So there we were at the Red Drum, a table full of beers, a few, that is,and all the gangs cunning in and out, paying a dollar quarter at the door,the little hip pretending weasel there taking tickets,Patty Cordovan floating in as prophesied,a big, tall, blonde, brakeman-type subterranean from eastern Washington,cowboy-looking in jeans coming into a wild generation party, all smoky and mad.And I yelled, Patty Cordovan? And yeah!And he'd come over, and we're all sitting together,interesting groups at various tables, Julian, Roxanne, a woman of twenty-fiveprophesying the future style of America with short, almost crew-cut,but with curls, black, snaky hair, snaky walk, pale, pale, junky, anemic face,and we say junky when once Dostoevsky would have said what, if not ascetic or saintly,but not in the least, but the cold, pale booster face of the cold, blue girl,and wearing a man's white shirt, but with the cuffs undone, untied at the buttons,so I remember her leaning over, talking to someone,after having slinked across the room,across the floor with flowing, propelled shoulders,bending to talk with her hand holding a short butt,and the neat little flick she was giving it to knock ashes,but repeatedly with long, long fingernails, an inch long and also orient and snake-like.Groups of all kinds and Ross Wallenstein, the crowd,and up on the stand, Bird Parker, with solemn eyes,who'd been busted fairly recently and had now returned to a kind of bop-dead city,but had just discovered or been told about the red drum, the open door,the great new generation gang wailing,and gathering there, so here he was on the stand examining them with his eyes as he blew his now-settled-down-into-regulated-design-crazy-notes,the booming drums, the high ceiling,and Adam, for my sake, dutifully cutting out at about eleven o'clock so he could go to bed and go to work in the morning,after a brief cut-out with Patty and me for a quick ten-cent beer,at Roaring Pantera's,where Patty and I in our first talk and laughter together pulled wrists,now Mardu cut out with me,glee-eyed, between sets, for quick beers,but at her insistence at the mask instead, where they were fifteen cents,but she had a few pennies herself, and we went there and began earnestly talking and getting height-tingled together,and now it was the beginning,returning to the red drum for sets,to hear Bird, whom I saw now distinctly digging Mardu several times also myself,directly into my eye, looking to search,if really I was that great nut I thought myself to be,as if he knew my thoughts and ambitions or remembered me from other nightclubs and other coasts,other Chicagos,not a challenging look, but the king and founder of the bop generation at least,the sound of it,in digging his audience, digging the eyes,the secret eyes, him watching,as he just pursed his lips and let great lungs and immortal fingers work,his eyes separate and interested and humane,the kindest jazz musician there could be while being and therefore naturally the greatest,watching Mardu and me in the infancy of our love and probably wondering why or knowing it wouldn't last,or seeing who it was would be hurt,as now, obviously, but not quite yet,it was she whose eyes were shining in my direction,though I could not have known and now do not definitely know.