A darkly baroque, extremely grubby bookstore owned by a grizzled roué who hired only beautiful young women. It was said he was sleeping with all of them—how’d he pull that off? They sat behind the counter looking ineffectual and sleepy-eyed—maybe he fed them opium? Anyway it was known as a great place for shoplifting.

North of the bookstore, a Santa Fe–looking stuccoed place to buy Birkenstocks and ponchos. A hangout for preppy bohemian girls, such as I was trying hard not to be. I wanted to be something more difficult, something other than what I was. I held a very deep misunderstanding about the world. I had this idea that if I wanted to be among people who were different from me, I should disguise my true self and become more like them. I perceived other people to be more authentic than me, and so in order to be more authentic, I became less what I was in the first place. I counterfeited in order to feel real or, more accurately, in order to hang around what seemed realer than the thing I started out as. You could call it class drag. But that was what the Ave was for, for some of us.