I went home to visit my family. I had a lot of thinking to do about what direction I should be taking. I wondered if I was doing the right work. Was it all frivolity? It was the nagging sense of guilt I experienced performing on the night the Kent State students were shot. I wanted to be an artist but I wanted my work to matter.

Sam got a room with a balcony at the Chelsea. I loved staying there, having a room back in the hotel. I could get a shower anytime I wanted. Sometimes we just sat on the bed and read. I was reading about Crazy Horse and he was reading Samuel Beckett.

Sam and I had a long discussion about our life together. By then he had revealed to me that he was married and had an infant son. Perhaps it was the carelessness of youth but I was not completely cognizant of how our irresponsible ways could affect others. I met his wife, Olan, a young and gifted actress. I never expected him to leave her, and we all fell into an unspoken rhythm of coexistence. He was often gone and let me stay in his room by myself with remnants of him: his Indian blanket, typewriter, and a bottle of Ron del Barrilito three-star rum.

Robert was appalled by the thought that Sam was married. He’ll leave you eventually, he would say, but I already knew that. He figured Sam to be an erratic cowboy.

I was bombarded with offers stemming from my poetry reading. Creem magazine agreed to publish a suite of my poems; there were proposed readings in London and Philadelphia; a chapbook of poems for Middle Earth Books; and a possible record contract with Steve Paul’s Blue Sky Records. At first this was flattering, and then seemed embarrassing. It was a more extreme reaction than had greeted my haircut.

It came, I felt, too easy. Nothing had come to Robert so easily. Or for the poets I had embraced. I decided to back off. I turned down the record contract but left Scribner’s to work for Steve Paul as his girl Friday. I had more freedom and made a little more money, but Steve kept asking me why I chose to make his lunch and clean his birdcages instead of making a record. I didn’t really believe I was destined to clean the cage, but I also knew it wasn’t right to take the contract.

Cavale is the criminal in the story. She kidnaps Slim and holes him up in her lair. The two of them love and spar, and create a language of their own, improvising poetry. When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. “I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say anything,” he said. “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise.”

“What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”

“You can’t,” he said. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”

In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life.

Cowboy Mouth opened at the end of April at the American Place Theatre on West Forty-sixth Street. In the play, Cavale tries to recreate Slim into her image of a rock and roll savior. Slim, at first intoxicated with the idea and beguiled by Cavale, finally has to tell her that he can’t realize her dream. Slim Shadow goes back into his own world, his family, his responsibilities, leaving Cavale alone, setting her free.

I was asked by Ruth Kligman if I minded if she made a play for Robert. Ruth, who wrote the book titled Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock and was the sole survivor of the car crash that took his life, was attractive in an Elizabeth Taylor kind of way. She dressed to the hilt, and I could smell her perfume as she mounted the stairs. She tapped on my door, having made an appointment with Robert, and winked to me. “Wish me luck,” she said.

A few hours later, she was back. As she slipped off her slingback heels and rubbed her ankles, she said, “Boy, when he says, ‘Come up and see my etchings,’ he means ‘Come up and see my etchings.’”