August 4, 1975

One page left in this old journal. One page, and I've been saving it all this time for something important, something... something that will change my life. Now my heart is beating so hard I'm amazed the people around me can't hear it over the music, that they aren't all staring at me. Because I think my life is about to change, I know it is, and my hand is shaking so hard I can barely write.

I'm in New York. New York City, sitting at a table in the diviest dive bar I've ever been in, and I'm watching a god play guitar. He looks like a gypsy, but probably he's Mexican, with long black hair and dark glittering eyes, his nose beautifully too large, and his skin glowing golden. He's playing a sunburst Les Paul that he doesn't look like he could have afforded, with his ratty T-shirt and ripped bell-bottom jeans, but he plays it like he was born with it in his hands. His big, beautiful hands, long fingers twisting and dancing up and down the neck, making music that sounds like making love.

I came to New York to start a band, and so far I've found nothing. Crappy little bands that invited me to sing, to jam, and rejected me; crappier bands that let me join and then crumbled or self-destructed. I've lived on people's couches, on people's floors, and I've spent the night on a bench in Washington Square Park. I've worked at and been fired from more jobs than I can count. I've snorted, smoked, and even shot everything I've been offered by musicians, by girls who think I'm cute, by hot guys who don't know I'm thinking about sucking their cock while we're getting high. I've searched for something, I don't even know what, and I haven't found it. Until tonight, when I found him.

I don't know his name. I don't know his band. I don't know anything about him, but by the end of the night I will. By the end of the night I will know everything about him, and in the morning I'll tell him that I fell in love with him the first second I saw him.