“With his big head of black curly hair, I can’t help thinking my brother looks like Judas.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said the girl. “Ridiculous and even morbid.”

“I know,” he said, “but I can’t help thinking it.”

WHEN THEY EMERGED from the San Remo about four in the afternoon, the fog had come back and the city was grey and cold once more. They walked along Columbus Avenue to the bookstore. The owner still wasn’t there, and they roamed around the neighbourhood.

City Lights Bookstore was at the corner of Broadway, in the nightclubs and sex shops area. Huge pink posters offered all the wonders of eroticism and sensual pleasure. The nightclubs had names like Naked City, Casbah, Chi Chi Club, Condor, Garden of Eden. At the door of each establishment a man urged people in, telling them they’d have a good time and that everything was free.

They walked up and down Broadway, then strolled in neighbouring Chinatown. They rested for a while in a park called Portsmouth Square. An old woman feeding pigeons told them that the bench on which they had taken a seat was the one where Robert Louis Stevenson used to come to sit and write. Before she walked away into the fog, she added that it might have been on this bench that he had written Treasure Island. Once again they felt surrounded by ghosts of the past.

They were walking south. Following Powell Street they walked to Union Square and a little beyond. This was downtown: an odd mixture of business people, artists and bums. At the corner of Powell and Market there were many bizarre characters. People who seemed lost. They weren’t too badly dressed and they weren’t really poor, but their eyes shone with a strange light; they talked to themselves and seemed not to know exactly where they were, who they were and what they were doing there.

Just before five o’clock, they went back to City Lights. The owner wasn’t in.

He didn’t come the next day, either.

On the afternoon of the following day, as Jack and the girl were leaving the bookstore and preparing to go back up Columbus Avenue, they spotted Mr. Ferlinghetti, a briefcase under his arm, coming in the opposite direction. His manner was very distinguished, but he was wearing blue canvas shoes like the Chinese. He seemed a little tired.

He paused without looking at them and entered the bookstore.

Jack and La Grande Sauterelle turned. As they were about to enter, however, Jack grew hesitant; he lingered outside, reading the titles of the books in the window: there was Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe and also Clean Asshole Poems by Peter Orlovsky . . . and then the girl gave him a firm push in the back.