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Show 22. Together Ben and I found a basement apartment big enough to share. But about that time Amelia's father had a heart attack in Cleveland, rode the pale horse for a ways. One day she picked up the telephone and out of that black plastic instrument a voice announced the mortality of her father like the end of the -world. Afterwards, white-faced, she kept saying, "But he's only forty-seven," as if she had been betrayed. She went home and her father held on; we waited. I was waiting too for the end of the month when I could move into that basement and set it up for candlelight and red wine-my ideal place to live. But when she came back to Chicago, chastened by death, Amelia wanted to live with Ben. I'd found the apartment but I couldn't say no to them, Free Love was too important. So I stayed on in The Castle while the others left. Hirsh the crazy philosopher was for all I knew still hitching to New York with his pocket full of spaghetti, Bill Vanderveer was in the looney bin, Leo Zimmer was shacked up with some masochistic girl. When the black woman took over, the first to leave was Norman. Applegate and Kasanof soon followed, then Cappy, who moved back with his mother. Then Wolfe and Tobey and Van Scott, Ed Bernstein, Kashdan, Morris. As each room fell vacant, a black man or woman moved in, or two together. By the first of the year I was the only honkie left. The blacks looked around me, over me, under me, through me but never saw me: I didn't count. Except for one girl, a thin, taut, almost pretty woman of twenty or so who looked me in the eye every time, hostility rising off her like heat. When first I was in my new room, the windows scraped, even though the |