After graduation I had it firmly in my mind that I was going to be a poet, and how could I be that without going to Paris, France, like Gertrude Stein. I’d read her book Three Lives as well as a long Amarillo Gazette insert on her when she died in ’46. I would obey my father’s plea and go to that city for my education. Only who’s to say a university is the sole place to get learning? I would enroll in one or two of those literary salons and there’d be no stopping my pencil then. To make this all float out of the airy realms of my head down to the hard world beneath my feet, I took a night job behind the counter of American Flyers Tenpin Bowling at the corner of Mendez and Texarkana, near Schnabel Park. I rented out shoes to the boys from Lackland Air Base, I drank Coca Colas, studied the French book I bought second-hand, and planned for Paris.

Mama and Gram-to whom I told nothing-were sufficiently worried; I wasn’t dating near enough. So once every five or six weeks, I’d go to the show with one of my regular customers. Two or three of the fellas I liked well enough. None of them were real amorous on Lovesome Kate, which is how they knew I wanted it. My favorite was a boy my age at the time-nineteen, I believe. His real name was Jacob Goldstein, one of the only Jews in San Antone, but he went by the name of Jack Gold, which didn’t suit him at all because he was pale, short, and thin with wrists that were a sight loose in the joint. He wore glasses and when he came to American Flyers three nights a week, it wasn’t to bowl or shoot billiards, it was to drink Cokes and read war books, preferably by Ernie Pyle.

He was my favorite because he spoke less than I did. I think one night he tried to kiss me as we walked home from a picture show. My memory is hazy on that one. I do remember his hand on my shoulder as we walked, however. Walking along like that, you would have thought I was a frail creature needing advice, or else he was working towards a pivoting, spin-on-his-toes kiss on the lips. In the summer of ’48 he stopped coming into American Flyers and I heard later he’d hitchhiked out to one of the other bases in town and signed up.