SIDE K  Mark

MARK.  When I met Brian, I was hustling outside a bar in San Francisco. Right after the great 'summer of love.' You remember the summer of love ... one of those many American revolutions that get about as far as Time Magazine and then fart to a quick finish. Well, just after the summer of love, winter came. Which was the last thing anybody expected.  And suddenly it got very cold. People were starving to death in the streets.

 

Any-way, like everybody else, I was very hungry, very desperate... the whole scene. So there I was one night, like many other nights, selling it down on Market Street, I wasn't very good at it, but it was paying the rent, and Brian walks up to me . . . I didn't know him of course... he walks up and asks me the time. Right? Well, I did my little number about time for what and how much was it worth to him. I figured anybody who'd come on to me with an old line like that was good for a fast twenty. And all of a sudden, he starts explaining exactly what time was worth to him ... Philosophy! On Market Street.

And before I know it, he's into concepts of history, cyclical and lineal configurations, Hebraic and Greco-Roman attitudes, repetitive notions ... time warps, even! Jesus, I thought, I've got a real freak on my hands!

 

And he's talking and talking and talking and I'm thinking I've got to score soon because it's getting late and I need the bread and I'm hungry ... but I can't get rid of him. I walk away, and he walks away with me. I go inside the bar and he goes inside the bar.

A real 'fuck bar.' I figured this has got to shake him. Right? Nothing. He didn't even notice. People are humping on the tables practically and he's quoting Aristotle to me and Whitehead and elaborating on St. Thomas Aquinas' definition of sin... completely

oblivious to everything around him! I thought I was losing my mind. Finally, I said, 'Look, man, I haven't eaten in a long time, and I'm getting a headache. Why don't we talk some business before I starve to death?' 

 

He bought me dinner! I couldn't believe it.

I mean, what the hell did he want from me? And he never stopped talking. Never.

 

But before he went, I lifted his wallet.

 

It doesn't matter, because the next day I returned it. I don't know why. I just did. And that's how I got to know him. I got interested in what he was doing ... which as it turns out was nothing. But he was doing it so well. He gave me a room. I could use it whenever I wanted. I started reading again ... I thought to myself, my god, I could really do something. Salvation! We talked and talked endlessly ... word equals idea equals action equals change equals time equals freedom equals . . . well, who knows? But the point is ... I don't know what the point is. What am I talking about?