My life at that time was like this: I worked four nights a week at a coffeehouse as a waitress, the rest of the time I told myself I was writing a demonic play. “Souvenir,” it was called. In fact, I dressed as soon as I woke in the morning, trekked across the hall to the bathroom, and sat in the chaise for a few hours doodling on a pad of paper and sending smoke up through the skylight, hoping for some deliverance, interruption. My creative energies were devoted to gross acts of nostalgia for wrongs I had inflicted or that had been inflicted upon me. I lay redoing them, living them over in the perpetual role of the afflicted, relishing my injuries, exalting myself with the guilt of having perpetrated even greater agony on my victims than any I had suffered. The pain I imagined for them writhed in me, and my own pain grew with each recounting. This all had a very literary bent to it, constant dramas played out in my peaked room. But it didn’t get any plays written. It was all so depressing that every day at about noon I would feel the same great need to launch myself from the skylight and end the mood in the alley below me.

I would not be young again, not a day younger. All that silly misery.

Instead of killing myself I would go out. I slipped down the stairs, shedding that peculiar form of darkness, and emerged on the street electrified, prowling hungrily in parks hoping for dramatic encounters, or descending purposefully on acquaintances with exaggerated tales of my latest adventures. Usually by nightfall I was tired enough to be relatively sane, and hungry.

Once Sam revealed the ease with which a suitably disheveled young person could get a free meal at his college cafeteria, whether they were a student or not, I took advantage of it regularly on my nights off from work. Sam held court over the plastic trays and cheered on his team of balding scholastic diners. They flung etymological witticisms at the cuisine, the staff of the cafeteria, the faculty of the college, Plato, Wittgenstein, Goethe, and various other defuncts with whom the whole group gave the distinct impression of having shared many a crust and chortle. I would walk down the long, noisy room balancing a tray, and find a vacancy at Sam’s table. Greetings, amenities, then I would work diligently at the food and listen. Sam’s friends were all characters, if only in their enormous desire to be colorful. These sessions became a substitute for my dream of the literary salon in my attic room, the wit cascading at my demand. The pink chaise sat alone in the dark room across town. I confess that it all thrilled me: their strange accents, their irreverent familiarity with words I had read, could spell, and could write, but had never heard spoken aloud before.