There was Ophelia in a painting at a gallery in London, dead, pallid, her skirts billowing, flowers in her hands as she drifted downstream. Next were tank convoys on the Marathon highway, a Russian warship in the bay, Greeks on the corners counting beads, and skinned goats hanging from hooks in the windows of markets.

I could rave about the beauty of these oaks with their prickly leaves or the mossy pond that smells like dead dogs, sing ballads of lost sons, recite from the Rubaiyat and laugh in despair, or strain for the strength to lift this Norton off my crushed legs and drag myself to Susan to kiss her young lips for the first time. But I must keep my humor. What did I expect from a crackpot and wasted world, a den of losers and pious toads. I'll run it all back, keep my eyes off her, and talk to this fool tape recorder, My father was a handyman, claimed we needed things to break so we'd have things to fix. It seems like half a day now I've been banging on the case, poking around in the gadgetry, spitting on the heads, scraping the crust off the batteries. The reels turn, but it won't play back. It might be recording, I don't know.

On a bench by Ophelia I scored a lid from Oscar the drummer. He brought me to Potter, lead guitar, promoter and manager, a pushy little fruit with a nose wart and the Thames van that carried us all down to Athens. British rock bands were strong, and we booked most of the clubs in the city and all the American bases. A cracked-skinned widow took me in, shared her bunk on her sloop at a yacht club in Rraeus. She was old as Lucifer and twice as nasty with a fetish for twisted positions she had learned in a Swedish clinic, but she bought me crabs and squid in the wharf cafes, tossed me