Jeffrey is the only boy in our high-school class who has already got a moustache. We all envy him. Sometimes he lets us touch it. Sometimes he lets me buy lunch for him. Then we hang around together after school. When I make Jeffrey laugh he slaps me on the back very hard. I like it. I try to make him laugh all the time. At graduation time he lets me autograph his yearbook. I use a whole page for a poem I write on friendship. Then the other kids come to autograph the book and see the poem and begin to look at me. I see them talking and laughing in the corners and Jeffrey is embarrassed and laughs too. The teacher knows about it and comes over to me and says, “Never mind, that’s a good poem,” but it does not help. I do not have anything to say to him. That last week of school I begin to find written on my desk the kind of words they put above the toilets in men’s rooms of bus stations.

“WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?” I asked Betty over the telephone. It was 2:00 A.M.

“I got tied up,” she said.

“Can you still come?”

“It’s too late.”

“You could have called.”

“I know,” she said. “I guess I’m no good for you.”

I could not lose her tonight and was prepared to lie relentlessly just to have her there that one night. “You’re too good for me. Come on over.”

“Look,” she said. “It’s late. We can have a drink some other time. Let’s both just get some sleep.”

“We could do that together.”

“I’m tired. And I’m sorry that I didn’t call or come but I just didn’t. Can’t you accept that?”

“Goodbye,” I said and pushed down the button.

It is very hard to push down a button that way when that little, little expenditure of strength cuts off forever the source of what has kept me from touching Alfred Bowles or from being on the streets like him, a hunter, with different, desperate eyes, reserved for the night, looking into back alleys and risking every degradation to solicit strangers in search of an affirmation of what he thought was himself. I lay back on my bed and thought of him, where he was now, whether he was still crying and to whom, or on what hard ear his pleas were falling. I thought of what must be his deep determination to get whatever it was he wanted, his desperate acceptance of whatever a hustler demanded for his company, his endurance of blows and laughs and insinuations, all for what? I had the feeling that I might have gone into Alfred’s arms earlier and that would have been all he really wanted, even though he might have tried to do something else, perhaps for no other reason than because he was expected to.