I’ve given up on San Francisco for now, but there’s still Fourth Avenue. At a combination clothing and record boutique, I’ve gotten a pair of silvery bell-bottom trousers, cuffed, subtly metallic, which I call my Flash Gordon pants. And then a pair of dull pink bell-bottoms, the color of bubble gum rubbed in ashes. Combine these with my thrift-store finds and my back-alley trash diving and I am beginning to achieve a look. I like jet beads, chokers, filigree rings in art nouveau swirls like the lettering on Alphonse Mucha posters, long scarves, satin, those ubiquitous Indian block prints that begin as bedspreads and wind up sewn in patches onto everything. A little patchouli oil, and look who you can be: a self-creation, playful, a little outrageous but very much of the moment, since I have been studying the moment very attentively. Liberating, these new clothes with their implicit message of freedom and experiment, expansiveness and liberality. I don’t mind when someone yells at me from a car, calls me a “hippie faggot.” They are, after all, talking about my clothes.

I may spend every afternoon in a smoky cloud of my own making, but at school I focus, at least in drama. I’ve been cast in Waiting for Godot and I pour myself into my part, Estragon: slapstick, melancholy, bitter but with the hopeless élan of a survivor. Bill plays Vladimir, and we execute our dark vaudeville routines with the expert timing of friends who know each other’s rhythms and patterns of speech exactly. My mother comes to the performance. “I didn’t understand it,” she says afterward, “but I understood it.”

When Sally gets out of jail for good, staying with us until she can afford a place of her own, we commence a new friendship, though in my aura of smoke and Beckett I must not be easy to know. My phrase of the hour is “far out.” I’m a blurry young man who’s doubtless a familiar type to her; she likes me but thinks, Boy, are you ever stoned.

With my new learner’s permit I drive her downtown to the old department store, and she makes her first purchase as a free woman, a pants suit of a truly forceful purple. She wears it when I drive her back downtown, in the evening, to the Santa Rita Hotel, and drop her off just outside. I like to watch her walk away, an emphatic violet presence under her red beehive hairdo, strolling into the shadow beneath the pink adobe archway that leads to a bar where a girl can always make a little money.