By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page preserves a small Los Angeles memory in which mutual waving across a car window briefly feels like proof of being known.
Its power lies in uncertainty. The scan-reviewed transcription clarifies the small street scene, and the insistence that 'they knew me' gives it an ache for contact, belonging, and urban intimacy that vanishes almost as soon as it appears.
A first-person L.A. memory: rolling 'slow along a shopping street' from the back seat, window down, a wave returned by 'these guys hanging out on the left.' The whole charge of the page is mutual recognition - 'they knew me and I know they did' - asserted by the trailing ellipsis rather than proven. A soft, almost wistful note of belonging that contrasts with the predatory desert and Prankster material later in the notebook.