Title: A Night on Sixth:
Author: Duke White
Last saved by: Jessica White

A Night on Sixth

By W. Duke White

(Written December 29, 2002 – January 21, 2003)

Sixth Street in Austin began as a cool and dark stretch of road, but then it quickly became decoratively lit with iridescent neon and colorful signs.  The rows of bars and clubs were loud with illumination.  Pizzerias, pubs, pool halls, and head shops lined up and squeezed in very close to one another, and post-Christmas decorations drooped towards the street, awaiting removal.
There were few people roaming the sidewalks.  Punk-rock kids with studded leather jackets and middle-aged men with countenances of determination on their faces scurried in and out of entrances.  The glare of light was magnificent, but it ceased suddenly at Brazos Road and reinvented itself with commercial clothing dealers and American banks.
My old man steered his beamer over to Seventh Street and pulled into a parking lot.  A few feet away, a drug deal was taking place between two middle-aged women.  My old man stopped near the camper where they stood.
What the hell is he doing?  Is he going to try to break up this drug deal?  My old man must have lost his damn marbles.  Who does he think he is?  Steve McQueen?  Oh, maybe he’s gonna hook up on a twenty.  That would…
 “Little twat’s got her hand out,” my old man interrupted.  He rolled down his window and handed the lady a five.  She stuffed the money into her hot-pink fanny pack and motioned to a vacant spot in the lot.
Oh.  We’re paying to park.
The afternoon had been beautiful.  The sky was blue and the air, warm and fresh.  However, once the sun had died and the air had chilled, I had become frigid and wrought with disappointment.  It had been nearly a decade since I had lived in Texas, and my memory began to fabricate facts about the weather.  I assumed even the coldest December night would maintain a comfortable seventy-two degrees, and because of this miscalculation, I left my jacket in the car and proceeded unsuspectingly to the next block.
We walked west on Sixth Street toward Interstate 35.  Six blocks of drunken adventures lay before us.  I had anticipated various types of rock and blues blaring from every orifice, but it was quiet, with the exception of a few cars and humans.  It was a half past seven on a Saturday night (the clubs were not expecting many customers until eight), so my old man and I decided to kill some time.
The signs piled atop one another above the entranceways.  The names seemed to run together in a sort of alcohol-induced colloquialism.  Shakespeare’s Pub, The Ritz Lounge, The Soho Lounge, The Chuggin’ Monkey, The Jazz Lounge, The 311 Bar.  There were miscellaneous cafés for those who drank too much and needed a cup of coffee, and outside the Comedy Club – Funnies, it was called – a man twirled a fake long-stemmed rose on a shoehorn that he held in his mouth.  By his side sat a basket of flowers with an advertisement that claimed two dollars a flower, but instead of kicking him down a little cash for his amusing presentation, I evaded him and continued walking with little eye contact.
What if he singles me out and persuades me to try his flower!  I thought.  I may have to teach him a lesson by stealing his slobbery shoehorn.  Of course, it would rob him of his fiscal prospects for the night – or at least until he makes it back to a shoe store to acquire another shoehorn.
I was tired of walking.  It was cold and I wanted to sit down and have a beer.  “You want to stop in there and have a drink?”  I asked.
“Nah,” my old man grunted.
Irritated, I moped alongside him passively.
The entranceway of The 311 Bar was draped with a green awning.  The doors were unlocked but there were no customers inside.  The bartender was a large Mexican with wild eyes whose baseball cap sat backwards on his caramel head.  He was trying hurriedly to wipe down the bar and put things in order before eight o’clock.
“We’re not open yet,” he said rudely without glancing up.
An older lady with a shrunken horizontal mouth drawn upon a taut wizened face materialized beside us.  She smoked a long, white cigarette and spoke in a sweet Texas tone that contradicted her appearance.  
“Unless you want a beer,” she said.  “We don’t have any ice yet.”
“That’s all we want is a beer,” said my old man.
“Joe, could you get these guys a beer?”
Her tone remained calm and sincere, but Joe appeared offended.  He slammed a Miller and a Budweiser upon the counter.  We took a seat at a small, round table against the wall and sucked on the neck of our bottles.
The den was dismal and dim.  The walls were decorated with half a dozen large, abstract paintings of Jimi Hendrix, and at the back of the room, overhead lights splashed about a large stage.  It had been quiet until the old lady with the cigarette turned on a Stevie Ray Vaughn CD, and then my boredom was relinquished.
My old man sat with the Bud in his hand and watched Joe.  The Mexican bartender worked quickly, trying to beat the clock, cursing as he scooted chairs and whipping his white hand towel in frustration over his shoulder.  It was now twenty till eight, which left Joe little time to accomplish apt preparation.
“This guy’s working too hard,” my old man observed.  I laughed cordially and lit up a cigarette.
I could see a nest of ashtrays at the bar, but I remained cravenly in my seat.  Joe’s temperament was unsettling.  I looked around in hopes of spotting a more convenient receptacle, but every available ashtray rested pompously upon the counter.
I held my cigarette gingerly while the ashes slowly curled ever longer around my fingers.
“Looking for an ashtray?”
My old man was quick.
“Yeah,” I said.
“There’s a whole bunch of them over at the bar.”
“I know,” I said.  “But I’m afraid that guy might explode all over me.”
“If he says anything, tell him to stick it up his yin-yang,” he said.  I smiled, retrieved an ashtray from the bar, and sat back down.  Joe had not even seen me.  I felt ridiculous for acting like such a pussy.
Strangers peeked inside the windows and tried the door handle.  Joe had locked the door since we had arrived.  They were noticeably perplexed, and they cupped their faces enviously to the glass.  After they had left, another couple wandered up.  The door handle had refused them entry and they too pressed their faces curiously to glass; and then, as if it were a crime for human beings to be original, their presence was again replaced by more gawking strangers who reacted in the same predictable manner.  I was concerned that their entire existence depended solely on the admission of the 311 Bar, and since their goal could not be accomplished, they might shrivel and die unfulfilled like slugs.
Joe never witnessed any of this.  He was in the back room, cussing at the air and scooping up buckets of ice to store at the bar.  The old lady suddenly materialized from her Hobbit hole or some damn place and spotted one of the couples at the door.  She popped the lock open, stuck her head out, and spoke again in her characteristic tone.
“You guys want to come in?”
The middle-aged couple entered and sat at the bar.  
“Do you have Sherry?” asked the man.
“Yes.  The only thing we don’t have is ice.  He’s getting it now.” 
“Okay.  Let me have a glass of Sherry and whatever the lady wants.”
“A Budweiser,” the lady said.
Joe noticed the new customers upon returning with his ice bucket, and he shot a nasty look to the old lady.  I felt his sudden dirty instinct.  He wanted desperately to run to her and slap her until she was limp and lying in a pool of her own blood and feces.  I pictured him standing over her lifeless body and screaming, “Why did you let these people in?  You knew that I was trying to get this place cleaned up!  Now you’re dead and covered in shit!”
The old lady did not see him scoff.  She was counting a wad of money and humming to the music.  Joe approached the bar and fractiously threw in the ice.  Everyone else went unwittingly about his or her business, and I seemed to be the only person cognizant of this man’s demeanor.
Suddenly eight o’clock came… and it was sudden.  The streets grew loud with horns and wheels on the cool, crowded pavement.  Throngs of people walked briskly by the window.  They shouted and laughed at each other gleefully and had audible conversations over the clamor of the automobiles.  Some of them entered and ordered drinks by the armful and in manners that kept Joe in a rush.
Within minutes, a band arrived and set up their equipment.  The lead singer/guitar player was a short, ugly girl with tight jeans and black cowboy boots.  The large, white Fender Stratocaster strapped over her small abdomen made her look awkward and childlike, but when they began playing, her appearance become superficial.  She slammed at the strings and wrestled the neck of her guitar.  Her freakishness was abated by the mad moan that seeped like sweet syrup from that expensive machine.  And realizing that I had underestimated her proficiency, I was taken aback.  Her head hovered intensely over the body of her instrument, and she girded the neck with her tiny hand and tickled the strings with her petite fingers.  The music screamed around the solid accentuations of the notes, and the power that resonated from the amplifier did not seem to coincide with the girl’s gentle engineering.  Her performance made the rest of the band appear drone and indescribable – with the exception of the keyboard player, who jumped and jerked and prodded the keys with his fingers and snapped his head around in a manner that would break any regular guy’s neck.
By nine o’clock I had drank two beers and smoked five cigarettes.  My old man decided it was time to take a walk and I agreed.  I was becoming bored with The 311 anyway.  So, after my dad hobbled back from the bathroom, we left the music and reentered the chilly air.
The streets were engorged.  Cars rolled languidly down Sixth, and herds of people rushed down the sidewalk, crossed streets, and filed in and out of entrances like ants atop an anthill.  Every club and bar throbbed with live blues and rock.  People talked and screamed and tinked their glasses together in celebration of life or of something unknown, and in the backdrop, the streets were alive and well with honking horns and car stereos.
The kids with unnaturally colored hair, Mohawks, and studded leather jackets loitered in front of a Pizzeria.  They created a clog in the flow of people on the sidewalk, and as we passed, my old man cracked one of them in the ankle with his cane.  The kid reared on his heels, irritation sparkling in his eyes, but as he caught sight of my old man, he dropped his chin and moved aside.
*	*	*
“Can I see your I.D.?”
I was so hypnotized by the sounds and sights that I had forgotten about doormen.
My old man did not wait for me.  He headed inside to the bar and ordered another drink.
After flaunting my age of twenty-two to the doorman, I walked in and leaned on the bar next to my old man.  He was drinking a Corona.  Miller was beginning to taste acrid, so I ordered myself a Budweiser.  It was smooth and cold.  The lady who gave it to me was hurriedly tending to the crowded little bar.  I noticed the large barcode printed across the front of her black tee shirt, and I did not find out until later – when my father and I had taken a seat in the back of the smoky bar – that this was the bar’s logo.
The name of the venue was Joe’s Generic Bar.
What’s with the name “Joe” in this town?  I know that people that live in Austin are more creative than that!  I guess many of the people in Austin didn’t originate in Austin.  I guess those ingenious families that loved the name Joe so much had migrated from Idaho or Iowa or something to get a taste of the thriving potential of this Texas capitol.  And why would somebody want their bar to be a “Generic Bar” or even have any remote relation to generics?  America doesn’t like generics.  We go for the name brand.  Why not call it “Joe’s Name Brand Bar” or “Joe’s Commercial Pub”?  Or why not just go all out and call it “Death of America”?  Those tourists would eat this place up!
The place was congested with loud people and their bellows of smoke, and the waitress, who seemed to be working single-handedly, was rushing in a business-like manner to give chilled beverages and receive ambitious money.  The place had a good feel to it.  There were many interesting pieces of memorabilia strung upon the walls, including a couple of paintings of Elvis Presley with his sarcastic sneer and a copy of an old promotional sign to re-elect Lincoln.  “Save the Union,” it said, or something to that effect.  The space in which the band played was located in the back of the bar next to a small flight of stairs, and at the summit of the stairs, a door that read “Men” led outside to an alley where a little wooden outhouse stood.  (The women had their own bathroom inside.  I pitied them because they didn’t have to go outside and see their breath on a cold December night as they relieved themselves.)
The band was playing the blues.  The lead singer/guitar player looked like a rookie in the Hell’s Angels, and beside him stood a large Italian who played the harmonica, and “he was no slacker,” according to my old man.  The bass player hid behind a wall of amplifiers next to the drummer, and the drummer was a woman.  Nope, she was a man.  He looked like a woman but he had no breasts.  I also notice him looking at me intermittently, and I was convinced that he was homosexual.  So, I decided to turn my attention away from the band and onto something else… just because I wanted to.
The exit door was open (the men’s bathroom, rather) and a supple breeze crept through the stagnant room.  A half dozen guys left to relieve themselves in the wooden outhouse, but as I sat pondering, I realized that I had not seen any of them return.  It is true that the band could have just been occupying my attention, but it was not long before my imagination began to run rampant.
Maybe there is a sort of phenomena inside that outhouse that swallows one up into another realm from which one cannot return.  
I knew this was a ridiculous concept, but it was more exciting and interesting than the other alternatives.
Is this the place, the cause, for many of the disappearances and lost faces we see every day on milk cartons and in windows of convenience stores?  Did Jimmy Hoffa come to this place one night in 1975 for a night of fun, only to meet his fate in the back alley of Joe’s Generic bar?  The chances are, no.  I don’t even think this bar has existed so long.  And what the hell would Hoffa be doing partying on Sixth Street, not to mention in this certain circumstance I had thought up?
It was all very unlikely, but stimulating nonetheless, and I was compelled to venture into the enigma and relieve my beer-burdened bladder.
As I stepped out, the cold hit me like a rack in the nuts.  I had to piss worse than ever.  I opened the wooden plank door of the outhouse and stepped in.  The interior walls were seized with graffiti.
In Kansas City, blues might be construed as amusement or something to scoff at or pass the time to while doing the duty.  The witty phrases stenciled on bathroom walls at home might include, “I fucked your mother” or maybe “this band really sucks” with a picture of a dick and balls doodled just beside it.  But here in Austin, blues music seemed to be a sort of spirituality, and those who praised it seemed to treat even the bathroom of the bar like it was a bibulous cathedral.  “I love blues,” read one of the phrases.  “Blues is Spirituality,” read another, with an “Amen” someone had scribbled beside it in assent.  I imagined a squirrelly black man, a beer in his hand and unsteady drunken eyes, carving away his heart on the wall as if to leave an affectionate note to one of his pen pals.  Then he would sit on the pot, read the other notes upon the wall, bury his face in his hands, and cry out, “I’m not the only one!  I’m not the only one that loves the blues!” as he squeezed out last night’s dinner into the toilet water.
I zipped my pants back up but didn’t flush.  I figured everyone else had made that mistake.  I had yet to see any evidence of anything strange – yes, I still petted the concept of strange occurrences lurking about the bathroom – and I thought that flushing the toilet was the catch.
What if I flushed the toilet and an immense whirlpool of air sucked me down into the pipes?  Down, down, down until I was suffocated or drowned or crushed by the violent suction of the small pipes.
So, I left the toilet for some other fool to flush and returned to my seat to suck on the neck of my Budweiser.
After a while, my old man leaned to my ear.  “You want to go knock around some more?” he asked.  I nodded my head and we finished our beers.
When we hit the sidewalk, I shoved my hands into my pants pockets and curled my shoulders around my neck.  My old man proposed that we go back to the car so that I could get my jacket.  At first I said no, but after a minute of toughing the cold, I decided we had better do so before my testes detached themselves and tumbled into my sock.
“Hey, where are you going?”  There was a young doorman about my age standing at the dark entrance to one of the pubs.  “There’s no cover to get in,” he said.  “Two dollar beers.”
I was polite with him.  “Going to get a jacket, man,” I said with a smile, but his business-like tone secretly irritated me.
“Yeah,” he replied, “it’s getting a little chilly.”
We turned a corner and passed the luminous purple sign of a Black Cat tattoo and piercing parlor.  Just across the alley, the Mercedes sat rigidly in the parking lot.  My father unlocked the door so that I could get my jacket, and I jumped in to take a couple hits from the wooden pipe he had stashed in his ashtray.  
I was soon under a young intoxication, and I flitted down the alley wearing an idiotic grin upon my face.
At the end of the block, we hung a right.  It was a little after ten now and Sixth Street was at its peak.  Herds of people pranced up and down the sidewalks, neon lights blinked invitingly, and a dozen cars honked simultaneously and seemingly for no apparent reason.  A tight group of college kids rushed by and I overheard one of them speaking.  “I feel my trigger finger starting to twitch,” he said.
My old man laughed.
“Did you hear that?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Do you know what he meant by that?”  I shook my head.  “He meant he feels like he’s coming into a bad part of town.”
“A bad part of town?”  I retorted inquisitively.  “There’s nothing dangerous about this street.  He must be a tourist.”
A horse and buggy followed slowly alongside us in the street, and I cowered behind my old man, watching the horse closely.  My intimate fear caused me to take precautions against an attack, although the horse showed no interest in me.  I knew he could smell my fear, and his black eyes pierced me as he clomped along, head bobbing up and down as if nodding to let me know he could smell it, and I could almost hear him say, “It’s alright, man.  I’m not gonna hurt ya.  I’m on duty.”
I lit up a cigarette just as we came to the Iron Cactus.  It looked chic and sophisticated.  I was apprehensive about smoking inside because of Austin’s smoke-free policy (despite being able to smoke in the previous bars), so I snubbed the cigarette out on the heel of my shoe and entered behind my old man.
The room was well lit.  The chrome bar was refulgent with blue neon and plentiful with ashtrays.  Behind the bar, a Hawaiian tended to glasses and bottles of alcohol.  In the corner by the window, a man by the name of Joe Vega played hit songs on his acoustic guitar and sang into his microphone.  A dozen set lists were sprawled upon the tabletops for anyone to make requests from – the choices ranging from Stone Temple Pilots to Alysson Kraus to Jimmy Buffet – and after he had finished one song, he would start promptly into another or ask the small audience to read off a request from the sheet.  Presently, he was singing in a soothing voice, “You my – brown-eyed girl,” followed by, “do you remember when – she used to sing.”
I turned in my seat, brandishing a beer bottle in my fist, which I sucked on sporadically.  I watched Joe with a tainted air of envy in the corners of my mouth.
I could do that.  What a simple gig that would be.  Just learn a bunch of hit songs everybody knows and belt them out.  I mean, I am good enough, although I haven’t played much in the past three years.  Not since the band broke up.  All I’d have to do is get a bunch of tablature off the Internet and I could gig out by myself anywhere!
The thought of getting back into the music scene had not effectively occurred to me before now.  It sounded like a good idea.  I began to ponder what might have become of my band had we stuck together.  We had been together only ten months, but we had come a long way and were just beginning to mesh when…
“You could do that,” said my father, sucking beer bubbles from his mustache with his bottom lip.
“I was just thinking that.”
“Oh, you were?”
“Yeah.”  I turned in my chair to face my old man.  Unlike any previous moment of the night, I felt conversational.  We had not spoken to each other much, but I could feel things were now going to turn around.  “Do you ever listen to my tape?”
“Your demo tape?  Yeah.  It’s in the collection of tapes that I listen to up at the shop.”
“Did I ever tell you why we broke up?”
“Yeah.  You sacked the bass player’s wife or something.”
“It was stupid,” I admitted as I took a shameful drink from my bottle.  “I mean, I feel silly because I practically haven’t picked up the guitar since we broke up.  It’s kinda like I’m punishing myself.”
“Well, don’t punish yourself for too long,” he said, sitting his beer back onto the coaster.  “You’ve already wasted away three years.”  I lit up the stinky cigarette I had put out on my shoe earlier and wedged it into the notch of the ashtray.
“Still, though, if I hadn’t stopped playing, I wouldn’t have ever thought about taking up writing seriously.”
“Maybe so.  How’s that going?”
“What?  Writing?  Pretty good.  I mean I still am having a lot of problems.”
“Like what?”
“Well…  I have problems with phrasing sentences, mostly.  Right now, I’m trying to teach myself how to write free flow.  I’ve started my novel about six times now, the one I started about three years ago, because I just wasn’t satisfied with it.  My main problem is that, after writing about two pages, I would stop and look over it and revise it and I would keep doing that.  So, I’m teaching myself how to just write what comes to me and when I’m finished, then I’ll go back and do the editing.”
“Well, everyone who wants to write has trouble writing, son,” said my old man.  “It’s not an easy task, and it’s a learning experience.  But let me ask you a question.  What do you mean you have trouble phrasing sentences?”
“Like, I put words in the wrong places and get them all jumbled up.  That’s why I’m teaching myself how to write free flow, because when I worry about what I’m writing, I get self-conscious and I feel stupid because my sentences look like they’ve been written by an illiterate teenager.”
“Well, you shouldn’t feel stupid.  It sounds like you’re coming along fine.  It’s just practice.  I know how when I was writing in college, I could whip out an essay or a story, no problem.  But my problems lay in other areas.  My point is, everyone’s got certain flaws.”
“I’d like to read some of your writings.  As a matter of fact, I’d like for you to sketch me out an autobiography sometime.”  I felt foolish saying this because I knew that my old man was a secretive person, but I was drunk, so I didn’t care.
“An autobiography, huh?”
“Yeah.  Mom’s told me a bunch of stories about you, and she said you had a pretty interesting life.”  My old man laughed and scratched his stubbly chin and pushed his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose.
“Yeah, I’ve had a pretty interesting life.  I’ve been a lot of places and seen a lot of things.”
“Do you feel your age?  Do you feel sixty-two?”
“No,” he said after some thought.
“How old do you feel?”
“About like I did when I was forty.  Except, I’ve had surgery on both of these hips and I recently dropped a goddamn refrigerator on my foot.”  We laughed and I puffed at my cigarette and smashed out the butt in the ashtray.
“So will you do it?”  I asked.  “Write out an autobiography, I mean.”
My old man evaded the question.
“Your mother,” he said instead, reminiscently.  “What kind of stories has she told you?”
“Oh, I don’t know.  A bunch.  Some has to do with your drinking and stuff…”
“Your mother has a strange way of remembering things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for instance, a couple things.  Your mother always called me an alcoholic when the truth of the matter was that she made me an alcoholic.  I drank because your mother and I always fought, and we fought because I drank.”
“So it was a catch-22 situation?”
“Yes.”
“What else?”
“Well, the marriage thing.  Your mother wants me to sign those divorce papers, still.  Even after I’ve told her that we’re legally divorced.  We’ve been divorced since ’94, since before your mother came back and we moved to Oklahoma.  Do you remember when your mother left?”
“Yes.  She moved up to Missouri and came back around her birthday.  You were working up in Oklahoma while I stayed in Texas.  George babysat me.”
“Right.  Do you remember the talk we had when your mother came back?”
“No.”
“You don’t remember?  The reason she came back was because you wanted your mother, and I told you that your mother and I were having problems and the only reason we were staying together was because we felt like you needed both a mother and father.  Do you remember that?”
“Not really, but okay.”
“Yeah.  So we’ve been divorced since then.”
I was at a loss for words at that moment.  I did not want to talk about my mother and father’s divorce.  I lit up another cigarette and puffed at it inanely.  Finally, my old man and I finished our beers and we ordered a couple more.  I suddenly felt awkward sitting next to my old man.  Soon, the beer began knocking at the door and the party inside my bladder was getting crowded.  When I returned from the restroom, my father was smiling at me.  I picked up my smoldering cigarette from the ashtray and puffed at it.
“I think I’m about ready for that hit now,” he said to me.  “I should have taken one with you.  After we finish these beers we’ll head back to the hotel room and take a couple.”  He took a quick glance at his wristwatch.  “It’s way past my bedtime, anyway.”  I looked at my watch, too.  It was almost midnight.  That depressing feeling that one experiences after a good party has ended began rise in me.  I sipped at my bottle slowly, trying not to think about it.
Joe Vega finished his set, and outside the erratic movement had slowed down dramatically.  I didn’t feel like talking anymore.  I wanted to just sit in my drunken bubble and sip pathetically at my bottle.  Suddenly a clamor arose beside me, and the rude sound forced me from my thoughts.  My old man’s cane had fallen from the back of his chair, and before I could think about fetching it, a clean-cut college kid had risen politely from his seat and retrieved it.  That kid irritated me.  I felt that I should have been the one to retrieve it.  But my logic returned and my serenity was soon restored.  I was glad to see that there was still dignity in the world, especially in today’s youth.
I jammed out my cigarette in the ashtray, and my old man and I stood from the bar.  Adorned in my jacket, we exited The Iron Cactus.
The essence of Sixth Street had passed its prime.  People were scarce.  The only thing that remained was the neon lights, which now only seemed to blink out of desperation.  “For God’s sake, go home!” it flicked in code.  I was disappointed to see such a jumping attraction pass its prime so early on a Saturday night, yet it gave me some relief to know that I had out-partied the college kids – at least on this stretch of road.
I’m sure the party’s moved elsewhere, I thought, trying not to jump to any conclusions about this fabulous town.  I wouldn’t think that Austinites would give up partying at such an early hour.  I’m sure there’s other possibilities for entertainment in this town, this fresh and exciting and eccentric town that gave birth to hundreds of musicians, this town that throbs prominently with young talent and untapped potential, this town that has brought out many emotions from me and stirred my imagination and fed me influence.  I’m sure there are a thousand parties going on in every corner of this city, and I’m sure that most of them are just getting started.  And I’m sure that every one of them is like an outstretched hand inviting a stranger’s shake; and when I come back, I’m bringing the party with me and I’m going to contribute to the plethora of parties to make it a thousand and one!
The neon began to die, or maybe it was the illusion that the back window of the Mercedes created.  Every light became a star amidst the midnight, twinkling and standing tall upon December.  They wavered a little and ducked behind buildings like playful insects and then out again, and soon nothing was visible except comparatively bland structures and night.  I felt that I had found something there, something no less that inspiration and no more than tranquility, and I was rather sad that I had to leave Sixth Street so soon, but I knew that sometime in the relatively near future I would be returning.