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sleep.
    When
I awoke it was light out but the room was shadowy. I inhaled the fumes of last
night’s liquor and sat myself up. My body ached and my head felt as if someone
was tightening a wire around my temples. I got myself into the bathroom and
swallowed some aspirin. I went into the bedroom and changed into my running
clothes. Outside, I forced myself to stretch and set off toward the university.
    The
first mile was torture. I passed beneath the massive stone arch at the entrance
to the school, pulled off the road and threw up. I felt better and ran down the
long palm-lined drive to the Old Quad. Lost somewhere in the thicket to my left
was the mausoleum containing the remains of the family by whom the university
had been founded. Directly ahead of me loomed a cluster of stone buildings, the
Old Quad.
    I
stumbled up the steps and beneath an archway into a dusty courtyard which, with
its clumps of spindly bushes and cacti, resembled the garden of a desert monastery.
All around me the turrets and dingy stone walls radiated an ominous silence, as
if behind each window there stood a soldier with a musket waiting to repel any
invader. I looked up at the glittering facade of the chapel across which there
was a mosaic depicting a blond Jesus and four angels representing Hope, Faith,
Charity, and, for architectural rather than scriptural symmetry, Love. In its
gloomy magnificence, the Old Quad never failed to remind me of the presidential
palace of a banana republic.
    Passing
out of the quad I cut in front of the engineering school and headed for a back
road that led up to the foothills. There was a radar installation at the summit
of one of the hills called by the students the Dish. It sat among herds of
cattle and the ruins of stables. It, too, was a ruin, shut down for many years,
but when the wind whistled through it, the radar produced a strange trilling
that could well be music from another planet.
    The
radar was silent as I slowed to a stop at the top of the Dish and caught my
breath from the upward climb. I was soaked with sweat, and my headache was
gone, replaced by giddy disorientation. It was a clear, hot morning. Looking
north and west I saw the white buildings, bridges and spires of the city of San
Francisco beneath a crayoned blue sky.
    The
city from this aspect appeared guileless and serene. Yet, when I walked in its
streets what I noticed most was how the light seldom fell directly, but from
angles, darkening the comers of things. You would look up at the eaves of a
house expecting to see a gargoyle rather than the intricate but innocent
woodwork. The city had this shadowy presence as if it was a living thing with
secrets and memories. Its temperament was too much like my own for me to feel
safe or comfortable there.
    I
looked briefly to the south where San Jose sprawled beneath a polluted sky,
ugly and raw but without secrets or deceit. Then I stretched and began the slow
descent back into town.
    When
I got to San Francisco that afternoon, it was one of those days that arrives at
the end of summer just as the last tourists are leaving complaining about the
cold and fog. The sky was cloudless. I parked my car on 19th and headed down
into the Castro.
    The
sidewalks were jammed and the crowds drifted slowly past bars from which disco
music blared and where men sat on bar stools looking out the windows. The air
smelled of beer and sweat and amyl nitrate. At bus benches and on strips of
grass in front of buildings, men sat, stripped of their shirts, sunbathing and
watching the flow of pedestrians through mirrored sunglasses. Approaching the
bar where I was meeting Hugh, I smelled marijuana, turned my head and saw a
couple of kids sharing a joint as they manned a voter registration table for
one of the gay political clubs. I stepped into the bar expecting to find more
of the carnival but it was nearly empty. The solitary bartender wiped the
counter pensively.
    I
ordered a gin-and-tonic and took it to a table at the