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secretly hoping that Julie would take me back, that she’d fall into my embrace, and that we’d get married on the same day with Robert.
    I first met Bob in the New School for Social Research cafeteria in 1967. I was neurotic. I stayed in the Judson Church where, as a Jewish socialist atheist, they let me live in the tower.
    Bob had lived in two rooms with a hot plate on 14th street. He had an energy to him. Notes, address books, magazines poured out of the pockets of his jacket and raincoat. He wanted to be a director.
    We climbed up the fire escape of the church together to the tower, where I read him my poems and stories. He encouraged me and brought me candles.
    Bob had a way of looking at people. If you were suffering, he suspended any movement; he seemed to have put everything aside and was focusing only on you. There was pain in his look. Yet it was hard to catch him at it. For when you paused, stammering, his gaze seemed to shift to an inch over you, or around you, so that you did not become self-conscious. But you knew he was with you. When you were in control, he looked directly at you again.
    In winter of 1968 we would stand outside the New School, in the freezing snow and rain, exchanging phone numbers of girls and articles we liked by I. F. Stone, C. Wright Mills and Murray Kempton. One day he mentioned a girl he had met. Linda. I knew who she was: the fabulous blonde in my literature class who kept injecting the word “Revolution!” into literary discussions.
    It was the time of the Beatles; Abbie Hoffman stripping nude at Fillmore East; Paul Krassner’s youth; the Fuck You Bookstore on Avenue A tended by Ed Sanders; Jack Micheline, Ray Bremser, and Allen Ginsberg reading at the 9 Arts Coffee Gallery run by a sailor in a loft above ninth avenue and Forty-third street; Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan at the Gaslight on MacDougal.
    Bob was a part of that period—not me. I was too afraid. Bob loved it; in fact he never got over it. To this day a Tuli Kupferberg print is Bob’s Picasso. The drugs, all that fucking, all that wasted time—not that I wasn’t dying for sex. At midnight I left the tower and walked in the snow along MacDougal Street past the San Remo, where O’Neill had worked [and Bodenheim and Joe Gould had begged], to the Cafe Figaro, where the young bohemians hung out. I would sit down with my notebook, a pen, drink a double espresso. I waited. My pen started flying as I really gave it to my father, my mother, and several mean teachers. The waiter came by periodically. I waved him away. I pictured myself, the driven, melancholy, brooding poet with a tragic, inspired look, far above such paltry things as food and drink.
    At 4 A.M. one morning the waiter asked me if I wanted anything else. I looked up wearily, seeing myself doing it. “Can’t you see I’m working?” I said.
    At 5 A.M. he said, “Are you sure you don’t want anything else?”
    â€œPerfectly!”—I don’t remember if I added, “You fool,” or not.
    â€œGet out,” he said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œGet out.”
    â€œI’ll order something. How’s your prune danish?”
    â€œGet out.”
    I grabbed my things and, trembling a little, weaved my way down MacDougal Street. It was deserted, except for a man in a hallway who screamed again and again, “I don’t hate—nobody. I don’t hate—nobody.” The snow was falling. It seeped into my shoes. I felt a weariness and a sense of persecution. I felt good, and so very special. I walked into Washington Square Park, the snow falling. It was dawn.
    I leapt into the air.
    Then, in 1970, Bob rented a loft for himself and Linda. There was plenty of work space: an act of celebration after 14th Street. Space to make love, to work, to have rehearsals: light and air. Bookshelves everywhere, posters, records, productivity. I had always lived in one room. Bob’s bicycle was in