When I got back, I spent much of the evening putting my study together. The cot went into place under the window. It’s okay, not great for a bed, but it will do as a couch. I hung Mom’s picture of the Golden Gate to the window, with Tim’s help. He enjoys putting rooms together. All of my knick-knacks came out of their boxes, some for the first time wince we’d moved from North Carolina. The dolls were arranged at one end of the bed. One of the oldest, who, when I was a kid, was variously named “Lavinia,” “Madame Frost” and “Madam Dagger,” looked pretty when I covered her bald head with a pale blue shawl. The room is shaping up. It looks like a room now, though there is still much I need to do, like bracing the bookshelves and hanging a few more pictures.

Typing this hurt my heart.

Digging up these old diary entries can be like a faint, familiar scent drifting up from an old chest that has not been opened for years. Do I remember that moment of setting up the room with Tim’s help? Not directly. But I know what the light was like in that room, and what it felt like for us to be working together, setting up a space I would use. I can feel him next to me, raising his arms to help me put up the picture.

The ghost of old hopes. We were in our twenties and thought we would be together forever.

I wanted to go out and get a cot for my study. I was sick of it being a half-room, unfurnished except for the desk and a couple of bookshelves, and a pile of junk. I took off to the Mission district after promising Tim I would check out the Tower Records store on Noe and Market for some Residents tapes. Just before I left, E .and B. called to invite us to Easter dinner tomorrow – lamb – Tim accepted and I made a face at him. He had told me, when I said I wanted to make lamb this week, that he hated the stuff.

On my way down Mission before I got the cot, a saw a cop running past me without his hat, a plump moustachio’d fellow looking neither angry nor frightened, just earnest. That part of the mission has one furniture store after another, cheek by jowl, interspersed with pawn shops. I found a cot in the Mission district for only $99.00. The little old Asian man who sold it to me insisted on taking my name and address “just in case,” he said. Since I paid in cash, I wasn’t sure what “case” he had in mind, unless someone was passing counterfeit bills in the area.  I pushed the cot out to my car for two blocks. On my way I saw the hatless cop with a lady police officer sort of frisking an unsavory looking old fellow in a cowboy hat and vest, asking him for ID I guess.

Tower records is in the area where Frank Robinson lives, the Castro District. The parking attendant, instead of the usual old men who man booths in parking garages, was a handsome, long-faced guy with a dark pompadour speckled with gray, black clothes, and a crucifix. He sounded like he came from NYC. .

At Tower I found lots of Resident tapes CDs. I got one called Eskimo, which turned out to be a very good collection of “songs” about Eskimo legends. After leaving Tower, I went across to Pier I to get some pillows for the cot.

Some very interesting people wander around the Castro, which is very gay, very clean and without that feeling of grimy menace I sometimes get in my own neighborhood . I saw another cowboy, this one young, also with a moustache but rather hardfaced, like one of the rednecks back home. He wore a dark suede cowboy hat, a dark suede vest, and dark suede chaps with fringes, which made his blue jeaned bottom conspicuous. He walked, I thought, with the air of someone who knew he was getting looks.

That part of the Mission was, back then, crammed with cluttered used furniture stores and could feel, even in daylight, like a walk on the wild side. The Castro District was bound to be a welcome contrast, with its broad, sunlit streets and pavements. Even then, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, there were many buff, happy-looking young men strolling about. Tower Records was a significant presence on the second floor of a modern building, with broad windows overlooking Market, a bright, new, interesting place to shop for music or rent videos.

Frank Robinson, a speechwriter for Harvey Milk and co-executor for his estate, wrote for Locus. More than once, as part of my job, I drove him to and from his place in the Castro. In his living room hung a poster for The Towering Inferno, the film based on the novel he co-wrote with Thomas M. Scortia. I remember Frank as a tall man in his sixties speaking to me from the back seat of the car with a New York accent so strong it was almost a blunt instrument. “I don’t want to hear about an incipient tragedy” he growled when I mentioned my younger brother had just moved to LA with his wife, and wanted to be a screenwriter.

Tonight, Tim and I drove to Berkeley, presumably to drop a mess of cardboard off at a recycling plant, but since it was closed we ended up going to some print shops instead. Tim got a lovely print of women on horses and another of Virginia Woolf to hang in his office. We went by Sun to drop them off under the watchful eyes of several security guards.

Virginia Woolf? Tim must have been going through his feminist phase. All I remember about his attempt to read MRS, DALLOWAY was him coming to me completely baffled and upset by the first paragraph. Tim was one of the most brilliant people I knew but he was a man, and he’s not the only guy I’ve encountered who couldn’t make head or tail of the passage. There seems to be something female encoded in that wonderful first paragraph that makes it clear to women but incomprehensible to many male readers.

When I drove to Tim’s Berkeley office I found it empty except for a few boxes, partitions, moving men, and a handful of employees, one of whom told me she thought Tim might be helping “set up the lab” at Alameda. I got directions from her and drove down.

It’s not difficult to find in that it looks like a spanking new commerce center just off the tubes. Sun now has a building of its own, very modern, and upscale looking. All I could see out front, though were what looked like moving people. Several large women, one with tattoos up and down her arm, conferred with some tough looking men next to a pick-up truck with a little girl in the cab. I wandered into the building and inside I ound a maze of partitions and offices, marked with numbers and names.

Occasionally I’d bump into a workman. Finally, as I was passing, one spoke to me. “Know where I can call out for a pizza?” he asked. He was short, dark and powerfully built, and talked like he was from new York. I told him I was a complete stranger to the place and sked him if any Sun employees were around. “They’re in the back having a fuckin’ feast,” he said.

In the back I found a small semicircle of Sun employees sitting on the floor in a bare room, surrounded by munchies and beer. I only recognized two of them aside from Nat Goldhaber. When I asked about Tim, they said he wasn’t there. “Tim blew off two hours ago,” a dark, bearded man said with stiff disapproval. I went back out to my car, to drive home, smiled at the little girl in the truck, who smiled back. (She was a dark-eyed little thing, bent over a book.)

Tim and I had takeout sushi for dinner – then we went out to buy a couple of CDs. This time we went to a shop on Haight Street. It carried mainly records, but there were few racks of CD cards. The clerks were pretty avant-garde, one skinny with a dry thatch of bleached hair tinted green at the ends and a tight leather outfit jingling with jewelry and chains. The other was plump and British, with black wire glasses and a simple punk cut pulled back into a stiff, short ponytail. We bought the new Talking Heads album and Sinead O’Connor.

Tim at that time worked for TOPS, (Transcendental Operating System) which had recently been sold to Sun. I remember Nat Goldhaber, now listed in Wikipedia as “an American venture capitalist, computer entrepreneur and politician” as a pleasant, pink, oval-shaped man. His new age outlook would have meshed with Tim’s interest in the occult. In 2000, Nat was the vice-presidential nominee for the Natural Law Party.

Those Haight-Ashbury record-store clerks, whose clothes and appearance struck me back then, would not warrant a second glance today. The Talking Heads album was likely NAKED, the Sinead O’Connor her first, THE LION AND THE COBRA. Two of my favorites. I believe I still have them.