My tastes were different, though I was no musician. I went for punk, mostly. Plug-and-play music, the scruffier and angstier the better. Prince’s music was about the only thing Flip and I could agree on. But somehow, as friends, we clicked.

My friendship with Flip had started in upstate New York where life was slow and attitudes were conservative. If you were a kid with any sort of ambition or dream for yourself then it was a place you knew you had to get out of as soon as possible. While Flip always prepped his thick brown hair and checked his look before making a move – even if we were just going to the Price Chopper to buy cigarettes – I was a perpetual slob in jeans, sneakers, T-shirts, and distressingly thinning black hair. Flip wanted to make it as a musician, which also meant he wanted to be famous and have money and any woman he wanted. He never had a problem attracting women and, though he was self-taught as a piano player, he had a lot of ideas about music. So, after a few years of living in Albany and not finding any good reason to stay, he figured he was ready. He made his move with a couple of friends to New York City.

I had nothing – no money, no ambition, no desire. I didn’t burn and seethe. I just imploded and drank too much. Further aspects of my larger problem. I knew I had to get out of Albany but didn’t know how. About a year after Flip moved, I wound up in New York accidentally, like a package mailed to the wrong address.

Once we reconnected in the city of dreams, Flip was always trying to put a fire under me, to get me excited about something. I think my directionless, lazy, time-wasting ways – which had survived the move completely intact – pissed him off and worried him. Here I was in New York City and what was I doing? Reading in the park. Reading in bars. Reading at home. I was still the same naked mole rat, sniffing and shuffling my way through a series of dumpy underground tunnels when mere inches away was nirvana.

What I could never explain to Flip, though I had tried, was that reading was a form of writing to me, a substitute for the writing I was eventually going to get down to doing myself. What I couldn’t explain to myself was that reading was not only an escape from the writing I wasn’t doing, it was also part of a larger delusion I had which was this: by immersing myself in a book, I was somehow slowing down time. And each new book I picked up carried with it a guarantee that there would be time in my future to sit and read it.

“At some point, you’re going to have to get really selfish if you want to do anything with your life,” Flip would say.

And I’d always tell him, “I know. It’s cool. You do what you need to do. I can take care of myself.”

I was waiting. I wanted to see him become famous and have all of his women because, in my life, I’d never seen anyone do anything before. I wanted to know it was possible that someone could get what they wanted – even if I thought what they wanted was dumb – before I stepped out and tried it myself. He was my test case, my surrogate, and I was his loyal audience. We used each other, but neither one of us was aware of that.

We were having a coffee and a cigarette one yawning Saturday afternoon when Flip said he wanted to check in on Shane, another musician friend I’d met a few times before, to see if he’d made a decision about playing in a band with him. Flip was anxious to snag him before anyone else did.

Shane had lived in the East Village since the mid ’70s. (“You have no idea,” was all he would say about that era.) He’d played with glam New York Dolls-types of bands that went nowhere. He’d played in rock bands that went nowhere. He’d played in a couple of quick, three-chord punk bands that went nowhere. He had opened for some big bands. He had a reputation. Somewhere in the midst of almost making it, he’d become a junkie, but he’d eventually managed to pull himself out. By the time I first met him in 1985, he’d been clean for six years.

Being in his mid-thirties, Shane seemed old to the early-twenties me. That he didn’t drink or do drugs of any kind made him seem even older. Like the other junkies in my neighborhood, Shane looked bloodless, his skull shrink-wrapped in a thin tissue of near-gray flesh, his mouth a mobile fissure outlined with weirdly purple lips. Yet, unlike the other junkies, his eyes shone like bright green suns surrounded by whites as bright as chalk. He also didn’t have the zero-body-fat, pure-muscle physique of a junkie. Shane, in fact, was a little paunchy, and wore his shirts untucked to disguise that fact. He was irreversibly healthy now.

And it was this healthiness, and the fact that he had no visible style or edge beyond another version of the same black leather jacket that everybody else had, that made me wonder what Flip was after in Shane.

We walked to his building on Second Avenue and hauled it upstairs.

Aside from a few guitars sitting out in stands, a twin bed, and a couple of bookshelves he’d taken in off the street, Shane’s place was empty. It echoed when you walked through it. The walls were rag-painted a buzzing sea green, and the windowsills, doors, and molding were the high-gloss black of fingernail polish. Shane liked to burn a brand of incense that always smelled like soap to me. He said it calmed him.

Shane had told us that the stuff he used to have had either been stolen and he never had the money to replace it, or he’d sold it to buy drugs. Once he got clean, he said, he realized that most of the stuff he owned had been garbage to begin with. Crap that a consumer culture wanted you to think was your reward for giving your life away to your job. Heroin, which he’d thought would lead him to some deeper, soulful reservoir of feeling and lift his talent to another level, nearly killed him. But getting clean helped him admit to himself that the only thing that might get him to that musical oasis was discipline and hard work. There could be no other way. He played every day, he said, every day.

After the usual heys and what’s ups (no handshakes – Shane didn’t like to shake hands with anyone if he didn’t have to), I asked Shane if it was okay if I looked at his books.

“Sure,” he said. “Just be careful you don’t get burned.” He held my look for a beat to see if I understood him, and then turned back to Flip.

Aside from some pocket paperback, sci-fi stuff – all of it arranged alphabetically and pushed flush to the very edge of the shelf – Shane read Western philosophy, from Socrates to Nietzsche to Sartre, and Eastern spirituality, from Vedic and Hindu texts that I barely recognized to the Hare Krishna books that its freaky disciples would thrust at anyone who looked at them. I’d only just started moving in these sorts of directions myself – part of some idea I had then that maybe philosophy or religion could help me figure out what to do with my life – so I was happy to quit trying to act cool, and disappear into my usual withdrawn state.

The religion and philosophy books were in rough shape: blown-out, battered, the spines nearly unreadable from the deep cracks running through them. Shane had wrestled with these things and they’d fought back. I saw that he had the same Vintage paperback copy of The Gay Science that I had, and pulled it out.

As I sat on the floor pondering all those Nietzschean exclamation points, Shane came over and asked what I was looking at. I held the cover up to him and he took the book from my hand, keeping it open to the page I’d been reading, a page the book had automatically fallen open to.

“I told you to be careful,” he said, and began to read the same page.

The last thing I’d read had been this:

“The strongest ideas and passions brought before those who are not capable of ideas and passions but only of intoxication! And here they are employed as a means to produce intoxication! Theater and music as the hashish-smoking and betel-chewing of the European! Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? – It is almost the history of ‘culture,’ of our so-called higher culture.”

The lines were underlined in red felt-tip pen.

A long, quiet minute passed while Flip and I watched Shane read. I looked over at Flip and he made an annoyed face.

“Yeah, that’s it, man,” Shane said, handing the book back to me. “People don’t get it, only the artists. Everyone else is like some sick junkie, looking for a distraction from reality, which nobody wants to deal with because nobody knows how. They aren’t up to it.”

I nodded, knowing he wouldn’t listen to anything I might have to say, and turned back to the book.

Flip and Shane resumed their conversation but the mood was off now.

Things stood this way – Flip was acting like he had an offer that Shane should seriously consider (with the implicit suggestion that it might be the best he could expect for someone of his age), while Shane seemed to be insulted by Flip’s condescension, seeing him as just another kid with too much attitude in a neighborhood lousy with them.

A deeper problem that hadn’t come up yet was the fact that Flip and Alex, the other guy in this band-to-be, hadn’t really written any songs. Though they had one that had a “killer” guitar part and a chorus of:
Get Busy
Get Busy
Get Busy
Get Def

Flip had told me about this fragment a number of times. I was embarrassed for him but never said a word.

At least he’s doing something, I thought.

Bored, Flip walked over to one of Shane’s guitars, picked it up, and hit one of the few chords he knew. Flip had been trying to teach himself how to play guitar because it made for a cooler profile on stage; definitely cooler than keyboards.

Shane’s eyes went wide the moment Flip grabbed his guitar. He reached out to stop him, started to make some kind of sound but shut himself off and shoved his hand in his pocket instead. Flip, not seeing this at all, attempted to tune the strings but – Shane being Shane – they were already tuned.

Flip hit another chord a little less successfully than the first.

“So, what do you think?” he said. “We’re gonna start rehearsing tomorrow. You wanna come by?”

The cigarette artfully dangling from the corner of Flip’s mouth was curling smoke into his eyes so he stuck it, like he’d seen other guitar players do, on the end of one of the guitar’s trimmed strings.

Shane lurched forward, plucked the cigarette off the string with his precise daddy-longlegs fingers, and threw it on the floor. He pulled the guitar from Flip’s hands and stomped to a case lying on the floor by his bed.

Flip laughed out an offended, “Whoa!”

Shane was on his knees with the guitar flat across his thighs, his back turned slightly as if he were shielding it from us. He was breathing deeply and running a cotton cloth up and down the strings.

“Look, man,” he said, “I’m sorry. I just I hate it when other people play my guitars.”

“Yeah,” Flip said. “No shit.”

“It’s just that the strings get dirty so easily and when the strings get dirty the sound dies.” He ran the cloth up and down each string, stopping to examine first the string and then the dirt captured on the cloth after each pass. Then he folded the cloth over to a clean patch and made another pass. “That’s why I keep the action high, too. I like that clean ring. It’s a whole aesthetic, you know, I’m not just fucking around.”

Flip gave me a look that said, Can you believe this guy is explaining music to me?

“It’s harder that way,” he said, “but that’s what I want. It strengthens my hands. Keeps me aware.”

He held his right hand out to Flip like a claw. “Check out my callouses. I play every day for about an hour then I clean the strings and play for another hour. And I just keep going like that.”

Between the explaining and the cleaning, Shane seemed to be talking himself back down. “I wash my hands all the time,” he said softly. “Ten, twenty times a day. Before I play and after. Everything just feels better that way.”

When he was finished, he laid the guitar down in the case, closed it, and slid it under his bed. He knew he’d fucked up the gig with Flip but he seemed relieved about it.

For some reason he turned to me and said, “I’ve done the Dionysian stuff, you know? I’m in a more Apollonian phase. Cleaner, you know? More pure.”

I nodded again.

He looked at me like I was everybody else and said, “Never mind.”

Flip and I left soon after.

I understood something about Shane only later: surviving had ruined him. I would see him a few more times after that. Sometimes his hair was blond, sometimes it was brown. Once it was green. For a year or two he had a girlfriend. Once, when we actually spoke, he told me that he wasn’t playing so much any more. He didn’t give a reason why beyond a secretive shrug. After a while we both stopped saying hello.

I saw Flip last year in a comic book shop, though he didn’t see me. We’d drifted apart and I hadn’t spent time with him in many years. I was surprised to see he had a little girl with him, clutching his pant leg while he walked down an aisle, looking at comics but not picking anything up. He moved slowly, with an adult exhaustion and sorrow that was unfamiliar to me. His daughter looked bored, like she just wanted to go home.

I’d heard Flip was married and was part owner of an art moving company. Now I knew he had a child.

I don’t usually go into comics shops. I’d stopped in because I wasn’t ready to go home yet, to go and sit back down at my desk and write. I was wasting time I had no business wasting. But I needed to believe that I still had time to waste. I still need to believe it.

I held my breath and watched Flip walk by me. Then – and I still haven’t forgiven myself for this – I slipped out and went home.

Damian Van Denburgh is a 2011 fellow in Non-Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has had residencies at the Millay Colony and the MacDowell Colony, and his work has been published in Knee-Jerk and Fourth Genre. His essay, “The Spell of My Father’s Wedding Ring,” ran in the Modern Love column in the New York Times this past February. He works as a freelance writer in New York City.

Annie didn’t reveal much about her life. All that we the friends knew was that she lived with her aunt and uncle in Baldwin Harbor. I think she mentioned having a brother, but I wasn’t sure. It never occurred to me to ask her if she had other family, but that was more about my alcoholic family secret thing. I was well trained in the keeping of secrets and turning a blind eye to reality. And, after all, this was suburbia; land of superficiality, where honest questions were rarely posed. And if they were, dodgy answers were the norm.

Turns out, Annie’s mother, Brigid, was a beatnick poet/playwright who lived with her lover, and son, Cado, in a cramped, two room apartment on the fifth floor of 175 Bleecker Street. The reason for our visit was to celebrate Brigid’s birthday. The apartment was packed with some of the strangest people I’d ever met. First off, there was Brigid herself, a very nice looking woman in her forties, with a few missing teeth, a joint in her hand and a tough, bossy way of talking to people. When Annie introduced me to her, she acted like she could have cared less about who I was, which Annie told me wasn’t true. "She treats everyone like that," she said. “And then there was Brigid’s best friend, Jenon, the Gypsy/Playwright/Social Worker from Turkey. Jenon’s lips were purple from drinking wine, her hair was in a wild afro style and when she flashed her eyes on me, I became extremely unsettled and tried to get away from Jenon, but she stood directly in front of me, practically nose to nose and asked me, in a heavily accented dramatic Gypsy dialect, “Ven ver you born?” I answered, “June, 16th,” and she went wild. She grabbed my two hands, pulled me up over to the couch and sat me down. I was so scared, my heart felt like it was nearly beating out of my chest. Jenon looked deeply into my eyes and said, in her gypsy speak, “I must tell you that you are a very high Gemini. James Joyce wrote his masterpiece, Ulysses, about June 16th.” She continued, still staring in my eyes, “You have tremendous energy, sensitivity and awareness. Your soul is on fire with wisdom and light. I know this for I, too, was born on June 16th.”

I managed to get away from Jenon and grabbed a hold of Annie. I was asking her for a joint or some kind of pill when the front door blasted open and in came two scruffy looking men in t-shirts and jeans. One I recognized immediately as Michael J. Pollard; I had just seen him in Bonnie and Clyde. The other curly headed character was introduced to me as Gregory Corso, Annie’s Godfather, who also happened to be, I later learned, an infamous Beat poet who traveled in circles with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Bowles, etc. The two of these guys were both wasted. Gregory went into the living room, laughing and talking some crazy shit while Pollard positioned himself next to the stereo player. He had a Woody Guthrie album under his arm and he put it on the turntable and played it over and over. Every time someone else came into the party, Pollard grabbed them and said, “Hey man, you got to listen to Woody Guthrie, man. He’s a genius, man” and he would drag them over to the stereo and make them listen. Whenever Pollard headed over towards me, I would take him by the shoulder, turn him around, and give a push, and he would walk back to the stereo. Meanwhile, Corso jerked off in the living room, and went wandering around the apartment with a handful of cum. He found Brigid and asked her what he should do with it. “Throw it down the toilet, you asshole.” I smoked a joint, drank some more wine and tried not to listen to the Woody Guthrie album, for the seventh time.

Get me the fuck out of here, I thought, as I moved to the other side of the room and poured myself a glass of wine and lit a cigarette. There was a very pretty woman, with blond curly hair, leaning against the wall by where Brigid kept the wine. She was quietly drinking and eyeballing the crowd. She noticed I was freaking out, and said, “Hi, I’m Jill. Are you Annie’s friend?” “Yes, we go to school together.” I replied. “So, you’re still in high school, huh ? This scene must really be blowing your mind.” “Yeah, kinda,” I said with a deep exhale. The woman introduced herself as Jill Freedman. She told me that she was a photographer and her next project was to travel with a circus. Brigid was riding shotgun as the cook. They were leaving in a few days to catch up to a circus in Philadelphia. The phenomenal document of this experience, Circus Days, was published two years later.

When I returned home late that night, I was amazed as I thought through the wild scene I had witnessed at Brigid's apartment. I may not have been ready to shift into hanging with the crazy, creative, bohemian scene at 175 Bleecker Street just yet, but I was definitely being primed for the journey.

Mary Shanley is a NYC poet/writer who has been reading and performing her work for the past 25 years. She has published: Hobo Code Poems and Mott Street Stories and Las Vegas Stories. Allen Ginsberg suggested she publish her first poems in Long Shot Magazine.

I was soon to discover the Café Espresso was not in business to attract customers. It was a strictly private gathering place, catering exclusively to a tightly knit circle of regulars; very much like the local Italian social clubs that dot the neighboring Mulberry and Prince Streets. The social clubs, however, are usually named after a saint, and a statue of that saint is featured prominently in the window of the club.

The Café Espresso did not feature anything prominently, except Nick and Carmine, who sat out front the Café, on straightback wooden chairs, every weekday from 11 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. Being the friendly type, I introduced myself to Nick and Carmine during my first week in the neighborhood. Nick, a shrunken specimen somewhere in his seventies sucked back a can of Budweiser while giving me the once over with his beady bloodshot eyes. His eyes darted out from behind oversized glasses that continually slid down his long, pointed nose. A few straw wisps of thin white hair hugged the lower lobe of his suntanned head, and though it was a mild autumn day, Nick was wearing a Herringbone overcoat.

While Nick spit and slurred his way through our introduction, Carmine, a younger, sleepy-eyed character, sat with his chair turned backward, in a kind of urban cowboy style, his large pulpy hands hanging casually over the back of the chair. A man of a few words, he favored the grunt and mumble style of communication, replying, “Uh-huh” to my greeting, while scouting out the local streetlife in a shiny brown silk suit, no tie. His white sportshirt was open at the neck, revealing a mass of salt and pepper chest hair in a tangle of gold chains. When I told Carmine that he reminded me of Henny
Youngman, only with more hair, he turned to me with the slow witted expression of a fighter that had taken too many punches to the head, scratched his chin, and returned his gaze to the street.

My daily encounters with Nick and Carmine developed into quite a chummy friendship. I had a lot of time on my hands while I was detoxing from drugs, so I often carried my wicker chair outside and sat in front of the café with the boys, shooting the shit and eyeballing the street, smoking ciggies and guzzling joe. Carmine really started to loosen up when he realized I was an expert in the area of early T.V. sitcom trivia. We’d try to stump each other with questions like, “Who played Lumpy Rutherford’s father on Leave it to Beaver?” or “Who was the actor Peter Graves brother, and what show does he star in?” Stuff like that. There was one subject I never discussed with the boys, and it was about what went on inside the Café Espresso when the regulars arrived.

Every afternoon at 4:30, a steady stream of big, black luxury cars came cruising down cobblestoned Mott Street and pulled up in front of the Café Espresso. Judging from the glimpses I got of these guys as they emerged from behind the tinted windows of the Lincolns and Caddys, they could have been straight out of mob central casting. These guys all wore shades, expensive slacks with jackets that often fit rather snugly around the waist, gobs of gold chains and bejewelled pinkie rings. The regulars hugged and kissed on the street before ducking inside the café. Not a soul ever reappeared outside the café until 7 p.m.

While the inside activity of the café remained a mystery, I did learn that the regulars favored Boar’s Head lunch meat. Carmine, who with Nick, always went inside the café when the regulars arrived, began to present me with the regular’s leftover salami, liverwurst and baloney. I usually picked up leftovers from the day before in front of the café around two in the afternoon, along with the current copy of the Daily News. Quite a nice little arrangement. But this one particular afternoon, I didn’t arrive at the café until 4:45, and by this time, everyone was inside the café. I didn’t think the boys would mind if I popped in to pick up my Boar’s Head and paper, so I opened the door to the Café Espresso. Upon opening the door, I was struck with a blast of activity so fierce, I can only compare it to the heavy trading on the stock market floor. The café was stocked with small
wooden tables, with four chairs to a table. There were one or two phones on every table, and every table was jammed with the regulars. They were talking on the phone, jotting down info, shouting, some laughter, the air thick with cigar and cigarette smoke, and more phones ringing. The moment they noticed a stranger in their midst, everything stopped. Complete silence.

The silence was broken by the sound of Carmine yelling at me, “What the hell you doing in here? Get the hell outta here! Don’t you ever come in here when that door is closed!” and he starts with the strong arm stuff, shoving me out the door. God! I couldn’t imagine what I’d done to warrant such an angry reaction, and tried explaining to Carmine as he turned to go back inside, “Hey Carmine, I was just….” But he didn’t listen, just slammed the door and went back inside.

I hot footed it back to my apartment and sat with the shades drawn, nervously wondering just exactly how much hot water I was in. The fact that I was in my first few weeks of detoxing didn’t help my mind set. “You’re dead meat,” I thought, “You’re never supposed to see anything or know anything about what goes on in this neighborhood..You fucked up but good this time…..” My only hope was that the goodwill that had grown between Nick, Carmine and myself would count for something, and maybe the worst that would happen is I’d have to start buying my own Boar’s Head and newspaper.

That night, as I tossed and turned on my captain’s bed, I recalled the words of my friend Dale, who had recently moved out of Little Italy. She said, “Whatever you see or hear down here, always pretend you didn’t see or hear anything.” When I decided to pretend like nothing had happened at the Café Espresso, I let out a huge yawn, and fell into a deep and restful sleep.

The following morning I awoke at ten, showered, dressed and hit the street. I ran into Nick and Carmine at Johnny’s Donut Shop on the corner of Mott and Prince. They were sitting at a table with Johnny’s Uncle Sonny, who I happened to also be friendly with. I took a deep breath, waved and said, “Good morning.” Surprisingly, they returned my greeting with big smiles and Carmine called me over and offered to buy me breakfast. I hesitated, still a bit shaken from the previous afternoon, but figured this was a peacemaking gesture, so I pulled up a chair.

The conversation centered around Johnny’s new cappucino/expresso machine and the upcoming, ten day San Genarro Feast. I mostly listened to the boys chat, while slowly eating my eggs over easy with jelly donut special. I was amazed at how well things were going! I was cool. I knew they knew I was cool. I didn’t feel cool. Matter of fact, I was scared shitless, but playing it cool was the name of the game.

When I finally excused myself, I thanked Carmine for the breakfast and said bye to the boys. As I pushed my chair back, Carmine got up with me. He pulled me aside and asked, “So, you stopping by for your stuff this afternoon?” “Sure Carmine, I replied, “why not?” Carmine patted me on the back, “That’s good.”

Phew. I did it. I passed the test. I’m not dead. And from that day to this, not a word was ever said about that fateful day I blew into the Café Espresso, stopping the regular’s business on a dime.

The building, one of those depressing residential hotels, housed a variety of colorful wayward denizens, including destitute students (like myself), drug addicts, alcoholics, and the elderly. There was one communal bathroom per floor. I shared my bathroom with an oddball cast of characters. One of them was a forty year old Male-To-Female pre-op transexual named Crystal.

“Are you getting off on sixteen?” A deep James Earl Jones-like voice reverberated from Crystal’s thin-lipped mouth like a bassoon. The elevator doors could never open up quick enough for me.

I always felt bad for Crystal because she was not attractive as a man and it was pretty obvious that she wouldn’t be any more fetching as a woman. Crystal was infamous for wearing loose fitting hospital pajama bottoms accompanied by a sheer yellow bathrobe that clung tightly to her gangly body. The robe’s billowy, faux-fur sleeves added an appropriate element of femininity to Crystal’s otherwise manly persona. Donning thin, drawn-in, eyebrows and just a hint of pink lipstick, Crystal took appearances very seriously and, despite the deep baritone voice and thinning spindly hair, Crystal made a concerted effort to always appear ladylike.

Crystal’s body language and flirtatious vibe made me feel ill-at-ease, but that didn’t stop me from admiring her. “How brave,” I always thought to myself after encounters with her. She was undergoing a major life transformation in front of all the building’s residents and staff. This was a gutsy thing to do. I thought so anyway.

One summer evening after an exhausting day of classes, I was on my way to use the communal facilities. I needed to take a shower and get ready for work (an evening shift of scooping ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s). Crystal suddenly approached me in the hall ...

“Don’t bother. It’s locked from the inside. He’s been in there for hours. I think he’s shooting up again.” It was common knowledge that the Russian residing in room #1605 had a penchant for heroin and other hard street drugs.

“Oh. OK. Thanks.” I said.

Defeated, I turned around and sheepishly walked down the hall towards my crackerbox-sized room, my toothbrush, washcloth and towel all in hand. My shift was to begin in less than an hour. What was I going to do? I was a complete wreck. I was dripping with sweat (not to mention the smell) due to the challenging tap dancing class that had just ended moments before.

“Now what?” I muttered under my breath. I was just about to reach for my room key when I heard Crystal’s voice again ...“Don’t go. I want to show you something. Come here.” Like a mystical sea nymph, Crystal waved me on. She wanted me to come inside her room.

Call me crazy, or just plain naive, but something told me it was safe to follow Crystal into her apartment that evening. There was something so genuine about her overture and, I have to admit, I was a bit curious.

Crystal’s room was a pathetic little chamber facing the north side of West 75th St. The space was packed to the gills with women’s shoes, scarves, and stacks of hospital pajama bottoms. Plastic Rubbermaid containers on the floor housed dozens of prescription pill vials. But what I saw in the corner of this 100 square foot space took my breath away. Inside Crystal’s humble little boudoir was a fully operational sink!

“You can clean up in here,” she said. “I’ll stand outside, in the hallway, and give you some privacy. I don’t mind. I need to make a phone call anyway.” She shut the door and sashayed herself down to the rotary pay phone located at the end of the corridor of the sixteenth floor.

Crystal had saved the day.

As I turned the faucet knobs of Crystal’s modest wall sink an overwhelming sensation suddenly came over me. The feeling was so huge I had to turn the faucets back off and collect myself. I almost began to cry. With one genuine random act of kindness Crystal had rescued me from the embarrassment and humiliation, of showing up at my job looking and smelling disgusting. But it wasn’t just that. It was something deeper. In that moment, at Crystal’s humble, avocado-green sink, I felt a sense of appreciation and gratitude that I had never experienced before in all of my nineteen years. It was like something right out of Buddha’s teachings. The strangest thing about it all was my epiphany was not occurring under a tree, or by quiet stream in the woods. It was at a transsexual’s sink on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I embraced the experience. I lowered my head into Crystal’s chipped porcelain sink and allowed the water to douse my hair and alleviate my worries. I had reached my personal nirvana. “Maybe tomorrow I can go to the building manager and request a room with a sink in it, too,” I thought to myself as I gave my entire body a much-needed washing. I took liberty in using some of Crystal’s sweet scented soaps. I didn’t think she’d mind.

While drying off, something occurred to me. This was the first time since moving to New York City that I felt things were finally beginning to look up for me. I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to stick it out and survive after all. I wiped up the remaining water and exited Crystal’s apartment.

On my way back to my room I mouthed the words “thank you” to Crystal. She was still on the phone.

“Anytime handsome. Anytime. Now don’t you work too hard!” she said.

“I won’t.” I replied back.

“Hey! You wanna know something? You clean up pretty good! Too bad I like older men.”

“Me too!” I replied.

Crystal let out a schoolgirl laugh and played with the pay phone’s long spiral cord in a coquettish manner and then blew me a big kiss from down the hall.

She was right. I felt like a million bucks.

Jackob G. Hofmann has lived and worked in Manhattan
since 1988. He is a theatrical director, produced playwright,
and essayist. www.JackobHofmann.com

"Me, too. I've got to get my kid by 5:30pm." Her answer tinged with aggravation.

Hearing this exchange through the bathroom door, my bladder shut down. I was on the 60th floor of the Woolworth Building, the world's tallest building from 1914 to 1930. My medical exam for the New York City Housing Authority hiring process was concluding with the traditional urine sample.

"Everything OK in there?"

He didn't care if everything was OK, he was telling me to get out of there, asap, so he could escape his eerie dark office. I stuck my head under the sink's spout and began drinking lots of water. Flushed the bowl a few times, and took off my shirt and pants for good luck.

"I hope he's not pee shy," came loud and clear through the door.

I couldn't believe she said it. The pressure already peaking, I drank more water and opened the small window, high over the sink to let in fresh air, and started pacing the tiny bathroom in my bare feet on the checkered marble floor. The socks followed my pants.

"For Christ's sake, it's been twenty minutes, did he die in there?" She said, then one of them fell dramatically into a chair based on the sound I heard of a sizable ass hitting a seat.

I couldn't possibly drink more water, and I couldn't go. My last recourse was sticking my head directly out the window over the sink. I figured I'd rock my bare belly on the ledge, while the rarefied air hit me in the face.

Climbing on the sink, I got most of my upper body through the petite opening. Once I got my arms through, I leaned on my elbows and looked left and saw the beautiful Hudson River all the way up to the Bridge. Then I looked right, and screamed like a girl, "Aaaaaahhhhh!"

Face to face with a stone gargoyle, not a funny gargoyle, a hideous gargoyle that comes to you in a nightmare after eating Mexican food way too late. My scream made me lose my footing and I fell forward. The snug window and my chubby stomach kept me from falling all the way out. The cars below looked like toys. I thought about the Post's headline, "Boxer Shorts Suicide Dives Off Woolworth Building."

Hyperventilating, stuck in the window, I heard, "Hey, what the hell is going on?"

"Nothing, nothing..." I lied, pulled myself out of the window, got off the sink, went over to the toilet and peed like a horse. I got dressed and came out of the bathroom with the specimen cup, refused to make eye contact with my medical providers, somehow found one of their hands to pass it off, and ran out the door and down twenty flights of fire stairs before I felt the urge to pee again. Took the elevator to the lobby with my legs crossed.
 

Crackheads are like seagulls: you feed one, and it comes back every day for the next year, staring at you with its flat, needful eyes, shifting from foot to foot, emitting an occasional squawk of impatience. It’s a particular kind of love, a pick-your-bones-before-your-body-cools kind of love. On Cape Cod, where I come from, only the tourists feed the gulls.

Now, I get it, I see the pieces sliding into place in your minds: white college girl from bourgie East Coast seaside town, moves to New York City, becomes “college poor” and ends up living in real poor neighborhood, naively takes condescending pity on desperate crack ho, and then can’t shake her. Cry you a fucking river, right?

Let me explain.

Tay Tay and I had more in common than you think, than I thought. And I’m not talking about our Puerto Rican fathers.

How about some more context? This was the year 2000, pre-9/11, pre-George Dubya, post-millenium. We had partied like it was 1999, and we were still partying, because the world had not ended, because we didn’t need a reason. It was the year I ripped my first CD, my junior year of college. It was the summer that Aaliyah’s last hit: “Try Again” was all over the radio. I loved that song, despite the fact that I had invested most of my music-loving years to semi-obscure indie-rock and the kind of underground rap music that only arty white college kids and the black intellectuals who hate them loved (remember Ded Prez? Cannibal Ox?). I was a New School student, after all.

It was not the first year that I smoked crack, but, it was the first time I could buy it at the corner store. Though, I didn’t know that when I first moved in.

I should never have given Tay Tay my money. It was only that one time. See, when we first moved in, our apartment building’s door was busted, which meant that after dark, the vestibule that housed our mailboxes was consistently fishbowled with crack smoke. Tay Tay would wait in the vestibule for a tenant to open the second door, leading into the building, wedge her flip-flopped foot in as it closed, and then lead her tricks up to the roof. She used protection, I’m happy to report, the evidence was all over our roof, as if a horde of snakes had slithered up there, and molted, en masse.

I wasn’t even looking for crack, that day. My heroin habit was much more pressing. But crack was the drug industry in Bed Stuy. She ripped me off, of course. I knew enough then that I shouldn’t let her out of my sight, but I wasn’t brave enough yet to insist that she take me with her to cop.

The next time I saw her, weaving down Gates Avenue, hair half braided, flip-flops flapping, one arm clutching a child-size pink raincoat closed over her skinny chest, the other raised high over her head, waving as she called out “Haaay-aaay!! Melinda!” I almost ducked behind a tree. I fiercely protected my double life, and only recently had my habits assumed the strain of desperation that threatened the compartmentalization of my ambitious college student identity and my street-savvy derelict. My literary heroes—those precious gold standards of junkiedom whom I referred to whenever the need to rationalize the obvious dangers of drug-use popped up—(William Burroughs lived into a ripe old age, nevermind that he shot his wife). Well, they had never written about what to do when your cover was blown in broad daylight by a crackhead in a pink raincoat. I gave her a dollar and scurried into my apartment as quickly as I could manage. Her hungry face disappeared behind the apartment door, but the gnawing fear in my chest hung around.

I never copped from her again, sticking instead with the dealers I quickly located around the block, who didn’t use their own product, and weren’t any eager to be seen in my company than I was in theirs. But Tay Tay persisted. “Girlfriend,” I’d hear her hollar from half a block away, on my way home from the Bedford Y—where I liked to lift weights in slow motion when I was high on dope.

Let me explain. My logic functioned on junkie arithmetic, which reasoned two bags of dope + one hour of exercise had an absolute value of zero; the two values neutralized one another. Throw in a shot of wheatgrass, and I was having a good day.

I tried to neutralize Tay Tay, by telling her I was on the wagon now. “White girl,” she’d say, sucking her teeth, “you. Are. Not.” She’d lean back to appraise me, squinting one eye theatrically.

“You on that good shit. Tay Tay can tell.” It took one to know one. Her brain might have been pudding from years on the pipe and the street, but a fiend always knows a fiend.

One time, I was standing on my stoop with my roommate, Emily, and our super, Walter, a giant, kind West Indian man who never fixed anything, but would bring us salves to cure athlete’s foot, and thick stalks of raw sugar cane. As we chit-chatted, I spotted Tay Tay coming down the block, and hurried to finish up our conversation. I relaxed as she turned down Franklin Ave, moving away from us.

“There goes a junky scramble,” I blurted out. I have often had the tourettish impulse to point out the objects of my anxiety, as if drawing attention to them will divert it from me.

“A junky scramble?” asked my roommate. “Like, a tofu scramble?”

I laughed. “No, like, a junky on the move.” I descended the stoop steps, and scrambled down the walkway. Walter hooted. It was an imitation of that motion recognizable to most people who’ve ever lived in a major city (well, the kind of people who live in not-nicest neighborhoods, or have a reason to notice this kind of thing): legs stiff but hustling, a hint of a limp, arms awkward but swinging, body’s frame rocking side to side. The junky scramble. It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing; everybody knows where you’re going when you walk like that.

Eventually, my roommates, who drank and smoked like normal college students, started to feel uncomfortable, about my drug use, and my new BFF. No one said anything—I never gave them an opportunity, and I never used in front of them, but I recognized that thickness in the air of our mouse-infested home, the gravity of silence clotted with words unspoken.

Then one night, I woke to one of my roommates prodding, her furrowed face leaning over me.

“Wake up!”

“What?” I asked her, blearily rubbing my eyes.

“Listen.”

We stared at each other in silence for a moment, and just as I raised my arm in incredulity, I heard it.

BANG BANG BANG.

I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes again.

BANG BANG BANG.

“What the fuck?” I said.

My roommate gave me an exasperated glare, and then I heard her.

“Melisssssssaaaa! Yo!! Me-la-nie!”

I froze, frantically hoping that I would wake up a second time, to find that this had been just another anxiety dream.

BANG BANG BANG.

“The neighbors!” hissed my roommate, and I sprung out of bed, hurrying through the kitchen and down the long hallway that led to the apartment door, my feet sticking to the never-mopped floor.
I secured the chain-lock, and cracked open the door, just as she began to call my name again.

“MEL—”

“Ssshhh!” I hushed through the crack.

At first I didn’t see her. Then I lowered my gaze. Tay Tay sat on the landing outside our apartment, smiling up at me with her three teeth.

“Oh, hey girl! It’s just me.”

She was obviously high—but not as agitated as her banging had suggested. I closed the door, and unlatched the lock, opening it again, but just enough to stick my head out.

“Tay Tay, what are you doing?” I asked. But it was obvious. She had an oversized sweatshirt spread out beneath her for a makeshift blanket, and neatly arranged across it were a couple of sooty crack pipes, a small pile of crumpled heroin bags, a battered box of Newports, and an empty 24 oz coca cola bottle. A crackhead picnic.

Perhaps this was all arranged just so for her convenience, but I later suspected, as I still do, that it was more for my benefit—either to entice me, or to horrify me, I’m still not sure. Drug addicts’ powers of manipulation can never be overestimated.

“Tay Tay,” I said slowly. “You can’t be here right now. It’s four o’clock in the morning.”

“Oh,” she said, tilting her head back. “You were sleepin’?”

“Yes,” I said. “And so were my roommates, and so were my neighbors.” I examined her to gauge comprehension. Or more accurately, to gauge cooperation. I silently prayed that she would go peacefully. I’d started talking to god more in those days than I ever had, being that I spent so much time in foxholes. “You have to leave, Tay Tay,” I said, not unkindly, but with what I hoped conveyed non-negotiability, and more confidence than I felt.

For a few moments, we didn’t say anything. She stared at me, then down at her picnic. I became aware of my goose-pimpled legs, my roommates breathing behind me, and the smoldering cigarette she had wedged in the cleft between her index and middle finger.

Finally, she gave a shrug.

“All right then. I’ll be on my way.”

I nearly collapsed with relief.

“But! You can at least do me this one favor.”

I didn’t know how I had ended up in her deficit, but I was willing to concede, if it meant that she’d pack up shop before my neighbors started poking their heads out from behind their peepholes. Bed Stuy’s sidewalks might have been scattered with crackheads, but its homes were mostly full of hardworking people, who just wanted a good night’s sleep.

“Okay, what?”

She cocked her head at me. “You gotta hair pic?”

“What? No. Wait, what?”

Tay Tay rolled her eyes. “A comb, you got a hair comb?”

“Ah, yeah, I guess. I mean, I think so.” I didn’t actually brush my hair often, but held up a finger to indicate that I would soon return. I pushed my way past my roommates, bare feet suctioning again to the sticky floors as I padded into the bathroom and slid open the medicine cabinet. On the top shelf, in a puddle of nail polish remover was a cheap black comb. I wiped it on the corner of a mildewy towel and scuttled back to the door, cracking it open once again.

“Here you go,” I sung, projecting an air of closure, as if it were now obvious to all that our business was finished.

“Mmm,” she grunted, and examined the comb. She dropped it onto the sweatshirt with her other goodies, and stared at it some more. A fresh spurt of anxiety chilled my chest. Tay Tay reached for the empty coke bottle and held it up to me.

“You got something to drink in there?”

I paused, “Yeah, yeah I can get something to drink.”

“What I’d really like is a shower. My head is itchiiin.’”

“Tay Tay…”

“I know! I’m only asking for a little something to drink. My mouth is dry.”

She coughed dryly to illustrate.

I rolled my eyes, but took the bottle. Closing the door softly again, I hurried back to the bathroom and filled her bottle with water, careful not to touch its mouth with my bare fingers.

When I handed it back to her, heavy and cool, and beaded with droplets, she stared at it, much as she’d stared at the comb. As if she had been expecting something better.

“You don’t have no coca-cola?”

“No, Tay Tay, I don’t drink Coca-Cola.” This was true.

She looked at me like I was crazy. I stared right back at her, and there followed another long stretch of silence, in whose liquid thickness I knew more than one potential floated. I could practically hear her brain gnawing on the options, and their possible outcomes.

Finally, she shrugged, and began packing up her picnic. This took longer than I need detail, but suffice to say, it was with no urgency that she closely inspected the insides of each empty baggie for any valuable residue before folding their tiny rectangles into tinier rectangles and laboriously wrapping them in the foil from her cigarette box. With a disgruntled air, she finally hoisted herself up, and into her blackened flip flops, and slow motion scrambled down the stairs.

And that, was pretty much the last interaction I had with her. Sure I saw her around the neighborhood, hustling across Franklin Ave like her life depended on it, which it did. Or passed out on the sofa underneath the C train overpass, which we referred to as “the living room.” Every couple weeks the city would drag away the loveseat, hobbled folding chairs, and milkcrates that had been collected there, and within another couple days, replacements would appear, with bodies sprawled across, or crouched over them.

I wish I could say that getting such a close-up view at what drugs did to human beings was what got me sober. I wish I could say that, at 20 years old, I realized that my middle-classness, my higher education, my wheatgrass shots, or theories of invincibility wouldn’t protect me from becoming someone else. None of that did. It was only the private revelation of my own suffering, and I had a few more years before that would get worse enough.

Once, on my walk to the subway, outside a bodega, I saw a man punch a woman in face three times. I had seen fights, but no one had ever punched me in the face. I didn’t hesitate before throwing myself between them like some kind of tiny white feminist superhero. Shooting rays of hubris from my knuckles. These two crackheads both looked at me like I was fucking crazy.
I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing today. But the shame I feel thinking about it has more to do with my silent presumption than my actions. That I knew anything about their lives, or their states of victimhood, or what of. I might have studied racial politics in my New School classrooms, waxed on about hegemonic class dynamics, gentrification, and paradigms of subjugation, but I didn’t have a fucking clue. At least not how to place myself in the context of any of that. I still thought that knowledge was an action. That self-knowledge induced change.

Though I stopped hearing Tay Tay call my name down the street, I did receive a call from my landlord. He was a mild man, who never minded if our rent was a few days late, and so I knew something was up.

The three of us showed up on the appointed afternoon, and were seated in his tiny Park Slope office.

The performance that followed I am loathe to describe to anyone, though I was proud of it at the time. As my roomates looked on, I explained to this man that the neighborhood was just full of these sad cases, and I had only been trying to help. I had tried giving her food, and then just enough money for a metrocard, or the 24hour buffet down on Fulton. I wept real tears, which is somewhat of a miracle, considering how emotionally numb I was—they must have been on reserve for whenever I got quiet enough to feel how completely terrified and miserable I was.

As I remember it, my roommates didn’t say much, and my landlord gently reminded me not to feed the crackheads. For years, I thought back on it, despite with growing chagrin, as my most immaculate performance. And I gave many.

After I got sober, left Bed Stuy, and was living the clean cut life of a professional dominatrix, my old roommate Emily and I had lunch in Williamsburg. The subject of Tay tay came up. I cringed.

“Do you remember that fucked up performance I gave david, after she showed up at four in the morning that time? I can’t believe I pulled that bullshit off.”

Emily stared at me in disbelief.

“What?” I said.

“Do you remember that day?” she asked.

“Of course I do!”

“You were so high,” she said, “you practically fell out of your chair.”

“What?” I said.

She just nodded, eyes widened.

I reeled. “But why would he just act like he believed me. Why didn’t anyone say anything?”

She stared at me for another moment. “What was the point?”

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, WHIP SMART. Her writing has been published in The Southeast Review, Redivider, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, and Bitch Magazine, among many others, and she has been profiled in venues ranging from the cover of the NY Post to NPR’s Fresh Air. She teaches at Purchase College, Sarah Lawrence, The New School, and NYU, and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. A resident of Brooklyn, she is currently at work on a novel.

In many ways Stan was an archetypal post-World War II junkie: Male, urban, working class, first generation American, and Jewish. Like a lot of the estimated 5,000 addicts in New York City at that time - most Jewish or Italian-American - he was a habitué of the drug-heavy jazz scene. For the Stans of the world the 1950s were not a sunny tableau of letterman jackets and chocolate malts, but a time when the status quo enthusiastically supported racial, cultural and religious discrimination and used the police to enforce that status quo. For the outsiders, the American dream was an unattainable fantasy, a ruse from which drugs offered some relief.

I met Stan in the winter of 2006. He was retired and living alone in a Brighton Beach apartment that he’d bought with his modest salary as a drug counselor. At his suggestion we met at a Starbucks during which he expressed sentiments like "why do you care about these kinds of stories?" and, to himself in particular, “why am I talking to you?”

I had first gotten in touch with Stan by phone as part of my research for a film and book on an experimental prison for drug addicts called The Narcotic Farm, which, among other things, housed drug-using jazz greats such as Chet Baker, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Heath and most of Charlie Parker’s band, as well as Sammy Davis Jr., Ray Charles, and writer William Burroughs, who wrote about The Narcotic Farm in his roman a clef, "Junky." Stan (rightly) saw himself as at the center of this American junkie culture and eventually agreed to sit down for what became a lengthy, riveting on-camera interview about life as a heroin addict on the streets of New York in the late 1940s through the mid 1960s. Before wrapping it up for the day’s shoot, Stan asked if he could tell us a story that wasn’t related to The Narcotic Farm but one he'd like us to hear anyway. We turned off the camera and listened.

Arrested for possession of a needle by an undercover detective in Manhattan, Stan recalled being sent to The Tombs for what would have been his second or third time in April of 1953. Before being assigned his jail cell Stan was already in acute opiate withdrawal. If you don’t already know this from the movies, withdrawal from heroin includes all variety of feeling shitty – you sweat, you experience both anxiety and deep depression, you get the chills, you vomit repeatedly and often, and your nose won’t stop running. This lasts about a week. On top of all this you have diarrhea, fever and, most memorable to Stan this particular time around, a pulverizing headache.

In the mire of this dope sickness Stan was lying face down on his cot with a pillow over his head, sweating like mad and trying his best to make it through yet another wave of thumping headaches when a woman somewhere within earshot began to sing a rousing, a cappella version of “God Bless America.” The voice, he remembers, was pretty good. But this, along with the steady din of the institution, its bootsteps, its clanging doors, and all the other sounds of a large prison, was too much too absorb in this fragile state.

He yelled for the woman to shut up. But her voice kept on going, unfazed and unstoppable. She kept singing and he kept yelling. When “God Bless America” was finally over, her voice started up again. Stan began screaming so loud a guard came his cell to see what was wrong. The guard listened passively as Stan pleaded with him to make this woman stop singing. He took out his ring of keys and opened the jail cell door and gestured to Stan that he was free to walk outside and confront the woman.

"Go right ahead," said the guard, "Just walk down there and tell her to shut up. But before you do that, you should know that that is Ethel Rosenberg who is singing. She’s just been sentenced to death."

JP Olsen is a filmmaker, journalist and musician living in Brooklyn. His film and book "The Narcotic Farm" received praise from Errol Morris and Luc Sante, among others. He also fronts the musical collective The Malefactors of Great Wealth, whose debut EP "Today is the Best Day of My Life," is released March 2011 on Old 3C records (old3c.com).

Internal Affairs arrested 2 cops from the 9th precinct, a sanitation cop, a bag man for the fire department, two transvestites, a circus clown, two barboys, three female bartenders, and me. The sanitation cop put up a struggle. The cops hauled him into the back bedroom and broke his leg with a baseball bat.

"Anyone else want some." A plain-clothed officer shook the baseball bat at us.

We shook our heads.

After 30 minutes an ambulance arrived for the injured cop and the officers led the other arrestees into a paddy wagon. We were arraigned in the morning and released without bail. Arthur and Scottie met me later that night at the Ritz. Arthur was wearing sunglasses and as nervous as a fugitive.

"What did Internal Affairs say?" Arthur had been visited by a psycho cop. A double blast from a shotgun was the 9th Precinct's warning to keep his mouth shut. He was hoping that we had done the same.

"Nothing. They didn't ask us anything."

"No names?" Scottie wore the same jeans, shirt, and jacket as the night before. His hair stuck straight up in the air as if he had standing on his feet and in his unshaven state he looked like Charles Manson's illegitimate nephew on the run.

"None. They booked us, arraigned us, and cut us loose."

"Cool." Arthur was relieved that none of us were in trouble. Not that he could do anything to help us.

The Jefferson closed its doors forever. I paid three months rent in advance. We never went to trial for the Jefferson. The story never made the papers. None of us had jobs. We didn't deal drugs. We only did them. Mostly cocaine. Within a month we were broke. Arthur kept talking about opening another place. His wife thought he was crazy, but agreed to decorate the next venue.

"Think about how we can do if it was bigger," Arthur told Scottie and me. Bigger meant more money. Investors thought the same thing and in the summer of 1981 Arthur found an abandoned garage on West 25th Street. He told the landlord that it was going to be an art gallery.

"It just needs a little work." The floors were caked with oil. The walls sagged with mildew, and the ceiling panels hung down like limp tongues. "We don't have to make it livable. Only good enough to serve drinks. We can open by Labor Day."

"Who's going to do the work?" I wondered. Scottie was a bartender. I was a doorman. The only time we used a hammer was to chip the ice out of the freezer.

"You guys and your friends." Arthur said without saying how. "I'm no contractor."

"How much are you going to pay?" I was only interested in money.

"Not much." Arthur was living on the skinny edge of life same as us. “But you'll have a job at the end of it."

"Throw in lunch and you got a deal."

"Deal." Arthur’s word was good enough for Scottie, myself, and several friends.

Werthel, a lanky 19 year-old cokehead from the Five Towns, also wanted to join the work crew. During the last months of the Jefferson his use had gone from daily to hourly.

"Why don't you go to rehab?" Scottie asked at the apartment that Werthel shared with our mutual friend, Richie Boy. "Your father has money."

"I don't want him to know about it." Werthel was swearing off blow forever. He gave us the last of his stash. "Have a party," he said.

"You mind if I take some change too." Scottie was staring at the bowl of coins on a glass table. It was filled to the brink with quarters.

"Sure, but only as much as you can grab with one hand."

Scottie snatched a handful and Werthel grabbed his wrist, shaking it so hard that Scottie's take was decreased by half.

"You're the meanest man in the world," Richie Boy declared from the sofa. Richie was Werthel's schoolmate from kindergarten. No one knew him better.

"What you mean by that?"

"If you have to ask, then what the use of explaining."

"Do you guys think I'm mean?"

"I won't if you let me take another handful." Scottie was ready to go double or nothing.

"Get out of here."

The coins covered a sandwich at the nearest deli. The cocaine went fast at AM-PM, an after-hours club abutting the exit for the Holland Tunnel. Free cocaine always had a funny way of making you too many new friends.

On Monday we showed up to West 25th Street at 9am. The street was shimmering with heat. Arthur’s craggy-faced partner was waiting for us. We all recognized him as the coverboy for a Time Magazine article on Herpes. We called him HP.

"You were supposed to be here at 8." HP was standing with his twin brother and a friend. The brother wasn't as craggy and the friend was wearing a very professional carpenter belt. It was leather. "Any of you have tools?"

"Tools?"

"I'll take that as a no." HP gave the carpenter friend $40. "Go get some hammers and shit. The rest of you I don't want talking to anyone about what we're doing. Nothing. I want you here on time. 8am. We finish when we finish. No overtime."

"What an asshole," Werthel muttered under his breath.

"As long as we get paid I don't give a shit." Scottie’s definition of paradise was a joint and Chinese take-out.

"Yeah, but he's still an asshole."

Within 30 minutes we were tearing down the walls. Scottie and I loaded up metal in a trolley. Werthel commandeered the sledge hammer and pounded the walls with a fury confirmed his status as the meanest man in the world. Decades old dust covered our bodies and sweat wet our skin. Arthur showed up at noon.

"Good work, guys. You look like coalminers."

"Looks like lunch time." Scottie was exhausted from the first physical work he had done in his life. I was out of shape. Only Werthel was ready for more, because his system was running on cocaine fumes.

"Who said," HP countermanded Scottie's suggestion. "It's lunch when I say it's lunch."

"Who elected you god?" Arthur snidely demanded in our defense.

"I'm paying for this. I'll tell them what to do." HP was approaching the first stages of apoplexy.

"Shut up already. Don't be such an asshole." Arthur was our union rep. "Lunchtime, guys. Cough up."

"Cough up what?"

"Lunch money." Arthur had as little money as we did i.e. nothing.

"I never said anything about paying for lunch.” HP was as stingy as a 13 year-old boy on his first date. “These guys are on their own. You have thirty minutes."

Werthel, Scottie, and I muttered "asshole" under our breath and Arthur rolled his eyes as if to apologize. Arthur and Scottie looked at the scrap metal. There was a junk dealer on 28th Street. The metal had to be worth something.

"We'll get rid of the metal and be right back."

Arthur and Scottie rolled the trolley onto West 25th Street. The temperature would have been 95 in the shade if there were any trees. The trip took them 20 minutes. They came back with two sandwiches. The junk dealer had given them $8. Arthur split the sandwich four ways.

“You done her.” HP was complaining about us taking too much time.

"I'll talk to him." Arthur was good with people, only HP wasn't listening to anything Arthur had to say. He knew it all. By week's end we wanted to quit. Arthur begged us to reconsider.

"This guy won't hire you, if you do." Arthur was powerless to stop HP from being an asshole, but we knew once the club opened we'd get our reward one way or the other and we stayed on the job.

Werthel was the only one who didn't mind not having any money for lunch. His mother thought that he was in summer school and gave him a weekly stipend. Every lunch he'd get himself a good sandwich, while Scottie and I ate a $1 slice of pizza. Scottie and I were losing weight. Werthel was getting stronger. We tried to schnorr extra food. He would throw the half-eaten sandwich in the trash. Scottie and I were too proud to dig out his scraps. He didn't deserve it, but we transferred our hatred from HP to Werthel.

The demolition got harder and dirtier. Things should have improved once we started construction, except none of us knew what we were doing. Werthel fell off the ladder and I smashed my thumb with a hammer. Arthur suggested that I should go see a doctor. HP wouldn't pay for the visit, so I wrapped my thumb with a torn tee-shirt.

One day Scottie and I were starving and Werthel said, "I'll race you for a sandwich."

"Me?" Scottie was short, but very fast.

"No, you." He pointed to me.

"Me." I had been a cross-country runner in high school in 1969. My finishes were never in the top 5.

"Yeah." Werthel was younger and taller. “You’re not hungry?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Then race me?”

“Werthel, just give us the money for a sandwich.” The previous night I drank until dawn with Richie Boy. My skin was sweating vodka.

“You want it. Run for it.”

HP and the rest of the crew stopped working. Arthur and Colleen got out of a cab.

“What’s the wager?” My stomach was growling from the lack of food.

"Okay, two sandwiches versus you being my slave for a day." Werthel was wearing sneakers.

"One day." I had on cheap work boots.

"I'll take some of that bet." HP yelled to Arthur from the loading platform. "But you have nothing to bet."

"I do." Arthur pulled $100 from his pocket. Colleen slapped his hand. The money was probably for an over-due bill.

"Straight up." HP was giving no odds.

"Straight up." Arthur looked at me. "You can do it, kid?"

"No problem." Arthur was 35. I was almost 30. His saying 'kid' made me feel younger. "The bet's on."

"Scottie, you hold the money." Arthur handed his c-note to Scottie. HP did the same and stared at Werthel. "If you throw the race, I'll welsh on the bet."

"I'm not throwing any bet. I'm the meanest man in the world." Werthel threw his sandwich in the trash. This race was a test of his drug treatment. "You ready?"

"100 yards." He was definitely faster than me for 50.

"100 yards." Werthel dropped his tools. Colleen was berating Arthur. Scottie was the referee. Werthel and I walked off the distance in the middle of the street. Workers from the rest of the street stopped what they were doing.

"You know we don't have to do this. You could give me the money for the sandwiches and I'll be your slave." I was more hungry than proud.

"No, this is a race." Werthel stopped at a manhole cover. "This 100?"

I nodded yes. He crouched like Jesse Owens and I stood at ease, both arms at my side.

Scottie shouted from the finish line. "On your marks. Get set. Go."

Werthel and I burst down the street. He pulled ahead instantly. One yard. Two yards. I dropped my head and pushed harder. My feet slapped onto the hot pavement. Shouts filled my ears. We were neck and neck. Scottie was only ten yards away. I leaned forward and beat Werthel across the line by a foot. Colleen screamed with delight and HP called for a rematch. Arthur grabbed the 2 $100 bills.

"No rematch. He won fair and square."

I thought so too, then he winked at Werthel. I turned to him and he said, "What? You won your sandwich. Enjoy."

Arthur gave Scottie and me $20 each. The sandwiches from the closest deli were terrible, but victory was a tasty condiment. That Friday HP said he'd pay us at his apartment. We went to One 5th Avenue. The doorman told us that he had flown to Paris to shoot a commercial about acne. We didn't see him till the following week. After HP paid us, Werthel called him an asshole.

"I don't need to hear that. You're fired."

"You can't fire me. I quit." Werthel chucked a hammer at HP. It travelled too fast for him to duck, but Werthel's aim was off. The hammer quivered in the wall. Werthel stomped off the site and HP said, "Don't even try to come to this club."

"Asshole," Arthur muttered.

He was a good judge of character. Later that night we went to see Werthel at his apartment. Richie Boy had a good laugh at everyone’s version of the story and Scottie asked, “Werthel, how it feel to lose to an old man?”

I might be beat up for my age, but not old, but before I could say anything, Werthel put down his Diet-Coke. It was the drink of recovering cokeheads. "I didn’t lose. I threw it."

“You don’t like losing at anything. Even checkers when we were kids.” Richie Boy had all the answers.

“I made it look like he won.” Werthel folded his arms across his chest.

“Shut up already,” Arthur sat forward on the sofa. “I saw your face. You wanted to win and thought you could win against a drunk and maybe if you hadn’t eaten your sandwich before the race you could have beaten him, but not on a full stomach. He won, because he was faster.”

“I could beat him now.”

Werthel was right. I had already drunk 5 beers. My feet and legs and heart were out of the competition.

“Maybe.” Arthur wasn’t letting Werthel slide. “But not then. Who was faster? Tell the truth?”

Werthel waited several seconds and grunted with an off-center smile.

“I have a good eye for winners.” Arthur was looking at Werthel with a sly grin. “And an even better for losers and no one’s as big a loser as HP.”

“Asshole.” We clinked glasses and drained our drinks.

"But not Werthel.” Arthur added, because where Werthel might be the meanest man in the world to his friends but he would always be one of us and to this Werthel had nothing to say. He could only smile.

Peter Nolan Smith left New England in 1976 for the East Village. The nightlife became his vehicle for traveling the world; Paris, Hamburg, Nice, and London. His career ended at the Milk Bar in Beverly Hills in 1995 and devoted his years to traveling in the Orient, supporting by his new profession as diamantaire. Most of his 21st Century has been spent in Thailand, although economics forced his return to the USA in 2008. Peter NolanSmith currently lives in Brooklyn and Sriracha, Thailand. He is the editor and writer of www.mangozeen.com.

I don’t go to Dr. Dave for check-ups, just when something goes wrong. And something is wrong today. I suck down the last hit of my cigarette and stub it beside a mural of spray-painted camouflage that covers part of Dr. Dave’s corner office on Clinton and Stanton. A sign—red cross inside a white circle—hovers above the entranceway. All my appointments here begin with me saying something like “Hey Dr. Dave. I’m pretty sure I got bronchitis again.” Or “Hey Dr. Dave. My throat, I think it’s strep, but it might be an STD.” Or “Hey Dr. Dave. You know that lice thing that’s been going around?” Then, typically, Dr. Dave writes me prescriptions, and typically, things get better. But today, I don’t think a prescription will help.

I open the door to Dr. Dave’s clinic, enter the empty waiting room.

I first heard about Dr. Dave after my friend, a train-hopping anarchist who calls a squat on Ninth Street his home base, got surrounded by cops during one of our politically charged street parties. He went out swinging and then went to Dr. Dave to get fixed up. It’s been a year and a half since my friend’s beatdown and almost that long since my first appointment with Dr. Dave, the only doctor I know of who welcomes people even if they don’t have money.

Dr. Dave’s waiting room seats about six, sunlight streams through the generous windows, and on a wall are two paintings with dystopian sci-fi themes, perhaps offered by a patient in exchange for medical services. There’s no receptionist, so Dr. Dave must greet and heal simultaneously. When the sleigh bells on the door ring, he’ll emerge from the exam room to nod at regulars or direct newbies to a stack of admission forms.

I grab a form and then sit. Under “Date,” I write “12/14/01,” under “Payment,” a “0.”

In addition to the paintings, the walls of the waiting room are decorated with several framed news articles. One of them, from the early 90’s, notes that Dr. Dave caters to “anarchists and artists” and administers free health care in sidewalk cafes. The accompanying photo shows him sitting at a table with a cup of espresso and wearing a doctor’s coat, the sleeves ripped off, tattoos coating both of his bare arms. In a more recent photo, he’s older, maybe forty-ish, with a tie, a goatee and doctor’s coat with the sleeves still attached; he stands beside Houston Street with a placard that reads Healthcare Is A Right.

Minutes after my arrival, Dr. Dave escorts a busty transgendered Latina into the waiting room. She thanks him and then struts out into the street, each footfall synchronized to a techno beat that only she hears.

Dr. Dave gestures me into the back room, and I hop up on the examination table, my feet dangling off the edge. He closes the door, thumbs through a file cabinet for my medical records.

“What’s up?” he asks.

“I can’t feel anything down the back of my right leg.”

Last night, lying in bed, suspecting something wasn’t quite right, I’d brushed my fingertips along the back of my right leg, tapped and flicked it, but the hamstring muscles there felt separate from me as they jiggled like Jell-O. I hyperventilated.

“Were you sitting on a hard surface?” Dr. Dave asks.

“Yeah.”

“Was it a bench?”

“It was like a bench.”

“Was it stairs?”

“Yeah, it was kinda like—”

“What exactly were you sitting on?” His eyes search for mine, which, in turn, are searching the floor. “I need to know,” he says.

“A toilet.”

My voice couldn’t be lower, and I feel the cheeky burn of humiliation come on.

To his credit, Dr. Dave doesn’t smirk or give any other indication that what I’ve said is the least bit out of the ordinary. And perhaps for him, after years dedicated to the practice of street medicine on the Lower East Side, my admission is simply mundane. In the most routine manner, he asks me how I’d ended up on a toilet for so long that my leg lost all sensation. And I do my best to explain it to him.

•

My problems began two days earlier, on Saturday, when I’d promised Leigh that she could have the apartment to herself. It’s a studio in the Upper East, the toilet in a closet with no sink, the bathtub elevated behind accordion-folded cabinets. Except for these two nooks and the entranceway, there are no doors in the place, so that means no privacy. It’s our home, but really, it’s hers. She’s the one on the lease, the one with the rent stabilization and the money that, at least for now, her semi-estranged family still sends her way. I’ve had to learn how to shuffle my life around hers, to be there when needed and to disappear, sometimes for months at a time, for the sake of her sanity and mine. The truth is, we’ve maintained our balancing act of communal living and shared responsibilities far longer than either of us initially thought possible, sometimes with a third and even fourth person thrown into the mix. Despite some protracted quarrels, we were friends, maybe even family.

I’d met Leigh in October of 1999, when I first came to New York from western Pennsylvania, to rappel off a six-story building with a banner that decried the city’s use of rainforest wood for benches, boardwalks and subway tracks. She’d worked on the action as well, and, after the arrests, one thing kept leading to the next, until my two-week trip had become five. Then Leigh suggested that I live with her so that we could battle together against earth-raping corporations and their elected enablers. I accepted without hesitation.

Of course I understand why Leigh had wanted me to vacate the premises on Saturday: a night of privacy for her and her girlfriend would be a lovely thing. And so I’d been out that evening until a little after two a.m., when I walked into the foyer of the up-scale co-op on Tenth and University, where my friend Stephen has his apartment. This is my backup home, another place where one-time strangers have become like family.

“Hey Joey,” I said. Joey, who’s Latino and in his late-twenties, sat at the reception desk reading a bible.

“Hey Tim.”

He dialed up to Stephen’s place, but no one answered, so he opened a drawer and thumbed through the little manila envelopes that hold back-up keys to each of the apartments. Joey knew the routine. My name is written on Stephen’s envelope, along with six others, which grants us access whenever he’s not there. Stephen’s place writhes with an ever-shifting cast of boys who crash, converse, lounge and copulate. It’s a makeshift community that rapidly ebbs and flows with the tides of time, ambition and tragedy. Stephen loves us all. He loves to film us even more.

“The key’s not in here,” Joey said. He picked through the manila envelopes again, looking for the back-up set. “The extra’s not here either. I don’t know what to tell you.”

What are the odds that not one but two of the others would walk out with the keys on the same night? I didn’t have my address book and couldn’t recall any phone numbers connected to people who might be able help me out of this situation. I thought about how fucked up my friends were, how flaky, and when I saw them again—I reminded myself to smile, to not make a scene.

“Thanks Joey.”

Cold gusts shoved their way down the streets, and, that time of year, everyone knew the weather would just get worse. I decided to do the ten-minute walk to the Boiler Room, over on Second Avenue and Fourth Street, and use a portion of my last twenty-dollar bill to buy a drink and find someone to go home with. Temporary displacement was providing a perfect rationale for re-labeling as business what I might otherwise have done for kicks. Last call was an hour away.

Inside the Boiler Room, I ordered a glass of red wine and surveyed the crowd—some leather, some queens and way too much Abercrombie and Fitch. But there is a great jukebox. I mean, how many boy bars have an entire Sonic Youth album?

I sat on a couch. I sipped my wine. Two guys beside me were kissing, one sitting in the other’s lap. Men with hungry faces circled the pool table and the bar, searching. Like other people’s luggage on an airport conveyer belt, just when you forgot about them, they came back around again. In the lounge, the crowd moved less. Here, they, we, perched in darkness, and the lit candles and pooling cigarette smoke turned our faces simian.

From a couch ten feet away: a pair of eyes, luminescent like a lit road sign at night. Before they extinguished and I directed my gaze to somewhere less risky, I saw, just barely, the contours of a football-player physique.

I reached for another cigarette. Minutes, maybe only seconds, passed. When I glanced at him again, I caught him staring. Again. He didn’t look away. Neither did I.

In the next half hour, Bill and I drank our second round. We sat on the couch together. From hip to knee, our legs touched.

“I like your dreadlocks,” he said, running his fingers down one of my blonde tendrils.

Bill came from Texas and brought along the vocal twang. He actually did play football in high school—a decade ago by his count. His forehead had some lines, like he’d been weathered from life under open plains or his pack-a-day habit was beginning to show. He’d just moved to New York City and was doing, whatever—it was too boring to remember.

His hand landed in my lap, my lips caressed his face. The bartenders shouted last call at three forty-five.

“What’s next?” I said.

“You, without clothes,” Bill said. “Your place.”

Wrong answer Bill! And only fifteen minutes left until closing time. I told him that half of his proposal wouldn’t work and then listed a couple of the things I’d do with him if we’d go to his place.

“Where I’m stayin’,” Bill said, “we’ve got a problem.”

“Which is?”

“See, I’m not on the lease, and the person who’s loft it is, he’s letting another dude hole up there too. Dude just got in last week, and he’s insane, and I mean flipped the fuck out.” Bill looped his forefinger around his temple.

“So’s everyone else in this city. Come on, me and you Bill.”

“Well… don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Whatever, I thought. It was better than the street, better than dead-ended desire. We stepped outside, exhaling December cold like chainsmokers.

During the cab ride, when I again asked Bill for his name, he pronounced it like “Beale”, the infamous good-time street in Memphis. Then he rubbed me so affectionately in the back seat that he morphed from a strategic fuck into a sweet promise. We got out in Chelsea, bought a six-pack at a deli and took an elevator up seven floors.

Bill opened the door, closed it behind him and, after a minute, re-emerged. “He’s taking a shower.” We went inside hand in hand.

“Um, I really gotta piss,” I said. “How much longer you think he’s gonna be?”

Bill knocked, the unwanted roommate behind the bathroom door shrieked, and I jumped. Then he yelled something about how the gates of hell had swallowed the dance floor, before quieting to a murmur, barely audible above the splash of water.

“Told you,” Bill said.

“He’s certifiable,” I said

“You can piss in the back stairwell.”

“You sure?”

Bill gave me two thumbs up. “Everybody uses the elevator.”

Certifiable growled.

In the back stairwell, Bill said the friend who leases the loft was returning later that morning, and then the two of them were going to do some kind of intervention, maybe get Certifiable hospitalized, but for sure remove him from the space. To me, Certifiable will never have a history, let alone a face or body. But I’m sure his problems began long before I’d heard his ragged voice. In fact, I think of him as Exhibit A for the argument that who we become, we already are. It’s as if we’ve got these fortune cookies interwoven into our DNA, and our brains are just awaiting their marching orders. I want to believe we make choices, significant, life-altering choices about the future, but sometimes the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.

I walked down a flight of iron steps, pissed on a concrete landing and hoped Bill was right about the residents and the elevator. On the landing near Bill’s floor, we sat down, cracked open two beers. We talked and talked and when our mouths ran out of words, we filled them with each other. He gulped my neck, unzipped my pants. He raised his arms above his head, so that I would peel off his t-shirt.

His beefcake pecs, their soft down of blondish-brown.

We cocooned. We swayed like prairie grass. But then everything changed when he said, his warm breath on my ear where his tongue had just been, “You like to party?”

“What do you got?”

He reached for his pile of pants, pulled out a baggie. He dipped a key into it and scooped. Along the stem of the key, an anthill of grayish-white.

“Just a little crystal.”

He leaned over, snorted, and maybe it was only the play of shadows from the exposed bulb dangling above, but his blue eyes melted into black sockets.

The Stairwell

After I tell Dr. Dave about the drug, he scratches his goatee.

“How often do you use crystal meth?”

“I don’t.”

“That’s not what you just said.”

Dr. Dave bumps a rubber mallet against my knee, my foot jumps forward, and I’m relieved to see that certain reflexes survived my bout with the toilet.

He asks me what other drugs I’ve taken, and I list mostly psychedelics: MDMA, MDA, marijuana, mushrooms, LSD. A smattering of coke, which is to say I don’t buy, and I don’t say no. Occasional Xanax and Ritalin. PCP, but exactly once. And an over-the-counter speed, which I took for a six-month spell—it seemed like the only solution to waiting tables at an impossibly busy Perkins Family Restaurant in western Pennsylvania.

The jingling sleigh bells on the main door announce the arrival of another patient, and Dr. Dave excuses himself. Through my partially open door, I watch as he hands an admission form to a mohawked squatter I’ve seen around the neighborhood. I remember a rumor I’d heard, that Dr. Dave had had the letters “MD” tattooed across his entire back. When Dr. Dave pivots from the squatter towards me, I quickly begin an inspection of my nails.

He shuts the door. “How often do you use marijuana? Three times a week? Every day?”

“Three times.” I low-ball my consumption.

“How’d you like to drown in your own snot?”

I look away, brace myself for what I know is coming next.

“That’s what emphysema will do to you. You’ve got access to an oven?” I nod. “Bake pot brownies instead.”

He flicks the cigarette box in my front shirt pocket. “Time to quit. Now. There’s a man, forty-two years old, comes here almost every day to get hooked up to oxygen.” I know this story. The guy had begun smoking at fourteen, and now he can barely walk up a flight of stairs but still fiends for cigarettes.

Despite Dr. Dave’s graphic descriptions, I can’t focus on warnings about pulmonary failure, only on what it’d be like to hobble along the avenues with a walker, the boxy aluminum kind favored by senior citizens.

“Take off your shoes and socks,” Dr. Dave says.

•

When I asked Bill how long he was planning to stay in New York, the question tumbled out, as if I’d spoken one word with many syllables. The zing in my speech also tap-danced through my arteries. I thought about my friends, who maybe weren’t so flaky, who maybe intuitively knew that those two keys would’ve kept me from Bill. And hadn’t Bill just answered my question? About staying in New York to be with me?

In thunderclouds, ions slamdance their way through the sky, searching for displaced protons, searching so intensely that they connect earth and sky in one billion volt-charges that kill more people each year than tornados and hurricanes combined. Your skin may tingle, or hair stand on end as a warning, but typically, you feel nothing until the bolt strikes. And so it is, all too often, with urges.

We were up against a wall of the landing. Or rather Bill was up against me and my back was up against the wall. He thrust his pelvis so that his cock slid along my thighs, caught where they met. I traced the plateaus and ditches of his torso. He buried his face in my armpit, sucking. Then we were down on the floor, a hurricane of limbs ricocheting off walls and knocking over bottles. My cheeks were whisker-burned raw. Our clothes lay crumpled around the landing, soiled by spilled beer and cigarette ashes. We reached for them, untangled pant legs and shirtsleeves. The smell of piss wafted up the stairwell. Bill checked the time on his cell phone. Quarter till eight.

He suggested we get a hotel in the afternoon, after the intervention with Certifiable, and I readily consented. He removed the crinkled baggie from his pants pocket.

“Hang on to this,” he said. “So you can stay awake.”

That hotel would be over six hours away, so drugs or no, I figured I should hop on the uptown train to Leigh’s for at least a little shut-eye. Though dawn had long since bested me to the streets, the sky was still an eye-shadow blue.

Ten subway stops later, I meandered through the Upper East Side—to whittle off another hour, to get the race out of my heart. It was after nine-thirty when I pushed open the apartment door, it’s familiar groan sounding louder than ever.

On the loft bed, Leigh jack-knifed.

“Hey, how are you?” I whispered.

“What the fuck,” she shouted, “are you doing here?” Her girlfriend lay docile beside her, either asleep or doing her best to duck the confrontation.

“I thought it’d be okay to come back now,” I said. “Sorry.”

“I ask for a night. Is that so difficult?”

“I tried, you have no idea how I tried.” The words I spoke skipped ahead of my thoughts.

“One fucking night?” Leigh’s voice got even louder. “You can’t—”

“I don’t have a goddamn home in the world,” I yelled. At least a part of me knew I was being melodramatic, and that, with a little more planning, instead of all this one thing leading to the next to the next, I wouldn’t have been standing in the doorway with all that righteous indignation and what must have been an methamphetamine-tensed jaw.

I tore out of the apartment—but not before grabbing my metal-studded hoody and cramming it into a backpack that already contained a Nalgene bottle, the Village Voice, a couple books and my journal.

I walked the four blocks to Carl Schurz Park. I leaned over the railing there to watch as a tired tugboat pushed cargo up the river towards Hell’s Gate. Then I looked straight down, several stories beneath me, at the four-, five-, six-foot lip of stone that is the last visible layer of Manhattan, a border between solid earth and the churning waters surrounding it. If you fell in, you’d never be able to reach above the sheer stone to save yourself.

I retreated from the railing to a half-circle of semi-secluded benches, and then pulled out the baggie that Bill gave me and the keys to the home I’d claimed not to have. I did another bump.

A forty-year-old man jogged by in a Nike running suit, a German Shepard panting at his side. Morning people. If they weren’t jogging, they were playing hockey on rollerblades. Or sitting on benches, bundled and holding cups of coffee and the Sunday Times. And then there were the families dressed in bright parkas, the mittened hands of parents linked to those of their children like paper doll cutouts.

I smiled, no, I squeezed the sunshine out between my clenched teeth, nodded and waved. Hiya morning people!

My pager vibrated in my left hip pocket, Leigh's number flashing on the screen. She wanted to get in a last word, maybe, or talk things through, but I wasn’t about to find out. Not anymore, I thought. New York sucks. No porches. No porches means no neighbors, no neighbors means no love.

I had to piss. I approached the one-story building that doubles as a tool shed for park maintenance workers and a bathroom for the rest of us, climbed its half-dozen steps, and walked into the men’s side and up to a urinal. Despite the fact that my bladder was full, I couldn’t empty it, no matter how hard I squeezed my abs. If I felt panic, it was more the general idea of it than the emotion itself. Guys came in, used the urinals on either side of me and left. My legs got wobbly.

I thought I might have better luck sitting, and so I settled myself down onto the seat of a toilet in the corner stall. Before trying to urinate again, I brought the key to my nose and finished the last few bumps and then flushed the baggie, the only evidence of criminal activity, down the drain. I envisioned Bill and me under plush blankets in a downtown hotel. My pants were bunched around my ankles. In the not-cold.

 The Toilet

Dr. Dave’s pen makes curlicues above his clipboard as I answer his questions.

“This was the toilet?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“And how long were you there for?”

“About five hours.”

“Five hours?”

“Yeah. And I had my backpack on and it was filled up.” He nods. I congratulate myself for providing Dr Dave with what I believe are the relevant details even as cold perspiration trickles from my armpits.

•

Personal tragedy in New York City often manifests as public display. At almost any given moment, sirens are screaming through the five boroughs, destined for stabbings and heart attacks and psychotic breaks and car crashes and—I’ll never forget this one—the man whose brain I’d seen scattered in chunks across a sidewalk in Bushwick. He’d been pushed from a fourth-floor window in a drug deal gone bad.

I contributed my own shard to this urban mosaic as I sat on the park toilet throughout that Sunday afternoon, convinced that I would unlock my bladder if I could just perform the right sequence of breath. I sucked in air, slowly and deeply, deeper still until I felt each tendon slide along each rib. Veins slithered. The electricity coursing through synapses—tangible, for the first time.

An eyeball up close in the crack between the stall door and the partition. It blinked and spoke in a black voice: “Dread, how you doin’?”

Listen to the sinews, I thought. Not to the voice. Breathe.

Through breath I could move urine, could move it to different organs, could move it up and out of my bladder into whatever is before the bladder, could move it down, way down, to just about—but never a single drop—out of me.

I developed rigorous breathing patterns. For one variation, I inhaled, air filling belly, lifting balls, expanding bladder; and exhaled, squeezing insides till urine stormed the barricade of brick built across my urethra. In another, I inhaled—“huh”—and exhaled—“ooo”—so fast I sounded like a mating baboon. I cavorted along the cusp of discovery, just as so many other explorers had done: Magellan, Cousteau, Neil Armstrong. Me.

The whooshing flush of a toilet from the adjacent stall seized me, sucked me down into pipes—Breathe, I thought—swirling, ricocheting, “ssshhhh” (sound was a form and it filled my head), shot me out with all the refuse into the East River, far beneath the tugboat I’d seen earlier. Blackness. Breathe in. And out.

•

“And you know what else,” I say to Dr Dave. “I thought there was an earthquake, that the walls and floors were shaking, but I just kept doing the breathing thing.”

Dr. Dave jots down another line, then tells me my body had been convulsing.

My stomach sours. Close calls have a way of replaying, of haunting your bedside again and again with worst-case scenarios, and I know that Dr. Dave’s revelation won’t be an exception. Perhaps my respiratory fireworks had prevented the blackness from winning that afternoon.

Dr. Dave asks me to pull down my pants and boxers. I lower them and there it is: a ‘U’, my own scarlet letter, emblazoned on my backside.
“I bet that feels good,” he says.

•

Behind the stall door, the sonorous tones of an old man’s voice began to rouse me from the weakening effects of the drug.

“Time to go,” he said. I went back to breathing.

“You hear me in there? The bathroom is closed.”

“Okay.”

“Hey, I been callin’ you for twenty minutes now. I wanna go home.”

I finally sobered enough to do the math, to wonder why this man hadn't called the cops and, most importantly at that moment, to convince him that he wasn't going to have to.

“Coming,” I said.

My arms retained full but shaky mobility; however, my legs wouldn't budge. With a frantic desire to avoid institutionalization of any kind, I clenched the toilet paper dispenser on the left and, on the right, the metal bar that generally serves the elderly and physically challenged. I pulled myself forward with all my strength, vapor pluming from my mouth, a reminder of the cold I still couldn’t feel.

I opened the stall door and there he was, kind enough to be persistent, to not abandon me to the police or worse: a black man with grey hair, garbed in the greens of Parks Department maintenance.

I tried to walk but could only shuffle my feet forward six inches by six inches. He had plenty of time to stare at me as my dumb and debilitated ass attempted to traverse the bathroom, a feat which, at that moment, seemed not unlike a pilgrimage.

“I’m so sorry,” I said to him. “Thank you for not calling the cops. I don’t usually do this.”

“It’s goin’ catch up with you one of these days,” he said. He shook his head.

I hobbled by the maintenance man and outside to the luminous grey of late winter afternoon. He locked the bathroom door behind us, said goodnight, descended the stairs and exited the park. It would take me ten more minutes to navigate those stairs and considerably longer to walk back to Leigh’s. Leigh and I would work things out, I figured, at least for a while longer. As for Bill: flashbacks of our sex in the stairwell got tangled up with lost time on the toilet. That evening, I’d decline his invitation to the hotel. In fact, I’d never see him again.

The Long Walk Home

“Drunkard’s Palsy,” Dr. Dave says as he taps my right hamstring. “Typically happens when someone passes out or nods off on a curb, a bench, a hard surface of some kind, and compresses one of their sciatic nerves—they run from the center of each of your buttocks, here and here, down your legs. The first thing you lose is feeling or motor skills or both. Do it long enough, you lose a lot more.”

Dr. Dave explains that electrical impulses normally rush from one neuron to the next along the sciatic nerve, as the surrounding muscle tissue communicates with the brain. But cinch this nerve, and these impulses are severed. After a period of time—there is no magic number of hours, though surely it depends upon weight and positioning—the sciatic nerve can become so severely damaged that it stops functioning permanently. Consequently, the gluteal muscles around the nerve atrophy.

“You’d be surprised,” Dr. Dave says, “at the number of drunks and junkies who have only half an ass.”

I imagine myself with one full glute and one deflated glute, and know that such a condition will effectively terminate my sex life. I’m beyond words. Tears flood my eyes.

“You’re lucky,” Dr. Dave says. “I think it highly likely that you’ve only sustained temporary nerve damage. If you don’t feel sensations within a week or two, I’ll take another look.”

I wipe at my eyes and feel a jolt of something coursing through me.

“Yeah?” I say.

I battle my cheek and jaw muscles, trying to keep them clenched in a solemn expression, but they liberate themselves all the same and a grin splits my face wide open.

I thank Dr. Dave and realize, with all the tingling nerves I can still feel in my body, that salvation lies in second chances. That's when you’re between two worlds—catastrophe and the possibility of your life as it was.

Mere minutes after my diagnosis, Dr. Dave is calling in the next patient, the mohawked squatter. And I, I am stepping out into the unseasonably warm weather wearing an ice cream grin. Half a block later, I’m bobbing along to salsa music emanating from a static-y radio on a second story fire escape. And that’s when I promise to never ever do so many things again. But, of course, the hardest part of a promise comes long after it’s made.

Tim Doody's essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail and Brevity. ABC's Nightline included Tim in a national list of "particularly troublesome, even dangerous, anarchists," and Rush Limbaugh made fun of him and his last name on the air. He's online at http://timdoody.me.

Illustrations by Carlo Quispe. Carlo contributes to World War 3 Illustrated, has drawn the Everything Is Okay Comic since 2001 and recently launched the magazine Uranus: Comics from Another Planet (Printed Matter).

My parents pinned all their hopes on me, their bright firstborn son. Though all my life, I had spent hours drawing with Dad in his studio, crammed with colorful canvasses, my parents insisted I take psychology courses in college. I didn’t want a sensible degree, I wanted to fulfill my father’s fantasies of artistic fame. Instead, I ended up a drunk university dropout, living at home. Dad burst into my room unannounced, catching me throwing a solo drink and draw party by myself.

“This is a waste of time. No one cares about your sketches,” Dad screamed, “Get a real job. They’re hiring at Duane Reade.”

“You’re just jealous,” I shouted back.

By 20, my parents had kicked me out of their house.
Angry and alone, I escaped to the old Astroland, where I had always been happiest with my father. I finagled an invite to the Mermaid Parade and a special VIP after party, to meet my best friend’s godfather for the first time, Sylvain Sylvain, bassist for famous vintage punk band The New York Dolls. Sipping whiskey from a Snapple bottle on the rumbling D train, the Cyclone shining in the distance, I felt like my real freak family would be waiting to take me in. Sylvain was in his 60s, the same age as my father and they were both artists. Yet, Syl had made it big on the stage, while Dad’s old paintings still hung dusty in his studio. I was ecstatic, imagining Syl would see right away that I was a hurt kid in need of a surrogate rock star father figure.

My best friend Meier and I spiked giant cups of lemonade with vodka and marched into an indoor club, velvet ropes strung up past fried clam counters, but Syl was nowhere in sight.

“He’s probably getting stoned with my mom in the manager’s room,” Meier explained.

Growing up, my parents only drank cheap Manischewitz on Hebrew holidays. Meier had been born in the Chelsea Hotel, where his mom had flings with famous rock ‘n’ rollers, a past that at the time I wished was my own. My mother and father had insisted on analyzing my childhood problems on the couch. We had strictly structured family dinners at 6 o’clock each night, a suffocating ritual recommended by all the eminent psychoanalysts. Yet, I kept a handle of Jim Beam behind my pillow. Without a diploma Dad approved of, I was drinking away the wide-eyed Jewish bookworm version of myself who had made muddy castles with him by the ocean’s edge. I secretly planned to search among the sequined, sandy crowds, hoping to find the spot where I’d been so close to my father as a child.

“Meier! My man!” A stocky guy in leather pants with long dyed black hair in a ponytail rushed over, hugging my friend. Sylvain had on dark leather pants and a matching vest. Syl’s skin was olive toned like my father’s, except Dad remained natural, letting his silver grey hair show.

“Who’s your buddy? You guys make music together?” Sylvain shook my hand. His raspy smoker’s voice reminded me of the lost world my dad had raised me in, old Spanish men flicking ash off their cigarillos as hydrants blasted jets of water into summer streets.

“No, we just drink together,” Meier laughed.

“I’m an artist too,” I blushed, lamely looking at my would-be mentor.

“Any drinking buddy of Meier’s is a drinking buddy of mine,” Syl grinned at me. “You guys want to get out of here? I hate these stuffy parties, I can give you a lift back to Manhattan.”

“That would be awesome,” I nodded before Meier could respond.

Meier sat in front and I piled into the back of Syl’s car. Syl drove fast with all the windows down under the elevated train tracks, subway cars squealing above us as he blasted old rock ‘n’ roll. I sucked up huge sips of my vodka lemonade, completely abandoning myself to fantasy. If I could only switch lives, I imagined I’d go on the road with the Dolls partying backstage with beautiful girls, living like a legend. I pretended I didn’t know Dad and instead moved in celebrity circles too lofty to extend to a painter’s co-op on the Lower East Side. I hadn’t been brought up in understaffed schools where hood classmates abused me, never lost my virginity too young or dropped out of college after getting in trouble with the police for alcohol, a legacy of failure that tugged at me, foreshadowing a future for myself I was desperate to escape. I was the son of a New York Doll.

“Do you guys need drugs? I can get you anything,” Syl offered.

“We want Shrooms,” Meier said.

“Anything but that,” Syl laughed.

We ended up getting pizza. Over pepperoni slices, Sylvain talked about music, a new clothing line he wanted to start, old drinking stories. I noticed Syl’s face in the fading light was a little fleshy, laugh lines zigzagging away from his lips. Like Coney Island, he was a creature of the past, fame slowly fading with the tide of fresh New York fables. I realized I had been living off salty ocean air and hollow hallucinations, sitting down for dinner at the wrong table. I had been staring at a distorted image of myself, as if in a funhouse mirror. My father had always worked steadily in his studio, raising a family, while continuing to follow his own creative passions. He had never been blinded by limelight, preferring to parent me with love. It could be fraught with anger, our shared unfulfilled dreams driving us to destroy, but underneath was an intense devotion to each other.
My artist/social worker dad and I ended up working things out in therapy. He could fix his client’s problems, and paint away his own, but the damage to our relationship was beyond diagnosis. We needed outside analysis. In a cramped office cluttered with art, my father admitted he had been jealous of my ambition.

“Don’t you think I have the same underlying grandiosity you do? Where do you think you got it?” Dad asked.

“I need to learn from you, not feel like we’re in a competition. Me being ambitious doesn’t mean I’m abandoning you,” I said.

“I know that now,” he admitted.

Over months of group sessions, I found out my love for Dad had been under construction, it was never completely crushed. Like the broken down boardwalk, we rebuilt our bond, slowly, piece by piece.

Royal Young just completed his debut memoir "Fame Shark." Follow him at Twitter.com/RoyalYoung.