blond hair; afghan coat making him into some wild mountain
creature; prominent, pointed, narrow, but graceful nose; a
laugh that went the distance from deep chuckle to shrill hysteria, and back each calibrated niche of possibility, and walls shivered.
It was amidst hashish and rock ’n’ roll.
The youth gathered in huge buildings set aside for dissipation. Inside we were indulged. The huge rooms were painted garish colors. There were garish murals. Political and cultural
79
radicals were kept inside, tamed, self-important, it was the
revolution: big black balls of hashish and rock ’n’ roll.
Inside there was this figure of a man, all brassy on the outside, and inside impotent and ready to die.
I took his life in my hands to save him. I took his face in my
hands, I kissed him. I took his body to save him from despair.
A suffering man: a compassionate woman: the impersonal love
of one human for another, sex the vehicle of redemption: you
hear about it all the time. Isn’t that what we are supposed to
do?
*
It doesn’t matter where it was, but it was there, in a huge mass
of rooms painted in glaring colors: rock music blaring, often
live, old-time porno films— Santa coming down a chimney—
projected on the walls, boys throwing huge balls of hashish
across the room, playing catch. Cigarettes were rolled from
loose tobacco in papers: so was grass: so was a potent mixture
of hashish and tobacco, what I liked. I got good at it. You put
together three cigarette papers with spit and rolled a little filter
from a match cover, just a piece of it, and put down a layer of
loose tobacco, and then you heated the hash over a lit match
until it got all soft and crumbly, and then you crumbled it
between your fingers until there was a nice, thick layer of it
over the tobacco, and you sort of mixed them together gently
with your fingers, and then you rolled it up, so that it was
narrow on the end with the filter and wider at the bottom, and
with a match, usually burnt, you packed the mixture in the
papers at the bottom, and brought the papers together and
closed it up. Then you lit it and smoked. It went round and
round.
The boys had long, long hair. There were only a few junkies,
a little hard dope, not a lot of stealing, very congenial: music:
paint: philosophy. There were philosophers everywhere and
artistes. One was going to destroy the museum system by
putting his paintings out on the sidewalk free for people to see.
I met him my first afternoon in the strange new place. He was
cheerful about destroying the museum system. They were all
cheerful, these energetic talkers of revolution. One spent hours
discussing the history of failed youth movements in Europe: he
had been in them all, never aged, a foot soldier from city to
80
