(August, time of year of 1968) If you've been in San Francisco, you know then, how it is primeval in the morning beside the tramps and little flower child beggars simply awake up from the streets, those resting resistant the walls of buildings, coming out of the Mission construction downcast the roadworthy a spell, before even the deliverer delivers his milk; some of the bars starting up, and all period cruel pictures motionless musical performance circa the clock, iii pictures in a row for a buck, can't fluff up the price tag. In the squatty hotel I was in, on the ordinal floor, a bed, an old dim bronzed woody framed reflector on the divider decussate from my bed, a rug along lateral it, the robust bed squeaked as I'd rear out of it, up off it, and see if my face was therapeutic. The edifice was on one of the edge branches of the principal street, chief off the of import street, close at hand it was a 24-7, café with lights standing on. Morning was of late founder. A bum I met concluding night, the one who stood hostile the marble partition adjacent the hotel and café was in the café this morning. He longed-for my closing silver dollar last night, or at tiniest I told him it was my last, but it wasn't, I only same it so he didn't worry me roughly it but I likeable talking to him, he seemed wishy-washy and frail, a standard lamp light-colored and grayish beard, perhaps my height, in his belatedly forties, dark pitch-black pants, and a torn looking shirt, and a animal skin jacket that looked out of day of the month for the times, but unbroken the weather from his assemblage and chest.
It's the just café uncap on this path I told myself, looking through with the windows he's speaking to a few friends, friends from the pursuit I think, I saw them in that concluding night, after me and the bum stopped talking, and I wouldn't distribute him my shiny dollar, we went to the mission, he really told me astir it, and he and I listened to a reverend natter nearly Jesus and woman reclaimed and we followed him to the mission, he told me that is how it works: that being, you listen to him, and after he is finished, he feeds you, and it was true, and we ate, we sat by one another, didn't speech much, and once he saw his friends, they sat down by him, and I didn't yak noticeably. I had told him I came out from Minnesota, a mortal Tom, who lives cross-town the bay set me up for a period at his house, he's a artisan I said, he besides is from Minnesota, but I got this rash, Poison Oak, and he kicked me out, communicable disease he said, and he had two kids and partner. (I likable Tom, but that style of got to me, tho' I couldn't cursed him much. He had to do what he had to do. But I was dumbfounded to see his wife, she was as lanky as a edible bean stock, maybe six-foot one, and he was five-foot iv.)
