She lay there sound asleep with her wanderings over and mine just beginning. I have been thinking about this simple event for years now. It stays with me and repeats itself over and over again like a pale marble movie.

Partners

I like to sit in the cheap theatres of America where people live and die with Elizabethan manners while watching the movies. There is a theatre down on Market Street where I can see four movies for a dollar. I really don’t care how good they are either. I’m not a critic. I just like to watch movies. Their presence on the screen is enough for me.

The theatre is filled with black people, hippies, senior citizens, soldiers, sailors and the innocent people who talk to the movies because the movies are just as real as anything else that has ever happened to them.

‘No! No! Get back in the car, Clyde. Oh, God, they’re killing Bonnie!’

I am the poet-in-residence at these theatres but I don’t plan on getting a Guggenheim for it.

Once I went into the theatre at six o’clock in the evening and got out at one o’clock in the morning. At seven I crossed my legs and they stayed that way until ten and I never did stand up.

In other words, I am not an art film fan. I do not care to be aesthetically tickled in a fancy theatre surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I can’t afford it.

I was sitting in a two-pictures-for-seventy-five-cents theatre called the Times in North Beach last month and there was a cartoon about a chicken and a dog.

The dog was trying to get some sleep and the chicken was keeping him awake and what followed was a series of adventures that always ended up in cartoon mayhem.

There was a man sitting next to me.

He was WHITEWHITEWHITE: fat, about fifty years old, balding sort of and his face was completely minus any human sensitivity.

His baggy no-style clothes covered him like the banner of a defeated country and he looked as if the only mail he had ever gotten in his life were bills.

Just then the dog in the cartoon let go with a huge yawn because the chicken was still keeping him awake and before the dog had finished yawning, the man next to me started yawning, so that the dog in the cartoon and the man, this living human being, were yawning together, partners in America.

Getting to Know Each Other

She hates hotel rooms. It’s like a Shakespearean sonnet. I mean, the childwoman or Lolita thing. It’s a classic form:

She hates hotel rooms. It’s the light in the morning that really bothers her. She doesn’t like to wake up surrounded by that kind of light.