Category: Fiction

I got here by thumb. From Port Arthur in a cold rain. I worked there six weeks as a security guard. Before that, Dallas, stacking crates. Before that, Tallahassee. But I’m not running from anybody, if that’s what you’re thinking.

There was a cluster of teenagers with their legs dangling off a boulder at the edge, smiling like lovers with their coy eyes and long hair for pictures they took of themselves. The woman considered herself a proper feminist, but she hated them a little, for being so pretty.

Leo lived in a residential neighborhood that connected Wrigleyville and Boystown, Chicago’s respective Meccas for straight and gay men. His apartment was equidistant from the baseball field on Addison and the strip of clubs that lined Halsted. As they walked up the front steps of Leo’s brownstone, Robbie saw a gaggle of gays exiting the building next door. Their tank tops and jean shorts seemed to deny the approaching winter solstice. Ten o’clock on a Friday, their night was just getting started.

“You don’t really hang out with that crowd, do you?” Leo asked as he led the way up to his second-floor unit.

“What do you mean?” Robbie asked.

“New York has become too risky. You can’t leave anything on the street unattended, even during daylight. And a Lamborghini? Not that he would ever leave it parked on the street, but just the thought, so he said, let’s get out of the city,” Miriam explained.

I was a teenage pothead. Defined as anytime, anyplace, with anybody. I self-medicated behind the gym, in hardscrabble woods, in the sprawl of parking lots, in stank-masking men’s rooms. And, of course, out the window of my rock-and-roll refuge, the room in my parent’s stucco-ceilinged castle. The built-in let-down being depletion, the bottom of the bag, when I and my like-minded stoner either pushed off, seeing as there was nothing left, or strategized about the next score. The friend of a friend of a friend, that kind of thing, or the vaguely known tough who might point us in the right direction. And then we had to come up with the cash.

It is 1956 and Elsie steps out of a taxi on 10th and Broadway. The city is quiet, a Saturday morning, and the golden hour casts everything in halo: the bodega owner watering his plants, the diner worker prodding a trash bag out the door, the taxi driver yawning as he pulls away. It has rained overnight, and the sidewalks, slicked wet, make a hazy mirror for the Manhattan skyline. Elsie’s heels click on the pavement, and her coat, a shimmery blue, swells in the spring rain’s belated breeze. On mornings like this, the city, cool and ethereal, feels like walking around inside a pearl. It is all hers.