He met Robert at The Clock on the Monday after his last Saturday night’s work. That Saturday night, just before Labor Day, was a gang-buster. The whole day was. Ohio State Football had just kicked off, their first game a home game at the horseshoe.
For a while Bill had lived on that end of the campus, the north end, just a few blocks up from the stadium. He had the top of a two-family, a beat-up place furnished with beat-up old furniture and lit by a central free-standing gas burner upon which he had once placed a small TV and then forgotten he’d put it there when he went out to pick up his girlfriend, who was at that time not his fiancé yet or even close to it. When they got back the place was filled with smoke and smelled that rancid, burnt-plastic smell.
Goodbye TV.
In retrospect, he’d always thought that the pussy was not worth the TV, a thought not directly aimed at his girlfriend as much as at girls altogether, and their parts, and in general.
Many times already he’d thought that girls were more than they were cracked up to be, that he was definitely better off alone.
Of course that didn’t stop him from messing around every now and then with the hippie girls downstairs, two of them, real free-love people, one who had a boyfriend who lived there too.
The girls sunbathed nude in the backyard. He could see them out his kitchen window and they knew he could see them. The skinny dark-haired one, a speed freak, had seen him up in the window a few times and had beckoned him to come down. They both had turned their lounge chairs so that he could see all of them, so that he could see up their open legs.
He had gone down. This was before his girlfriend in the year-and-a-half-long period when he’d had no girlfriend, when he’d written a lot of self-absorbed poetry that would lead to his being told by his friend that he should try writing fiction, which he did with a passion, which was where he had originally started as a writer when he was fifteen.
The Dapper Duo, that’s where he started, what he wrote first, a long series of kid-sized James-Bond-like adventures that were, at the very least immature and at the very best utterly ridiculous. Stupid.
At least he was lucky enough to come to this realization on his own, to understand that what he had started needed not revision but discarding. So he had discarded it and kept at writing, the original fiction that morphed into some self-absorbed, budding-poet poetry, that poetry of the time.
Later, when his friend told him he should try writing fiction, it was because he had developed into writing longer, narrative poems that maybe to his friend read like fiction. So when he started writing fiction for real, some almost three years into his being a writer, it was like he had come home.
On the day he got busted, on the day of the riots in which of the 600 he was the first arrested, he had gone to meet with one of his professors, a translator of Japanese poetry and a poet himself, to talk about his poetry. The professor had suggested they go to see what was going on at the demonstration.
The rest was history.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
They all said hello, the girls not making any moves to cover up.
“We see you up there. You see us down here. What you doing?’
The chubby, dirty-blonde girl with the boyfriend was the one who spoke. She sat up. Bill could see she had big breasts with pink-pink nipples that were getting stiff as she spoke.
“I’m working,” Bill said. “I was getting coffee and saw you out the window.”
“I’m Patsy. This is Trish. Got any drugs?”
