am light, you are my moon, don't go to heaven without me. The thorn is safe from the fire in the shelter of the rose's face: You are the rose, I your thorn; Don't go into the rose garden without me." She might have been the first hippie, but Ginny Good drew the line at not shaving her armpits. Part of being the definitive hippie chick was not doing things all the other hippie chicks did—and she had the most perfect armpits ever. Strong arms. Muscular shoulders. When she stretched her arms over her head, the veins in her armpits showed up like veins in leaves. She was beautiful—vital, alive. She was just a regular chick, too. She got her feelings hurt and had sibling rivalries and liked to drink coffee and read the pink section in The Chronicle and go to movies. She wanted to make something of herself. She wanted to have kids, to get a house, to cook, to sew, to plant vegetables, to sing in a choir, to sit on a porch swing somewhere and watch the sun go down. She wanted to make something of me. She wanted to get me rich and famous and educated so we could do all those things with each other. I didn't get rich. I didn't get famous. I didn't get educated. We didn't do those things with each other. We did other things, different things.

Chapter Fifteen Boulder Creek Christmas of 1964, we spent at Ginny's father's house in Boulder Creek. Sandy was there, too, with a guy named Joel Pugh. There's a long story behind Sandy and Joel—he was sort of bald is all I remember. You could find out more of the rest of the story on some of the Charlie Manson true crime websites, I suppose. Ginny liked going to Boulder Creek. I'll let her describe it. Here's a long letter she wrote from there probably in around 1967 or so, maybe even 1968. The letter doesn't have a date. Not many of them do. It was Fall is all I can say for sure. Oh, oh, when you get to the part where she says, "ect., ect., ect.," that was the way she wrote it...it's pronounced the same way it's spelled. "Dear Gerry: Your letter was far from stupid...on the contrary it shocked, pleased and enlightened me far more than previous epistles. However, I shall not comment too much on it because I'm happy...tra la. Reasons for it: (a) Grandmum's death, (b) Mother's acceptance of me whoever I might be, and mostly (c) Boulder Creek's PEACE. There is no noise. Quiet! AHH! Pisces dig peace. Need it. "Last night I almost really dissolved into the light. My arms went first, then legs, then somewhat trunk and head. It said, 'A peaceful environment is NECESSARY.' The light did. Daddy is lovely. He's going to give me anything—even a jog to Europe. Maybe I'll go. A Great Pyrenees! Can you imagine? If I go to Europe, you can take care of him and he will love you and you can take soft ethereal journeys in his warm white fur and remember sometimes me. Things are getting better all the time. I'm reading the latest Hesse, 'Beneath the Wheel.' Icky, so-so, but I like him anyway. "There is something sad. The woods are dying. No water runs in the streams and everything is dry and brittle. There was ONE leaf that still had its colors—sitting in the harsh crisp dusty others. A month ago you or I would have disdained and UGHed it, so paltry it would have been in the others' glory. It would have been then less than an ordinary leaf. Now, while far from gorgeous, it is pretty. And is a martyr—a humble testimony to the grandness that was—a slightly moribund but brave clinging remnant of a wondrous and glorious civilization! Oh little leaf! (I started out perfectly seriously.) And it's true anyway! "Please go to the library and pick up a copy of Gurdjieff's 'All & Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson.' You are in for a GRAND SURPRISE. It's nothing like the Ouspensky crud. Also 'Childhood's End' is neat. "Grandmother's funeral was quite nice. Requiems played all day. And beside her picture burned two lovely angel candles and there was a book of Kipling and 'Br'er Rabbit'. Death! Did you write to your Grandmother? You'll be sorry. She will HAUNT you. I will HAUNT you. You will be HAUNTED to the end of your days on this Earth! "I think I'll go out into the woods now. You should do the same sometime. It saddens me that you have to have your ass whipped (how's THAT!) to go out to where you think, 'Why haven't I done this more often?' And to where you learn fresh things—wood music, drum beats, daddy long legs, trunk monsters, ect., ect., ect. Get Yo 'Lil Ass Out Into Them Woods and Dig Almighty Everlovin' Mother Nature! (I've been associating with a rock group lately.) Oops, I'm sorry. "OH, OH! Guess what just happened! I was deep in the woods. I went out there right after I told you to. And ran into a hornets nest and they chased me screaming all the miles home—in my hair and all over me and now I am just bumps—hurting, stinging bumps—and I was eulogizing nature at the time and an hour before that I said to God, 'Oh, it's such paradise. It's too perfect. I know you'll punish me, but how?' NOW I KNOW and am more scared of bees than ever. It was like a cartoon, only I had no lake to jump into." (Picture of stick-figure girl being chased by bees.) "And I had miles to go and made it in lickety-split and was screaming and brushing them off and I was even laughing because that incessant objective part was watching the hilarity and I brought some in the house and ran to Daddy and SAT DOWN on his stool to give him an account of it all while they were still in my shirt and hair! 'Til I realized and ran to the shower and tore off clothes and jumped in and then heard them in the bathroom and BUZZZZZ couldn't come out for fear. "And in the woods, running, with them on and chasing me, I took a wrong turn and bumped into a wall which gave them an advantage and I was thinking, 'Oh, no—maybe I'll die here and they will find me all stung out.' And they were BZZZZING in my ears (I even bit one) and I've never run so fast or hysterically or long like that in my life, not to mention the screaming up hill and down. They stopped chasing me just as the beloved house came into view. "It's not the next day now. It's the same bee sting night. I decided to tell you about it now. Good night. And may Allah protect you from the stings and arrows of outrageous yellow jackets. "It's the next morning and the mailman will be here any minute. Now bumps itch like hell. I wish you could have come here." Ginny's father was around my age at the time. The age I am now. Old. After Ginny's mother divorced him, her father remarried, had another kid, and ended up living in a big gray house on a golf course in Boulder Creek. He was a kind, generous, thoughtful guy. His name was George, George F. Good, as I've said, and he really did look a lot like Harry Truman. I mentioned it to him that Christmas, the Christmas of 1964. "How many times do you get told you look like Harry Truman?" I asked. George F. Good was fiddling with his stamp collection, but stopped for a second and looked up at me and said very slowly and precisely, as was his wont, "I'll tell you a story about Harry Truman." Then he went back to fiddling with his stamps, but continued the story. "Harry Truman was reading letters that had been sent to him at the White House. Bess was with him in the room at the time. Bess was his wife." "I knew that," I said. "He had a daughter who played the piano or something, too, didn't he?" "Margaret, yes...who was actually better known for her singing...which reminds me of another story...but first things first." George F. Good looked at a stamp through his magnifying glass and went on with his original story. "The letters he was reading were apparently not as congratulatory as he might have liked them to be. Most in fact were crude and critical. Harry Truman turned to Bess and said, 'Why is it that only sons-of-bitches know how to lick a stamp?' I always found that story quite telling." He put the magnifying glass down and looked up at me again. "That's a telling story, all right," I said. "What's the other one?" "Ah," he said and smiled. His teeth were small. He waved his chubby hand through the air. "It's more or less along the lines of an aside." "I've got nothing against asides," I said. "The music critic from The Washington Post wrote a review of Margaret's abilities as a singer. He said she wasn't very good." George F. Good made a face. "The next day Harry Truman wrote the music critic a letter which said in part, 'Someday I hope to meet you. When that happens, you'll need a new nose.'" "That's kind of a cool thing for a president to say," I said. "He was a father, first and foremost—was the point I took from the story." "Hey, Ginny's a really good singer, you know. Like, in case no one ever mentioned that to you before." He smiled. He thought I was amusing. I was. He thought I seemed to like his daughter pretty well, too. I did. On a shelf above his desk, there was a picture of him taken when he was around twenty-two—the same age I was then. He was in his last year at Princeton, reading a newspaper that had a picture of Charles Lindbergh landing in Paris on the front page. A few years after our conversation, George F. Good got overwhelmed with grief and fearful for his safety when he heard that Sandy had been living with the so-called Manson Family and not long after that, he died. But, back then, during the Christmas of 1964, he didn't know what to do about Ginny anymore than I did, anymore than anyone did. We took the family golf cart down to a little combination gas station and grocery store. On the way back, I told him his daughter was pretty seriously nuts. Everybody knew she was nuts, but nobody wanted to talk about it. He nodded and sighed and thanked me for telling him. Christmas morning he gave her a hundred shares of stock in a company called Dental Supply, which at the time was worth five thousand bucks—which at the time was a lot of money. There were strings attached, however. That's not a figure of speech—in keeping with the spirit of the holidays, there were three pieces of red thread attached with Scotch tape to the bottom of one of the stock certificates. Her father thought that would be a gentle, nonjudgmental way of saying that if she had to be hospitalized, she could use the money from the shares to pay for it, and if she didn't have to be hospitalized, she could use the money for whatever else she might want to use it for. It was like an incentive, a bribe to stay sane. He didn't know what else to do. There wasn't much else he could do. He also gave her a diamond and ruby encrusted watch that had belonged to his mother. It was a pin, actually—a watch pin—which Ginny promptly lost that New Year's Eve. The watch had been in the family for over a hundred years; it took Ginny less than a week to lose it forever.

Chapter Sixteen Clift Hotel Ginny lost the watch pin in North Beach. We'd gone up there to be at the Jazz Workshop at midnight. It was the two-year anniversary of the night we met—which brings me to a point at which I don't have to rely quite so completely on what's left of my piecemeal memory. Ha! Yippee! I have a little green diary of stuff I wrote about during the first nine days of 1965. The diary begins with a list of Ginny's New Year's Resolutions. They're in her handwriting and no doubt speak for themselves: "Gerry will: 1) Persistently, unrelentingly, write at least 3 pages every day, 2) Tell the truth each day about the above, 3) Eat like a hog and become fatter, 4) Get the scholarship to Stanford by next year, (this means writing stories, attending State and APPLYING to Stanford), 5) Take me to a swank hotel once a month and out for dinner and to a culturally and intellectually stimulating event, 6) Keep his apartment clean and neat at least 5 days a week; this resolution may be waived only in the event that Gerry is immersed in writing—at which time slobdom is permitted, 7) Make money—lots of it, 8) Not be sexually narcissistic except if he is absolutely compelled by frustration for a period of seven (7) days, and 9) Read at least one book a week." Hey, wait a minute, how come Ginny's New Year's Resolutions were all things I was supposed to do? What the hell was she was supposed to do? I don't think either of us ever knew. Oh, well. Then comes a little preamble in my handwriting—which I barely recognize anymore. Who was this kid? "Perhaps the most ominous prospective New Year's Eve I've ever experienced began with Ginny on the threshold of acute nuttiness. She was to have gone out to dinner with Tom and his mother—a situation that was scary for various reasons, guilt about her relationship with Tom in his mother's eyes, how she gets around Christmas, etc. She, in short, didn't go and came over to my house (in a very beautiful but depressed state). We checked into the Clift Hotel, had a bottle of champagne and went out to a dinner of filet mignon and shish kebab at Omar Khayyam's. From there we went by cable car to North Beach to be at the Jazz Workshop (where we had met two years ago) at midnight. Somewhere in the wild, mad confetti crowd, Ginny lost her new beautiful watch and was sick all night." After that, the day-to-day diary begins: "Friday, January 1: Ginny and I woke up in our huge bed between sweet yellow sheets, puttered around with TV and finally slept again 'til 12:40 in the afternoon. I got a small bottle of good champagne and we drank it in front of the city from the edge of the bed. We went to lunch at David's (lox, pickled herring, sauerbraten, blintzes and pastry) that we took with us to the movie 'Goldfinger' that evening. Afterwards, we cleaned my apartment and went happily to bed." "January 2: Ginny was to stay in bed all day for her cold. I read to her and rubbed her back while she rested. I made a police report for her lost watch and called about apartments for us to rent. At 4:00 she went to the doctor's and from there we again had drinks at Omar Khayyam's. I let Ginny drink. I was happy and confident and she was loving me. Ginny's drinking resulted in a horribly painful psychotic episode in which she smashed my typewriter and gouged a long slice of skin from my back. I was stupid and sorry for letting her drink (like I was daring her psychotic counterpart to emerge amidst all this love, as though love was a weapon to overcome Ginny's demons). It didn't work. I cried very softly, she harder." "January 3. Sunday: I knew it was morning when Ginny kissed me, her cheek on my shoulder. She seemed better but embarrassed and shaky. I cleaned the kitchen and bought groceries. She stayed in bed but any favorable responses to food or reading or back rubs grew less and less spontaneous as the day went by. Finally she was a sick girl again—strangely sick, mostly weak, tired, nervous—aftermath from last night I guess. She went to Tom's and watched television." "January 4: I went quickly dressing and not shaving late to work today—extra talkative for some reason. At noon Sabine called. She wanted me to meet her that night. I took my clothes to the laundry and cleaners, then went to Sabine's. We talked. I got drunk and pretty sick. Ginny came over and made me feel much better." "January 5: There was no hangover today and I ran excitedly on coffee and nervous energy, manic as hell. At noon I seduced Ginny, then laughingly took her home (to Tom's). After work I took a bus downtown and walked in the windy rain for an hour with no coat, trying to get my typewriter fixed. Finally I traded it for an electric. Picked up my laundry, came home, called Ginny late and started writing. After I'd written a bit, I called Ginny again. She was sick-drunk and on her way over here. We laughed. I dictated to her and she typed. She got out of her nuttiness quickly and was loving me for typing. I got aroused, realized I couldn't work any more. I was tired and went to bed. We made love nicely, pretty much all for me. I think it's less enjoyable if Ginny doesn't have an orgasm." "January 6: Pretty uneventful. I came home at noon, washed my face and got in the mail all nine Beethoven Symphonies. Ginny was here. We looked witty and irritably at each other. She said I kiss either like a fairy or too femininely, so I kissed her coarsely—she probably thought I was reacting and therefore it was phony (as perhaps it was a bit, but not that much). I don't like her to ask me questions like, 'What are you thinking?' when I'm doing something to her which might be construed as a vent for some kind of queer tendencies. They're not, but if I say so, she'll wonder why then did it cross my mind. When I got home, I took a long bath and finished 'Herzog.' Beautifully done—writing and ideas." "January 7: I couldn't get out of Bed (capital letters, like God) this morning. I slept 'til one-thirty. Missed an appointment at noon to bring some clothes over to Sabine's and was slightly disappointed to find that at so late in the afternoon, Ginny hadn't missed receiving a call. My stove doesn't work. I paid my rent and bought a shoeshine kit from the Fuller Brush man. I worked ten hours straight writing Ginny's Luft paper while listening to all nine of the Beethoven Symphonies. When singing burst out in the last one—after eight without any—it scared the crap out of me." "January 8: Friday: Was an hour late for work. At noon I took some clothes over to Sabine's in order to set up our phony apartment. After work I got the gasman to fix my stove and talked with Mrs. Rousseau for a long time. She might be able to let me rent one of the huge beautiful apartments for Ginny and me. I worked on as much more of the Luft paper as I could without having the proper Jung quote. Ginny called me from the Hub Tavern. She had walked out on the symphony and was more angry-drunk than nutty. She came over. We had drinks in the big room and we painfully made love—apologizing and making up later calmly, truly." "January 9: Saturday: Elliot came bouncing up to the window in front of which Ginny and I were having a salami, cheese and French bread breakfast. He had been to the zoo. We talked, listened to some stories Elliot told about Vietnam and Thailand and then the three of us went to Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. Ginny and Elliot paddled themselves around in a paddleboat for a while, just the two of them. I was quiet and a bit uncomfortable. Ginny was a marvelous hostess and Elliot was interestingly nerve jangling—to me at any rate. We took Ginny to her Doc. Elliot and I tonight had another episode of mutual irritation. He asked my permission (half just to make me squirm and half seriously) to take Ginny to Squaw Valley next weekend. That, in the frail state Ginny, myself and ourselves are in, was not the right thing to have asked for reasons I'm not going to go into." At that point, the diary skips a month—in fact, the only other entry in the whole thing is that on February 17, Ginny went to the hospital to get an abortion. It was before they were legal. We had to go through all kinds of rigmarole. Reading these diary entries reminds me what kids the three of us were, doing the things kids have been doing forever—falling in love, irritating each other, running into predictable complications, figuring them out as best we could. We're still figuring things out as best we can. Well, some of us are. I am. Fuck. Which brings me back to Elliot "bouncing" up to our kitchen window. Everything up to now has led to Elliot bouncing up to our kitchen window that Saturday, and everything from now on is going to lead to what Ginny and Elliot and Melanie and I all tried to do with each other back in the summer of 1972. Keep that date in mind. Saturday, January 9, 1965. That was the first time Elliot flat-out, bald-faced tried to steal Ginny away from me. That was the beginning of everything. Could he take her to Squaw Valley? Ha! No. He couldn't. He could stick Squaw Valley up his ass.

Chapter Seventeen (Listen) Vietnam Elliot Felton had been infatuated with Virginia Good since the night we both met her. If he hadn't been on his way to Vietnam the next day, he would have called her himself. He remembered her name. I didn't. He had looked her up in the phone book the night before I took him to the airport. He'd been infatuated with her the whole time he'd been gone, and now that he was back and the two of them had paddled themselves around in a paddleboat for an hour or so, he was in love with her, plain and simple. We talked about it one night, just the two of us, Elliot and I. He never came right out and said he was in love with her, he just was. There was nothing he could do about it. He knew it. I knew it. Ginny knew it. It was as close to a fact as anything like that can get. It lurked under the surface of everything the three of us ever did, separately or together, like the creature in The Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was like we knew the creature was there and we didn't know the creature was there—like we were in the audience and could see the creature swimming around, hiding among all that lush, creepy vegetation, but we also went obliviously about our business, doing our everyday dog-paddling at the surface of the lagoon with our bare legs dangling. Elliot's discharge hadn't officially come through yet, but for all intents and purposes he'd completed his military service. He'd done everything that had been expected of him and more. He had all kinds of new medals—an Army Commendation Medal and a Good Conduct Medal—and a bunch of new ribbons above the pocket of his uniform. One of the medals had a silver oak leaf hooked up to it. He was a god damn bona fide war hero. He showed me the certificates that went with the medals. They were all typed up neat as you please on a clunky old Courier twelve-pitch typewriter. The day after he got back from Vietnam, Elliot bought a conservative blue suit and a conservative brown suit and five white shirts and five narrow ties and a pair of black wingtips and a pair of brown wingtips from Roos-Atkins. The next week he went to work at Dean Witter's on Montgomery Street as an assistant to a stockbroker his mother was going out with. Elliot had learned a thing or two in the military. He had a plan. He knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He also knew things not many people were in a position to know at the time. He'd been at the front lines of a war everyone in the country was getting curiouser and curiouser about. According to him, the U.S. Army had no business in Southeast Asia, period. The war was a racket. The South Vietnamese Government was nothing but a bunch of money-grubbing thugs. Elliot knew who killed that Diem guy, for example, and why—to get him the hell out of the way so the USA could run the war its way, that's why. He told me flat-out to stay out of the draft no matter what I had to do, but by then I'd pretty much figured that out all on my own. The way Elliot saw it was that the only thing the people in Vietnam wanted was to feed their families—to grow their rice, to fix their fishing nets, to ride their bicycles—and that Ho Chi Minh was one tough son of a bitch who wouldn't ever make any concessions to anyone about anything. The war would go on forever. Ho Chi Minh couldn't lose. He wouldn't lose. He didn't. Most of the time Elliot was in Vietnam, however, he was actually in Thailand—smoking Thai sticks and living in rickety houses on bright sandy beaches with well-paid Thai chicks. It sounded like a kind of polygamous religious community, like paradise, like heaven on earth, like something Brigham Young might have dreamed up. Elliot fit right in. I was probably a little jealous. It didn't help matters much that Ginny was enraptured by the stories he told. She'd never known a bona fide war hero before. Elliot and his buddies had it made. They shared everything and ate mangos off trees. It was utterly ephemeral and serene and lavishly financed by the bottomless pockets of U. S. taxpayers. That was where Elliot's plan came in. It was his single-minded intention to recreate the same sort of camaraderie up in Marin County or down by Big Sur. He wanted to get a bunch of people together, to live with them, to build things together, to cook, to clean, to write and paint and sculpt and play music and make movies, to sell stuff, to share everything. But the first thing he had to do was to get money—lots of it—and the way to get money was to have patience. That was the biggest thing Elliot learned while he'd been in the military. Patience. He was calmer than he'd been before, more sure of himself, confident, quiet—a grownup, an adult. "We had a sort of...mascot," Elliot said one night in that halting, fidgety way he had of talking when he talked to Ginny and me at the same time. The three of us were sitting out in Mrs. Rousseau's parlor. It must have been a week or so after he'd been back. Ginny's legs were lying over the arm of one of Mrs. Rousseau's overstuffed chairs. She had on a pair of Levi's and a faded green t-shirt with no bra. She was fiddling with the ends of her hair with one hand and steadying a good-sized glass of wine on her chest with the other hand. I was at one end of a loveseat. Ginny was still conflicted about whether to have an abortion or not—she and her father's lawyer were trying to sort things out—and we were still in the throes of the worst of the Christmas whacko stuff. She was getting drunk and going completely crazy every few days. There was barely time to catch our breaths between bouts. "His name was Jin." Elliot got an enigmatic hitch in his voice and looked over toward Ginny. "Gads!" Ginny said. "Really?" She removed her legs from the arm of the chair, put her bare feet down onto the rug, reached over toward the gallon jug of Red Mountain on the floor and filled her glass again. She was well on her way to getting drunk. That she overused the word "really" was a sure sign. "Yeah. He was like you in other ways, too. But old." "I have an old soul," Ginny said. She shook her bangs out from in front of her eyes and took another sip of wine. "So did he." Elliot smiled—a little too sweetly if you ask me. He'd been getting awfully familiar. At least he wasn't wearing his fancy green hat and his spiffy uniform with all the ribbons and medals. He'd come by after work that night, dressed in a suit, the blue one. Ginny was eating it up. "But he had the leathery old face to go with it," Elliot said. By which, of course, he meant to point out that Ginny did not have a leathery old face, but that she had a pretty, young face. They were totally flirting their asses off with each other right in front of my eyes. Elliot looked down, like he was shy. Then he looked up again, right at Ginny, and said, "He used to tell our futures in movements—like a dance." "What do you mean, like a fortune teller?" I asked. "It felt like that, yeah." Elliot nodded. "So he did a dance, and you guys knew the future? Cool," I said. I was skeptical, sure, but I also just wanted to keep interrupting him so he wouldn't launch into one of his god damn spellbinding war stories Ginny found so enthralling. I never knew what she was going to do, what would set her off, what kind of ruckus she might cause. "Well," Elliot said. "First he'd throw a handful of sticks on the ground..." "That's The I-Ching!" Ginny said excitedly. "He didn't call it that. He didn't call it anything. He didn't speak English. He just did it. He held the sticks in one hand, like Pick-Up-Stix. Then he put them up to one ear and shook them and looked like he was trying to listen to them. Then he listened to the sticks with his other ear and threw them onto the ground." Elliot moved his hand abruptly, like he was throwing a handful of sticks onto the Chinese rug in Mrs. Rousseau's parlor—it startled us, Ginny and me. "Yeah, we all sort of jumped, too." Elliot smiled again. "Then Jin got down on his hands and knees and looked for a long time at the way the sticks ended up in the dirt. That was when he picked out whose future it was going to be that he was going to tell. It was always just one guy. Then he'd start dancing. It was more like a pantomime, like Marcel Marceau, maybe, but barefoot and dressed in a raggedy shirt and wearing a rope for a belt. When he got to the end, the guy he'd picked out knew what was going to happen to him. One of the guys..." Elliot stopped. "What?" Ginny asked. "One of the guys, what?" She frowned. She was starting to get antsy, loud, impatient, insistent. None of those were good signs. "One of the guys...knew he was going to die." He looked right at her again. "Oh," she said in her quiet, obedient little four-year-old girl voice. "When Jin had finished, he and the guy put their arms around each other and got tears in their eyes. Nobody else knew why. A few days later, back in country again, the guy was gutted. He looked like a fish. There wasn't any warning, just a swoosh. I was right behind him. You could see what he had for breakfast." Elliot blew a little laugh out his nose. "He was the one who taught me patience." "The dead guy?" I asked. "No, silly. Jin, right?" "Yeah," Elliot said. "How?" "The same way, I guess. I don't know, I just knew, you know?" "Yeah," Ginny said. I rolled my eyes. "He threw his sticks and danced his dance, and I knew everything was going to be fine, no matter what. It was like I'd passed the only test I'd ever have to take—like, whew." He wiped his forehead. Ginny nodded. She was enraptured. I rolled my eyes higher. Elliot brightened up a bit and kept on talking. "That was when I knew what I wanted to do, too. How I wanted to live. Quietly. Peacefully. Seriously. Gladly. With people I trust, people I can share everything with. I can't explain it." "Try," Ginny said. She was on the edge of her chair, reaching haphazardly toward the Red Mountain, which she was guzzling in big gulps by then. "It all just sort of came to me during the same...detail. The same day the guy in front of me was killed. What Jin had told me with his dance just, like, descended, you know? I was filled with...calmness. Certainty. Patience. Peace." "A peace which passeth understanding." I shook my head and made a little clucking noise like a squirrel. "Shut up." Ginny frowned. "Quit saying really, really stupid stuff." Two reallys right in a row, wow—that was a very bad sign. "Okay," I said. I felt like Pontius Pilate. I couldn't tell by her eyes whether she was completely blacked out by then or not, but she was pretty close if she wasn't. "I can't explain it," Elliot said. "It was just a feeling. You had to be there." "Take me there," Ginny said. Elliot seemed to know the effect he was having on her. We'd already had our chat. He knew that she was pregnant, that she was going to have my kid, for Christ's sake. I'd told him about Christmas, that she went nuts when she got drunk, that I didn't want him rocking any boats. I'd already told him to stick Squaw Valley up his ass. But he couldn't help himself, I guess—any more than she could, anymore than anyone can. "I can't," he said in that conflicted way he had of trying to talk about things he couldn't talk about. "You have to." Ginny said. Elliot looked at me. I didn't give him a clue. He was on his own. They were on their own. We were on our own. It was going to play itself out. "We were waiting for a...helicopter." Elliot seemed to have trouble thinking of the proper civilian words to call some of the things he was talking about. "We had Teddy...Bear, we called him...we had Bear's body. There wasn't anything to do but wait. I went into a kind of trance. I was sitting down, leaning against a pile of rubble from a...house...a hut. I don't know what you want to call it...a hooch that had been torched a few months back. Grass had already grown up. The whole country's a jungle. Things grow..." "Like weeds," Ginny supplied. "'I am the grass, I cover all,'" I quoted. Elliot kept talking. "Stalks of—yeah—weeds, I guess. Grass. I don't know. A sort of ragweed looking thing with little cauliflower faces was swaying back and forth between my legs." He moved his head slowly from side to side, like a metronome. Elliot was on the edge of his own chair by then as he continued telling the story: "Then a shadow went over my face. I looked up into the sky. The shadow was coming from a cloud crossing in front of the sun. Pieces of the cloud evaporated around its edges, but the cloud just kept coming and coming, it just didn't stop, it was unstoppable. I looked down again...and saw a little no-account spider that had made a web between a couple blades of the tall grass. I watched him. He didn't seem to know. He just went on about his business, building his web, patiently adding another strand. He started at the top and strang it all the way down to the bottom like he was taking little leaps down the face of a cliff." "Strang?" I asked. "Shhh." Ginny waved her arm vaguely in my direction. "Then I saw another spider," Elliot said, completely ignoring everything but Ginny. "One about the same size as the first one...and all of a sudden they were glaring at each other. They had transparent bodies and long, almost invisible legs. They ran at each other then...not for any reason that I could see, but they ran from opposite ends of the web straight at each other, and when they came together they were slashing their legs at each other like swords or switchblades. They were trying to kill each other, trying to bite each other with their tiny, tiny, mean little teeth...and I got sadder than I ever knew I could get. It had to do with Bear, I guess, with Jin, with the future, with me, with the country, my country, their country, my friends, my father, my mother, their friends, their families, their kids, the whole world. It felt like everything was like that. Mean, you know? Cruel. Fighting just to fight. Everything was fighting. Grass was fighting with grass. Flowers were fighting with flowers. The world was a brutal, bad, mean, evil, vicious, vicious place to be." "Gadfrees," Ginny said. "It got better, though." Elliot smiled his twitchy little smile. "The sun came out from behind the cloud then...and the spiders weren't fighting anymore. They were dancing!" His face got bright the way it had when he'd wanted to waltz me around like a rag doll backstage at Hillsdale High School. He was almost laughing out loud. "The two spiders turned in circles on their tiptoes, holding each other's hands above their heads, and parted slowly, longingly, like they were going to miss each other, then darted in opposite directions across flashes of light from the sun shining on their web. I started laughing. I couldn't help it. I felt like an idiot, but it was funny, the way everything was all of a sudden dancing with everything else—the spiders and the grass and the flowers and the clouds. I mean, one minute everything's fighting with everything, then everything's all of a sudden dancing together. It was ridiculous. Absurd. Laughable. Insane. "I closed my eyes. I wanted it all to just stay that way. Nice. Dancing. I was happy. Just before I closed my eyes, whatever I looked at twinkled from having tears in them...and when I opened my eyes again, everything was clear. Defined. Done. Understood. It felt like I knew and had always known...and would always know what the world is like without me in it. I can't explain it. The spiders weren't fighting or dancing, either one—they weren't even spiders. That's the thing I can't explain. Flowers weren't flowers. Grass wasn't grass. Clouds weren't clouds. The sun wasn't even the sun. Then I couldn't remember what the hell they were when they weren't spiders. I couldn't figure out what they'd been doing when they weren't fighting or dancing." "Gosh," Ginny said. "Yeah," Elliot said. "I don't get it," I said. "There's nothing to get," he said. "That's the point. It was just a feeling. Laughing. Crying. Both. Neither. It was so stupid and tragic and sad and funny at the same time that I had about ten different kinds of tears in my eyes. How can you forget what you'd always know? How can you remember not being somewhere?" None of us said anything. Not even Ginny. We all knew what he'd been talking about, whether we could explain it didn't matter. We were friends, somehow, the three of us. We were going to do things with each other, share things. I still can't explain it. None of us could, not in a million years.