“What do you want?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said.

He was always that way. He never knew what he wanted. Sometimes I thought he was pretty deep because he never knew, because sometimes I don’t know what I want. But sometimes I thought he was square and pretty stupid. Like for instance the way he wouldn’t dress in the morning; he’d just mope around in his underwear all day as if he was trying to make up his mind whether he wanted to put clothes on or not before it was time to go to bed again. Sometimes he could be really weird, like he was being that night. I looked at him. “Look,” I said. “That Newport thing was crap anyway. We should’ve left the crowd and cut out on our own, up to one of the beaches or something.”

“Yeah,” said Jack.

He was laying on the floor with his hands behind his head and he was looking up at the way the lovebeads dangled from the string on the light. I felt bad because it had been my decision to come back so soon.

“You sure you don’t want some pussy?” I asked him.

“I’m sure I don’t want some pussy,” he said.

“Want to turn on?”

“No.”

“Want to go to bed?”

Jack just looked up at the lovebeads. Finally he got up and went over to the box and got a couple of beers. We sat drinking them.

Now I know Jack, mind you, and I knew that when he didn’t know what it was he wanted he would always think about it over beer. We had been in the place two years together and I had got used to the way he was. Sometimes, for no reason at all, he would get moody and just flake out. We would be laughing about something or we would have a couple of broads over and I would look up all at once and Jack would be turned off, completely. Now, I tend to mind my own business and I usually do a good job of it, but seeing him all uptight or flaked out or whatever he was, kind of bothered me. I remembered one time he went away, just before he finally quit school for good. Jack had been in Philosophy and he used to really think about it and read a lot of it before he saw where it was at, and put it down. I remember seeing him there, at his desk, not even turning the pages of his book or not even smiling when I was talking funny about some far-out cat we both knew who was trying to be hip. It was real funny. But Jack wasn’t listening to me. I stopped talking for a few minutes and he never even noticed it. Then I said:

“Hey, man, where are you?”