I was a bum in San Francisco but once managed to go to a symphony concert along with the well—dressed people and the music was good but something about the audience was not and something about the orchestra and the conductor was not, although the building was fine and the acoustics perfect I preferred to listen to the music alone on my radio and afterwards I did go back to my room and I turned on the radio but then there was a pounding on the wall: “SHUT THAT GOD—DAMNED THING OFF!”
there was a soldier in the next room living with his wife and he would soon be going over there to protect me from Hitler so I snapped the radio off and then heard his wife say, “you shouldn’t have done that.” and the soldier said, “FUCK THAT GUY!” which I thought was a very nice thing for him to tell his wife to do. of course, she never did.
anyhow, I never went to another live concert and that night I listened to the radio very quietly, my ear pressed to the speaker.
war has its price and peace never lasts and millions of young men everywhere would die and as I listened to classical music I heard them making love, desperately and mournfully, through Shostakovich, Brahms, Mozart, through crescendo and climax, and through the shared wall of our darkness.