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CHAPTER 8 A Purpose Finds Me M y trip with Mel a week or so later made it clear I was feeling needy and unsure, but probably not ready for anything—though I would have liked to be. As I was ushered into Mel’s private space, he showed me his instruments, explained a bit about how he worked with them, and said something about how I would learn to work with tools and learn more about the process of creating—and eventually feel myself compelled to do real creative work—sometime in the future. It was one of several cryptic and off-putting statements he made that night. But as I lifted off on his very good acid, lying on his floor looking to experience something familiar from my previous acid trips, assuming that Mel would do something amazing when he was ready, he just sat in his chair and watched me, and I felt small and unimportant. Mel apparently experienced me that way, too, and just waited until I came around enough for him to talk some sense or some wisdom into me. When he did, it was about work. He told me that when he was younger, he had had to do a great deal of heavy physical work, even though he didn’t have the constitution for it, and that with the kind of body I had (I’m quite small but sturdy; at that time I was also soft, but had the potential for strength) I really had no excuse to not be working and making money. This wasn’t quite the elevated message I was waiting for, but it was definitely, and literally in my eyes at the time, a “dancing lesson from God,” to borrow Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful phrase. I left Mel’s space with a purpose, a bit let-down but ready for something, if not for anything. I stumbled home in the early morning to tell Candy this little bit of news gleaned from what I had hoped would be a major transformative experience, but to my surprise, something else was happening at the house. Our gay friends Will and Larry, from Michigan but now in New York, had shown up for an unannounced visit while I was tripping, and what a weird time it was to try to be nostalgic with them. We just couldn’t pull it off. I found myself telling them (I don’t know where this came from, because it had not been said to me in words by anyone) that the gay explorations I had shared with them the previous year were just not relevant to me anymore, that that wasn’t my life now. Since they had come to express concern for our welfare, probably curious and a bit horrified after the letter I had sent to 68 | Chapter 8 them and all my other friends, this was not the warmest message for them to hear, and they left rather disillusioned and worried about us. Candy wanted nothing further to do with them, and I couldn’t see myself maintaining the friendship given my current beliefs and the all-encompassing nature of Fort Hill life, even though I felt a deep loss. Many years passed before we communicated again. I was ready to get on with my new life as a worker. Another Fort Hill man and I found jobs in a furniture warehouse a short walk from the Hill, in Jamaica Plain. Was this the future? At the age of twenty-three, I had never held such a job before. People on the Hill were fond of saying you couldn’t skip any steps in your personal growth. I guessed I was making up for lost time. Candy was also making up for lost time, in her way. She was becoming more and more a part of the inner social scene on the Hill, and finding me more and more irrelevant. Before long, she moved into Number 1, Jim Kweskin’s house. Soon she was involved with one of the men and took to offering me pointed little lessons about Hill life. I was quite unhappy. I returned to her a shirt I had given her that she had left behind when she moved out, along with a short note critical of her “social climbing”; that comment briefly became the joke of the Hill gossip circuit. The warehouse job soon got old, and I quit to do some favors...

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