's drinking was a hard lesson for me when I was young, and I'm sure that my ambivalence about was an expression of my ambivalence about . I must have known that they were drinking the night before even if I didn't allow myself to think about it as I took my tour of 's boat. That's probably why I wore my peace symbol. I wanted to hate because of the effect he had on . I wanted to humiliate him with my peace symbol because he himself was the symbolic extension of everything believed in but couldn't quite live up to.

And yet, I think this story is about how I couldn't do that, how I couldn't humiliate either of them on that day. Not because I was a child and didn't have the power-- although that may have been true enough-- but because I was becoming a man and didn't have the desire anymore. This contact with changed me for a moment into a person I couldn't imagine and wouldn't really become for years: a man bewildered by the world, and yet beginning to fall in love with his place in it. I must have had the feeling that I too was loving but brutal, generous but prone to fits of mood, kind but always a little suspicious of kindness. I was beginning to identify with them.

You see, when I was ten years old, I didn't want to grow up to be a man. My experience with my parents and the world at large had convinced me that most men were foolish and brutal. I admired women because they were noble and suffering. At ten, I didn't see the possibility of a synthesis. I grew up in a family where synthesis was hard to imagine. I loved my mother to the exclusion of just as I loved Jesus Christ to the exclusion of . It seemed to me a choice between the victims and the victors. As I often felt like a victim myself, I identified with the victims and the moral weight that victimization conferred on those people who would always be under the heels of big strong men like and . I didn't want to become a man because I didn't want to be the perpetrator.

Did I want to become a woman?

Maybe and maybe not. If such a thing were possible, I would have abdicated my masculinity in favor of almost anything.

But I was wrong. I had it all screwed up.

Something changed inside me during that tenth year, and there came a day when I wanted to be a man. After all, I was a man. And if this revelation didn't happen on the day I saw 's boat, it was indeed near that day. I began to identify with men like , perhaps even men like , because I could see through my difficult childhood toward some qualities in them that I hadn't guessed were there. I had noticed their stoicism, but I had missed how they besieged themselves. I noticed the harshness of their threatening words and movements, but I missed the poetry of their desperate attempts to control the world. I had made the mistake of putting too much emphasis on their strength and I had missed their fear. On that morning in Newport Beach I noticed the incredible vulnerability of these men. But I couldn't have said it to you in those words, not then. was prey to age and alcohol, and was the victim of alcohol and his own dreams for himself and his family. Something clicked in my mind and I was able to detect a sweetness which was the inevitable fruit of their defeat by the world they sought to master, even if their only defeat was death. Near the day I met , I gave up on being an altar boy. I gave up on becoming a revolutionary. I gave up on becoming a woman. I started watching movies with .