Capsule Summary. In 1974 I was going to San Francisco State and majoring in pre-med and trying to fit myself into a life that I didn't belong in at all. I had a girlfriend Leslie who wouldn't sleep with and who wanted me to be somebody very different from who I was. She kept threatening to break up because I kept screwing up, at least from her point of view. I should have just let her go. I didn't even like her all that much. But she was willing to be my girlfriend, and in my experience up till then that was pretty unusual.

One afternoon I met an older woman named Virginia in a coffee shop. She looked like an artist, was obviously bohemian and very conventional, and she fascinated me. We ditched her boy friend and went to a bar where we both drank quite a bit, something I wasn't used to at all. She wanted me to come to New York and live with her in Greenwich Village. She claimed that she could introduce me to writers and editors and publishers, and that I could very quickly be very successful there. And I was almost ready to go with her. But then she got into a big fight in the bar and the police were called and we almost got arrested.

I had a crucial date with Leslie that evening and I needed to get away, but Virginia was in hysterics and kept insisting that I needed to take care of her, and even though I had finally realized that she was pretty much completely crazy, I just couldn't bring myself to just abandon her. So I tried taking her to some friends of hers, but we wound up just having to go one place and another. And finally it just all fell apart. I just totally lost it, and then she started taking care of me. And finally we did make it to some friends of hers, and they took us both in for the night. At the end, it was just an experience in total chaos, but the thing was, at that point I realized what I should have known long before, that I just couldn't go on with the life I'd been trying to live.

God, this is horrible! I can't do this! There's not enough time any more! I can't write that fast! I can't write at all, in fact. This is crazy wanting to be a writer, all my life I've just been beating my head against the wall. I have never been able to think up stories. I'm not creative. I have no imagination.

I have no words for this fucking story. There's nothing here that really grabs me. This whole thing is all a big mistake. I can't do it.

Look, it just has to be a FIRST DRAFT. Just get something the fuck written. Okay if it has lots and lots wrong with it, if it's pointless, if it doesn't go anywhere, if it doesn't make sense. Give my fellow students lots of things to criticize. That's what they want to do, give them the chance, it will make them feel useful, intelligent.

Be generous. Turn in something bad. Give them a chance to feel smarter than me.

I met Virginia on a Sunday afternoon in the Peabody Bookstore in Baltimore when I was nineteen years old. I only spent one afternoon, and the following evening, with her, but I've never forgotten the experience. It was almost like a rite of passage. She helped shake a lot of things loose that would otherwise have burdened me for a much longer time.

When I remember the year 1959, what I think of is black. Just an enormous blackness, like a black fog that totally enveloped me. I've had lots of bad years since then, but nothing ever matched 1959 for pure black depression.

I was a sophomore at Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. Hopkins is, of course, an elite university, famous for its medical school. But most of the undergraduates at that time were studying engineering. To me, it was a grungy place full of guys carrying slide rules around. I was an engineering major like everybody else, but I was also taking the second year of classical Greek, which was one of the few courses I took even half seriously. I was enrolled for 19 units and regularly showed up for about half my classes. In my science and mathematics courses, I could usually learn all I needed on the night before an exam. My freshman year I'd had a straight 4.0 average, but last semester I'd got two B's, and now, in the spring, there was actually a risk that I might flunk my chemistry course, which ws Quantitative Analysis and which I despised.

What I actually wanted was to be a writer, but I wasn't taking any English courses at all, since I was sure that I didn't need anybody to teach me how to write, much less how to read. In high school, I'd written quite a bit. I'd always had a poem or story in the school literary magazine and always won at least one prize in the annual literary contest for high school students sponsored by the local newspaper. But at Hopkins, I wasn't managing to write at all. There just didn't seem to be any way of fitting it into my life. And none of the other guys in the dorm would even thinking of writing something that wasn't assigned for a class. For them, the idea of writing a short story was about as realistic as asking them to flap their wings and fly.

What I'd been doing more than anything else that spring was reading philosophy. For a while I'd been reading Sartre, and then I started on Nietzsche, who I liked quite a bit. What attracted me to Nietzsche was that he was a nihilist and rejected everything that the conventional world held sacred. Then I started on Wittgenstein. I don't think I understood much of what I read from any of these books. Mostly, Id just find a sentence here and there that seemed to be saying something really important. God knows, I'd never try looking at any of them these days without having the guidance of a course in the philosophy department. But back then, I thought I was invincible intellectually.

The dorm. That gets to the heart of why those two years at Hopkins are such a black memory for me. Hopkins at that time was a mens' school, as far as undergraduates were concerned. Almost all students lived either in the dorms or in one of the fraternity houses. I was, of course, much too much of an intellectual snob to join a fraternity, which in retrospect would have been the sensible thing to do. At least at the frat houses, they had parties. And there were women who came to the frat parties. There was a lot of drinking at those parties, with no concern about the fact that many of those present were under-age. And there were stories that sometimes women at those parties would get so drunk that one of frat members could take them upstairs and have sex with them.

Sex. For those of us living in the dorms, sex was mostly a mythical country, the subject of a multitude of unreliable reports. And even those who had had first-hand experience didn't seem to be able to adequately describe the territory.

This was the tail end of the Eisenhower years, and sex was for us somewhat like what drinking had been for an earlier generation and drugs would be for a later one. It was something unquestionably illicit, outside of marriage, of course. It was something constantly sought after, and almost never found, and fraught with all kinds of dangers, the most obvious being pregnancy. Birth control was unknown except for condoms, and those were kept under the counter at the drug store. And if one did get a girl pregnant, one would almost certainly be forced to marry her, a horrible fate to imagine. The danger of pregnancy was one of the main reasons that sex was wrong.

None of us in the dorm were in much danger, in any case. For us, the main opportunity to meet girls was at the monthly ``mixers'' at Goucher Teachers College. Goucher was nominally coed, but as a teachers college, its student body was overwhelmingly female. At the ``mixers,'' guys who were brave enough could ask a girl to dance to the music of Pat Boone and Rosemary Cloony.

And at one of those mixers that fall, I had actually managed to find a girlfriend. We'd had five dates so far. On one of them, I actually took her to a football game. In those years of the Eisenhower administration (may they never return!), that's what one actually did on dates. What's worse, Leslie had actually seemed to enjoy the game.

But what was most significant: we'd actually had sex! Or at least, I guess we had. We'd both been on the ground and there had been some attempt at insertion, and after that it wasn't exactly clear what had happened. Apparently I was no longer a virgin. I hoped so, in any case, because there didn't seem to be much hope of the experience recurring. Leslie would get angry if I even attempted to bring the subject up.

Mostly, my social life was pretty lonely. In the dorm, I felt like a complete misfit. My roommate was a baseball player and was very popular, and was not in our room very often, which suited me just fine.

One place I used to go to fairly often was about eight or ten blocks from campus. It was called the Peabody Bookstore, but even though it did have a bunch of shelves full of books at least thirty years old that nobody would ever want to steal, much less buy, what it actually was was a bar. It was rather famous, in fact, as the place where H.L. Mencken used to hang out. I suppose it had once been a speakeasy, disguised as a bookstore. But it was a small nothing place. There was a beat-up old upright piano, and on weekend evenings a pianist and violinist would play chamber music: Mozart, Schubert, whatever. I'd come in in the evening and drink a glass or two of port wine. It was the only drink I knew. I didn't like beer at all and I didn't drink often enough to try and find something I'd enjoy.

I'd become friends with some of the waiters and I discovered that nobody minded if I came in during the day and ordered a glass of wine and spent all afternoon there reading or working on assignments. I knew that there were a lot of famous writers who used to write in cafés, but I never managed to be any more successful trying to write fiction at the Peabody than back at home.

Jesus! 160 lines here, and the story hasn't even begun. Okay, okay, there's no turning back at this point. No starting over. Today I'm going to push straight through to the end, no matter what it's like.

But let's just try a little experiment.

Okay, so not counting the capsule summary and introductory cries of desperation, this is a little over three pages typeset double-spaced. That's much much much too long, but not as bad as I feared.

You know, the Peabody Bookstore is too small for this scene to work. Well, too bad! Nobody's likely to actually know and if they do, so much the worse!

It was Sunday afternoon. That was important, because Sunday afternoons at Hopkins were special. Sunday afternoon in the dining hall, dinner was early --- at four o'clock. And dinner was always southern-fried chicken, which in those days, before Colonel Sanders, was a lot bigger deal than it would be today. And to mark it as really special, on Sundays no student was admitted to the dining hall unless he was wearing a sports jacket and a tie.

But this Sunday was especially special, because my parents were coming for the Sunday dinner and Leslie was also coming, to meet my parents.

And now I was in the Peabody Bookstore, writing Leslie a letter. I used to write her letters all the time, long letters explaining my ideas about the world and about myself. On some level, even then, I realized that very little of what I wrote made any sense to her at all. But I wanted somebody in the world to understand me, and she was the only person available. I could have just put my letters into bottles and cast them adrift in the harbor instead. I guess that would have actually made more sense. Then there would have actually been some chance that one of them would be read by somebody who could understand it.

Leslie was always saying to me, ``Why can't you just be normal, like everybody else?'' I could never make her understand that I didn't want to be like everybody else.

I can't take this any further. It's just no good. I've got to start over again. Go back to an earlier version with Virginia on the first page.