My year zero: 1967. Bengalis on the street selling shawls with magical symbols, buskers dressed in Elizabethan costumes, plastic bracelets from Biba, Indian saris that never fit me right and that I ended up mailing to Tali, who was with Juan now but I didn’t care, or I was a little jealous but I understood: he and I needed separate lives so we could find each other again. The boutiques on Walton Street, the thigh-high boots with miniskirts, which were hard for me to wear because you have to have very thin legs for them to look good. A designer on Carnaby Street explained the best options for my body type and style: long skirts or wide-legged pants with high heels, boas, bronze earrings, hair teased when it went limp in the humidity. I bought earrings shaped like pentagrams, big and black, from a girl on the street. I learned to draw the sigils of the Key of Solomon to perfection. I’d started doing them when I was very young, but in London, the Order perfected my technique. I didn’t use the traditional materials; instead, I used chalk. Sometimes blood. Time seemed infinite. I drove my Mustang to Cambridge, went to classes, which I juggled along with the ones at the Warburg, and there were still hours left over for magic and clothes and exploring. Time, suddenly, had stretched out. I knew that’s how it would be: it was what I’d come looking for. The pasta at Alvaro’s place when we were very hungry. Baghdad House, the restaurant where they played maqam music and people smoked hash out in the open. Going with Stephen to King’s Road, where my favorite dress shop was. The 7½ Club, where I saw Jimi Hendrix play in a basement so stifling and smoke-filled that the acid closed off my throat and made me cry. The incredible shows at the Marquee. We planned our acid trips to predictable places: the Uffington White Horse, which we stared at from a distance for hours, its stylized chalk shape that was so incredibly minimalistic; the neolithic stones at Avebury, Glastonbury, and Stonehenge, where we always encountered hippies and travelers and the hundreds of neopagans and mystics who populated the country: once, we ran into a “druid” ceremony and my girlfriend Laura, who was tripping and drunk, laughed so hard they kicked us out. You don’t know anything!, she shouted at them. If you only knew!, and Stephen covered her mouth because if Florence found out we were going around insinuating our secret, the punishment could be serious. I liked going to Stonehenge: a lot of musicians visited the circle, and there was nothing I liked more than music. Some of them brought guitars and it was beautiful to sing with them wrapped in a jacket of Afghan leather, smoking hashish. Our outings almost always included Edward James’s house in West Sussex, that surrealist mansion with its forest and its hunting preserve. Years later, Tali would often ask me how we managed to drive while high. How did I manage to study in those conditions? The truth is that you can function under the influence of drugs a lot better than people think, plus, I was so young I could wander around on acid all day, and the next attend several classes and study as many hours as I needed to. We had enviable stamina.