I became a fugitive from justice that winter, early in 1976.
Alex, Harold and I met one last time — for breakfast at Betty’s on Bryant Street. I don’t know what we expected from each other. Forced clowning proved we’d lugged our friendships into an advanced state of atrophy. We resuscitated the personalities, keeping them breathing, barely pumping blood, longer than nature designed them to last.
Our goodbyes done, I walked the rise up Elmwood Avenue alone, looking in the shop windows, thinking I ought to be memorizing some things. How long and at how great a distance would I retain any of it? I lived in this snowy, deteriorating, beautiful city for ten years. It felt like a long stay. I married and bungled my way into fatherhood. I knowingly committed creative as well as emotional felonies for which there’d never be prosecutions. My heart had gotten lost in emotion and been broken. ...