the first minute. The first word he spoke to her was probably a lie.

He remembered it. “Let’s hear your clever first line,” she had said, on the sidewalk on Sunset Strip.

“I don’t have one,” he had said. I . . . I was a lie. He didn’t exist, not in the way she knew.

“I don’t have a clever last line, either,” he had said. At least that wasn’t a lie.

He threw away the tailings of the cigarette and got on board the black ship. Jimmy was the only passenger, the last of the night to go over.

Alcatraz.

Every city, every society of Sailors had its place. The Place. When they met all together, for whatever ceremonial necessities, they met there. In L.A., it was aboard the Queen Mary. Here, it was Alcatraz. There were always enough Sailors in high places in any city to give their brothers and sisters some space. To facilitate. Sailor cops and Sailor firemen would be there to direct Norms away, to declare the glare of lights or the cars or the lines of people filing into a public place hours past midnight “nothing” or “a private party.”

Sailors covered the island. As the black ship angled in to bump against the dock, Jimmy saw them. Everywhere. The hundreds, the overflow from the main gathering inside the prison. Whoever was in charge had sure enough fired up the place with blazing lights. It was so bright, so alive, there were bound to be calls in the morning to the Chronicle. Groner would probably take them.

The local Sailors still thought Jimmy was somebody. As he came off the ship, they stepped out of his way, cleared a path across the dock and up the Z of the ramp, to the big prison buildings on the cap of the rock.

Up top, there was really only one big building. It was two or three hundred feet long, two-thirds as wide, tall, with thick walls angling in. Like a fort. Like a prison. Like a structure used to test bombs. The walls were a cream color in the daytime, and peeling under the almost constant salt wind, but at night they just looked gray. There were support buildings down the slope and out on the point, but they didn’t matter, just the big building. There was a concrete and grass yard in front, the front facing San Francisco, and another, all concrete, on the back corner, facing Tiburon.

The light of the lighthouse swept around like a scythe.

Jimmy ducked it, went through the crowd and inside.

They called the main cell block Broadway. It was two tiers high, “oft-photographed.” The factions of Sailors had divvied up the space the way they’d divided up the parking lots over at the Wharf. But most of them seemed to be thinking outside the box. Any box. Half were drunk, the other half high, high either from pills or pot (or acid, this being San Francisco), or just from the unsettling mix of order and chaos. Like a prison.

Or maybe it was the cold that had them jumping. It was freezing. Beyond the main cell block was the cafeteria, tables long ago ripped out, but not the clunky apparatus in the ceiling where they could spray out gas in the old days, “to quell a disturbance.” Some of them spilled over into that.

On the back wall of the main cell block was the gunrail, a balcony of sorts on the dividing wall. One end of it was against a high, barred window. A man was posted there, looking out the window, looking up at the sky. At intervals, he would broadcast a number. And then repeat it. Wherever he’d started with it, he was down, or up, to thirteen.

Jimmy heard a few more repetitions of his Christian name.

Sailor men and women dressed for occasions like this, usually arch versions of whatever they wore living. Whatever that was. The parade down to the docks hours past midnight must have been a sight for any insomniac Kansans peeking around the hotel curtains. There were men in bowlers, men in stevedore caps, men in those slanted knit caps union organizers fancy. Men in oversized Vietnam cammies. Among the women, there were festive Mae Wests and Marilyns and Jackie O.’s. And too many hippie chicks, who probably still had daddies out there somewhere wondering what had happened. A couple walked around wearing real Mae Wests, inflated life vests, glow sticks glowing. Most of the Sailors wore black arm-bands, but it wasn’t a