I was unrolling and spreading flat my last week in San Francisco with the side of my hand. If I am ever again as unhappy as I was during my San Francisco years, I hope it is because I am being tortured for information which I heroically refuse to release. Every hour of the last week is in my memory.

I went to see a Jodorowsky movie. I rode the bus. Black sky, fog like a car compactor. The Muni jingling inside itself and the laser gun pluck of its pole on the wires it ran along. Mostly empty and some warm humans leaning.

At the little shopping center in the black. Wide shallow stairs. An empty fountain. I asked the man at the theater window if there were any tickets left. He gave me the look people gave me back then. Clothed against the cold, I’m sure I looked like a Christmas gift wrapped by six-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder in rabbit fur and rope. The corners of the empty fountain, white at the L and black in the mouth.

Big chocolate and a big bottle of water. Slid-down, my knees against the seat in front of me. A few human bodies like clothes in a dim closet. Somebody was smoking. In the movie Jodorowsky as a boy comes to a cliff in pain. Jodorowsky the man comes behind him and embraces himself, grips himself across the breast and they roll in pain and comfort. They roll from the strength of the feet of the man like wire spun in a fist. The movement is skilled and knowledgeable; and this skill acted as proof for the idea and the scene and the act. The skill of the man’s movement and the man’s feet was the veracity of his claim.

Outside the theater, the sound of the sky and the shopping center was like the thick ground above subway. Concrete the breadth of a state. The density of a state of land if the state were a body of a human. Air like a soundproof room.