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In the afternoons, in that quiet city—especially quiet now that summer was over for the University students and the fall term hadnt yet begun—my friend and I would walk through the campus, along the lake.... And at the same time that I felt myself being lulled by the serenity of the lake and the soon-to-fade green of the scenery, the craving for a certain life drew me away from them. Because even before I got there, New York had become a symbol of my liberated self, and I knew that it was in a kind of turbulence that that self must attempt to find itself.
              
               After my separation from the army, I had come into my first contact with the alluring anarchic world which promised such turbulence. On my way to El Paso, I had stopped in Dallas for about a week, to postpone facing my mother with my decision to leave El Paso. In Dallas— suddenly! —with the excitement of someone exploring a new country I discovered that world. As abruptly as that, it happened; that sudden, that immediate: One day, nothing, and the next it was there... as if a trapdoor had Opened.
               Those days in Dallas, without entering it then, I explored the surface of that seething world; and from the isolation of my early years and the equally isolated time in the army—purposely apart from everyone—I resolved to free myself swiftly, to leave my place by the Window, uninvolved with life, and hurl myself into its boiling midst. But it had to be after I had faced my mother again.
               I couldnt tell why I was determinedly taking that journey. Perhaps in part it was because of the obsessive ravenous narcissism craving attention. Whatever it was, it was a compulsion for which I didnt have clear-cut reasons. I only knew that in the world I had discovered and not yet entered there was a desperation which somehow matched—and justified—my own.... And although, now, to you, this sounds unclear, I’ll clarify it very soon. This is only by way of saying that when I reached New York, that world was waiting for me. I required no slow initiation.
     

          
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               Times Square, New York, is an electric island floating on a larger island of lonesome parks and lonesome apartment houses and knifepointed buildings stretching Up. (I will think dazedly one night: Someday this city will tear its wharf-lined fringes from the ocean and soar in desperation to the Sky....)
               Times Square is the magnet for all the lonesome exiles jammed into this city.... And this is how I found that world of Times Square.
               In the incessantly running showers of the Sloane House YMCA the day I arrived in New York, the big hairy man made conversation with me; where am I from and what am I doing and am I working yet (“No? Good. I mean good that you dont have to be anywhere at a set time.”), and will I come to his room and he’ll buy hamburgers. Hes a merchant marine, tanned from a recent Voyage to somefarwhere—on his way now to Boston with I imagine a roll of money big enough to make me greedy. Unfairly, Im almost broke—$20.00 when I left Chicago, and one phone number what said nervously we must have lunch sometime. And no prospect of a job which will pay me before the money runs out.
               In the tiny cubicle-room facing the courtyard across which a lonesome youngman, also undoubtedly just arrived in the City, played a doleful guitar by his window, we sit eating oniony greaseburgers and ignoring the persistent sound of the running showers. For a moment, I think it’s the hurricane.
               Outside, in the hallway, doors open and close. The sound of feet walking up and down never stops. A hurried conversation outside, a door closes.
               Even before this man speaks it, I know that something of what Ive come to find in this city will soon be revealed in this room.