We moved into a wooden rambler on Poirier Street. The house wasn’t quite in Berkeley, but it was right across the Oakland border, with the artists and the full-time trippers. The summer of love had already gone stale. Kennedy died and then King died, the other Kennedy died, little Bobby!, and everyone felt a little lost. People were doing drugs for different reasons than they’d done them before.

The kid who ran the rooming house called himself Peter Pan. He sold drugs all over East Bay. Not just hash or acid, either, though I liked both of these and got my first dose of each from the jars lined on the rim of his bathtub, their glass the color of seawater.

Arthur and I dropped tabs in Tilden Park. He said, Put your torso against my torso, and his voice sounded like it was coming from beneath the grass. I tried to put our imagined hours on one side and our real ones on the other. Was there an earthquake so small we might have dreamed it? Was there a crow picking out the eyes of a squirrel? Did we throw stones at it? Did we kill it? Did we see its soul rising? It’s a sputtering inside you when everything gets rearranged. It’s amazing to share it with another person.

Peter P. was frying bigger fish, too. He was helping folks run off the rough end of the sixties and jump straight into harder stuff. Guys came back from the war and couldn’t remember who they’d been before they started burning villages. One guy stumbled into our kitchen with a bloody gash down his arm. He’d broken one of our windows. He handed Peter P. a dirty twenty with the corner ripped off. “You fucker,” he said. “Nearly killed myself for the cash.”

Peter P. was holding a beer in one hand and a tuna sandwich in the other. He gave this man a little plastic Baggie. “Hey now,” he said. “You got to stitch yourself up.”

That night I told Arthur I wanted us to move out. “He’s killing people,” I said. I hadn’t known what it looked like when your body needed something that badly.

“Baby girl,” Arthur told me. “You don’t know what’s what.”

I felt lonelier with him than I’d ever felt by myself. At home, at least, I’d thought that leaving home would bring me somewhere better.

Arthur liked fucking in all kinds of places: on our little tar-and-gravel rooftop, in the hallway closet, in the bathtub. “This is just fine,” he said, propping me up on the kitchen table. “A real fine-grained wood.” I got the sense that he was homesick for his wife and all their nice things. One time in the bath I saw the door cracked open. Peter P. was standing there, watching.