My Christmas week in 1968, the last year I was a cadet at West Point, began with a frantic search for somewhere to go and someone who would take me in. My parents were stationed in Hawaii that year, and I couldn't afford the airfare to fly from New York to Honolulu. A trip to Colorado hitchhiking on an Air Force cargo plane, like the one I had taken with a friend the year before, was out of the question. The military brass had cut back availability for such flights for some budgetary reason I can't recall after all these years.
So, I called a girl – a young woman, actually – I had met at the Village Voice Christmas party earlier in the month and just came right out and asked her if I could spend Christmas with her in New York. She was a nurse who worked nights at Bellevue Hospital on First Avenue, and we had taken to each other at the party with a, shall I say, certain youthful fervor, and she quickly said yes. All I had to do was take the bus down to Port Authority, shoot across to Grand Central on the shuttle, take the Lexington Avenue line down to Bleecker and walk across to her pad on East 2nd Street, in the middle of a bombed-out block of abandoned tenements and empty lots where the hulks of burned-out cars competed with dead sofas and piles of household trash for bragging rights.
