Then the owner looks at me, with my longish hair and work shirt, bell-bottoms, and boots. He’s probably thinking that there’s no way in hell I’ll ever become a big shot. To him, I probably look more like the kind of losers he takes advantage of in his factory.

The paterfamilias asks the owner if he’d mind if “his people” look through the books. That is my father’s way of letting the owner know he’s a pretty heavy dude himself, even though no such “people” exist. The owner says that’s fine, but that if the paterfamilias is serious, he shouldn’t dawdle, because “other parties” are interested.

In the car going home, I wonder what that meeting was really about. My father’s father — I guess that would make him my grandfather, but I never knew him — abandoned his family when Dad was four. My father grew up poor during the Depression. He worked his way through college, living and serving as the janitor in a boardinghouse, where he made twenty-five cents an hour. Is that why he’s become a bloodsucking capitalist blowhard? It wasn’t even like he and the owner of the junk-mail business were trying to outdo each other. It was more like they shared a willingness to swallow each other’s baloney. The paterfamilias and his make-believe “people.” The owner and his make-believe “other parties.”

Is this the life the paterfamilias wants for me? To be able to show off? To be able to acquire more material possessions than the next guy and let everyone know it? (Welcome to Capitalist Bullshit 101.)

It takes me more than an hour to walk home from Tinsley’s. As I trudge up the driveway, the garage door opens and there’s the paterfamilias in his fresh white tennis clothes, on his way to the club for his first match of the day. He tosses his tennis bag into the MG, then turns and sees me. Guess it’s obvious I’m coming back from a long night out. I nod as I go by. He nods in return. Ships passing in bright daylight.

Sunday, August 3

8/3/69

Dear Robin,

This is probably the sixth time I’ve started this letter. Each time I get about this far and don’t like what I’ve written and tear it up. But this time I’ve gotten this far and haven’t torn it up. Look, I’ve gotten a little farther. And now even farther. Hey, look, it’s a paragraph.