When I was going to San Francisco State, I was living in the Mission District. There used to be a coffee house called the Bronze Angel where I hung out a lot, reading, and filling notebooks with all kinds of strange writings.

This would have been 1973 or 1974, since I was a sophomore then. Technically I was a pre-med student, but what I really wanted to be was a writer. However in my usual perverse way, I was assiduously staying away from all courses in the English Department, especially creative writing classes. I put in a minimal amount of time on the courses I was actually taking --- zoology, chemistry, calculus, the normal pre-med stuff. (Technically, I intended to declare my major as zoology when I got to be a junior the next year.) For the most part, though, I spent my time reading philosophy. I'd tried Sartre, but in my opinion he was rather jejune. (And who was I to be calling Sartre jejune? Well, I didn't let my youth or relative ignorance get in the way of being very emphatic in my judgements.) Recently I'd been reading Nietzsche, who seemed to really speak to me. But I'd also suddenly become interested in Wittgenstein.

And from time to time, I would try to get started on the first chapter of my novel. I didn't know very much about what this novel would turn into, except that it was about a painter in Paris. I'd never been to Paris and my knowledge of art was miminal --- I could hardly distinguish Degas from Cezanne --- but looking at it in retrospect, I realize now that I wanted was to write about a man who spends a lot of time looking at naked women.

Naked women were another subject I didn't have much experience in. This was 1973, the Seventies were just coming into their prime, it was the time of the Sexual Revolution (although those of us on the front lines wouldn't realize that until Newsweek told us a few years later). And here I was with a girl friend who was a sexual reactionary. A counter-revolutionary. For me, it was par for the course.

And she wanted to break up with me. I should have been glad to see her go, I now realize, but for me up to that time, girl friends had been few and far between. I'd put in a lot of effort with this woman (although back in those days I would never have used the word ``woman,'' even though the feminist movement of the Seventies was already going strong by that point). I'd finally reached the ``You won't respect me in the morning'' stage in our relationship, and I didn't want to start back at the beginning with someone new.

I was sitting there in the Bronze Angel trying to write a letter that would straighten things out between us. So far, I must have had about ten drafts sitting underneath my coffee cup. The problem was that I wanted to make things all right between us again, but without owning up to the fact that I'd been a total asshole, and my talents at creative writing just weren't equal to the task. I had a letter about half finished now that I thought was pretty masterful, though.

That was when the older couple arrived. Al and Virginia, as I would later know them. Of course at that point I didn't know them from Adam & Eve. I noticed them right away, though. Everyone did. You couldn't help it, considering how loudly they were arguing.

The woman was dressed strikingly. She fit my conception of what an artist would look like. She was wearing high-heeled boots that came up a little above her ankle, and black pants --- what people used to call toreador pants. Not slacks, pants. And a white frilly shirt. If I call it a Cyrano de Bergerac shirt, you may get the idea. And a dark blue bandanna tied around her neck.

She didn't really belong in the Seventies, despite the well known sartorial extravagance of that era. The fashion of that time, shown so well in reruns of the Brady bunch, was clothing as costume. But this woman wasn't wearing a costume. Her clothing was extravagant, but it was a part of her. Where she really belonged was in Greenwich Village during the Twenties.

Everybody was rather conspicuously not staring at these two. Except me. I just let myself stare. I used to stare at women who attracted me a lot in those days. I more or less knew it was rude, but it was the only way I knew to try and initiate contact. Not that it ever worked, of course.

Except that this afternoon, contact was made. Virginia was looking around angrily and suddenly she saw me and there was a moment of surprise, almost as if I were someone she knew. She gave me a look of understanding, almost like a nod between two people that have agreed to a bargain. It totally flustered me, so that I looked back down at the letter I was writing. Her boy friend looked like the kind of guy who could be extremely jealous if he thought something was going on between the two of us. And, to tell the truth, I would have been intimidated even if he hadn't been there.

A minute later I decided that I'd go ahead and take my chances, and I looked back at her. But by then she wasn't looking in my direction any more. It seemed that I had lost my opportunity, if indeed there ever had been one.

Then a few minutes later she came over to the table I was sitting at. The movie section of the Examiner was on the table. It wasn't even mine, it had been there when I sat down, but I still thought it a bit nervy of her when she reached over and picked it up. In the process, she quickly ran one fingernail across my chest, and it was a minute after she'd walked away when I realized that she'd said hadn't actually been, ``Do you mind if I take this?'' Instead what she'd said was, ``Follow me when I go to the bathroom.''

When I looked at her now, she wasn't paying any attention to me at all. I was almost ready to believe that what had just happened had been a hallucination.

She and Al were arguing about whether to go see a movie. Finally, Al agreed on one.

``Wait,'' she said, ``I've got to take a piss.''

``Couldn't you have done that before? We don't have time for that now.''

``So what do want me to do, wet my pants while I'm in your car? Would that suit you? I'm not planning on having a major bowel movement or shooting up. Is it okay if I just piss, can you fit that into your schedule even though I forgot to make an appointment?''

In all this, she didn't look at me even once. The corridor to the restrooms was out of sight. Was she waiting for me back there? She didn't expect me to follow her into the ladies' room did she? Or more likely I'd just misunderstood what she said, or hallucinated it.

She took a long time. Finally, Al went back and started knocking on the door of the ladies' room. I was over my head in this situation, and I finally picked up my notebook and all the drafts of the letter to my girl friend and left.

I'd walked about thirty steps from the coffee house when she stepped out of a doorway, grabbed my arm, and said, ``Why the fuck didn't you do what I told you to?''