I never wrote about most of the people from the Blue Lamp. If I transformed them into fiction I might lose my grasp on the real place, the evidence of which has otherwise evaporated. The bar is gone. All those people have died. That might be why. Or perhaps a person can write about things only when she is no longer the person who experienced them, and that transition is not yet complete. The person who writes about her experience is not the same person who had the experience. The ability to write about it is proof of change, of great distance. Not everyone is willing to admit this, but it’s true.

As I said, I was the soft one. Maybe that’s why I was so desperate to escape San Francisco, by which I mean desperate to leave a specific world inside that city, one I felt I was too good for and, at the same time, felt inferior to. I had models that many of my friends did not have: educated parents who made me aware of, hungry for, the bigger world. But another part of my parents’ influence was this bohemian idea that real meaning lay with the most brightly alive people, those who were free to wreck themselves. I admired a lot of these people I’m describing to you. I put them above myself in a hierarchy that is reestablished in the fact that I am the one who lived to tell.

I was the weak link, the mind always at some remove: watching myself and other people, absorbing the events of their lives and mine. To be hard is to let things roll off you, to live in the present, to not dwell or worry. And even though I stayed out late, was committed to the end, some part of me had left early. To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home. And then I left for good, left San Francisco. My friends all stayed. But the place still defined me as it has them.