Waldo’s apartment was in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood Bill’s mother would have called the wrong side of the tracks. It sometimes seemed to Bill that its noisy, crowded streets were composed entirely of gay bars and pizza joints. In back alleys, garbage was piled against the chain-link fences topped with barbed wire that ran along the ground floors of apartment buildings. The buildings themselves, three or four stories high, jostled together cheek to jowl. Whether their façades were wood or brick or plaster, they were equally filthy, the bottom-floor windows barred and the entrances plastered with warnings and advisories about drugs and loitering. Incongruously, above these same entrances he would sometimes see a stone scroll inscribed with a name—The Windsor Arms, The Adagio, The Norma—harkening back to the 1920s or ’30s when their builders envisioned a sedate, tree-lined district of sophisticated urban dwellers.

The shabby Tenderloin burst with life. People shouted down from third-floor windows, lovers or drunks quarreled loudly in the street and anti-war posters peeled from the sides of walls. In little corner stores that reeked of insecticide the Chinese owners sold single cans of beer to derelicts in rags. The streets, crisscrossed by overhead electrical wires, were slowly pulverized by the incessant flow of cars and delivery trucks and buses. Bums and hippies, buskers, men in suits, whores in miniskirts and bigwigs, off-duty MUNI drivers, anxious-eyed tourists, transvestites, boy prostitutes stroking their bejeaned crotches, brown-skinned children clutching the hands of their pregnant young mothers, Franciscans in long brown habits with rope belts, saffron-robed, shaved headed Buddhist monks, the crazy woman in her wheelchair and Kabuki makeup screaming on the corner, the Bible-thumping black street preacher with a rhinestone studded pectoral cross, the girl in a fringed leather jacket hawking the Berkeley Barb, and ordinary people with weary faces trudging home to their tiny apartments on tired feet; these were the people Bill encountered whenever he left the apartment.

In his first few weeks, this urban chaos terrified him because he had no point of reference for it. Eden Plains was a town of ten thousand people from working-class white families, each with its two- or three-bedroom tract house and a summer cottage in Michigan. The fathers worked at the Ford factory and complained about the union. The mothers were housewives who attended PTA meetings. No one locked their door at night. Once or twice a year, the dads might take the boys to a Cubs game at Wrigley or Soldier Field to see the Bears. Bill’s life in Eden Plains was as hermetic and predictable as life at a monastery but now he been turned out into the world, noisy, unpredictable, and evidently indifferent to whether he sank or swam.