I’d drink too much and long for the taste of the streets again, of the gutter, the dark hotels, the cities where I was not known. Oh, to start over and live a totally different life! Some nights I’d break out of our home, looking for I never knew what, or where I might find it. More often than not, I’d end by calling my “girlfriend” (who was later to be my second wife), summon her out of her home. We’d walk the streets, sing and dance on the sidewalks, end by fucking in alleys, in the back rows of movie theatre balconies, and on park benches, in the summer on the roof of my apartment house, in the winter up against the radiator in the entrance of the building where she lived.

Was I hoping to be caught? I didn’t care. Something had to happen, something dramatic. And soon! I was trapped in my “success.” I hated the sound of cultured voices, heard them against the cries of anguished unrest within me.

I knew I needed help. I’d had the attention of one psychoanalyst a few years before, gone to him only because Molly said she’d leave me if I didn’t. He was cultured and cuddly, and his wife drank too much. When she had to be assisted up the stairs and to bed halfway through dinner at his apartment, it caused me to wonder how a man who hadn’t been able to help his wife could help me. I dropped out.