Before I went to Tallahassee I drove a car to Long Island for a drive-away service. I visited Jack and Karol up there. They were living in an apartment in Weehawken, New Jersey, across the river from New York City.

Their apartment had a Murphy bed and a cold-water sink in it, but no toilet. They washed their dishes in and shared a bathroom with two other couples on the third floor.

Jack had finished up at the Art Students League and was taking a job as a lineman with ConEd, although he hadn't started work yet, and had two weeks to show me around. He had worked for Florida Power and Light, at home. Karol was an English major at Farleigh-Dickinson University.

I met Jack somewhere and he rode out to Long Island with me, to deliver the car, then we took the train back to where he'd met me, and we drove to Weehawken.

On the way out, we drove through The Springs, where Jackson Pollock lived, and died. I thought the movie Ed Harris directed, Pollock, showed his life out there pretty well. I loved the scene where he was riding home with a case of beer on his bicycle handlebars and a truck of locals passes him, and says, "Hi, Jackson," and he waves--he is drinking a beer--crashes his bike, and the case of beer spills, bottles breaking and spraying beer all over, and Pollock, stupefied, looks befuddled. I could just picture the locals laughing at him.

Jack took me by the League and I met his old instructors, maybe a couple of old classmates.

We went to galleries, the studios of his painter friends, museums.

The Museum of Modern Art was having a Jackson Pollock retrospective. Seeing all those huge canvases assembled under one roof was an occasion, and standing six feet in front of one was different from seeing a picture of it in a magazine, or an art book.

The only comparable sight I have seen was in Chicago at the Monet show, where, just before you debouched into the gift shop full of expensive Monet spin-off merchandise, you came into the room with the water lily paintings on all the walls.

We went to the Metropolitan Museum several times. I never got tired of looking at the Chinese porcelains, with the celadon glaze.

The only comparable experience was digging up an Archaic celt made of greenstone, that looked like a piece of jade coming up under my trowel.

We went to see a triple-feature, with La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, and The Red Desert, Anita Ekberg shooting her bow and arrow at the paparazzo, we went to see The Homecoming on Broadway. Maybe I saw Accident, too. Harold Pinter wrote that.

Harold Pinter is now a Nobel Laureate. Jack Neff is dead. I don't know how to get in touch with Karol. I am an unemployed technical writer, running slowly out of money. My 50th high school class reunion coming up next year.

I loved New York City.

We ate at the Carnegie Deli, I ate in a bar prizefight managers hung out in. Jack and I had garlic soup in a Spanish restaurant.

I vowed to come back when I was sent for. Come back in triumph, so to speak. Like a writer who had been in exile his whole career, finally being recognized by the elite, the literati, Zora Neale Hurston called the cultural elite of the Harlem Renaissance the niggerati, ended up buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. Like Mozart.

Potter's Field.

Oh, yea, we went to Slug's, in the East Village, to hear Yusef Lateef.

We were tolerated.

I didn't feel comfortable there.

I felt unwelcome.

I guess that sums up the sexual revolution, for me. I got laid once a pay period, overseas, in the Air Force, and not at all, when I was stationed stateside, or was a civilian.

I was eight years behind my high school class, or eight years ahead of the class I would be joining at FSU, if you count the reading, and letter-writing I had been doing, as autodidact education.

It was the College of Hard Knocks, I guess.

I'd get laid a couple of times at FSU--two times--before Brenda and I became an item.

I'd meet Brenda at FSU.

We'd become an item.

Charles Bukowski begins Women,

I was 50 years old and hadn't been to bed with a woman for four years. I had no women friends. I looked at them as I passed them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without yearning and with a sense of futility. I masturbated regularly, but the idea of having a relationship with a woman--even on non-sexual terms--was beyond my imagination.

I was 26 and perfectly normal, for a shy person, and bookworm. I just hadn't met my soul-mate yet.