The Search
I was in no hurry to lose my virginity, as I was more
engrossed in this new freedom I was feeling, and the whole new world of
fellow phantoms I was discovering. It seemed like I had waited these last
ten years for just such a refuge among those who had suffered the same aloneness
and who were just now coming into their own and discovering they were not
alone but were in fact an entire generation. We ate, worked and slept with
one another, and we never thought it would end. We were free to be ourselves,
and that is all that mattered.
I imagined myself becoming a great writer, a chronicler of the runaway adventure. I began writing poetry like my heroes Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, whose music could be heard almost constantly over a stereo in the crash pad and throughout Old Town on loudspeakers that were everywhere. Every other person I spoke to offered me a book to read, and I read them ravenously, these books on poetry, zen, art, cosmic consciousness, whatever I could get my hands on that spoke to this way of thinking that was new to me, a wave of thought that opened up a world that had been, by comparison, dull and colorless.
