The intersection of those two streets formed a very lively square with a cable car terminal, busy bus stops, a subway station, numerous stores and restaurants, newspaper stands, itinerant salesmen, florists, musicians and all sorts of passersby and idlers, among whom from time to time Jack and the girl spotted those bizarre individuals they had noticed before: vacant-eyed people who talked to themselves and wandered around like ghosts.

At the entrance to the subway station there was a sort of little open-air amphitheatre made up of galleries where public benches and ornamental plants had been set out. These galleries were below street level, sheltered from the wind that blew in off the Pacific. In all of downtown there was no better place to warm yourself in the sun.

Usually Jack and the girl ate their meals in a cafeteria on Geary Street. Sometimes, though, they would go to the Burger King at the foot of Powell Street; they would have a very economical meal: if they had a “bacon double cheeseburger” at noon, they didn’t need a snack at four o’clock and didn’t feel hungry before seven or eight at night.

They strolled through the neighbourhood, and the days passed.

One day, to get their minds off things, they took the Volks and went to the Haight-Ashbury district where the hippie movement had flourished during the sixties. They didn’t expect to meet any hippies, but they hoped to see traces of the movement, some reminders that thousands of young and not so young people from every part of the country had come there to try to put into practice new ideas about life and human relations. All they saw were boutiques and restaurants. Jack declared that storekeepers were the most stable people in the world.

“They can survive all changes and fashions,” he said. “One day there’ll be nobody on earth but storekeepers.”

In the city centre, Jack and La Grande Sauterelle had struck up a friendship with an old woman who supported herself by playing electric guitar and singing. She would set herself up on the east side of Powell Street (the side that got the afternoon sun), across from Woolworth’s, on a folding chair, and she would sing old songs like “The Kentucky Waltz” by Billy Monroe.