I am staying in Andy’s closet.  It’s a walk-in, big enough for a futon pad and the rent is cheap —free.  The rest of the rooms in the house were full before I got here.  Andy lives in the master bedroom, which is really not much larger than my closet; down the hall on the left is Sarah, the art student/waitress who engages me daily in great feminist debates; on the right is Kobyoshi, a strange frail lad from Thailand with a mind that far outstretches the meager sphere that his body implies.  This morning Kobyoshi informed me that he is quitting his position as a research assistant at a nuclear fission lab to pursue a career in ballet.  Fine.  Perhaps I ought to get a job in a fission lab, there are several around here, but I won’t.  It’s a cheery little household.  We’re all just waiting, biding our time; we’re all dead to the world.
	Outside is America land of the free wage slaves, my corner for now is San Francisco.  Not a bad corner of the nuthouse as things go, it seems endlessly expansive, solid city all the way down to Palo Alto through Silicon Valley and all the rest of the deranged suburbs that I only know about from reading the papers.  I stick more toward the center of things, the city, the teeming thriving pulse of the city; at least here there is a distraction from banality and some outside drama by which to measure the immensity of my own failure.  My economic failure, my failure to be assimilated, my refusal to die, my own obituary that is written in blood on the streets I wander.  Once your dead the world takes on a spectacular detached glory that I heap over my rotting bones like a warm Indian bearskin.
The telephone rings and shortly after Andy informs me that we are to meet Brent for lunch downtown at Café Claude.  Café Claude is an authentic little French bistro that the three of us like because it reminds us of better days, days we haven’t had yet, days we aren’t going to have.  In America there is only one way to be happy and that is to have a lot of money.  All other things are looked on with scorn and derision he who is not working to better his financial lot is a blight upon the national character.  A disease that must cured.  I am the biggest blight of them all having never held a job for more than year; at least Andy works at a bar which is a kind of halfway house into which he was thrust until he could be assimilated and digested by something bigger, something corporate, something with real teeth that can hold him for a lifetime.  I doubt it will ever happen; Andy is too good a man to ever fall for such a downright ridiculous con.  For the time being he cuts me in on his tips and we survive.  He also steals a lot of liquor from his work so that we never want for drunkenness.  I am constantly drunk, but rarely on liquor, I am drunk because I see everything around me with absolute clarity, I have two selves one which walks and the other which records and it is the other that concerns me now.  
Andy is the last living being I know, excepting Dean who is still down in Los Angeles fettering away at a newspaper job that he hates and which, if he is not careful, will kill him.  For now, right here, Andy is the only one alive; we share the drunken enthusiasm of those without hope, and without hope there is no despair everything proceeds in splendor and glory one is left free to contemplate the details and minutia. Nighttime we regroup ourselves into his room and regale the days, I talk of buttons found in gutters and Andy talks wild futureyarns.  He comes home stumbling having usually polished a bottle while closing and usually brings some flimsy woman with him under vague pretenses of incongruous behavior.  Andy is a delirium his fever-struck eyes are always one step ahead of you, its dizzying to keep up, drives me mad keeps me up at nights long after he has peacefully lapsed into a coma and a girl I don’t know is asking for a ride home or cab fare or directions to the subway.  His latest plan calls for Costa Rica, something about casinos and rich American bitches, as he calls them.
	It’s cold outside still, morning is undercooked; I can feel the raw drafts that leak under Andy’s window.  They come in waves wafting in and sinking down to the hardwood floors, swirling about propelled like a drunken countess’s foul smelling fart.  They seek me out, countesses, farts and drafts they find me lying here wrapped in my pathetic collection of blankets.  Ah it has found a way under the door!  It creeps in and wraps me up in dank odorless fecundity leaving me in a clamshell. I take another drag off my cigarette and crush it out in the ceramic bowl by my head; no doubt later when we walk up the hill to the BART station it will be roasting —always hot or cold no in between.  Andy asks what I think of the girl he had last night, he forgets that I was asleep before he got home. 
“I mean she was no supermodel I realize that but did you see that kind of vacant peaceful stare in her eyes?  I was on top of her just staring at her eyes they were like obelisks —Arabic mosques…. Did you not that twinge of religiosity about her?  I think she was from Kansas, something weird about those people… so flat… so much sky they always have an air of wonder that hangs in their eyes….  Have you seen my jacket the one with fur lining?”
	Andy is right over my head looking around the other side of the closet for his jacket.  He’s hopping about trying not to step on me, rattling on about his new girl.  She is going to come into his work again tonight, but that is not so good he informs me, it will blow his chances with “the randoms” as he calls them.
	“It’s a Friday see and I didn’t think about that when she said she was coming in.  Fridays you don’t want anyone hanging around because all the cunts that only come out on weekends are there and they’re only there to get a little.  They’re a special kind those girls that work hard all week they go a little bit farther in there spare time… Do you remember that one a couple of weeks ago, Michelle I think her name was… turns out she had the herps so I went and got tested before work last night… hey,”  He stops looking for his jacket and stares down at me he has a wistful look on his face, but his head is upside down and reminds me a potatohead toy with a pasted on goatee and slightly askew lips, eyes that look out of order and crazy, glinting.  He ponders my face for minute and continues on earnestly now "you wouldn’t want to go with me to the clinic would you?  I mean its one of those things I know it doesn’t kill you or anything, and I don’t have any symptoms… I went mostly to make sure that she wouldn’t accuse me of giving it to her… you know how women get on things like that these days, but still would you mind?  I’d rather have someone there if it does turn out bad for me….
	“Sure Andy, let me take a shower.”  I am mildly touched that he is dragging me into the sordid affairs of his life, that he thinks so highly of me, but they are nevertheless his own sordid affairs and frankly I want nothing to do with them, but he promises to buy me lunch if I accompany him.  The shower is weak and barely wets your hair, but it’s hot and it washes off the sticky dampness of morning.  By the time I get out my skin is pink and flushed, my reflection in the mirror reminds me of a newborn.  
In the BART station Andy tries to convince me that we should attend a private party for the wrapping of Coppola’s new film On The Road.  “I know you don’t like the book or any of that, but there will be beautiful women, actresses and hangers on, it like a Hollywood type of thing only right here in the city.”  He tells me about the girl that invited him and somewhere lets it slip that the Daily Grill is catering the affair.  Food! Now that’s worth any amount of hell, I would trudge across stygian mountains of insipid shallowness, fly low over enemy territory, flak batteries firing pointless banal conversations if only there be a sandwich at the end of the line.  It is wonderful thing to go to bed with a full belly.  Last night Andy didn’t come home until three in the morning, I fell asleep with my arms clenched against my stomach to stop the gnawing pain.  
It’s almost noon when we hit the street at Embarcadero.  Downtown has an cold electrical buzz to it, a peculiar conglomeration of sounds that phase-cancel each other and bounce around in the echo chamber of buildings to create a hoarse faintly bucolic noise.  It rattles your teeth if you focus on it.  The combination of a millions of computers humming, ovens cooking, stoves frying, refrigerators opening, cars starting, neon open signs lighting up, and all the other cryptic roaring noises from fires of the good life assail me like the smog in Mexico City.
I remember as a kid wanting to live here; I thought it was the greatest city in the world.  It might be, but I want to check the rest of world before I settle on that opinion.  I had been in Los Angeles minding my own business, eeking out a pathetic little existence full of long term goals, plans, marriage even and then one day I woke up in the middle of the night and there was a strange man beside the bed.  He extended his hand and I took it.  We floated up out of the room over the entire earth and looked down at the overflowing anthills of man, it looked like the view from the top of the empire state building.  The entire country was in a state of rabble; the people moved through ruins like the retreating Napoleonic Army leaving Alba.  Everywhere the lines were falling back, but it was not real war it was a ghost war, there was no enemy, nothing to run from only hunger, the wretched hunger of the human belly which forced us all the shoulder up and trade time in for tickets and ticket for money and money for food and all the grand dreams, the Horatio Alger myths were nothing more than a bankrupt game of miserly old men smoking cigars and trying to fill there own bellies.  And everywhere the retreat continued, men racing in shadows hiding from everything from everyone who might steal their bread their wine their wives.  The squirmed like little bugs fearing heal boot of the old men who were themselves only slightly bigger and therefore more grotesque bugs.  The scene could have come from Dante but it didn’t it came from life itself, life without art, life needed art, something to hang on the walls something to read at night before bed, something… anything to stave off and hold the truth at bay, the ugly truth of sewer rat’s retreat.  There was no art in life, it was not of life it was separate and detached it had no purpose.  I saw my own retreat a steady shameful slink from one shadow to another until that night when the strange man thrust me forth into the light, into the realization that all life was without hope.  Hope was a product of the human imagination not human life, life itself held out nothing, asked nothing and gave nothing.  Hitherto I had been waiting.  Waiting for something to happen, but now I saw clearly that nothing was ever going to happen, nothing had ever happened and all of history was but the meandering account of sad little creatures burrowing there way through the earth searching for death.  The waiting had driven me mad, I had clutched onto any straw of hope that came my way and they had all turned to dust in my hands.  The lilies of the field do not want for clothing said Christ why then did he wear a robe?  All imitations of life are false to it, all reflections cast back by art or art under any other name are only broken dreams, hope dashed on the rocks of failure careening like a pirate ship with no port to call home.  And then as the man faded out and I found myself hovering over the sewage mess of the earth I saw little fires burning, outposts in the western lands, retreat camps where those who had given up the ghostly illusion of hope were congregating.  I drifted down out of the clouds and settled myself near a camp where I could observe and record.  
The next day I got up out of bed after my wife had left for work and I packed up my things, what I couldn’t carry I gave away and I headed for Dean’s place where I new I could exist in relative peace.  Two weeks later Andy sequestered me off Dean’s couch and said I would be much happier in San Francisco.  He said the artificial plastic palm tree paradise of LA was making me myopic, I remember because I had to look up myopic in the dictionary.  Andy always had a kind of word-for-the-day thing going on lately it had been mellifluent, which Minop said was akin to relaxed or mellow.  I didn’t feel myopic in LA, but I had consigned my fate to the wind and Andy was the first to blow through, so I came here to San Francisco.  For now I am content in this damp cramped world of fog.  I’m not leaving until I solve the riddle of the fog, where does it come from (Brent told me there is a potato field up north by Stinson Beach where you can supposedly see it forming).  Why is it here?  What is it trying to tell me with its plodding ceaseless monotony?  Why is it robbing us of our summer sunshine everyday around four o’clock?  Why does it retreat again around noon?  What are we to make of this four hour gap of sunshine?
Brent is waiting for us outside Café Claude, nervously smoking cigarettes and looking for all the world more like spectral ghost of machinery than a human being.  He looks worse every time we see him, the better his life gets the worse he looks.  Today he announces, opening the door as he says it, that he just landed a new ad campaign that’s going to earn him three thousand a week.  Two thousand of which will go to support that massive heroin addiction he maintains and another nine hundred of which will pay rent on his swanky downtown loft that he insists of keeping.  Brent would rather starve than live in the slum joints up the hill; his way of staying afloat in the all-consuming ocean of heroin is to elevate addiction to a form of art.  He shoots with an old metal syringe won’t do it with a common ‘junky pick’ as he calls plastic syringes.  He keeps it neatly in a hand carved cedarwood box on the coffee table.  He ties off with a leather strap that he claims was tanned by an old Indian expressively for the purpose.  When he shoots up its like watching a magician going through well rehearsed but cryptic methods, the spoon is real silver, the water distilled and filtered, the arm band tight and then bang in it goes, and the needle is always removed and carefully placed back in the cedarwood box before he allows himself to nod off.
But then once he comes round again all is cut loose and he turns to a manic clawing about the room scrapping his fingernails down the rough edges of ideas, he has an enthusiasm and energy such as I have never seen in another junky.  He paints like he shoots, everything is methodically laid out and then without warning the frenzy begins, he leaps about in front of the canvas chaotically stabbing out with a passion borne more of frustration than inspiration.  It’s the passion of one who strives for something and no longer knows why.  Brent is the sergeant giving orders who can’t help wondering why it is that he has to take the hill.  For Brent everything is suspect, life is a paranoid adventure where everyone moves their heads on cake turners, swiveling and scheming for each others mutual demise without know why, without having motivation for anything other than sheer existence.  His only recourse is the ritual that is the only thing over which he can assert any control and he does it in such a way that gives him total control and then he steps back from himself and lets go.
The drinks are hardly on the table when Brent launches into how, despite his recent successes as the art director for an advertising firm, everything is more or less going to hell in a hand basket.  I for the most part agree with him, but for wholly different reasons.  Under his haranguing critics of his life the lunch brews like an oceanic storm; he only invites us in order to have an audience for his misery just like a priest has nothing without a congregation.  The tempest starts slowing, small lapping boat wakes at first, bread, wine, a plate of cheese, I try not to woof it down because I am not accustomed to rich foods.  Richness Brent claims is merely ritualized discontent….  Then breakers roll into the jetty, seared ahi salad with warm honey mustard sauce, delicately arranged on white plates with fresh ground pepper.  The walls swim in light floating textures of wine and palpated with bread soaked in balsamic vinegar and oil.  The other patrons begin to veer and swerve about, their food passes by rousing a selfish hunger, dessert carts cloud up the sky and signal the coming danger, and then finally the tsunami.  A beautiful girl named Holly serves us Terrine of Sole and Salmon in three different colors, fish arranged like impressionist art with all the delicacy of the Louve only to be shoveled brutally into hungry mouths with the blunted points of a fork.  Skewering money, chewing up delicacy and putting it back where it belongs in the churning stomach of slime and guts.  Holly is lascivious and I see her bent over a table begging for it, wanting the flesh, the warmth, the wild freedom of penetration.  The restaurant turns to a saturnalia and patrons falls into unadulterated orgies of stinking flesh smeared with sweat and cum; they regress into hair covered hunchbacks slobbering and drooling, crawling all over each other with snarling lust, all the hidden stresses of their lives turn them backward, relics of DNA that reek of perfumes, jewels, and other masks to cover the organic septic tank of their origins.  By the end of the meal I am in pain again clutching my stomach and loosing my belt, the richness of the food swells on contemplation and we float, whisked by vaporous entrails back out into the street.  That’s the way it’s always been starvation followed by gluttony; I wouldn’t have it any other way. 
Because Brent bought lunch I talk Andy into buying us all a cup of coffee.  We catch a cab to north beach because Brent refuses to use public transportation —another method of rising out of the cesspool, the crème of the junky crop.
“I’m gonna check into a clinic as soon as I get this job finished because I’m tired of struggling to get junk when I should be enjoying my life.  You know this is the first time I’ve left the house in three days?  I’ve been working so much I just don’t have time to get out anymore.  If I do go out its only over to Oakland to get some shit and then straight back, I’m sick of it, sick to death, but you can’t just quit you know… or at least I can’t.  I need to be forced off the shit, weaned slowly…”
“You serious?”  Andy retains great faith in Brent; I retain great faith in heroin.
“Ya.  And I know I’ve said it before but this time I mean it I gotta get off of this roller coaster and do something with my life.”
I laugh in his face, I just couldn’t help it, but he ignores me and continues on.  “I want to travel see the world, see my painting hang in a gallery; I went to an opening about a week and half ago and it was terrible.  Fucking terrible!  Lacquered checks that was one of the pieces, just lacquered ordinary bank checks!  What the fuck is that about?”
Brent is convinced that he only needs to find the right person to represent him, give him money or at the very least just believe in him because he doesn’t believe in himself he never has from what I can gather.  He is always putting the final touches on the perfect piece, but we can’t see it, we can’t see it until it is exactly as he wants it, as if the thing had no life beyond what he was capable of vesting it with, and indeed for that very reason his painting don’t have any life beyond him.  No one ever saw these paintings and I for one didn’t really think they existed anywhere but in Brent's own head.  They weren’t even paintings anymore they were representations of his entire enormous bloated cosmology distilled into crystalline existence by the very force of his own will.  Brent should have been a priest, he was better suited for a life where nothing can ever possibly be experienced, where hope keeps you outside life, everything is constantly elsewhere, unreachable, only to be shouted at and begged for.  He was a cur dog lapping at the crumbs fate had dealt him when all the while everything he ever wanted was sitting right on the other side of the door.  It was torturous to listen too and I fairly bounded out of the cab when it stopped.  I slipped out like a neutrino unaffected by the gravity of the black hole.
We stop in at La Boheme, THE place for an artist to be seen in San Francisco.  We went there because the place makes us laugh or it make Brent laugh, it makes me think of Celine’s comment: “I piss on all from a great height.”  Inside is like a trough urinal at a baseball stadium, people sit at booths and stand by tables peeing out their mouths.  The neo-bohemian set is pissing all over themselves today with extravagant warm streams of urine out of one and into the mouth of another where the recipient will swill it around for a day maybe two and then when you come back they will be pissing the same thing into the mouth of another.  I order a cup of coffee and head outside letting Andy pick up the tab.  Walking to the door I can hear the streams of piss splashing, great Niagara’s cascading from the mouths of privilege, children of tomorrowland who mortgage the future for a bit of today.  Children who can’t stop pissing out inane theories and ideas, principles and mottoes, quoting dead authors like their words where written solely for them to drink down.  Drink rich and deep and then piss it out like a bulimic myna bird mimicking everything it hears, the voice is hollow detached, devoid of feeling.  I find a corner table and wait.
Wait.  Wait.  Waiting for the sun, the moon and the stars to keep shining, waiting for Brent to kick junk, waiting for the bohemian children to be flash pasteurize in the blinding white light of creation.  Waiting for the world to curdle like sour milk, buttermilk, sweet and sour.  Waiting for nothing and everything to join forces in celestial alchemy and produce —something.  Waiting for the world to escape the nightmare of history.  Waiting for James Joyce to come waltzing down the street with great crowd of children gathering behind him.  Bugs Bunny, Maldorf, Harvey Milk, and Anwar Sadat sit at the head of great float bespeckled with roses and bearing a banner that reads: Come As You Are.  Forget life; forget everything only come as you are.  When there is no hope there is no despair, there is only now, no plans, no future, just now.  And that seemed utterly more valuable than the despair of misguided hope.  Despair exists only for those who are unhappy in the moment those who live future bound or those that choke to death on the weighted words of the past.  Waiting.  No more waiting, everything is herenow.
  Andy and Brent round the corner and head toward the table, Faith the French girl I am in love with hangs on Brent’s arm.  Her head curls back in slow rippling laughter with the jerkiness of stop-motion film, her emerald eyes dance in sunshine when there is none, she breaths different air than the rest of us.  She is done waiting. She is missing nothing. She belongs to a hidden race of seekers, of living people dead to the world, those who take the body and eat.  The rest of them do not know what she knows; they are looking still like some forgotten, wayward evolutionary glitches lying in languid rooms of far off dream cities —Paris, Prague, Peking, Peoria, or St Petersburg.  She is dancing in a netherworld dream with Joyce and the rest, ripe like a pomegranate bursting forth pure cleansing light that washes over all of us.  Cleansing the urine out of our minds, the poisons from our bodies until all is love.  Because all is love and it only takes Faith to show it.  Love should never have been a verb, it is object of love, the noun, that initiates its action, that mysterious thing that is not an action at all but a moment, a fleeting feeling that draws us out of ourselves, beyond this world and the next.  It is not Faith it is me, everything is radiating out of me….  The Eucharist of flesh will lead the way out of the valley of the shadow of death to borrow from the ancients, and we will lie beside the oracle as Van Winkle beside his river and together we dream eternal.  No more waiting we are here to go… Faith… Sky…. Dizzying leaf patterns chaotically thrown up by Maples, Oaks, Birch…. An Italian family with a stroller…. Circling swooping gulls… the dull hum of the city… inorganic and intoxicating… without human passion it becomes all too metallic and dull… shimmering like a mirage in the heat of existence… Faith… Faith….


Later after Brent leaves Andy draws me aside and asks if I am still going with him to the clinic.  I had forgotten entirely, we have to get rid of Faith; we make false excuses and head off in opposite directions and rendezvous on the other side of the block, all of which was Andy’s clever plan for giving Faith the slip.  He’s in love with her too.  Everyone is in love with Faith.  It so happens that we meet in front of the American Express Travel Agency; the lush photograph of New York from the sky that hangs in the window temporarily freezes us both.  The tag below it reads: only 399 roundtrip.  Neither of us had much more than the necessary monies to survive travel is out of the question.  Travel in the twentieth century is left solely for the rich; even hitchhiking is portrayed as a nightmare likely to end only in death; the rich have something and they want it kept to themselves.  Not that I blame them.
“Damn it man if I don’t have the herps lets head down to LA for the weekend, Kobyoshi got enough money to buy gas and my bus is running quite well.  I bet you could talk him into going to see his family and then we’ll tag along…look up Dean and Ed?  See what’s changed down there?”
“Absolutely nothing I would imagine…”
“Alright then lets go somewhere, anywhere, lets just get out of the damn city for while… doesn’t it bear down on you?  Man I think I’m going to go mad sometimes when I look up and I can only see a tiny little sliver of sky.  I get claustrophobic in these buildings, with all these damn people scurrying about like ants.”  He pauses because we’re walking uphill and out of breath.  “The thing is you have to have money to travel, you have to have leisure time, you have to get up and catch flights at hours of the day that I don’t see, you have to do all these things and then you go somewhere for like a week and then home again back to the grind.  Only its worse then because you have to pay for all the money you spent while you were on vacation, and then to top it all off the whole time you’re there wherever you go… it doesn’t really matter… every time you see a clock it reminds you that you have to leave.  Do you get that?  Man when I see a clock when I’m on vacation I get furious I remember throwing one out the window when I was in Mexico, it’s like they put ‘em there to make sure you won’t stay, to remind you that this is there paradise and you can enjoy it for a time but then… you gotta go gringo!
“Of course if I do have the herpes I’m going to get monumentally depressed and jump out the window tomorrow night….”
“Isn’t it hard for a man to get herpes?”
“How the hell should I know, I mean they told us all that in health class I think, but when you’re seventeen you don’t listen to that crap that’s what happens to adults, its not going to happen to us you know?  Shit even if it did I wouldn’t have believed it back then, I mean here we are trying to discover this wonderful sweaty world of sex and they march right in the door and tell us its going to kill us?  That shit used to piss my off, just one more way of still reinforcing those old Christian ideas about sex being dirty.  And then I have to sleep with the people who did listen and they have all these terrible neurotic beliefs about love and sex and they can’t understand how I might possibly want to just fuck because it feels good and I don’t need much motivation beyond that… how do you do it man you always seem to sleep with these wonderful liberated women that actually enjoy sex… you’re always getting the kinky ones, I envy you on that….  I might get laid more, but you’re record speaks of quality, real quality not drunken bravado or pointless casual sex.  Laura and I were talking about that the other day… I think she’d like to get a piece of you I think she’s tired of hearing the moaning and wondering what you do to provoke it.  You should give her a lay she’s practically dying for it.”
We were at the door of the free clinic on Hyde.  It was quite a scene all the effeminate fags from the Castro district decked out in loud colors, a riot of magentas, oranges, sapphires, rainbows of happy homos getting free condoms marching out the door with the badge of I Get Laid plastered on there foreheads accompanied by the sublime look on their faces that only a horny male can radiate.  I waited outside observing the gay community while Andy went in and got his results.  Gays are like the Jews relegated to history's ghettos they have found themselves in the dungheaps of humanity and carefully painstakingly rearranged the dung to form beautiful living communities.  Fragile rickety alliances one borne by blood the other by sexual preference, both very odd ways to bring people together, but they did and both cultures had the ghetto sensibilities and lust for life that is lacking in the stuffed belly’s of there oppressors.  A gay man, no matter how high on the social ladder is still first and foremost a gay man.  Assuming of course he is open about it and very few are, but nevertheless you will find that those in positions of power that are gay tend to put that up first.  I pity the first gay male president; his lot will be a rough one, along with the first woman, the first black, the first Hispanic.  In America if you aren’t a straight white male you are a freak from the get go, the whole thing is set up, even the ones who aren’t persecuting you want to know about “your people” or what its like to be gay or black, are you friends gay?  Are your friends black?  The Jews have been here for long enough that the daft ignorant Martha’s vineyard morons who run things have about figured them out, its not tres chic to be Jewish anymore, sorry.  But just about anything else and especially lesbians, from the scene around LA you would think that the vast majority of the population had just realized that lesbians existed.  As the bottom feeders of the past begin to leave the pond and gain the notice of the so-called mainstream they are greeted on one side by hatred and on the other by incredulous fascination, either way you turn you are no longer human, you’re lesbian, you’re black, you’re Mexican, you’re gay, you’re fat, you’re a vegesexual, and then if we can wrap our feeble minded idiocy around that…. Then in a hundred years or so we just might remember that you are first and foremost a human.  Welcome to land of the dead or should I say those who have died to the world?
Nietzsche talked and wrote a lot about the dead, the inhuman, the new philosophers he called them.  A strange breed this those that turned there back on the so-called human values and proudly declared themselves in human.  He believed that as time went on more and more would turn there backs and let the false pretense of the world die its horrid stinking death, and he was right, but he didn’t take into account the mutual growth of humanity.  Humanity this loose leafed term through which all the pages of history are turned like that dream of idiots, humanity sprints through time in a straight line, the arrow launched by cupid that hit the apple in eve’s hand and sent it whirling to the far reaches of the galaxy.  Beside, running parallel, but on a different set of track, the track of individuals, run the stream engines of Nietzsche's beliefs.  All these artist of the future to which he spoke are dead to the world.  The world won’t give them so much as a hasty acknowledgement, the world is still trying to figure out why some people like boys and some like girls, the world can not look itself in the mirror it slinks like a shamefaced soldier who ran from the battle to the comfort of his own dead mothers bosom.  The world rots on top of the dead god’s cunt.  Head stuck to the primordial womb like imbeciles or children that suck their thumbs.   Look at all the pretty things, lovely things, look at what we have built, look at what we can do!  Look at all the pretty pictures; hear the pretty stories and sleep tight at night!  Never never dare to question the underlying fundamentals shake up your field if you must but leave the essential framework of shithouse alone.  And yet we crawl down here in the basement where you pay us no mind and slowly like industrious beavers we gnaw at the wood frame of the house the monkeys built, the house that world trembles in fear of us and we will bring it crashing down one day, the beavers, the termites, the wood fungi, the decay always wins in the end.  Children of the true warmth know that, they watch it, they live it, first they eat themselves out and then they turn their back and die sinking out of sight, but they are not gone, no they are here.

Faith dropped inonus around seven wanting to take e to dinner.  I was more than happy to ditch the on The Road party; I always hated Kerouac’s Jock/Buddhist inanity and I definitely didn’t care to hang out with bloated egos dedicated to recreating that inanity.  Faith was wearing tight black leather pants and a thin strapped sleeveless shirt that barely contained her breasts.  I would have followed her gladly right aross the Styx, but she only wanted Italian food and patio seating so we went to ldkjadlkj and sat under the soft glow of heat lamps.  It was an eerie little patio, the heat lamps burned the pea soup fog off so that the air was damp, but clear about twenty feet up and then dissolved into a misty whiteness that acted as a kind of raised outdoor ceiling.  Bread and salad arrived without a word from either of us —a mark of great restaurant.  When food is served without being requested there is a hint of what lies at your finger tips, it whets the appitie andopens up a world of edible delights that seems more mysterious and inviting than the simple words of the menu.  It wasn’t just bread either, it was flatbread fried and delicately coated in fine strips of lox with sprinkles of capers and sprigs of parsley.  Nina insisted on a bottle of cabarnet before anything else.  I studied her face as she prattled on about the various wines her then boyfriend had introduced to her.  She had a nose for wine, Faith, she hardly needed her boyfriends help, in fact it was Faith that had gotten me on the endless wine kick that made me in terrible standing with the average red blooded beer drinking males that I tend to have as friends.  I remember the first night I met Nina or remet Nina or something.  Actually the first night I met her she was do to leave in the morning for Paris so little happened, I forgot all about her while she was gone and then one night she showed up again.  It turned out she had been back for some time and was seeing a clothing designer who lived somewhere in a loft downtown.  We sat at the bar and drank for a while and then she hatched this crazy plan to get back at the designer boyfriend… we ended up breaking into his loft and stealing two bottles of Merlot, kfjlkdj private reserve (I know this because Faith made the bottles into candle holders…); we then drove back across town to Golden Gate Park where we sat in moonlight and looked at the twinkling lights of Sausilito.  There was a little kissing, maybe even some groping but it has faded into memory and now as she prattled about Cabrenate and Merlot and Pinots and  whatnot all the kissing and groping is definitely gone and there is only this strange lovable girl Faith, that is more beautiful than anyone I have ever gone to bed with, buti have no desire to go to bed with her.  It sets me in a weird mood to spend time with Faith.  She makes me question my value system and what I want… that is to say that I want her and yet I don’t want her and this leaves a sort of tension in the air that makes everything prickily and more alive than when I am with most others.  That’s why I love her.
“What are you going to do with yourself Sil?”  She has that look of concern in her eyes, it a look that says far more than the question itself.  Faith knows me well enough to know that I can take care of myself, but she likes to know that plans before everyone else.
“dunno, no plan yet…”
“At least you left that awful ogre…” she laughs.  Amy hated Faith.  Women always hate women that they know are more attractive than themselves.  Faith had quietly waited in wings while Amy ran her course and now that she was gone Faith could finally gloat.  It was a healthy gloat; afterall she knew well enough that it wasn’t going to last.  “I told you… you run off with these girls and don’t talk to me for practically years… but you always come back to me.”  Her face lit up with a kind of pride.  “that’s why we don’t have sex… I love you too much to let you go getting possessive and jealous and whatever it is that you men turn into when you stick your little things into us….”  She laughed again.
“We could always give it a shot… you know maybe test the theory…?”
“No.” She popped a stray caper in her mouth and smiled sarcastically.
“Okay.  But I still think we could have some great sex….”
“I don’t doubt that, but I don’t need great sex as much as I need great friends.  Besides,”  she cracked that mischievious smile again, “your cock doesn’t have dual speed settings and a clit massager….”
“You don’t know that for sure….”
“Uh huh… call it an educated guess… what do you think of the wine”
The wine, the wine, my dear Faith I am not thinking of the wine….  But now that you mention it its heavy and sweet, an ambrosial wine.  Quite good.
“Yes the wine… its good…”
“Stop it… I am wearing clothes you know…
“Yes it’s a true tragedy…”
“Sil you’re starting to annoy me… haven’t you had any sex lately?”
“Ya friend of Andy’s… she wasn’t very good though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know… somepeople have an enthusiasm for sex and others don’t you know?  Well she didn’t”
“too bad.”
“ya”
Dinner swings through; Linguini with clams, more bread, more wine, more wine more wine.
“So you love this guy or what?”
“um it’s a bit early to decide something like that… hey can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Have you ever not been able to get a hard on?”
“Umm, well that’s depends how you define things… there have been times wheniwas so drunk I had the good sense not to try having sex….”
“No I mean not drunk or anything… you just couldn’t get it up….”
“Faith I’m only twenty seven… ask me again in twenty years… why?”
“I dunno the other night we were fooling around and I tried to go down on him and it wouldn’t get hard… I mean I didn’t want to have sex or anything, I just wanted to go down on him.  I don’t know if its me?  Am I doing something wrong?”
“I wouldn’t know obviously… um how old is this guy?”
“thirty eight.”
“Oh shit.  God please let me be able to get it up…  I wonder about that sometimes though.  I mean I hear these sorts of stories or read the in magazines and such, but it’s a problem I can’t relate to… yet.  It must be weird I mean if you were to just whisper a few words in my ear I could fuck you right here on this table… they tell me that I am well past my sexual peak, but I don’t see it.  I think it mainly happens to menwhose wives get fat, whose jobs are stressful you know factors I don’t have in my life….”
“But what if its me?”
“ya so?  What do you do when you’re down there?”
“Uh I don’t know the usual I guess…”
“The usual what the fuck is the usual?  Is that like where you walk into the bedroom and he says I’ll have the usual?”
(laughing) “no you know I lick and nibble and suck and I don’t know….”
“the secret is all in the hands.”
“The hands?”
“Yes the right combination of hands and mouth and saliva, saliva is key… you have to be messy about it.  Theres a little licking a little sucking then the hands… and don’t forget we have balls… woment seem to forget that we have balls.  Give em a lick or two… real gentle there though otherwise it hurts….  Jesus I’m turning myself on.”
“I do all that stuff… that’s the usual…”
“then its him… maybehe had an off night….”
After dinner we walked around Sasalito for a while and Faith decided that we had to go into a paint your own pottery store and, well, paint some pottery.  I chose a giant ashtray and swabbed it dully in mottled gray paint.  Faith went in for a rice bowl and was adorning it with fairly intricate patterns of astrological symbols and such.
“I got a tarot reading the other day… the woman told me all about my realtionship with Garret; it was kind of creepy she was pretty accurate….  She also said I would get a roll in a film soon and the next day my friend brian called and wants me to do his student film….”
“You really believe all that shit don’t you?”
“I am a very religious person, you know that.’
“Ya I know, its just refreshing, I forgot about it.  Everyone I know is so cynical about things like that, we’ve all chased down the mystery for so long its not a mystery anymore.  Its good the hear someonespeak with a little Faith in their voice.  No pun no offense.’
“None taken.  But thank you.”
“It was telling Andy the other day that I think intelligence has become synonamous with cynical… some sort of legacy of Frued and Neitchze.  It might be that all these new fangled explanations of the world, like psychology or science in general are easier to understand than something that requires faith, but they loose something… you know?  I think to be completely convinced of something, even if you find yourself indisbelieve years later, is one of life supreme joys.  I love to fall.  Love to be taken in…it doesn’t matter if it’s the latest theory of physics or the ornate world of new girlfriend.. the thing is never that important it’s the feeling I get from falling in completely and being emersed and saturated with belief.  Fantastic.”
“I know.  That’s why I didn’t get mad at you for ignoring me for two years.. when you were with Amy, I knew that you didn’t love her you loved the idea of her… I knew you would be back someday.”  She smiled at me.  It was a smile of supreme happiness of one who was falling… it was beautiful to look at, floated there in the air, not teeth not gums not flesh and blood, but some understanding of the universe that came from the fall.  The fall of man.  The redemption of being human.  I painted a whale on the bottom of the ashtry as an after thought.  
Walking home we debated whether or not modelling made one stupid and whether or not Johnny Depp and Uma Thermin could produce the ultimate manifestation of DNA or whther the forces of nature would intervien and create a moster.  And of course the tradgedy inherent in the fact that we would never get to know.  Faith kissed me at her steps and went inside.  I sat down to smoke a cigarette, but her new beau pulled up so I slipped off.  I didn’t want him to get any wrong ideas about the situation.  As I left I tried to through a little sexual energy his way, maybe send it across invisible wires that run between all of us.  Walking home on the deserted nighttime streets I wondered why I had stopped going for my walks.  I made a mental decision to start them up again.  Andy was gone when I got back, but I didn’t care.  I stayed up for while smoking under the cover of inky still darkness watching the blue grey rings of smoke drift about in the still air.


It turned out that Andy didn’t have the herps but he did have a gall bladder infection, which came as a surprise to both him and me, as neither of us knew we had a gall bladder.  We had heard of them, but never had to actually realize we had one, and I thankfully still didn’t.  Andy was right Laura did want me to give her a lay. She had set her sights on me and made me her knew goal.  I felt awkward at the house and began to only come home late at night.  In the mornings I wandered down to the university area and had coffee and listened to the poor witless school children drivel about test and papers and things that had to be done.  It made me feel better about my life.  To listen to them you would think that the entire world is one series of deadlines to be met and knowledge to be regurgitated, even the ones who had passion only had passion for the ideas, they had no passion for the act of living, they were bending life to fit the ideals.  Why it never occurred to them to bend the ideals to fit the life is beyond me, but then from where I sit looking back I do occasionally see myself at times back when I was waiting for something to happen back when it thought that the world “happened.
After coffee at the café I head over to Starbucks and wait around for a cute girl to pull up and then, positioning myself casually just outside the door, I wait until they come out and ask for ride downtown, if they happened to be head that way, if not I sometimes just went wherever they were willing to take me.  Sometimes I spent the day with one of them, but more often I spent the day trying to find a ride back to the city, occasionally barring all other methods I would call Andy and have him pick me up.  Once I made him drive all the way the Stintson Beach to get me during rush-hour traffic, but he never complained.  
There were those days though when Laura got me before I had a chance to escape.  She tried so hard and without ever coming right out and saying it either, maybe she was too scared that I would have said no, but she never just asked.  It would always start with a casual question, what was I doing?  Did I have plans? Would I like to go for walk? Would I like to have a beer and watch a movie in her room?  Of course I never had plans and when I ran out of excuses I would end up in her room watching movies or listening to records and drinking beer or gin; she would feign interest in whatever I said and I feigned interest in what she said, we developed a wonderful sense of conversation where one of us would tell a story with the appropriate prompts so that the other would have a chance to say his lines.  It was an elaborate daytime drama played out in her room, the conversations were never between two people they were lines read off a script that life had handed us.  Sometimes I almost lost my will and gave in, give her a lay I figured let her have some, but I knew my heart wasn’t in it and when your hearts not in sex is mechanical and disgusting.  To have lust there has to be heart, wild robust hearts full of consumption like feasting leopards tearing at the raw meat with fury, but if I had gone ahead she would have turned leopard and I would have been eaten alive in my boredom.  Not that she wasn’t attractive, she was beautiful, but she just didn’t have any life to her.
With Laura everything was an example of something she had read, there was no green life, it was buried under the words of the past before it ever had a chance to come out and shine, it stretched in the early morning and then bam!, a ton of bricks fell on its head.  It had all been done and said before according to Laura; I would hardly start a sentence and she would tell me I was paraphrasing someone whose name I had never heard.  She was most fond of discussing philosophy because Andy had told her that I used to study it.  I had the conversation down to where I only listened for my cues, the interim’s I spent musing over her figure trying to appreciate the subtleties of it, the nuances that only a lover is supposed to know.  She wanted me in the flesh but it liked her in my mind, a character I never could have sketched.  A creature so bizarre I wouldn’t have believed it if it were a dream.  Her words tore out and ripped the room to shreds, but I sat silently meditating on the core of existence, the body, the body electric he sang… 
“Who is you favorite philosopher,” she would ask.  How is one to answer such a question?  My favorites were the ones I disagreed with the most which always led to arguments between us, with her accusing me of philosophical treason for calling Nietzsche (her favorite) a bore.  He was so I thought then, quite a bore always moping about the miserable condition of mankind which is all good and well, but what of the inherent beauty what of the passion what of the celebration?  The majority of Americans may be clinically insane, but down there in the cesspool of life lies the forgotten individual and the individual can do remarkable things with him or herself even in the midst of a mad world.  Nietzsche was blinded by the numbers, couldn’t see the tree for the forest as it were.  Or I would say Whitman and she would correct me saying he was a poet, not philosopher and I would say poetry is the true philosophy and then she would launch like a rocket into the space of her own carefully constructed latticework of belief.
“Poets serve different ends they reach for the gut, the emotions, the philosopher applies cool reasoning and evaluates with out judgement.  Poets are too hot headed to be philosophers….  A philosopher sees things as they are, even if that is only as they are to him, it is still the way they are… or they way they see it, they reorder the world.  That’s what I am trying to get at, poets observe the world and philosophers reorder it.”
At times like that I wanted to strangle her for my own sanity, but legally all I could do was defend the Leaves of Grass.  “Poets reorder the world just as much as the next man, that’s all we do in fact we reorder the world to suit whatever it is that we happen to believe.  We only see what we want to see, because that is all we can see.  If you believe that blades of grass are nothing more than cellulose and water than that is all you will see when you look at grass.  But if you shut your ridiculous preconceived notions off for a minute and lie down on the grass then you might for just one instant start to see the world from the grasses point of view and you will notice that grass does not philosophize, it just is.”
That particular day I was in a bad mood and things ended with me refusing to discuss anything further until she read Science and Sanity.  I loaned that precious tome to her though I already knew she wouldn’t get much past the second introduction.  I led the horse to water let her drink for herself.  I never expected her to actually read it.  I gave up on philosophy for the simple reason that it failed to accurately resonate the world of existence.  For me the chaotic registers of the poets and novelists captured the illusive passion of reality far better in the garbled code of metaphor and warm blankets of experience they wrapped existence in a picture of song, a symphony of anarchy that matched the one I saw when I walked down the street.  The world of the philosopher is like Laura’s world, its cold confusing and you never get what you want and even though you know that you can’t get it you keep trying all the same playing out the uneventful script that is the martyr’s.
One day I kissed her to see what she would do, if she would act on restraint or try to take me like she wanted to, if she had I would have let her for the simple reason that at least then she might be alive for just one second.  I would have liked her to rape me, to show some life to her, but there was nothing, she hung on my lips romantically like the stale ideas that hung on them when she talked, there was nothing but romance and empty meaninglessness in her. I figured at least the kiss had sealed it and I knew if ever I was down on my luck she would take me in and that was far better than love or passion for a man in my circumstances.

I have taken to wandering the neighborhood again, playing word association games with myself trying to see how much of my childhood I can remember.  I can never get back beyond the memory of walking down a trail in a forest somewhere.  I am singing a song as I walk, singing a song with my mother and father.  We are hiking down a mountain somewhere.  But I can’t see the forest; I can’t hear the song or see my parents.  I just have the fuzzy out lines of it, I called my mother one evening and she said that I must have been around four or five which only served to further depress me, I hate that some people can remember as far back as their crib while for me even kindergarten is a stretch. 
Coit Tower is beautiful at night, a proud phallic overlook for city teeming with sex.  San Francisco is the only city in America where you actually run across lover in alleys, exhibitionists in front of glass windows on the hill tops and discreet blowjobs in movie theatres, fitting then that it should have a giant concrete cock of light looking over it.  The trip across town from Andy’s place off Ashbury, through the mission district and little Italy to Coit is like a sociological tour.  The Mission District has many of the landmark houses that you have seen of San Francisco, the fronts are colorful and happy, but is artificial and only looks colorful and happy in postcards.  In reality they are at the catacombs of the city, the doldrums south of the equator.  They are home to the middle class city dweller an aging variety of Consumerus Americanus, usually grouped with the yuppies but wrongly so.  These peculiar neighborhoods are the breeding ground of the suburbs.  These are in fact why there are suburbs.  The Mission is set back from downtown and is a primarily residential neighborhood steeped in the lukewarm water of mediocrity.  It is here that librarians, office managers, public officials and otherwise uneventful people arise from, and it is here that the whole suburban utopia of better newer shinier gadgets was born.  Here the old gadgets stick out and show the datedness of their species, they were overrun, can no longer keep up, the ones trampled down on the battlefield of progress, they did not win, they failed even to retreat, they lie where they fall waiting for stretcher bearers to carry them off to the morgue.  They have cellular when they should have digital, they had beta when they should have waited for VHS, and they got the eighttrack player installed in their car about a month before the advent of the cassette.  This post war generation turns around in profound confusion, they are assaulted on all sides by constant change, they have felt out of control ever since the first greaser put a comb in his pocket and took one of their wives behind the college stadium and showed her what sex should be like.  The wanted to discover the world and instead they built suburbs because it seemed to be the thing to do.
I feel at home amongst such failures, we share the common wounds of the dead, though theirs were not fatal, they are as good as dead the world turned its back on them and they wander about like zombies, preoccupied with the future, but to cautious to gamble on it.  They are always going somewhere, doing something when all the while a little voice is driving them mad whispering sweet perfumed fables in their ear like: it is all nothing….  They never say hi or wave like gays do further down in Castro, they don’t try to hustle you like the Hispanics and blacks downtown, there are in fact no homeless in this neighborhood, better to lie in a rat infested dumpster downtown than to lie here.  Makes you nervous, a neighborhood where people won’t sleep on the streets, whether its for fear of the cops or the thugs makes no difference they’re both in the same league.  The denizens of the Mission District all walk with there eyes glued to the ground if they are alone or glued to the person they are with, the world slips by unnoticed by them, they are creatures of habit, serial killers never plague them, they are too easy.  
Like this guy… he is right here everyday like clockwork, like me in fact, but his routine is so old and I am such a recent addition that I don’t register, he never turns his head.  I stop and block his path and he goes absently around the back of his car up the driveway as though I was invisible.  I begin to feel curiously invisible, a bit separated from the tactile world, unsettled and hyperaware I continue up the steps that lead to Coit tower, I feel as if I am teetering on the razor edge of awareness.  About half way up I hear the muted grunting of what sounds like a television set playing pornography.  I snap my head to the side and listen because sex sounds move at a frequency to which I am acicular, they moves in waves like any other, but sex has another more primordial quality, just beyond the edge of conscious hearing. It makes you turn your head involuntarily, like a traffic accident or a machine gun at the family reunion in Kansas.
I follow the sound climbing up the hill instead of using the path, about half way from where I left the steps to the top I turn around and see a couple fucking doggie style in there couch in plain view of all the world, except that all the world is hidden by trees.  I light a cigarette and watch them go at with wild animal abandon, not like most rich women I have been with who are so disinclined toward any sort of dirtiness be it on the linens or during sex.  These two have taken Woody Allen to heart; sex is only dirty when you do it right.  She comes before I am halfway through my cigarette and sits down on the couch to suck him off.  It comes as electrostatic charge this feeling of peeking into the lives others, of watching them harmlessly, but yet they would likely have jumped up had they seen me, so strange that we like to hide the most personal of human expressions and yet will kill and degrade each other in the streets before live television crews.  It all stems from not showing any cock in R-rated films, but that’s not important right now.  Right now her warm mouth is drawing him out and I am leaving, not wanting to see the end of the show, preferring to leave it eternally occurring in memory like a loop of film flapping in an empty theatre….
Memories shrouded in gauze and muslin, filters that are colored and toned by what I brought to them when they happened… mixing like oil and water with what I bring to them now.  Take for instance Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in hazy brown discolored way, but it’s not the smog, it’s the nature of memory —the nature of my memory.  The images overlay each other like a photomontage.  I see it in moving pictures: cut to a shot of the subway, sad brown faces and I want to know why they aren't on vacation like me… lay on top of it an image of pyramid excavation digging up and trying to solve the Mayan Caper.  Years ago you would. Understand she was standing right next to me and then...Warm sweet smelling cab and my father says “hey, look a Kentucky fried Chicken” and sure enough I see one.  Americana right in the middle of foreign chaos it threw me into a different world, a sudden realization that life is not ordered like the clockwork metaphors I learned in grade school.  It became in that instant a chaotic kaleidoscope of astonishment and splendor … the shock of fried chicken.
Everything became focused up into the sun; it burned in fantastical visions that existed only for me, leaving me alone and for a long time afraid.  Not fear in the sense that you feel threatened, it is much worse, not conscious, it just lingers in the back of the mind occasionally eliciting a paralysis that would haunt me for a while and then fade again in the face of day to day activities.  
It’s a fear that leaves you like a woman I saw once stone still and shell shocked, stuck right in the middle of this enormous arch in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.  She just stood there unable to move, feeling the digging hooks of unbridled terror burning into her brain and creating an endless and spellbinding feedback loop that forbids you to move.  It anchors your mind right back in the primate body because you feel it and yet rips you right out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange land where there is no you.  I watched her sit there unable to help herself, doubtless staring at the two thousand-foot drop off on both sides of her and the meager four foot wide sandstone arch that was holding her there.  She was suspended in mid air, seeing herself for the first time the way we are: naked cold and deathly afraid.
	But the cab driver just laughed and said, “here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, But definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken.”  He smiled this crooked smile revealing gold caps and over moist gum structure that was so large it seemed to be slowly crawling right down over his teeth.  He then sternly advised in all seriousness against eating there, of course I wouldn't have anyway; he merely gave me a rational reason for that.  And all this was years before I would ever get to India to learn that, first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is... 
I realize my legs are moving as fast as the random associations of the mind and I am in North Beach again without even realizing that that was where I was headed.  I slow a bit and notice the damp cold, a glance at the sky reveals the story —gray again—nighttime fog in the middle of April.  
Weather everywhere is getting more severe, mudslides, floods, droughts, tornadoes.  It’s as if something really big were building up to vent on us.  The Ancients placed great stock in weather and saw storms as harbingers that something was wrong within the tribe. Many of them associated the outside as intimately connected to the inside of the tribe. Educated people (historically that reads white) first scoffed at such notions, but now two thousand years of theories later we have elaborate sciences which are beginning to prove the simple wisdom that tribal people know just from observing life
Jostling through the crowds of Jackson street brings back tapeloops of Boston —Harvard square—fall—the Charles River slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people— onlookers drunk beyond comprehension of what they were there to look at— they stumble out of bars and lurch through doorways like grenades rolled out on the street.  Inside the Radcliffe boathouse a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse in orgasm.  Her breasts pool salt onto my tongue.  Her flesh is hard and metallurgic turning brittle under my hands, the life is slowing slipping out of her, out of the sewers of life up celestial heights of orgasm, among the eagles, the screaming eagles, the German philosophers sitting like a nineteen ten bankers awaiting the thief.  The tape is endless, looping across eons, cultures, genetic hardwired associations to the galaxies, interstellar abbreviations of life.  Cool hard water distilled in my mouth and then she falls from my arms like a limp rag and I am cast down a tube a tunnel endlessly falling, clattering of the walls building speed, a vacuum with no terminal velocity I want to reach out for limbs for human hands to catch me….  I scream and there is no sound save the rush of air passing my ears and finally I settle in the twinkling light still shining from above and I relax to the falling sensation no longer concerned surrendered eternity forever to remain here now and then the light goes dim… the taxi’s in times square… Truman Capote… An auburn haired girl I liked in seventh grade… tumbling of great vistas into nothingness into all timelessness….


It was inevitable that Dean would come for me, we always rendezvous at some point and then we set off for a while and bounced apart again, things had been that way for as long as I can remember.  Things had taken a turn for the worse.  Andy was leaving for Costa Rica to work on a cruise ship.  Apparently the late night talks had not been all smoke screen as took them, to make matter worse I could have a hob myself, but raising the air fare seemed impossible.  In a vain effort I started panhandling downtown and serving cocktails one night a week at club 36 where he worked, but money was hardly rolling in, and when it did it left just as fast.  The panhandling I enjoyed, it reminded me that people weren’t such horrible creatures after all, when you beg you are forced to look for Emerson’s little spark of divinity in everyone.
Sometimes panhandling was just something to do while you were reading; a way of making some money for the age old magic of deciphering words into images, into thoughts, into life.  I would get up before dawn and catch the first train downtown.  Around five the flow picked up, traders, analysts, number theorists, restroom attendants, secretaries, janitors, the streets were thriving in the still murky dawn.  In an hour, in New York City the grand number game would pitch off on another day of “trading.”  What they are trading and why was totally lost on me, but I liked to watch them go about it.  By six I would have in the neighborhood of ten dollars, sometimes more sometimes less, but when the bell sounded six the number of people on street declined. 
	I was reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising, a wildly fascinating tour through quantum physics, modern psychology, and ancient shamanic ecstasy.  I had never encountered a mind that could so formidably wrangle about entire worldviews with such succinct explanations and clarity of language, always with a sense of humor too.  Irish authors are geniuses at working that quirky clever humor of theirs into the most unlikely of places; I thought of Joyce, Wilde, McKenna, even Beckett is hilarious to see on stage.  Its actually more fun to watch the audience watch the play; you understand Beckett’s logic much better from observing it in action than from him telling it to you, but he is there like a ringleader assembling the drugged lions so that you can safely walk amongst them.  Beckett saw the emptiness of the game and stood in the middle of the court slowly, inanely bouncing the ball to see if anyone would notice.
	The Irish seem to know best how to write and how to drink, how to live you might say if you had my view of things.  Of course it doesn’t do anything for you in this country.  In America if you want to succeed you have to suck seed, the seed of fat cat bosses, lawyers, politicians, Hollywood stars, washing machine salesmen, sitcoms, the latest way to get your socks whiter, the newest car, the biggest television… plenty of buying, consuming and swallowing of the preverbal seed around here.  Precious little living though, a melting pot was never where one ought to have looked for the distinctive flair that marks man as alive.  In becoming individualists we lost ourselves; all that’s going on in American thought is newer and cleverer way of differentiating between the individuals, creating categories.   A carrot here, cabbage there, and celery, beans, beets, broth, turnips, potatoes, and freeze-dried madmen to spice the grand stew.  Everybody fits in a category, everybody can be marketed to on somehow or other.  Ordering chaos and turning the stew into pureed banality might be the only thing we ever accomplish before the whole shit-house country turns into a police state.  It was demoralizing to be American, you were either a human or citizen and the two remained separated as violently and far more successfully than church and state.
	And what of the separation of church and state?  It sounds good in the ear but by the time it hits the brain its curdling like old milk.  It didn’t turn out quite the way it was supposed to, instead of separating them we just threw away the church and made the State into god.  Maybe it was inevitable and we were merely the ones to do it, we had needed a new god for a long time when this country came to fruition—might as well give the state a try.  Someone once said that the defining characteristic of Americans is that they will try everything wrong before they get themselves around to doing what they knew was right in the first place.  Who better to head that racket than the State?  Who better to make god?  We’re heading the right direction maybe, god’s face is coming into view more and more and more people I meet are ready to wake up from the nightmare of history as Joyce put it.  The history of god is no different: first he was everywhere, then he was in an animal, then he was in a building, then he was in some guy, now he’s in all our heads… can’t the man just sit still for a few centuries?  No, God’s on the run doesn’t want to be found because he doesn’t think he’ll be liked when we find him.  Same reason we off ourselves, every human action are a tiny suicide until we give up the ghost.
	The conquest of death will be the end of science and then we’ll have flushed god out, left him nowhere to hide.  In the mean time… alms for the poor?
	And maybe another quarter drops from a passerby and jingles as it lands in my cup.  I have learned not to look up; they don’t want you to.  Non-confrontational begging is the wave of the future; it’s the atheist’s way of tithing.  They never look at you, just drop some change in the cup as they pass never even break their stride.  I had decided long ago that these busy nessmen and women were all raised in some flat monotonous religion like Presbyterianism, sheltered from god by money but still open to manipulation via guilt.    I was guilt, a reminder, and the dogshit that made them remember they were dogs too.  They made it quite obvious that giving was an odious task, one they would just as soon not do, but something compelled them nonetheless.  Some mysterious lingering Presbyterian guilt, or perhaps it was a calculated attempt to cover their doubts, just in case there was a god of judgement they needed a few legal briefs in their corner, someone they could subpoena as a character witness before St Peter, as they tried to grovel and argue their way into heaven.  Ah heaven!  The good life!  Wouldn’t it be great if we could still live in fairytales… perhaps I gave them a bit of childhood fairytale back, reminded them that at least they had things….  The rich need the poor that way, it gives them some comfort to know that there are less fortunate, makes them feel like they have gotten somewhere in their fervent march to the top of the national muck heap.  
What they liked even more was to support street musicians and comic performers, the modern court jesters playing in the palace of the Everyman.  The streets, the city lights, this was the group palace for the middle and upper class; high above it behind the thousands of mysterious glass stories those with real power and real money moved about in hushed whispers, prowling in the shadows and watching the show from above.  It was Celine who said near the end of his life when someone asked him what he thought of the human race (an odd question to put to someone, but then Celine was an odd man), “I spit on you all from a great height” was the old boy’s reply.  “I spit on you reaching great height” I would have said; I like it down here at the bottom in the trenchant, pitched battle for survival.  The people were of a better character, more aware of the things that money can’t buy, namely anything of value.  Wait till they start bottling the air my Dad used to say well Dad they have, in Mexico City —they sell it right there on the street corner.  The swan song of the earth will be sung by asthmatics and the trumpets of the end days will be blown by lungs measuring out bottled air.  Bottling the air!  Things are fine, really!  No more wars, no more uprisings, no more taxes... no more anything save the eerie hum of the refrigerator cascading about the silence of your house late at night.  Hmmmmmmmmmm Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.  It crawls cockroach-like over your face while you sleep, it perches on your forehead and listens to your heart beat —admires the cacophonous organic simplicity of human sleep.  
I was out of town when Dean arrived, an old girlfriend, Leah Wright had seen me begging downtown and taken pity on me; she insisted on putting me up for a vacation.  She was married and I could tell that her husband didn’t like me, but he thought I was funny and didn’t mind too much that I stay with them.  They were both appalled to learn that I lived in a closet.  He loved the I’m still in the closet joke of it, laughed like the honest farmboy that he was.  After leaving her I lost track of Leah for a while; she went and married a Canadian farmboy who used to play hockey and now plays golf and he talked a lot about being a sports newscaster.  It was a different life than what I had in the city, they were in the rather ritzy suburbs of Marin, a nice house tucked back in the near forest of the hills.  It was the suburbs to be sure, but a suburb that was not artificially planted which made it livable even attractive sometimes.  They ate three square meals a day and went work like the good little citizens that they were.  I sat around all day smoking cigarette and typing in their garage because neither of them could stand smoking.  After a week or so I started to run dry of ideas.  I took to hoeing out a patch of land to plant them some tomato plants and it was as I was in fact planting the seeds that I saw Andy and Dean pull up.
I felt slightly ridiculous standing their looking at them, I had temporarily slipped into a mild dementia over the tomatoes, I was obsessing over the universe in great detail and then they got out of the bus.  Dean looked ridiculous himself getting out of Andy’s VW bus in his customary suit and tie, it was an incongruous image and I couldn’t help laughing.  Andy just stood on the running board and yelled over the car.
“Come on lets go!”
It was simple enough, I ran inside grabbed my bag and my laptop and threw them in the back of the bus.  I ran back into the house and pilfered about for a bit looking for some stowed cash, I hit the jackpot in the middle of Leah’s g-string underwear, almost two hundred dollars.  I grabbed it and scribbled an IOU to take its place, as an afterthought I held one of the g-strings up to my nose, it had the unmistakable odor of Tide.  Nothing fecund in that house I realized, all the surfaces were clean to hide the smell of rot that permeated their flesh.  I shuddered and ran out the door, I dove in and we headed off.
	On the way into the city Andy got to telling Dean about his bar job and Dean was all gung-ho for it. Dean collected women the way some people collect art once he had them they never really left.  He was telling Andy and I about his latest one Monique the strangest girl he’d ever fucked.  He said she was dumb as nails and she didn’t even like him she just wanted to fuck.  He said it was what he always wanted in a woman, but it was not a good as he thought it would be.  Even she got to be a burden her said, “if its not love they want then its sex whatever it is the point is that they have got to have it all the time, it doesn’t matter what it is women must control it.  I think its natural result of patriarchal society or maybe just human nature — you want what you can never really have….”
	Crossing the bridge we got stuck in traffic and Dean took the opportunity to get out of his car and get a new cartoon of cigarettes.  Andy and I were catching up on details, but then we realized that Dean had been gone for a few minutes and the car in front of ours had moved forward.  I got out to find Dean and he came running up through me the keys and got into a car with some girl I had never seen before. 
About three hours after we got to Andy’s Dean came over and the three of us headed to the kfjla bar.  I wasn’t really of the mind to go there, but Dean insisted and I just found myself going along with the will of others.  The sky bar is a swanky joint all decked out in purple lights with silent cocktail waitresses that never write anything down or say any acknowledgement or recognition and then mysteriously show up with drinks and then later the bill.  The inside was done up in the stylings of a seventy’s porno set in the nineties —if you follow that.  That sort of peculiar intangible decorating term art deco, which used to mean Miami Vice and now means feng shui.  
	We sat down in the corner and drinks appeared to Andy’s sign language gestures.  Dean still hadn’t made any mention of the bridge girl and I was ready to drop the thought forever when he sets down his drink and launches into a story.
	“Alright now the bridge thing, that was a forced experiment on my part a psychology experiment to see if I could meet someone on a bridge in traffic and go home and have dinner and then sex with them than I had decided that I would quit the newspaper and just slowly weave about the country burning down towns and whole cities behind me, but still being myself with out any worry of bills, rent, food all of it gone.  The thing is though I didn’t figure I would be able to do it; in fact I didn’t really do it some other guy did it and I watched.  It was a very surreal afternoon.  She had two kids man that was weird, made me miss my daughter…”  He stared off into space of brief sniped moment and then exhaled smoke.  “I don’t know… I sort of had a deal with myself here… and now I’m not entirely sure I’m ready for what I thought would remain an abstract idea.  I dunno fuck it why not?  Why not make people my job?  Can I earn their trust and tell them what they want to hear with such grace as for them to offer me food?  Or money? Or their bodies?’
	Dean routinely subjects himself to these little psychology self-experiments in his quest to understand.  He put considerable effort into it; he never when to college and I think that the experiments were what he used for his own little private college where he was the only teacher and only student.  
	“See Sil the thing is I came up to see how you were and now I realized that I was the one who needed some help.  Shit man you were staying with Leah!  My god how many years ago was that?  And her husband too.  He he well done.”
	I was sleeping in their garage; it wasn’t like there was anything going on with her; I really did just need to get out of the city for a while and write.  I was going bonkers though… I mean I felt fine now, but I was planting vegetables, but I figured if Dean saw it that way then who am I to correct him.  Things teetered along like they would have any night any where and then something strange happened that had never happened to me before.  After we had been there about an hour a guy bought a round of drinks for the house, which at this point must have been sixty people and certainly cost a pretty penny, but it happens every now and again.  We got our free drinks and settled down again when the music was cut and guy jumped up on a barstool.  He asked if everyone had their drink and then announced that he was closing the door and making the place into a private party.  At that point people groaned and started yelling but he silenced them simply by raising his hand.  He said he had bought us the drinks so that we could drink with him and from right now on all of us were guests at his party now patrons in his bar.  He said that he had just asked his girlfriend to marry him and that she had said yes and he was very happy and wanted us to share in his happiness.  He said that he wanted us to toast his new and he pulled her up onto the table next to him and we all clapped and he said that he had met her three years ago in this very bar and that she was the most important thing in his life now.  He said that people always told him that you don’t meet someone in bars and he said that he was here to say that they were wrong and that whereever your heart leads you, you will find happiness.  Or words to that effect.  He carried on like that for almost ten minutes and then finally he sat back down and the music went on again, but everything was different now and people were talking across tables and they were moving across the room and strangers could be seen shaking hands all around us.  Some sort of flood gate had been opened by the man; even I felt better though I was not looking for happiness I felt better know that someone who was had succeeded in the endeavor.
	Suddenly instead of a bar the place gained some intimacy, it was a private party and we were all invited, we were alone together so to speak.  Dean said that it reminded him of how he pictured an Italian wedding, like the one in Deerhunter and enormous party that could go on for days if it wanted to.  He was right the place had an air of electricity to it as if now that there was a reason to be happy it could spread and affect all of us even though it really meant nothing to any of us.  Same sort of thing the evangelists have always been doing from Christ on down to a Baptist revival in the rural south.  What the man did was conquer that last human demon and he did it with simple heartfelt honesty and generosity.  He succeeded in making all of us together, all of us suddenly human and frail, but not alone in our humanity, not alone in our frailty.  The thing about modern Americans is that we like to think we are the big kind hearted freedom loving people of our mythology deep down we all believe that the world need our help with its problems and we all believe that we can solve them.  There is no human event happening on the earth that we can not improve with our very presence and yet behind that when you strip away the mythology and look at the cold hard truth you see that we are mucking it all up.  We are killing people to set them free and we ourselves are not free.  We are not the happy go lucky people we think we are.  We all carry this private despair around with us that wiggles around under our skin when we sleep at night.  Just like we are destroying the world we are destroying ourselves and yet all it takes to rectify the situation is one man in a bar with a bottle of happiness.  We came undone the little creatures under our skin popped out and ran away unable to live in the boiling cauldron of happiness.  They were forced extinct by the change in environment, like the dinosaurs unable to adapt they died.
	In their place came an air of enthusiasm a sense of shared adventure that was hitherto not present.  The movement of bodies about seemed to stir it up in the air and soon it was fever pitched.  Couples were dancing in the isles between tables, in corners shadows could be seen groping at each other and men clapped each other on the back while women cuckold in circles.  Everywhere stories spun out, true ones, false ones, exaggerated ones, downplayed one, stories that rang out and were delightful no matter what they said.  None of us were actually aware of what we were daying we just knew that it felt good to talk felt good to pour out our innards to strangers.  Commiseration and celebration wrapped each other up like packages and dropped down the chimney from the grip of an invisible hand with red sleeve.
	Five girls at the booth next to us can over and introduced themselves and soon we were all squished in together and talking like old friends.  They were mostly from the university across the bay.  Graduate students getting their MA’s in philosophy and heavy stuff, but we all tossed it about like it was cotton candy.  We were at the circus and no matter if Plato or Nietzsche were on the ferriswheel because it was still a carnival and everything is welcome at a carnival.  Thing kept up well past two when the alcohol stopped flowing.  No one waned to leave we all felt like it would fall apart if we left the room.  Finally around three large groups started to head off to various impromptu parties and we went with the girls back over to Berkeley where they had an enormous old house that they all lived in or at least most of them did.  By that time we were all a little sketchy on the details of the situation.  On the subway we all careened back and forth into each other with the way of the train.  I was sitting forward in the car away from the main group with my arm around a girl who had said she was an art theorist.  We had talked art theory in detail at the bar but now in wan of it all we just made out.  We were deep into a tongue battle when catcalls and whistles were heard from the other end of the car.  Everyone gathered around to watch us and we gave him or her a show.  It seemed like the right thing to do at that moment some way of pulling everybody in together simultaneously intimate and yet encompassing all.  We finally broke it off to breathe and there was a round of applause.  Some one from the train had joined into the party; he and his friend were swept up by us, and they came all the way back to house.
	Around four we finally fell asleep; I don’t think anyone had sex that night though there was plenty of groping and exploring going on.  I passed out with my head between the girl’s legs.  Around nine Dean kicked me and I opened my eyes to see him and Andy all dressed and ready to go.  
	“Come on man lets get some breakfast and go for a drive”
	I got up and put my shirt back on.  We went down Telegraph and all had huge omelets at ldjflkdjfl.  Afterward we worked our way back to Andy’s stopping off for a drink at an Irish pub and some chocolate from Geridelli.  It was early in the morning on a Thursday and no one was in Gerridelli square.  It was pleasant; everything glowed.  After another beer at Andy’s Dean talked me into coming and staying with him for a while.  He needed some help at the newspaper and offered free rent and some money.  I went for it on the condition that we drive down the long way, on highway one and stop off a few places, make of day of it.  He agreed and we blew out of town around eleven.  We had lunch in downtown Santa Cruz and went swimming at the nude beach just north of there.  It was a beautiful June day on the coast.  Seagulls circled low over the kelp beds and the sun was bright and warm without being hot.  We ate sandwiches in silence with the voracious hunger of the hungover souls.  Breakfast seemed like years ago.
From Santa Cruz down to Nepenthe we talked at length about Dean’ plan to prostitute himself which he had turned around so many times in his head that he no longer saw it as that.  At most he was willing to concede that it was opportunistic, but didn’t see any real harm in it.  I assured him that it was indeed harmful and would only tie him down to those that he was indebted to.  I know Dean and I knew that he was not that mercenary; even if he had convinced himself that he was it would have faded eventually leaving him high and dry.  I consented to working at the newspaper for a while to cheer him up.  In Nepenthe we had dinner and walked along the bluffs watching the sea otters out in the kelp beds.  The sunset was typical California beautiful, gilded light that slowly worked its way through the color spectrum from the first rays of orange then to fiery red and finally gentle purple hues that gave way to the blue green cover of darkness.  Just south of Big Sur we cut over to the 101.  
I’m not sure how we got on the subject, but we were soon talking about Rick.  To say he was a friend would have been hyperbole, to say he was an enemy wouldn’t be accurate either.  Rick was just kind of there.  And then one day he wasn’t.  He was one of those people that just kind of shows up without warning, without rhyme or reason, but he was there.  He became the butt of most of our jokes; the biggest and best of which was supplied by his own so-called girlfriend.  Her name was never worth committing to memory, but I do remember that night at the bar when she let it slip that Rick had a misshapen penis.  Actually she didn’t just let it slip; she seemed to get a perverse little pleasure out of telling us that.
 “Rick probably wore tighty-whiteys until he was seventeen.”  Dean had no respect for Rick; I couldn’t blame him.  Rick was nice enough, but there was something about his ignorant spoiled approach to the world that had grown increasingly repulsive over the years.  
	I started laughing, “actually he still wears them now.”
	“Are you serious?  Did he ever have a girlfriend?”
	“Not since I knew him, not until her anyway.”
	“So that’s why he puts up with her…”
	“whadya mean?”
	“I’m sorry she’s just foul… I mean Rick’s not a bad looking guy.”
	“He’s kind of goofy though.”
	“Ya.  I guess, but she’s gross, have you seen her face?”  It was a regretible reality that Rick must have faced every night when he climbed in bed.  She was hideous.  I used to wonder what he said to himself in the mirror when he confronted the fact that this was not the ideal woman that will be on the cover of magazines… probably he was consoled by the fact that she was willing to put out.  With Rick’s rudementary grasp of the sexual act she was probably the best thing that could have happened to him because she was very likely the only person willing to show him the ropes.
	“Which way do you think it curves?”  
	“You know its thoughts like that that I wish weren’t forced into my brain.  I have this thing where if you say it I see it and there I am now its right there, his cock is in my brain, you put the guy’s cock in my brain….. I would guess its to the left.”
	“Really I was thinking right, you know cause of the tighty-whiteys…”	
	“No well I don’t know maybe but most guys hang to the left.  In my experience”
	“I know, but I’m assuming he was a freak of nature all the way around you know?”
	“I can see your point, but I mean have you ever met a righty?  I mean I suppose there are righties out there but I believe they are the minority.  I’m not sure why I believe that; I think I read it somewhere.”
	“What do you read?”  Dean was sitting up wide eyed.
	“Oh you know The Lefty Times, it the official journal of the Lefty Alliance, a loosely organized federation of men dedicated to service of Lefty Cause.”
	“The left Nut Cause?”
	“Ya we take stands of issues that are important to the lefty voters and represent their interests in Congress.  We’re actually going to have a table at Woodstock this year and MTV is putting out spot on right after total request live.”
	Dean picked it up too and soonwe had constructed our own plans for world domination based somehow on the fact that if your cock hangs to the right there is something fundamentally wrong with you.  I reeled it out like a politician or political consultant —a door to door whore in another universe.  We switched it up after conquest, we instituted a new means of government, instead of voting for politicians they were forced to go door to door and perform for voters.  Whatever sexually act the voter desired they had to go through with to get the vote.  Then the voters picked their favorite and who became THE MOST EXAULTED COCKSUCKER as we renamed the office of president.  It fell apart there and Dean went back to sleep.
	I was left alone in this universe where ideas rule and sex is relegated to fulfilling basic mammalian urges.  Here and there a handful experiment a little with tantra and Kundalina techniques.  A desiple of reich and a fan of de Sade lurk around the edges of brains that lurk around the edges of bodies, but for the most part its hidden amongst ten maybe twenty friends and confdants to whom we dare share the “intimate” details of our sex lives.  The thought depressed me and by the time I got to Dean’s apartment I was morbid.  I flopped on the couch and fell asleep without word.  Dream it off someone once told me; so I did.