Soon after that I made regular and that gave me an 8 hour night, which beat 12, and pay for holidays. Of the 150 or 200 that had come in, there were only two of us left.

Then I met David Janko on the station. He was a young white in his early twenties. I made the mistake of talking to him, something about classical music. I happened to be up on my classical music because it was the only thing I could listen to while drink– ing beer in bed in the early morning. If you listen morning after morning you are bound to remember things. And when Joyce had divorced me I had mistakenly packed 2 volumes of The Lives of the Classical and Modern Composers into one of my suitcases. Most of these men’s lives were so tortured that I enjoyed reading about them, thinking, well, I am in hell too and I can’t even write music.

But I had opened my mouth. Janko and some other guy were arguing and I settled it by giving them Beethoven’s birthdate, when he had penned the 3rd Symphony, and a generalized (if confused) idea of what the critics said about the 3rd.

It was too much for Janko. He immediately mistook me for a learned man. Sitting on the stool next to me he began to complain and rant, night after long night, about the misery buried deep in his twisted and pissed soul. He had a terribly loud voice and he wanted everybody to hear. I flipped the letters in, I lis– tened and listened and listened, thinking what will I do now? How will I get this poor mad bastard to shut up?

I went home each night dizzy and sick. He was murdering me with the sound of his voice.