THE WALL

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I found a note recently, one of my own, in an army jacket, along with a buck

and three books of matches. It contained the words "the wall." I was really thrown, although I was glad to retrieve the buck which I had more or less forgotten about. I had trouble remembering what the note was supposed to stand for, what I had had in mind. Eventually, I did remember, although it took some doing. The note was a Third Avenue bar note, written to myself in a moment of drunken unhappiness and subjectivtity. A memo denoting some sort of insight, self-awareness, written while I was thinking through some relationships, some people I had known. It seems that when I first knew Louie-first met him on Third Avenue in a bar which wasn't quite chi-chi, wasn't quite as friendly as a neighborhood bar, wasn't quite in the Bowery, wasn't the sort of bar which is ever likely to get into a New Yorker short story-that Iwasn't supposed to like his friends, wasn't supposed to be liked by them. There were walls galore which Louie wanted to build, his walls, in a rather pathetic attempt to dramatize his life. I think that he had one in particular in mind, a wall between myself and my immediate predecessor with Louie, a guy named Joe.

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