I had known the Troll for some time.



When we first met, he was charming and childlike in his enthusiasm, as misunderstood as I had been but appearing markedly less perturbed by the fact. He recounted, with enthusiasm, his safe haven, Satan’s Alley, and in his descriptions of the entrance between two stone walls I could see the deep darknesses of the valley I would have yet to become familiar with.



Syd, back then, had his particular group, and in my mind he was a Mahayana Cultist.

Yet it was troll’s company, almost a sore thumb in Syd’s grounded group, that prompted me again to consider paving the world in leather rather than wearing sandals. It was, in particular, Troll’s charmingly innocent unawareness of the almost Christian piety behind his passion that made his enthusiasm that much more moving, at a time when I could not relate at all, except intellectually, to the extreme non-involvement of his peers, which, again, seemed almost to not affect him.

‘Do you support causes’’ I asked Syd, and, of course, his reply was of the almost jeering kind that he himself, and many of his friends, took always to be ‘charming’, as though the fact I wasn’t barking up his tree meant instantly that I was barking up the wrong tree.



I had finished the drawing of my crush’s face as I was eating with Troll and another friend. It was my first attempt, back when I was not in the established habit of illustrative art, so it was understood when she ultimately overlooked it with an artist’s disinterest.

Yet it was vivid, swarming with detail. The seasoned gentleman sitting by the window at Sorrento’s gave me the kind of appraisal for it with, in retrospect, a widening of the eyes that at that moment had seemed ecstatic and assuring but that, in hindsight, proves to have been, assurance and approval notwithstanding, the tempered, sagely look of a man who was Alive in the Sixties but who, in that moment, witnessed something surprising come of our generation.



I was geared up and revved like an automobile.

An ecstasy that was partly brought from home and partly that of the Palomar Student Body coursed through my veins like gasoline and solar power, respectively.



I stormed into Randy’s, spotted the cute, young Mexican woman behind the counter, and, approaching her with an upsurge of gusto, asked, ‘How do you say, “Can I have your number?” in Spanish?’

She seemed pleasantly taken aback. I explained that I needed to ask a girl out.

She encouraged me, finding my quest admirable.



Passing the parking lot, I saw Troll, walking far ahead of me, ambling joyously, almost gelatinously, not looking behind him, immersed in the joy of his companion.


I knew, for his sake and hers, that I couldn’t do it.