After a few weeks of driving around reading signs stapled to telephone poles Betsey and I found an apartment in the tenderloin near a residents' hotel where another friend of mine worked, and the three of us began a regular schedule of juice fasting which we were mistakenly told would calm our vibrational field. Everything seemed like it might work at first. The fasts lasted for four or five days but we were allowed water and carrots and seasonal fruits. During the fasts Betsey grew pale and her mouth tasted like lime and once when we made love she fainted and I eased myself off her quickly as though I had at last done something outside the law, a feeling both thrilling and shameful. I looked at her still body lying there as skinny as a junkie's and I wondered, is she dead? She could have been dead. I didn't believe it but still I felt strangely close to her then since usually she talked all the time, talked or laughed in her motor-like voice, and who was I in comparison, a boy who at twelve wore black mascara and at fourteen was shooting speed up my nose because I could not deal with after-school chitchat. When Betsey came to a few seconds later her eyes were very red at the rims which might have been the beginnings of allergies -- on the days the wind blew from the east, which was not very often, we all got scratchy throats due to toxic leaks from the Richmond Chevron refinery. To offset this and other maladies we began to take zinc.