worrying herself sick over my disappearance, talking to the police, thinking I might have attempted another suicide where I could not be found. I was so caught up in the sudden liberation of the open road that I felt nothing but exhilaration. I was free, freer than I had ever been or ever would be again.

We reached Chicago that evening, and the sheer magnitude of it overwhelmed me. I had never before walked the streets of a city that contained so many millions. By comparison, San Francisco was a much smaller, more compact city; and Sacramento was hardly a city at all. I followed Jerry through Wells Street in Old Town and was introduced to men and women who would have been far more alien in Sacramento than I would ever be. The men wore long beards and even longer hair, usually shoulder length, and they were dressed in army surplus jackets and jeans. The women wore long colorful dresses or mid-riff baring bell-bottoms, and everyone wore bead necklaces and earrings. They were all very distant, but polite.

We stayed for a very long time at a hot dog joint called Franksville, one of several shops in a novelty area called Maiden Lane. Jerry managed to find us a place to sleep that night, and about an hour later we walked up five flights of stairs in a really old and decrepit building to find a dusty, abandoned apartment entirely empty of furniture or any other signs of human habitation. Once we settled in, if you could call it that, we visited a friend of his in an adjoining apartment.

"Jerry, baby. Look, feel, touch," I heard a woman's voice as we entered. It was quite dark, lit by candles, and in the corner I saw a mattress heaped with coverlets and what looked like Jerry crouched over it and some young woman under all those blankets kissing him for the longest time. I don't remember him ever introducing me. I only know that he sent me back to our apartment, and we spent the next few days making the rounds of Old Town.

Jerry left for Milwaukee a few days later, and I never saw him again. I was pretty much left on my own in that dusty, abandoned apartment, so I spent several days just walking around the city and drinking it all in. I spent a good deal of time at Lincoln Park near the Lakeside,