Downtown’s the province of the drunk (the ones who lack what my mother has, someone to shelter them) and the destitute. Of course there’s a gay life there, blossoming after dark, but I don’t know it. Maybe it is Petula’s promised place, but the scales on my eyes keep me from seeing. I don’t know how to see, and would be terrified if I did. Though I am perfectly clear, deep in myself, about my wishes, I can’t imagine translating them into action. Afraid of being seen, of seeing myself as I am, I spend most of my time somewhere above my body, at a remove from desire; I will not acknowledge what I know. Alone in my room it’s another story: I can sink into autoeroticism as into the warmest and most thrilling of seas, give myself over entirely to the delights of flesh. And even though I don’t think my body beautiful, it is capable of such absorbing elation, of occupying me entirely.

Then I button myself up, stuff pleasure back down in its place, become the head on a stem I am, floating above my flesh, deeply disloyal to my body, and go—well, not downtown, but to Fourth Avenue.

Fourth Avenue’s a strip of low storefronts near the university, and here cultural change has taken on its visible, public form: retail. Here’s a bookstore called the Hungry Eye, which has so few books that they are displayed face-out, singly, on wide shelves: Ginsberg, Krishnamurti, Anaïs Nin, slender volumes of surrealist verse illustrated by haunting collages, Whole Earth Catalogues and back-to-the-land handbooks and heaps of pamphlets and newsletters and homemade books with swirling shapes on their covers, a visual meltdown frequently involving smoke, mushrooms, wizards, and Volkswagens—the signature vehicle of the era. Later, on acid, I’ll ride over the Rincon Mountains in my friend Dino Gordon’s yellow Volkswagen and actually hear the vibrations of the car perform Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, the entire thing, while I lie in the back seat and watch the desert sky through the lovely biomorphic shapes of the Beetle’s windows.

But I get ahead of myself. I haven’t discovered drugs yet, though they are one of the determinants of Fourth Avenue culture. Why else does the bookstore offer prisms and kaleidoscopes, and little cubes of colored plastic which serve as the stash boxes of choice? In the Hungry Eye I read the poems of Federico García Lorca for the first time: Verde, que te quiero verde. The language itself seems saturated in color, better than the bright boxes, a deep coppery cistern verdigris: Green, I want you green. Sensuous and mysteriously exact, translated from Spanish of course, but somehow not translatable into everyday speech: evidence of possibility.