The party was in the second floor space of some Mission retaurant, a ritzy joint that’s part of the upscale trand driving so many businesses and people out of the neighborhood. I got only a confused impression of the place, a broad concrete hall, a stairway decorated with foreign movie posters, a sort of foyer in whichg a projector had been set up and was soundlessly showing a movie against a far wall, and then the party, which was in a dark broad balcony overlooking the restaurant. It wasn’t too crowded, or too loud, and there were tables set with heaps of cheese and tortilla chips and salsa. We commandeered a long table set in a niche behind a column.

I sat across the table from the young dark-haired girl, Corrie. We talked politics for a while, happily damning everyone. She is studying film and working on her thesis, a pair of documenatires. One of them is about two very elderly women in a home for old Reds. The women, she told me, are the only lucid residents left in the home, and her documentary is about how they try to cope.

A couple of times I went over to the balcony and looked down at the empty dining room with its rows of round white tables, its cunningly stark decor. I wondered wistfully when management would kick us out.

The dark-haired girl was replaced by a small man in his twenties, his head shaven to a black fuzz. He talked briefly with me about Gladiator, then spent the rest of the time with Michael.

2:00 AM finally loomed and management in the form of a slender, good-looking man in a suit (Corrie had sworn she saw him speeding the last time she was at the restaurant) came upstairs to respectfully implore us all to leave. We trickled down to the wide, concrete corridor where we’d entered. Outside, Michale, Jon and I hailed a taxi.

Since Corrie was talking about the man inside the restaurant, I assume she meant he was strung out on speed rather than driving a car.