When emerged from the house, he was leading a giant old man. I thought about the peace symbol hanging from a leather string around my neck, but it seemed so inappropriate a weapon against the figure who now shook my hand. He was nothing like a movie star. He was nothing like a symbol for reactionary politics and ruthless masculinity. He was more like a tired but brave sea creature returning to the land for some important ceremony that might end his life. And as he walked toward my mother's car-- a red Dodge Dart-- I wasn't shocked so much by 's celebrity as by the weight of his being. He was huge and tan and freckled and old. He had a hard time breathing because, as had told me, he'd lost a lung to cancer. He moved like he was wearing the world. As he bumped his head on the door frame of our little American car-- because he was so tall-- his brown-grey hair seemed strange to me. I watched it carefully from the back seat. Years later, I realized it was a toupee. smiled like the proprietor of this great moment in my young life. When we arrived at 's boat (ship is a more appropriate word for a 136 foot vessel), my sense of his strangeness grew. He couldn't see too well, and he had no patience with himself as he flipped through a congested keyring for something that might unlock the door of The Wild Goose. He offered the keys to me and I think I found one that looked likely, or perhaps he described the key we were looking for and we found it that way. I remember this key episode more than anything else about the boat. I mean, I guess I saw all there was to see-- staterooms and dressing rooms, bridge and communications equipment. It had been a warship and it still looked like a warship-- but I don't remember any of that so much as I remember his fumbling the keys and the complicated string of expletives that trailed slowly from his mouth as he did. There was something so appealing about the way swore. Like a sailor or a soldier, he used swearwords for most parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. There was a gorgeousness about his cursing.

"If I could just find the mother . . . fucker, this cock . . . sucking key, we'd goddamn be able to get into this god . . . damn boat."

I didn't actually spend much time with . It was certainly less than an hour. Not enough to change the direction of my life. But as drove home from Newport Beach (we lived about twelve miles inland), I was made quiet by my guess that something tremendously important had occurred which I was failing to understand. As my life puts distance between me and my meeting with , this feeling has grown.

Thinking about it again a few years ago, I realized that both and must have been hungover that morning. What I childishly imagined were the effects of 's age-- his anxiousness, his trembling hands, his cosmically foul mouth-- made more sense to me as the predictable aftermath of a hard night drinking with . 's mood was also explained: he was a much younger man than and his enthusiasm, the glow that followed him through the morning and all the way home, could have been the gift of an exuberantly enjoyed, good old heaven-and-hell-filled drunk, the kind that could still sometimes pass through his thirty-five-year-old body like a revelation from God.