JOURNAL ENTRY, APRIL 1975: When you told me your new friends knew who you “really” were, I didn’t know what to think, but from the moment I arrived, you seemed so confident and happy that it felt like my wishes for you, after all these years, had been granted. But Squirrel, if it’s true you’re so liberated from your past that posing for artists is “no big deal,” why am I still not allowed to take your picture or to meet these friends?

Thank you for showing me your city. In the back of my mind, I thought I knew what to expect, but Los Angeles is quite different from San Francisco. There’s a hardness beneath its surface that scares me a little, but also an excitement and a sense of freedom, a feeling that important things are happening. I hadn’t heard of skateboarding before you took me to Bicknell Hill, but I’ll never forget the feeling of watching those boys speeding down that asphalt slope. Passion manifests in such a beautiful variety of forms.

Considering that when I was twenty, I wasn’t on speaking terms with my mother, perhaps it’s a victory that you tolerated a visit from yours, but you revealed so little of yourself that I couldn’t help wondering if you wanted me there at all. Certainly you’re old enough to live how you like. What breaks my heart is that you don’t think you can—or just don’t want to—share the details of that life with me.

111. Sam Decker with an undeveloped film cartridge containing photographs of his friend Private Kevin Conway, Cleveland, 1975

LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, JUNE 1975: According to Mother, who, since last Christmas, has made a Sunday habit of asking Sam to dinner and then interrogating me about him once he’s gone, Sam hasn’t asked me to marry him because I haven’t been trying hard enough. When I tell her that Sam and I are simply good friends, she smiles and offers to treat me to a makeover. In truth, I feel closer to Sam in the darkroom than I ever felt to Charles or Ken. It’s both wildly different and at the same time exactly what I imagined when I began writing letters to the boy whose photographs I fell in love with at seventeen. I’m no longer in love with Sam’s work, and I suppose I was never in love with the man, but what we do in the darkroom goes deeper than either of those.

The portrait wouldn’t have happened if Sam hadn’t asked me to grab us some pop, then told me where in his refrigerator to find it. The film canister blocked my hand’s path. Sam must have known I’d be curious about that single undeveloped roll, but I understood him well enough not to ask questions when I returned with our drinks. Instead I simply handed him the film canister, then snapped the shutter as he spoke.