“I read it in my psychology textbook,” she said. “They have to meet on a bridge.”

I glanced across the river at the orange lights of the Williamsburg Bridge and imagined myself flagging down the next available bike messenger as he flew over the arc of the pedestrian overpass. I imagined myself crouching in the shadows, lying in wait. Allie rummaged through her bag and withdrew a flashlight and a spiral-bound notebook. She flicked on the light and flipped the book open to a dog-eared page.

“If two people meet on a bridge they will almost always fall in love,” she read aloud. “It’s a reaction against chaos. The bridge is perceived by the body to be a threat to one’s safety. We understand logically that we’re safe, but the primal parts of us don’t. We’re unstable, so we grasp for stability. The grasp is falling and the stability is love.”

“I can’t picture myself meeting anyone but muggers on the bridge right now,” I said. It was two-thirty in the morning on a Tuesday night. The smell of salt water, seaweed, and sewage rose and fell with the breeze that lifted off of the East River and scattered the garbage that littered the park.

“I’m not talking about bridges,” Allie said.

I looked at her like she was crazy.

“I’m talking about when Lucy hitchhiked across the country and fell in love in New Orleans.”

Our friend Lucy left college halfway through her sophomore year to take to the streets and like Kerouac, type – not write – the Great American Novel. Her original plans were to go Los Angeles, then up the west coast and back, but she fell in love with an accordion player named Dallas as soon as she hit the Big Easy. Lucy’s letters described the heat and his hair and I figured it must have had something to do with the humidity and the rum and the damp, swampy air that snags some people in their lower latitudes and ropes them into staying. According to Allie, it had nothing to do with the air or his hair or his accordion or steel-stringed guitar. Lucy’s luck in love had everything to do with a bridge.

“Not the Williamsburg Bridge,” Allie groaned, rolling her eyes. “Lucy was on a bridge. I was speaking metaphorically.”

She shoved the flashlight under her chin and made a horrible face, then grinned and flicked off the light.

He straightened his vision. The sky was navy in the weak pre-dawn light.

Six months later, Morgan was still talking about the warehouse. It was the weekend before Christmas; Morgan and I were sitting in his apartment in Bay Ridge, drinking Jack Daniels and wasting the daylight. The walls glowed blue with the light of the muted television screen.

“Come see it,” he said. “You’ll be impressed.” I set my drink on the windowsill and ran my finger along the dimpled wood. Heat bubbled up from the radiator, causing the paint to pocket. I cracked the window.

“You don’t want to go alone?” Morgan paused. He was a solitary wanderer and an even more solitary drunk. Morgan didn’t drink for confidence or for social stamina; he drank because his limbs demanded it. Whiskey loosened him like hot water on packed ice. It caused his joints to pop and crack.

“No,” he said. Morgan’s fingers began to sort bottle-caps on the table. He shook his head.

It wasn’t a long walk down to the water but it was cold. A chill whipped down First Avenue like a frozen slice of a hurricane. My hands turned red in the wind. We found the building just as Morgan had left it: hole blasted out of the side, crumbling bricks, graffiti that read “ENTRANCE TO HELL, DANGER, DO NOT ENTER” in thick, red swirls. We squeezed our way through the entrance, taking care not to trip over the piles of tires, smashed ceramics, and metal scraps that spilled from the gut of the building onto the sidewalk.

Once we were inside, the brightness of the air took us by surprise. The sun was setting, painting a slate of deep powder blue above us where a ceiling should have been. In the center of the room, a looming tower of corroded steel caused the floor to bend. We followed a path through the trash and saw that the tower was actually a pile of abandoned cars that had been smashed and set aflame. We moved as close as we could without causing the ground to collapse. The floorboards buckled beneath my feet; plastic bags snaked around my ankles but I didn’t stop to tear them away. Morgan pointed to the places where the steel had melted, sizzling in the burning paint and chemicals, then dripped like candle wax and burned through the floor.

“A chemical fire,” he said. “Whatever it was, the flames were hot enough to weld the cars together.” I looked backwards, towards the jagged entrance. Someone had driven through the wall in order to drag the wreckage inside and burn it. The tower was powdered with ashes and dust. I couldn’t understand why the fire hadn’t spread, why the rest of the building hadn’t burned to the ground.

Morgan lit a cigarette, smoked half of it, and put it out on the floor. An aura of emptiness and stale anger hung in the air, twisting with the meat-hooks that dangled from the ceiling, swinging in the wind.

“The basement,” Morgan said. “I want to find the basement.”

We toed our way around the cars and headed into the rear of the warehouse. The floor sagged, creaking in places where it had caved in and had been patched with slats of cheap plywood. The garbage was becoming sordidly domestic: broken records, ripped books, spent needles. A pile of trash blocked our way to the back wall, an area where the floor had collapsed at the foot of an iron staircase. A gaping black hole opened like a set of jaws. Morgan began to part the trash with his hands.

“Don’t,” I said. I grabbed his shoulder. Morgan froze. There was something finely-tuned and immediate about his body, as though his muscles were composed of tightly-wound copper springs. He looked at me without looking, like an animal about to disobey, then threw the plastic crate he’d been holding back into our path. I took a deep breath. The air stank of gasoline and decaying meat.

“We can try that one,” I said, pointing to another rusted staircase, one whose bottom stairs had collapsed and fallen to pieces in a rusted heap on the floor. The stairwell rose almost forty feet into the air, connecting the ground floor to a small, precarious balcony and a doorway that glowed black in the waning light. Morgan hesitated, then nodded quietly. I grasped the banister and began to climb, testing my weight on the edge of each step before I trusted it with my entire weight. I felt Morgan’s breath on the back of my neck. He jerked the rail nervously, then stepped around me and sprinted up the stairs, disappearing into the doorway.

At the top of the stairwell I paused, surveying the ground below. I squinted my eyes and listened, hearing nothing but the rustling of plastic bags in the wind and the clanging of chains and levers.

“It’s safe,” I heard Morgan call. I hesitated, then stepped around the corner and into a small room. The walls were covered in brightly covered designs, tags layered over other tags, some done artfully, others in violent slashes of paint. Another hole in the wall led to a crawlspace between buildings. The room was almost empty, save for a pile of rusted tin cans and a spotty, stained mattress that lay askew like a limber body.

“Come look at this.” I tip-toed to the top of the next staircase, following Morgan’s voice onto the third tier of the building. The stairwell let out onto an expanse of exposed concrete, boxed off like a chessboard. Square holes opened up in the floor in order to let the chains of the meat-hooks through. Metal beams hung above us like the ribcage of a slowly decaying whale. Morgan waved for me to walk over to where he was standing, and when I did, the floor opened up in a sea of shattered glass that twinkled blue and silver in the dying light.

“It’s like being in a movie,” he whispered. I nodded. In the shadows, Morgan’s shoulders took on a soft, molded contour. He buried his face in his scarf, then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his flask. “A drink?” I nodded. We stood side by side, passing the flask back and forth between us, watching our breaths condense. We were silent for nearly fifteen minutes, waiting for the sun to sink below the horizon. When it did, the warehouse sank into a cave-like darkness. I could hardly distinguish the holes in the floor from the floor itself.

When Morgan turned to leave, I followed.

We walked home in silence, side by side. We followed the BQE, stumbling along Third Avenue underneath the trembling metal rails of the freeway. The wind whipped around us, freezing the puddles on the sidewalk into slick plates of glass. Morgan turned up the collar of his pea-coat and pulled his hat over his ears. As we got closer to Bay Ridge, the streetlights coated us in a tangerine glaze. Morgan’s cheekbones were glossy in the light. After a second glance, I realized that he was crying. We took a left on Seventy-Third and headed home, cautiously, stopping at each crosswalk to wait for the lights to change.

“It’s like a fishtank,” Franco once said, laughing. He was almost too stoned to cut hair.

Whenever Franco was busy with a client, Allie and I would linger around the apartment, drinking cheap wine, sprinkling lemon juice on plates of lettuce. We were both unemployed, constantly in limbo between printing the resume and handing it in. The weather was just too hot to move; we kept the lights off for the psychological effect of the shade.

One day Allie and I had a change of heart. “We need to find a way of eating good food without paying for it,” I said. After considering the options – “stealing and whoring,” Allie laughed – we decided that working tables would be our best and only option. We decided to apply for waitressing jobs at Caffe Della Pace, mainly because we were starving and in the mood for one of their omelettes and a mixed-berry tart. I loved the way they topped the fresh berries and cream with powered confectioner’s sugar.

We were antsy and school-girlish at the counter. All the waitresses looked like out-of-season print models and disgruntled Swedes. They glared at our lopped-off angular red hair and one even rolled her eyes. We cringed and slunk outside. Before I even had a chance to start feeling sorry for myself, Allie grabbed my shoulder. “Jobs are stupid,” she declared. She pulled me back through that door and we both ordered berry tarts with the last of our spending money. We stiffed the snotty waitress her tip.

The summer of 1997 was probably the hottest summer I’d ever felt. This was the summer before Wally’s became Niagara, before the cops actually cared if you were drinking in front of Coney Island High, before Coney Island High was closed and abandoned. Granted, the neighborhood had long been gentrified; there were renovations and rising rents everywhere. But there was still something dirty, something unclean about the streets. It smelled funny in the gutters. People still begged for change, hung their laundry on the fire escapes. Allie and I stayed up past dawn, put on our sunglasses, and walked around Tompkins Square Park. The benches were filled with homeless men, red and wrinkled as overripe fruit.

I took to borrowing Allie’s pink sundress. Since she was nearly two inches taller, what would have been an obscenely short micro-mini on her was a perfectly acceptable mini-skirt on me. We stole her roommate’s boxer shorts, pulled them on under our dresses, and brought our beer out on the fire escape. Anton, the superintendent, was always out on the sidewalk, fixing his bikes. He was a full-fledged Harley man with the beard and the beer-gut to prove it. Sometimes, when we were downstairs hanging out with Franco, Anton would let us squeeze his biceps but his beard was off-limits. Allie bought him a 6-pack of Grolsch every Friday and he’d turn a deaf ear to the noise complaints we’d cause on the weekends.

“Nice panties, ladies!” Aton waved. Allie and I cackled.

“You can’t see nuttin, loser!” she screamed.

“Damn straight I can!”

Allie gave me a look, then poured the entire contents of her beer straight down onto Anton’s sunburned head. He spun around like circus on wheels, cursing and laughing.

“I know where you girls live!” he yelled, then looked up, smiling. “There’d better be one of those beers in store for me!”

“Oh, there’s more where that came from!” Allie yelled, sticking her bony arm through the iron rods of the fire escape, tipping her empty bottle of Bud. Anton stormed into the building.

“Oh shit, he’s coming upstairs!” Allie and I jumped to our feet, fumbling through the window. We dashed for the front door, slipping on papers and dirty clothes, but Anton had already let himself in with the master key. I tripped on a chair, drunk out of my mind, and Allie follwed me onto the floor. Anton just watched as we laughed.

“So you girls gonna get me drunk, too?” he said.

Allie handed him a Bud and we followed each other down the narrow, winding staircase and into the daylight. Anton’s bike gleamed in the midday sun. We waved to Franco, who was busy primping a lithe, blonde gentleman behind the glass front of the salon.

“Let’s get a falafel,” I said. Allie and I said goodbye to Anton, who lazily sucked his beer on the metal bench in front of the building. When we left he was in a daze, gazing at his motorcycle.

Allie and I followed our shadows into Tompkins Square Park. A punk band was playing loud music to crowd of teenagers and old men as young mothers maneuvered baby carriages along the cobblestone paths. I watched a couple embrace, their colorful spikes meshing like fronds of tropical plumage. There was a breeze. Somewhere in the air I smelled grenadine, apple whiskey, and coconut lip balm. The trees trembled with excitement. I breathed deeply. This is what summer is, I thought, this is what summer is meant to be.