Holland Tunnel: A Novella

part 01: can i live with you?

When I returned to New York City in 2003, only my skeleton arrived.

After a drawn-out breakup, two apartments, dwindling savings, and eighteen months of celibate monogamy, solo drug use and isolated art experimentation had burned away my nerves, city-life muscle, baby fat, and most of my ego. But somewhere in Florida's hot and angry rot, I found the thread of stories I wanted to tell, art I wanted to make… though neither path nor market existed for me down there.

So with the last of my savings, I copped a one-way ticket – always returning like a beaten dog – back to New York.

The cab driver who picked me up at JFK ignored my attempts to small-talk, silently farting at me with his windows up until I shut up and covered my face with my beanie. With my cat carrier in my lap, the grays and browns and blues of the Belt Parkway rushed past outside like an angry river. My fingers stroked Wedge’s chin inside his carrier. He purred and grumbled, needing a litter box and some fresh water.

The yellow cab stopped at the corner, right on Kings Highway in Midwood. This was deep Brooklyn. Real Brooklyn.

TAXI DRIVER: Here good?

ME: I dunno, boss... I gave you the address. I’ve never been here before.

He made eye contact with me in the rear-view mirror and farted again as he hunched over the steering wheel to squint at house numbers.

TAXI DRIVER: I don’t see… three… zero… one… okay. That one down there… three one seven.

He idled out front long enough for me to step out into the pouring rain with my cat and duffle bag before pumping the gas and splashing black mud across my pants. I took my Nokia out of my pocket, scrolled down to “Pickles” and thumbed in: IM HERE.

My brother came out: big smile, arms wide, eyes holding an unhidden tinge of pity. He threw his arms around me and we hugged for a long time.

PICKLES: Don’t worry about anything. You’re welcome to crash here as long as you need.

In his arms, I nodded, bruised and seasick. I had less than 30 bucks left.

++++

Pickles led me into the vestibule and closed it, sandwiching the three of us between rattling windows until he could fiddle his keys into the lock again. He beckoned me up carpeted stairs; apparently, he had the whole second floor of this house to himself. His landlady was a woman he’d met on a dating site; they didn’t vibe that way but remained friends, and she came through for him when he posted about needing a cheap place to live himself.

Inside, his place was messy but cozy. He led me through the living room – both of us stepping around stacks of plays and comics and tchotchkes spilling off every surface, an orange GameCube plugged into an ancient color TV, empty boxes of Pop-Tarts and Ritz crackers – to an open door next to the window.

PICKLES: This is you. It’s not big, but it has its own door for privacy and a window that opens. There’s an air mattress, sheets, towels in there already.

ME: Thank you, Pickles. Seriously.

I peeked inside; it was… really tiny. The sheets were folded on top of a tiny wooden bookshelf adorned with 1980s puffy unicorn stickers and faded Garbage Pail Kids.

PICKLES: It was originally a baby’s room. So, you know, it’s crib-sized.

Me and my 30 bucks couldn’t complain. I inflated the air mattress. It more than covered the entire floor, curling up the room’s walls and I was grateful. My cheeks burning from blowing up the goddamn thing, I stretched mismatched sheets over it and lied down with Wedge curled into me. Immediately it hurt my back: a quarter-sized circle of my single ass cheek bore my entire body weight on the linoleum tile. 

But we were grateful, and slept.

++++

I hadn't realized until I woke up that the next day was a Saturday. We had the late summer weekend together to goof around on Kings Highway. Pickles showed me his favorite spots in the neighborhood: the late-night pizza/boureka/shakshuka shop, the expansive Russian-Polish supermarket with a smoked fish counter you could smell a block away, the century-old bagel shop underneath the subway tracks, the sneaker shop filled day-and-night with shady Russian teenagers that was definitely not a front for something else.

Pickles and I had lived together as adults in Brooklyn before – we’d shared a house in Park Slope before I moved back to Miami – and we instantly locked right back into that groove again, like my eighteen months rotting in the sun had never happened. Except I had learned new skills, found a different voice… but in order to get there, I’d had to traverse the darkest places inside myself, and the queasy gut-churn of I AM STILL NOT OKAY was always watching from the shadows, sitting on its hands while I wobbled back into my old life like a baby deer, on new and uncertain legs.

But I knew this: I had to keep moving to get steady again. 

++++

Also, I needed money to live. I just couldn't leech off my brother’s kindness. I maintained connections at a few temp agencies that sent me out on occasional day-gigs, usually on the nine-to-five grind. I’d shave my face, wear a blazer and tie, pass myself off as human. Because I had corporate graphic design experience, a few weeks later I bagged a second shift “permalance” position at a Midtown Manhattan law office, designing PowerPoint decks and logos from 5 pm till 1 am. And just like that, I went back to “vampire temping” – working all night and sleeping during the daylight.

This job, however, didn’t offer a driver to take me home at the end of my shift. Riding the Q train back to Midwood already took an hour, but the MTA had long-term service interruptions forcing you to exit the subway, pile into a city bus above-ground with the other late-night zombies, and ride a mile or two to a different subway station before going back underground to get home.

On my way home around 4 am, I’d pass construction workers and police officers heading to work. I’d carefully unlock the front door of Pickles’ house, hold my breath in the vestibule, tip-toe past the landlady’s door and up the creaky stairs until I made it back into baby’s room, just to break my spine all over again on that air mattress. 

One August day, I’d picked up a daytime shift at the law office – I jumped at any chance for extra cash – when all the power went out. Not just in our section, not even the whole building, but all of Manhattan, New York City, the entire eastern seaboard. Everyone was afraid it was another terrorist attack. Work stopped and everyone waited, unable to take the elevator 38 flights downstairs and go home, relying solely on text messages from friends and family to learn what was going on. But I said FUCK THAT, packed up my bag, and stomped as fast as I could down dozens of flights, bursting out into what became a mass skyscraper exodus from Midtown.

Everyone on the street was ready for explosions, death; we’d all been primed for this two years earlier when the World Trade Center fell. When it was revealed as just a “massive multi-state electric grid failure,” everybody cut loose and it turned into the biggest block party in the country. We – all of us New Yorkers – walked home, en masse. Drinking, flirting, laughing, the summer sun slowly turning everything to honey. My own path from Midtown to Midwood took all day and well into a dark night where the city was lit only by cars’ headlights and candles. It was a magical blast: the complete inverse of 9-11’s mortal shock, still one of my favorite-ever days as a New Yorker. But by the time I hit Kings Highway, I was walking on squishing burst blisters and raw skin.

And I knew then: I didn’t want to live that far from the action anymore. I couldn’t keep imposing on my brother’s space. I’d had a couple months of rent saved up. It was time to move out of the baby’s room and find a proper place to live.

++++

Anyone who’s lived in the city knows that last sentence is a whole other full-time job. While working 40-hour weeks, I was doing apartment research and booking viewing appointments while on the clock, even taking extra-long lunches to see places near work. My morning began with afternoon viewings, and after-work for me was early morning for civilians, and so I wound up meeting potential roommates at weird hours every day of the week, all over the city.

These folks were consistently either creepy, or the room they offered was overpriced or sad, or my gender/orientation/cat ownership was the dealbreaker. As weeks of this dragged on, my search parameters got looser, the quality bar lower, the price I’d pay higher. Honestly, I blame the fucking air mattress.

Then one morning, I saw a Craigslist ad to share a two-bedroom all the way west on Canal Street, next to the Holland Tunnel. A great location, the right price, cat-friendly, a private room. The ad said “Call Shane.” A nice, gender-nonspecific name. I called Shane. No one answered. I texted the number and Shane wrote back immediately.

SHANE: yea cool come by whenever

ME: hmmm i work nights but really want to see your place

SHANE: what time u get off ??

ME: 3am 

SHANE: ill be up u can come see it then

ME: ok…

++++

Exiting the Canal Street 1/9 station at 3 am, I walked straight into wind whipping across the Hudson River. Summer was dying quickly; tonight was the first real crisp weather of the year. My eyes stung, tearing up as I crossed West Broadway, but I wondered if these tears were the wind or total emotional exhaustion.

I felt like I’d been floundering for a while, a few years at least. My spirit needed to sit still and breathe, with solid, consistent earth beneath my feet for a minute. My eighteen months in Florida left me disconnected from everyone and everything, even being back in my city. Life as a vampire temp didn’t exactly help.

I found the address and my feet stopped on their own in front of a crumbling red brick building, one in from the corner. It was taller than the corner building, which had a mega-watt electric billboard on its third-story roof that threw moving colored shadows across the street. I stood there underneath it, swimming in a sickly blue commercial for Manhattan Mini Storage. Shane’s building had a steel door, beaten-to-shit, covered in paint-marker tags and stickers. I was about to knock on it when it opened a crack.

A thin line of light beamed out onto the sidewalk. Within it: a slice of an exposed brick wall and a shadow with a top-lit blonde mop. One blue eye peeked out:

SHANE: You must be… “Daniel,” right? You’re right on time.

When I nodded, forcing a smile, he giggled, high-pitched but full-throated. Then he kicked the metal door open with his heel, sweeping it across the sidewalk like a medieval weapon. I jumped back; it just missed me. Shane then leaned against the door frame on a bare elbow like a Parisian hooker. From the skin folding in around his perma-stoned eyes, I guesstimated he was in his mid-fifties: stringy shoulder-length blond hair, pajama bottoms with dirty tube socks and flip-flops, a children’s Ninja Turtles tee that left his fluffy belly bare.

SHANE (with a wink): You coming up, or what? 

Now I’d seen dozens of apartments these last few weeks – I’d met a forgotten old Broadway singer, two firemen who’d left their wives to be together, a dominatrix whose landlady jacked up the rent to force her out, a hive of queer assistant book editors – but I’d never met a Shane. I wasn’t even sure what a Shane was: his energy threw me because he acted like we’d already agreed that I’d be his roommate, that this was just a formality.

He turned to walk up the stairs and I followed. The metal door banged shut behind me like a bomb. Inside the exposed brick stairwell was stifling hot, scented with a hint of Shane’s sour sweat. I bit the inside of my cheek, hard, wondering what the fuck was I doing, even stepping inside that building with this dude at three o’clock in the morning. Was this my last night on earth? But I knew: I couldn’t keep going like this. I needed a place – a tiny fucking room – to call my own. As he rounded the first set of stairs, the recessed light in the stairwell floor showed me shadow-puppets of bare balls beneath his pajama bottoms. To be fair, who wears underwear under their pajamas?

SHANE: You’re gonna love living here. So much.

ME [looking around]: It seems pretty cool. How long have you been here..?

SHANE: Hmmmm… I guess about seven years. Rents exploded out here a while ago, but at least it’s still interesting. Culturally, we’re at this downtown nexus – Tribeca, SoHo, West Village, a slash of Chinatown – but it’s also our own little pocket dimension, these few blocks to the river.

He stopped in front of the only door on the third floor. Actually, there was only one door per floor, meaning it was one of those legendary old SoHo walk-ups I always dreamt of living in. I swallowed, excited about what waited for me inside. This door had a chunky metal “3” nailed to it made of miniature construction girders that looked custom, hand-made. He saw me clock it and nodded with his chin:

SHANE: You like that, huh? [running his fingers through stringy hair] Yeah, I do metal work sometimes. Mostly I pay the rent with the film industry jobs: shop work, props, art department. My real passion is special effects though – practical ones, not that CGI shit. Do you like… movies, Daniel?

ME [my flex]: I actually, uh, graduated from film school a few years ago. In Miami.

SHANE [with a big grin]: Oh, did you now? I had a feeling about you…

His smile was missing four front teeth on his top and bottom jaws, leaving just the wet pink landscape of lips, gums, and tongue. My entire nervous system seized up just to hold the muscles of my face in place; I didn’t want to be rude, or stare, or hurt his feelings. But also: I really needed this.

SHANE: Okay, enough flirting… ready for the reveal?

The door opened on its own just then, and the world’s fattest calico cat squeezed its girth through, then started making figure-eights around Shane’s ankles. 

SHANE: And this here is our other roommate, Captain Galaxy! [Galaxy chirped hearing its own name] My sweet, sweet Gally-baby Gally-boy!

He reached down to pick him up, grunting as he heaved the neckless feline to his chest and rolled it onto its back, its pink asshole winking at me like a bad punchline. He nuzzled Galaxy’s wobbling belly with his face until he reared back and clamped his fangs down onto Shane’s shoulder. Not maliciously, but hard and drooling. Their bodies locked together like that, Shane and Gally-boy pushed open the front door with a backwards butt-bump and they led me inside together.

++++

As we entered the kitchen/living room space, it felt like going backstage at a theater: greasy gray linoleum rug, walls covered with pegboard-mounted homemade prop replicas. The kitchen sat on a raised platform, a yellow Formica counter that Shane sawed a hole into to install an industrial steel sink. No stove, but a microwave and an old wooden cabinet from someone else’s kitchen he spray-painted fluorescent orange. On top of the cabinet was a police dispatch radio that softly mumbled addresses, NYPD codes, and requests.

SHANE: Isn’t that nice? The ambiance of that helps me sleep. [clears his throat] Uh, full disclosure: we have a bit of a cockroach problem. They come up through the building pipes. I don’t spray poison because of Gally, so I just… smash a few and they stop coming for a week or two.

Scanning the room, Shane had hung dozens of models from the ceiling with clear fishing line – WWII airplanes, spaceships from sci-fi movies, kaiju from Japanese monster films – and wrapped a cat’s-cradle of Christmas lights around them. The whole thing hovered above us, in motion. If I was still in my teens, this would have been my dream room. He saw me looking up at them and beamed.

SHANE: I know. I love this room. Let me show you yours.

He took three steps to the left and slid open a Japanese-style door – one with frosted glass instead of washi paper – and gestured for me to step inside. The angles of the room were weird, almost triangular, but three out of four walls were exposed brick, one of which had a sealed-up brick fireplace. Instantly, I saw myself sitting there, writing and drawing. Like I’d already been there before. 

The same greasy gray linoleum rug continued in from the kitchen, except for vinyl tile beneath an uneven-looking black metal futon bed in the corner.

SHANE: That belonged to my last roommate. We can take it outside if you don’t want it, but–

ME: No, no, leave it, please! I’ve spent the last few months on an air mattress.

SHANE: Oh! You poor, dear boy.

He walked to the foot of the bed, to the window just above the oily radiator, and slid it open. Outside was a rusty, rickety metal fire escape, that iconic New York City kind that feels like it will collapse at any moment but has held for a century. The view looked uptown, over SoHo backyards and illuminated windows, tiny theatrical one-person shows stretching out for miles, the misty-peaked Empire State Building lording high above it all.

My cheeks flushed. I thought about lying in that broken futon, day and night, staring out at that view. That felt like peace. When I turned back to Shane, his glazed eyes squinched tight until they almost disappeared:

SHANE: You love it too, don’t you? [clapping] Ohhhh goody gumdrops! Can I show you my magic place?

As he jumped up and left the bedroom, my stomach filled with icky butterflies. I wondered if this was where the vibes get awful. Is this where he “shows me his bedroom” and I get raped and murdered? I swallowed hard, and willed the corners of my mouth not to stop smiling. 

SHANE [from outside]: Coming, Daniel...?

All I could do was follow. But Shane didn’t lead me to his bedroom. He’d stopped in the kitchen, to the window just outside the sliding door. He hiked it open with a grunt. Looking back at me, he threw one leg over the windowsill, then the next.

++++

On the other side of the third-floor window was the rooftop of the building next door, the one on the corner. We stood on its scratchy tar paper roof beneath the electronic billboard I saw from the street, blasting video ads out onto drivers trying to get into the Holland Tunnel.

I stood on the roof with Shane, bathed in colored lights and the pattering of raindrops, and exhaled a tiny cloud of relief and joy and possibility out over the city.

ME: Yes. Yes, I’ll take it.

Shane folded his arms, smiling big and gummy.

SHANE: Shall we consecrate this moment with a doobie?

I laughed. It was just after 4 am.

ME: Fuck it, yeah, why not?

Shane pranced back through the kitchen window and came back out with a joint and a butane torch. He pulled the trigger on it, incinerating its first half-inch. Then he stuck it in his mouth, took three deep yogic puffs, holding his breath as he passed it to me.

As I took it, he exhaled, a silhouette lost in a haze of billboard-lit smoke.

SHANE: Daniel… you and I are gonna have such a good time together.

part 02: friend of yours?

Thanks to MTA service interruptions, I didn't to get back to Pickles’ place until 6:15am. 

Back in baby’s room, I lay awake on the air mattress, keys to my new place in hand, vibrating with excitement. As my eyelids grew heavier and the syrup of sleep filled in the spaces around my thoughts, I heard giggling from the kitchen: Pickles and his girlfriend were up. 

I came out to meet them, bleary-eyed, and he handed me – without asking – a mug of hot coffee.

PICKLES: Long night?

ME: Yeah, I just got in like, 30 minutes ago. How are you kids? 

They exchanged a sneaky look, a giggle. They had a secret, but I didn’t press.

ME: So, uh, okay. I have good news. I found a place to live. Got the keys!

Leaning against the hallway bathroom door, I jingled the keyring I got from Shane. 

PICKLES: Oh, fantastic! Tell us about it!

I explained the Canal Street spot: the location, the room, the weird but charming roommate, his magic place. Then I apologized for being in their hair for longer than expected. Pickles waved away any apology. 

Behind the door I was leaning on, the toilet flushed loudly. I jumped. I didn’t realize anyone else was home.

ME [mouthing]: Did… you guys have a… threesome??

Again, a knowing look between them. Behind the door, the sputtering hiss of a dying aerosol air freshener. Then the bathroom door opened: it was my father.

ME: Wait… what?

PICKLES [laughing]: Told you he’d forget!

DAD: Thanks. That makes me feel… important.

In my sleepless weeks of night-work and roommate-hunting, I had completely forgotten about my father’s visit. He wanted to come to the city to visit his boys for a few days, slumming out here in deep Brooklyn. I remembered now: he got in last night, but I had work and then met Shane and completely spaced. I shared my news (again), jingled my keys (again), then explained my day.ME: So, I have to be at work at five, but… I’d love to get my stuff moved in first so I can get home later tonight. You guys want to come with me, see the place? We can dick around, get some Chinese food afterwards?

DAD: Sounds good to me!

Everything I owned fit in a taxi.

++++

And so I moved in. My brother and father came along in the cab, schlepped my lone duffel bag and one box of books up the stairs while I brought Wedge in his carrier into his new home. Unlocking the door, I looked around for Shane:

ME: Hello? Shane? Anybody?

Captain Galaxy chirped and came waddling over. He smelled Wedge, twitched his tail. I set the carrier down first, so they could check each other out. Galaxy purred, but Wedge growled low and loud, hissing any time the other cat came near.

ME [shocked]: Whoa, I’ve never seen him do that before.

Cats not liking each other should have been – should always be – an omen of trouble. Meanwhile, my father, who does not give a shit about cats, glanced around at the model kits and Christmas lights as I’d done a few hours earlier. He looked horrified and confused.

DAD: And you’re paying how much to live here…?

Clearly this apartment’s appeal was less impressive than Pickles’ Midwood crib. I invited them into my room – which was even nicer by daylight – to show off my view of the city, the Empire State Building. Unpacking my shit took all of 10 minutes. There was no dresser, so I hung my clothes on a shower curtain rod in the room’s narrowest corner. My family congratulated me but also was ready to go outside and get something to eat.

We were putting on our jackets in the kitchen when Shane walked in, whistling a jaunty tune. He looked up and flinched, seeing the three of us standing there. Taking off his tan Carhartt jacket, he wore a tie-dye cut-off muscle tee and black sweatpants with what we all prayed were toothpaste stains on the thigh. He did not take off his iridescent Oakley visor. 

SHANE: Greetings, Daniel and… strangers.

ME: Hey Shane, this is my brother and my father. I wanted to get my stuff moved in before I had to go to work–

SHANE: No worries, brother. This is your place now, too. [bowing robotically at my family] Nice to meet you, Daniel’s family. My name is Shane, like the cowboy movie.

DAD [trying to connect]: Great movie. Alan Ladd.

Shane just nodded. Behind his visor, I knew he was extremely high. Like, you-should-not-be-out-in-public high.

ME: Hey, we’re about to head out, get something to eat. You’re welcome to join –

SHANE: N-noooooo thank youuuuu… IIIIII… [reaches for a lie, finds it] I just ate pancakes. Big ol’ stack of flapjacks with syrup and bacon.

I gave him a wink of understanding and apology. And we headed out into the city.

++++

I was sitting in a Cantonese restaurant across from my dad and brother, staring through the space between them at my own reflection in a mirror behind a large aquarium that’s green with algae. Fat catfish inside spending their entire lives swimming infinite circles, brushing each other with their whiskers. I knew that feeling. I remembered then that I’d barely slept since the night before last. Also really for the last six or seven weeks.

Our waitress came up behind me – I watched her approach in the mucky mirror – and reached over my shoulder to drop three bamboo baskets of dim sum on the table. A whiff of her armpit sweat simmered beneath her perfume. She asked if we needed anything else and Pickles waves her away.

DAD: So. That roommate of yours...

PICKLES: Yeah. What. Is. That. Guy’s. Deal?

ME: He’s odd, no question about that… but he’s fine. He works on film sets.

DAD: Are you guys, you know… 

He pushed one finger through an “O” he made with his other hand, pumping it in and out. My brother, about to bite the tip off the top of a soup dumpling, blanched. He’d never even considered that possibility.

ME: We are definitely just roommates. He was the warmest of like, nine thousand strangers I met on Craigslist over the last month or two. Plus, I love the space, the location–

My father snorted, threw his hands over his head.

DAD: Good! Very nice to hear. [looks away] Hope it works out for you.

That dismissal ended all discussion about my life for the rest of the visit, and in the months that followed. We wandered outside and over to the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, got black sesame cones, and then oh geez! Look at the time, I’ve gotta schlep my exhausted bones back up to Midtown and pay that rent.

++++

Which I did.

Apparently, I was at work for eight hours. 

On autopilot, recalling nothing.

++++

Going home afterward is a breeze: the trains are infrequent at 3 am but a major improvement over Brooklyn. Then 10 minutes on the downtown 1/9 and five minutes’ walk in the cold. Inside my building, I’m already toasty by the time I reach the third floor.

Shane owned an electric kettle, so I made myself some instant noodles – an extra-large bowl of Spicy Seafood Shin Ramen – and took them outside through the kitchen window. On the wrong side of my circadian rhythms, I was so far past exhausted that I felt a new burst of energy. I couldn’t sleep, and why would I want to, with this view, this moment? 

Sitting on the wet tar paper, hot ramen resting on my knees, the commercial billboard threw its color-changes up into the clouds. Familiar faces appeared and morphed into others as I sat slurping spicy noodles and breathing, just breathing slowly. I saw the faces of the girl I’d just broken up with, the woman whose love I didn’t value, the brother whose kindness I took advantage of, the friend I wouldn’t let be there for me. I carried shame about these, wanted to be a better person than this. The shame was burning me literally even now, a fiery pain spreading from my lap to thighs and balls that I just couldn’t ignore.

Or maybe there was just a tiny hole in my cup of noodles. Maybe my shame was just an idiot trickle of hot soup that would boil my loins unless I stood up and kept moving.

++++

I did keep moving. And so did time. First a dazed shamble that worked its way up over a week to a brisk Manhattan stroll. 

And it turned out, Shane was right. I did absolutely love living in that area by the Holland Tunnel entrance. Our pocket universe was the westside nexus for three of downtown Manhattan’s main arteries – Houston, Spring, and Canal – all running at angles that narrowed to converge right here. This made it exceptionally easy to get around anywhere downtown.

By day, I walked to the city, exploring, making friends, flirting with cuties, taking my sweet time as I made my way uptown in time to clock in for second shift. I was a regular at daytime screenings in near-empty theaters, drank afternoon pints at the good old Ear Inn. Sucking down cheap dumplings and half-sized cans of Thai gray-market Red Bull syrup, I wandered every side street in Chinatown. Even with my meager income, I came home with imported treasures from Chinese markets and pirate VCD-DVD shops, feeding my belly and my brain.

Wanting to do some light nesting, I brought home a few bags of groceries from an Asian market. But in our kitchen cabinet, there was hardly any space for my stuff. Shane actually didn’t keep proper food there, just bulk packages of snacks like Slim Jims, Ho-Hos, a big tub of JIF peanut butter. But one item of his took up nearly a whole cabinet: a massive plastic tub of Colon Cleanser. 

I didn’t want to shame him by asking about it, just worked my Asian groceries around it best I could and hoped the tiny cockroach scouts inside our plumbing didn’t locate my food stash.

++++

Shane and I both liked to get high, but after that first night on the roof, we rarely got stoned together. Not on purpose, we just passed each other on opposite schedules: I worked nights, walked the city during the daylight, and didn’t sleep much. Shane… worked? I supposed? Slept? His door was closed half the time during daylight and I respected that. When we did intersect, it was always to crash: we’d just nod to each other en route and close our doors.

The cockroach problem was real. They weren’t the prehistoric winged Palmetto bugs I grew up with in Florida, but they made up for their size in sheer number. Shane showed me his technique of bashing a few and leaving the remains around the sink’s opening.

SHANE [very seriously]: It is brutal and disgusting, but it’s the only thing keeping us from a full-scale invasion. Once the little shitheads peer out of the disposal and see their friends’ hairy legs and crushed heads… they’ll think twice about coming after my peanut butter and crackers!

To me, assigning them personality and intelligence made me imagine the stories they told about us in their world beneath our sink.

++++

The first crack in our honeymoon – and the first lingering question mark to appear in my new life – began in our bathroom. The tile had filthy yellowed grout, a carpet of pubes behind the toilet, a knot of long blonde hair in the shower drain that sometimes moved up to the soap dish but was never just flushed down the toilet. And that toilet, filthy inside and outside, wore its years-old diarrhea patina proudly. I bet Shane had never cleaned it even once. 

We spoke a few times about it, tensely – bleary-eyed apologies, promises instantly forgotten – until I broke down and went at it with dollar-store rubber gloves, scouring pads, and Vietnamese Comet until it absolutely sparkled. But after just a few days of pine-freshness, the dump-funk rolled back in again. And no matter how much I cleaned, I couldn’t keep up with whatever was being thrown down our pipes.

Did Shane have a medical condition? Maybe he douched before ass-play? I never asked, but tensions had begun here, over toilet paper. I bought enough for both of us every few days, never making a big deal, never asking him to chip in.

But whenever I did re-stock the bathroom, I always had to remove a roll of paper towels from the top of the toilet tank. And when I used the bathroom next, the paper towels would be back, whether we’d run out of TP or not. Was Shane wiping his ass with paper towels? Did he prefer to wipe his ass with them? Was I missing something brilliant here?

I never found out. But it reminded me of the bucket of Colon Cleanser in the kitchen cabinet.

A clue? Foreshadowing?

++++

At any rate, after a few weeks, I was finding a nice life-groove and now, finally, the world-bruised creative organs in my skull were starting to itch again. I’d picked up a discarded wooden door, found some leftover PVC pipes in the alley around the corner, and built into my bedroom fireplace the art desk I saw myself working at the first time I set foot in the room. I was ready to return, for real, to my art-making practice. 

Down in Miami, I’d spent the last 18 months developing an all-digital workflow for making comics and just had my first comic published (a collab with my brother in his series STYX TAXI). On the strength of that short, Pickles and I were invited to contribute to an erotic indie comics anthology called Smut Peddler. It was the perfect thing at exactly the right hungry moment. I dove into it full blast.

Our six-page story was called “Schmear,” about a Jewish boy sneaking into his job at a Lower East Side bagel shop with his girlfriend and a stolen Viagra pill and boning until the boss finds them at sunrise. I went down to Essex Street at dawn to a century-old bialy shop where the Puerto Rican bakers let me inside to shoot reference shots of the bakery’s interiors. From there I went home to smoke up and make comics.

It might have been a long holiday weekend, because I lost all track of time for days, powered by Thai Red Bulls and my trusty one-hitter, working on multiple pages at once. Our silly script took form as a black-and-white photo-realistic piece that I tried to make feel like Woody Allen had shot a porn film: horny teenagers, Jewish humor, seventies bush.

By the time I got to the last remaining panel of Schmear (I was working out of order), part of me wanted to collapse onto my sagging futon and sleep for a week. But the panel I’d saved for last featured an absurdly large hose of a cock, vibrating and spurting. I mean, that was the job, right?

I’d collaged out the figure references with a combination of porn actor bodies and celebrity faces, then scaled up a photo of a meaty cock to an impossibly silly size before I started drawing. It was so fucking stupid and fun, this piece of ours, I was stoned and cracked-out, laughing to myself while rendering the figures.

And then I heard breathing behind me, smelled slightly-sour sweat. 

The level of Red Bull syrup in my bloodstream was already legendary and lightning shot through my spine, spinning me around on my desk chair to find Shane watching me work from the doorway.

From just his body language, I knew Shane had taken something harder than weed. His whole body was in a state of ongoing curling, shoulders and hips and knees and neck, all of him undulating like a twist of live snakes or a cat in heat.

SHANE [looking at the giant cock on my screen]: Oooooh… friend of yours?

He was also naked, but for a pair of turquoise bikini briefs. His penis was semi-hard, pressing against its fabric, leaving a tiny wet dot near its tip. 

SHANE [giggling]: I had no idea you were so very talented, Daniel! Oh my Jiminy Crickets!

As he laughed, he slid his back up and down against my door frame, working its edge in between his butt cheeks. Any words I might have had – should have had – flew out my window to hide on the fire escape. Shane became aware of me watching him and got self-conscious, his face flushing even deeper red:

SHANE: Oh no, I– I’ve crossed a boundary, haven’t I? [looking down at his bare feet] I’m… sorry I’m like this.

ME: No, but definitely yes, boundaries… but I’m glad you can recognize that.

SHANE [overheating]: It’s just… this pill I’m on is making me feel… soooo good right now, you know?

His eyes flicked up to find mine and held my gaze.

SHANE: You think you’re going to be up much later? Maybe when you’re finished with whatever, we can smoke a bowl in my room? I’ll put on a shitty old science fiction movie?

And as he stood there in his tiny blue briefs, his asshole rubbing the doorframe of the room I was renting, that tiny dot of precum became a bold-faced question mark at the end of what exactly the fuck had I gotten myself into.

part 03: blonde hairs

Shane’s behavior was beyond problematic. 

But he then apologized for being weird. Which meant there was some self-awareness, some empathy in there. That let my fight-or-flight response soften when otherwise I should have run for the hills.

And I was happy to soften, because the thought of apartment-hunting all over again so soon made me want to lay down and die. There was no doubt about the change in the apartment’s vibe though. The stink of shame hung like a cloud in our common kitchen area. Whenever we exchanged pleasantries, Shane’s eyes revealed a bad-puppy regret that felt legitimately painful to him.

I was no stranger to shame. I’d been treating friends, lovers, family like extras in my life for a long time, and I’d been called out for doing it too. Shane and I were both hiding in this pocket dimension, holding on to a sense of self and trying not to slide off the edge of Manhattan into the freezing Hudson River.

The shame – his and mine – was weighing on me since the precum dot.

 Somebody had to extend the olive branch sooner or later.

++++

It wasn’t me.

About three weeks had passed. Three weeks of intentionally being ships in the night. Navigating around each other’s schedules. Even our cats were marking territory with hiss and piss, guarding us from each other.

++++

One Saturday evening as the sun began to set over the Hudson, I was posted up at my fireplace desk, drawing some portraits for a client. I heard the tell-tale scrape of sneaker sole against linoleum, just outside my door before—

A soft knock, hesitant. My stomach somersaulted as I swiveled in my chair, not knowing what I’d find, but I grabbed for the loose doorknob anyways.

Shane stood there, glazed eyes squinting nearly shut, his toothless smile harmless and sweet. He was fully dressed (from the cold) and holding a large pizza from Famous Ben’s a few blocks up:

SHANE: Hey, brother. Would you like some pizza? I got a large since we’re both home for once.

ME: That’s… very nice of you.

SHANE: Care to take a break, smoke a bowl? I’ve got about [counts fingers] 2,400 vintage VHS tapes in my room… have you ever seen “The Wizard of Gore”?

I had. A fantastic underground splatter fest. He was speaking my language.

ME: The original? Herschell Gordon Lewis actually shot his films not far from where I grew up in North Miami. Before I was born, of course.

The ice between us slowly started to melt.

SHANE: Might you be into… Supermarionation? [he squealed] The whole world’s seen Thunderbirds and Fireball XL5, but my favorite’s always been—

I chimed in:

US [together]: Stingray! 

ME: I loved the underwater setting! 

SHANE: So cute and cool, am I right?

A bridge had appeared between us, invisible good vibes rooted in greasy pizza and 1960s British kids’ shows.

I stared back at the drawing I really didn’t need to finish right this second:

ME [decided]: You know what? I’m gonna take that break now.

++++

I’d peeked into Shane’s room before, but I’d never ventured inside. I knew he was into model-building and B-movies, but when he swung his bedroom door open, that mystery only deepened. Inside was dark, cave-like, ripples of green light pouring out from within.

Crossing the threshold felt like entering a sacred space: there was a central platform he’d built out of plywood where a large aquarium shone like a beacon, algae-choked and bubbling. His windows were covered with taped-down blackout curtains, turning everyday objects into mysterious shadows.

Homemade shelves fanned outwards from this central platform, surrounding the windows like scaffolding and crawling across all four walls.

His shelves were absolutely choked, stacks of CDs crammed between piles of books, cassettes and postcards. An entire wall of shelves was just unopened boxes of vintage Japanese plasmo (plastic model) kits. His 2,400-title-strong collection of VHS tapes and DVDs ringed both windows from floor to ceiling.

I looked around in awe, not just of the obscure things he’d collected, but of this space he’d built with his hands to contain his treasures, this Museum of Shane he’d crammed into a 200-square-foot bedroom.

SHANE: Square footage, brother. It’s a constant fucking battle.

He sat down on his futon bed, laid the pizza box next to him. It rested on a secondary wood platform against the far wall, with storage underneath stuffed full of action figures in Ziploc bags, old sneakers, balled-up laundry.

I took a seat on the floor. That same greasy gray linoleum carpet as my room, but even dirtier. Like you’d find in the “office” of an auto body shop. He probably ganked it from a film job. Shane lay down on his side, barefoot, one hip in the air. He smiled at me. The vibe felt weird again. Uncomfortable.

We both felt it. Shane lifted the lid on the pizza and gestured for me to take a slice, before realizing:

SHANE: Oh, oopsie… [cartoon-butler voice] Might the young master desire a plate upon which to sup?

I nodded. With yogic skill, he twisted his torso backward behind him, his hands fishing between the bed and the wall before coming up with a roll of paper towels in one hand and a three-foot glass bong in the other. He tore off a single square of towel for me before digging into his own slice of pizza, moaning as hot cheese and grease coated his gums:

SHANE: Oooo, nummy nummy! [watching me eat, carefully] How’s yours, Daniel?

I’d just bitten down, orange pepperoni grease only beginning to sear open the skin of the roof of my mouth. It hurt but was also salty, fatty, delicious. 

ME: Mmmph... Famous Ben’s is consistently great.

We gobbled up three slices apiece like vultures until Shane burped into his fist, leaped to his feet, and held the box with the last two slices above his head, declaring in a Highlander voice:

SHANE: I decree: ye shall be Tomorrow’s Breakfast!

With a slam, he chucked the pizza box into the fridge and returned to his room at a full sprint, sliding into a seated position right next to me on the floor. He reached out for the bong — stained, rancid, like it had survived a war — packing it with a fat tangle of red-haired flower, before he handed it to me:

SHANE [giggles]: Ladies first…

As I lit the bowl, as I took a dozen half-sips of air to coax smoke from the burning nugs into the chamber, as I pulled the slide and inhaled twin lungfuls of high-grade “Al-Qaeda Kush,” Shane sat on the floor the whole time, watching me. His cheeks flushed red, his blue eyes burned, a splash of orange pizza grease slowly changing shape in the corners of the left side of his mouth.

Holding the smoke until it burned, I emptied my lungs with a champion exhale that went on forever until it tripped up over its ambition and crashed out in burning coughing jags. And with that I knew: I was now absurdly high. Shane watched me in the green glow of his aquarium. Grinning, delighted.

ME [laughing as I realized]: You— you were fuckin’ high already!

SHANE: You bet your boots, roomie; it’s my default setting! Why’d you think I went out for pizza?

But his stare: it wasn’t just mutual stoner camaraderie. I willed my eyes to flick away from his, ultimately wrenching them free. They landed on the fish tank. Lit from above, half the aquarium was occupied by a thick green clot of plant mass, dense and fluffy like thermal insulation. Tiny silver guppies swam in and out of it, circling the tank to encounter each other anew again, again, again.

SHANE: This tank reminds me of like, life. This is all we experience, you know? Swimming ‘round, trying to find each other, forgetting we had, then remembering. 

He sighed deeply, wearily.

SHANE: This weed is pretty exceptional shit, right?

Then he cackled at how exceptional the weed was. I felt his breath and microdroplets of his spittle against my flushed cheeks. I felt the green light passing through my eyelids, entering my skull, greening my brain. What the fuck does “greening” even mean? My eyes shut, I was just another tiny guppy. I didn’t want to be a fish. I wanted to be a whole person again. I desperately wanted not to drag the anvil of my heart behind me everywhere I tried to go, plowing impossible grooves of longing and regret in the cracked sidewalks. I wanted to rewind and return to the child I once was and start over from there, avoiding now-obvious wastes of time and the advice of idiots who cared about me. I wanted to seek out better mentors, grow faster with clearer intention. That’s what I wanted, right now. Was I having some kind of breakthrough?

My eyelids slowly fluttered open. Shane still faced me, leaning on one elbow. His lips pursed, wet with saliva. His gaze heavy, sleazy: 

SHANE: You really are quite… striking, Daniel.

I did my best to ignore the toes — and untrimmed yellow toenails — of his left foot as they spidered across the carpet to rest their skin against my own. There was an electric shock that passed between us that felt instantly wrong and very bad. I flinched, retracting my foot, and scooched backward on my ass until two more feet separated us. Because I did not want to fuck Shane, nor did I want Shane to fuck me.

ME: I don’t want to fuck, Shane.

The light beaming from his smile broke, an audible crack, like a glass fuse burning out.

SHANE: Then, why…?

ME: I was hoping this was just… nice roommate pizza time. Things have been weird around here and I just appreciated this… gesture.

SHANE: Ah. And I’ve just misread you… yet again.

My head bobbed up and down, a nod so hard it bordered on rude. I got to my feet, thanked him for the pizza, and went back to my room.

After I closed and locked my bedroom door behind me, after my heart stopped racing and I could breathe again, I lit an incense in the dark and lay on my futon with my cat purring on my chest.

Through the door, on the other side of the apartment, I heard Shane mumbling to himself for a few minutes, then making tiny whimpering noises that sounded like he was crying.

++++

Our boundaries newly hardened as being “just roommates,” Shane and I became very much just roommates. My rejection made him colder toward me; any inching into friendship – or friendliness – had scuttled into our very separate corners of the apartment. It didn’t feel like a big loss; it’s not like we were ever truly friends at any point… but now any sugar-coating was removed and our interactions had become 100% transactional.

Honestly, I didn’t even care all that much. I had an address in lower Manhattan, I had my own tiny pocket universe within our shared pocket universe and that was just fine with me. Also, I had a little cash and a place of my own to start dating again. After 18 months in sex jail, I could let my dog off its leash.

++++

Because that dog was thirsty and New York City was dripping wet. Once I’d broken the celibacy seal, I started waking up in strange places, bringing strangers home; the frozen sidewalks piled with filth-black snow mounds hid strangers with tiny cozy apartments, bedroom candles, shared comforters. Single-serving adventures, single-serving humiliations, I was out here in the streets again, reaching to satisfy a thing I could not name.

++++

Winter nights were dark and long but definitely not lonely. On one such night of many, an apple-cheeked stranger shuddered and came loudly beneath me, collapsing into a puddle. They mumbled for me not to fall asleep in their apartment, to walk my ass to my own home. Sunrise was still two hours away, but you can’t overstay a welcome never granted.

I trudged west in the dark and wind, all the way down Canal Street, until I re-entered the pocket universe. Upstairs, I peeled off my clothes, my body a map of bite marks that smelled like someone else’s sweat. After a hot shower in our again-horrid bathroom, I crawled back under my own comforter, face-down on my pillow, waiting for sleep to swallow me.

My eyes closed, my pillow felt moist on my cheek and smelled… off. Did Captain Galaxy sneak in and piss on my bed? It wasn’t an ammonia smell, it was more… sour. My heart began to race but my brain had already begun to dim the lights, turn down the volume.

I woke up a few hours after sunrise, coughing. Something was stuck in my throat. Finding the end of it with my tongue, I pulled and pulled and pulled until a long, thin blond hair unspooled from my mouth like a party clown’s rope of handkerchiefs. 

Every inch of my skin began crawling with ants. I leaped out of bed only to find several more blond strands: in my bed, in my armpit, between my butt cheeks. For the first time in my life, I very seriously wondered if I’d been roofied — or worse — in my sleep. 

I stripped down in front of the mirror and inspected my body. I didn’t feel any pain or discomfort. My neck and torso were covered in bite marks, but I’d brought those home with me. Besides, Shane didn’t have that many teeth.

But what he did have now was a fucking problem.

++++

I waited for him to get home. I waited literally all day, until he dawdled in around three in the afternoon, roasted to the tits. He was not expecting to see me.

SHANE: Oh! Fancy seeing you home at this hour, Daniel.

I stared daggers at him. He felt them, and sweated.

SHANE: Usually you’re outside, lollygagging on your way to work—

ME: What the fuck were you doing in my bed?

He let his army-navy backpack drop to the floor with a thunk. His eyes met mine, naked, wounded. He chose his words before he opened his mouth:

SHANE: Now, hang on a minute—

ME: Shane, my pillow was wet with what smelled like YOUR SWEAT when I got home last night and I woke up covered in YOUR HAIR. You owe me a fucking explanation!

SHANE [raising his voice to match mine]: And I’ll fucking give you one if you’ll stop being PARANOID!

I folded my arms, all ears.

SHANE: I didn’t realize it was a crime to climb over your bed so I could sit on the fire escape and take pictures of the sunset. I’ve been doing that with multiple roommates for the seven years I’ve lived here. Did I enter your room without permission? Yes. You weren’t home and I… I didn’t think you’d flip out over it…

ME: What about the hairs? I found nine hairs in my bed, on my moist pillow—

SHANE [defensive]: Man, don’t be cruel! I’m 56 years old, brother! They’re all falling out! I’m not sure what you need to hear to believe me—

He was dancing, wriggling right out of my hands.

ME [not giving up]: Why was my pillow wet? And… smelly?

SHANE [tearing up]: Oh. Oh, that’s just… You’re a mean fucking asshole, you are.

He threw up his hands and pointed at Wedge, who was peering out from my bedroom doorway to observe us. 

SHANE: Probably your own little devil took a cheeky tinkle on it! Captain Galaxy has never, would never do something like that!

Shane’s eyes swallowed up the tears. I felt awful; I was the monster in this situation, shaming and belittling this innocent goober… until I noticed his hands fidgeting in front of his crotch. His fingers were knitted together, the dry skin of his palms rubbing against each other noisily as he tried to cover a clearly blossoming erection beneath his ski pants. Was manipulation his kink? 

Right then, I knew: I couldn’t trust a word Shane would ever say to me, and whatever was going on between us was slowly approaching critical mass. This moment hung in the air like a temple gong, filling the room and slowly fading away. When it had gone, Shane licked his lips and took a breath before asking:

SHANE: Are you… satisfied? [I stayed silent]. Are we… cool? I don’t think I want you to continue staying here if we can’t be cool.

He’d flipped it around on me again. I bit the inside of my lip, too hard, tasting my own blood.

++++

I began making notes of his comings and going in my sketchbook until I started to find the shape of his weekly schedule. I annotated the secret codes of his meal times, weekend plans, who he claimed to hang out with. I’d heard him mention a few friends, but I’d never met a single one. 

Something else wasn’t adding up: did Shane even work? I hadn’t seen him go on a single “film industry” job since I’d moved in. He’d asked me to write my rent checks out to him, not to the landlord, and motherfucker had definitely been cashing them. My room was nice but not any kind of cheap. Was my vampire temp work bankrolling both of our lives in the pocket universe?

Now that I’d built out his schedule, I was able to shift my own at home so we stopped intersecting almost entirely, with any occasional hiccup being a nod, a pair of “long time no sees.” Polite, transactional.

But my door stayed closed. Locked.

+++++

And then, weeks into our psychic cold war, on a frosty Sunday in early March, Shane knocked on it. I’d been awake for a while, looking at untranslated manga and slurping instant lemongrass noodle soup for breakfast.

SHANE: Hey, Daniel. Are you decent?

Swiveling in my desk chair, I opened the door, praying to Jesus this time he’d be fully clothed. 

He stood there in his winter jacket and chunky snow boots.

SHANE: Listen, brother, I know this is sudden, but I’ve got to leave town in a few days. I’ll likely be away for… well I’m not sure yet how long, but I’ll be taking Gally-boy with me.

ME: Oh. I hope it’s not a family emergency or…?

He’d never mentioned his family, or where he grew up, or any single detail of a life before he’d moved into the pocket universe.

SHANE: No, no emergency. Just life complications. I know we’ve been… spiky with each other, but I hoped you’d be a pal and feed my fishies while I’m away? I’ve left enough fish food for months if need be.

ME: Months? Wow, okay. Of course…

Months living here, without Shane? My first thought was how totally naked I was going to be all the time up in here, alone and with sleepover guests. But my second thought was: 

The aquarium was in his bedroom. Maybe, finally, I might find out what the actual fuck is what.

part 04: medicine bag

Shane was home the rest of the day and night, moving things around in his room with his door closed.

I was supposed to be working on a project behind my own door, but I was constantly distracted by the clumsy clomps of work boots on plywood. Instead I spent most of that evening sexting with a tattoo artist who called herself Mugwump I’d met online a few weeks back. Things escalated this evening:

MUGWUMP: u like dum-dum lollipops?

ME: those lil ones from the dentist’s office? yea

ME: but i dunno why they give you candy after you just got your teeth cleaned

MUGWUMP: i always carry dum-dums in my bag 

MUGWUMP: case I need to suck on sumthin

ME: … what flavor?

MUGWUMP: cherry. always cherry

MUGWUMP: can i stick my dum-dum up ur butt?

ME: only if you suck on it after

MUGWUMP: ooo meow now my stomach growling

ME: lol maybe we should meet up

MUGWUMP: yea dummy i need food 

She lived on the LES. We decided to finally meet in the middle, in person, for soup dumplings, maybe Dum Dums for dessert.

++++

Sitting across from Mugwump, she was crusty-hot but we had zero chemistry. After she ate her dumplings and most of mine, she excused herself to the restroom and never came back.

Maybe it was me. I was only half-listening to her. I couldn’t focus on anything but Shane’s impending travel. Whether he was gone for weeks or months, I was building sand castles in my head about how he’d just never come back, and whatever boiling point we were barreling toward would just pop like a bong hit in a balloon and dissipate, and then I’d grandfather in to his lease — assuming he even had one — and I’d replace him as the new Shane, the High Lord of the Pocket Dimension.

That fantasy ate up my walk home on Canal against the freezing wind off the Hudson. Dumb thoughts. Childish hopes.

++++

But when I got back to the building around 11:30 pm, I could hear Captain Beefheart blasting from the sidewalk. The stairwell stunk of cigarettes, beer, dank weed. It was coming from our place. 

Opening the door to our place, I braced myself for the shitshow but the kitchen was empty: just a pile of coats, hats, and boots in the corner. Shane’s rager was confined to his room, with the door closed. And I wasn’t invited.

++++

The prog rock and bong smoke continued for hours. I lay fully clothed on my bed in my own closed bedroom with my pillow wrapped around my ears. At some point, those noodling rock records shifted to Depeche Mode and OMD karaoke, drunk and stoned voices bellowing and warbling… how many fucking people could squeeze into his tiny room?

Then, suddenly, the voices stopped. A menacing silence crept in. And from the silence: an awareness of many bodies breathing, shuffling feet on plywood, then moaning, banging on furniture, banging on the walls.

In my room, I stared out the window. Snow was falling, dusting the rusting fire escape, outlining the red bricks of SoHo with thick white lines. It was not quite 2:30, maybe I could still make last call at The Ear.

++++

Last call was made as I entered the bar so I ordered three whiskeys. Behind the bar, Sammy laughed; she’d seen me on my best nights and my roughest and gave me a wink.

SAMMY: One of them?

ME: You cannot imagine.

I drained the first whiskey. As she started to wipe down bottles and countertops, I closed my eyes in this safe corner of the pocket universe. I could imagine the sweaty, toothless, sour-smelling group sex going on in my apartment right now and prayed it would stay confined to Shane’s room exclusively.

I started to tell Sammy — and the other two stragglers — about the Shane orgy I was trying to ride out at the bar counter. Unanimously, they’d all been there: this was New York City, after all. 

An older woman named Elaine — I’d seen her in here loads of times before; I heard she was a famous playwright — piped up from the corner table that sat underneath the rickety staircase:

ELAINE: Living through shit’s part of the reason you came here.

I raised my second glass to that, and as the whiskey shot down my gullet into my stomach, Elaine stood up with a wobble and strutted over like she meant business, then collapsed onto the stool next to mine.

She wanted a last drink but Sammy had already called last call. I slid my third whiskey over to her and she toasted me with it:

ELAINE: This is a kindness. They always come back around.

We sat together in silence in that ancient bar, under its wooden beams and plaster walls and sordid history. Peaceful, almost prayer. We breathed together, alone in our thoughts, until Sammy flashed the lights over the bar and turned the dimmers up to full brightness. It was time to go. Elaine’s crumbled body stepped off the stool and extended vertically until her spine was straight, her neck long and high. She was a good head taller than I was, the coat she pulled on expensive.

ELAINE: Honey, are you going back to the orgy, or do you need a place to crash tonight?

My glance back at her said it all. 

ELAINE: I’ve got a nice antique sofa in my study. No expectations, okay?

She tugged at the elbow of my coat and walked toward the exit. I followed.

++++

Under orange sodium street lights, we wobbled together along burst-open asphalt, revealing older cobblestones beneath. Her heels caught in the stones and she nearly lost her footing; I caught her by the elbows just in time. Without thinking, I asked:

ME: You’re out alone. Where’s your husband… [remembering] Dennis…? Out of town?

She snorted and laughed.

ELAINE [making air quotes]: Yeah, “out of town.” Permanently.

ME: Oh. I’m sorry, did he…?

ELAINE: Die? God, I wish! No, he left me… he’s uptown right now, in his love nest with his young leggy assistant. [sucking her teeth] The fucking male ego is the most toxic substance on earth.

She stopped walking in front of an old brick loft next to the firehouse. We were both shivering in the screeching wind as she fumbled with her keys and unlocked the single door.

++++

Entering the vestibule, I noticed the lack of a buzzer with tenant names on printed labels. This whole three-floor building belonged to them.

Elaine hung my coat for me on an old brass hook next to a spotty oval mirror. The stairs were carpeted and curved upwards where they opened to the next floor. Everything was wood and glass and antique furniture they’d collected together. Each wall featured one large painting orbited by a cluster of eclectic, smaller framed pieces. Their bookcases stuffed with hardbacks and keepsakes brought back from far-off lands. This was what life as a successful, creative New York couple looked like.

Sitting at her kitchen counter, Elaine made us spiced tea with honey, served it in heavy ceramic mugs made by an artist whose name I didn’t recognize. 

Then she led me upstairs to her study, brought me a knit wool blanket. I took off my shoes with a drunken grunt but kept my clothes on as my eyelids finally started to get heavy. Just as I sank into sleep, I heard a floorboard creak. I opened one eye, like a grumpy cat. 

Elaine was peering in from the doorway. Her eyes met mine and she smiled, stepping into the study in a thin cotton nightgown with nothing underneath, her wild dark bush on full display.

Groggy, I rose to plant my feet on the floor but suddenly she was on me, straddling my chest, pinning my shoulders down with her knees. Lifting her nightgown, she threw it over my head, forming a sheer tent around us. I looked up at the paunch of her belly, the thin hairs trailing up from her bush to belly button. With her fingers cradling my skull through her gown, she breathed in silence before whispering to me:

ELAINE: Is this okay for you…?

My breath against her midriff, she trembled. A damp, growing heat radiated from that dark hair. She tilted her waist, opening her thighs wider for me. She was wearing a man’s cologne: leathery, masculine. Probably her ex-husband’s.

I leaned in and relaxed, lifting her hips to place herself against my mouth. She whimpered and palmed the back of my skull and pushed my face deep inside her, trying to swallow me whole. 

Her thighs twitched. When she came she shuddered in waves, oceanic, her juices sliding down into the nape of my neck. And when she was sated:

ELAINE [panting]: Welp. So much for no expectations.

ME [laughing]: Unexpected, but lovely.

ELAINE: I got a vibe off you at the bar but got… self-conscious. You’re much younger, and girls of your generation all shave or wax. Not me; I love being a full-bloom woman. Why would I want a preteen cootch?

She shifted her hips, sitting back tall and straight on my ribcage, releasing a suction squelch of air that was definitely not a fart.

ELAINE [unfazed]: But then Dennis — my husband of 21 years — leaves me for someone who certainly is smooth as a Barbie down there. Has the media made all men, like… grossed out by a natural bush now?

This hill I was proudly prepared to die on:

ME: Shaved pussy makes me think of plucked chicken.

Elaine snorted and high-fived me, then got up for a hot towel.

++++

A little later, she sent me on my way after a cup of very good Rwandan coffee. The sun was up now; steam rising from manhole covers and sewer gratings, nobody else on the street yet but a leaky garbage truck with squealing brakes.

I nodded to the big man hanging off the rear handles of the truck with work gloves. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, flicked it directly into the sewer grating:

GARBAGE MAN: Walk of shame, eh? [chuckles] I remember those. Enjoy it while it lasts, boss!

++++

And when I got home, Shane was gone. So was Captain Galaxy. Wedge greeted me at the front door, happy to have his run of the place. The apartment was emptied of trash and all traces of the party, save the ever-lingering weed-funk. He’d left town and even taken his bucket of Colon Cleanse with him.

On Shane’s bedroom door was a taped sheet torn from a spiral notebook that read: REMEMBER 2 FEED MY FISHIES! Beneath it, he’d duct-taped a Ziploc baggie with three new containers of fish flakes, which, as a former aquarium enthusiast, I knew was like three or four months’ worth.

I checked the clock next to the police radio on top of the fridge: I had about seven hours before I needed to start heading uptown to work. I took a hot shower, washed Elaine off my face, and when I was clean, dressed, and ready, I opened the door to Shane’s bedroom.

++++

His room smelled — if I had to name it — cummy. It had been straightened up, but the furniture was all a little off-center now, as if things had been knocked around, not put back quite right. When the thin slice of sunlight snuck in around the blackout curtains, you could see the sheen of skin oil, body prints left on the black walls: an arm, an ass cheek, a pair of feet.

His bookshelves were untouched. I perused — can’t help myself, bookshelves are such a window into a person’s mind — pinching his ratty paperback of Beautiful Losers for later.

I opened the drawers of his dilapidated Ikea dresser; they were empty. He’d taken all his clothes, but left his Museum of Shane intact? Where had he gone, and for how long? Was this place just a storage facility for him?My eyes caught the space under his futon; the balled-up laundry and pairs of dirty shoes were gone too. Just his toys remained.

Looking over at the fish tank, I remembered I should probably feed them. Sprinkling some flakes into my hand from an open container onto the mucky surface, his fishies all swam up from their hiding spaces. I watched them swim up toward the green light to feed, the aquarium’s pump gently sending bubbles through an algae-caked tube into a ceramic pirate’s treasure chest. The lid was hinged, and as air collected in it, the lid swung open to release it before slowly falling shut again.  

It was relaxing in here, watching the treasure chest, even if it smelled like jizz.

And then I saw the sparkle of pirate gold: there was a tiny brass key. This was a plot point in A Fish Called Wanda, one of my all-time favorite movies. Looking up at Shane’s VHS shelves, there it was, on the third shelf with the rest of the Monty Python films.

Unoriginal motherfucker. Now I just had to find the lock it fit.

++++

Looking for the lock took time: the Museum of Shane wasn’t just overloaded with stuff and built by a mad stoner craftsman, but it was also organized using a logic only Shane himself understood (maybe). Whatever I disturbed needed to be back exactly as before, otherwise he’d know… and that transgression would cross a line that would bring whatever confrontation was brewing between us to a head.

I started slowly: if I moved a pile of CDs — say, a stack of Amon Düül II, Gong, and early Hawkwind albums — I moved the entire pile as a unit, not individually.

This process began that morning and lasted four more days of obsessive attention to detail before I found what I was looking for.

++++

I remembered how Shane reached between his bed and the wall for his bong and a roll of paper towels. I figured he kept his nearest and dearest tools there, but moving the platform away from the wall, I found just some crusty socks, a dried-up condom, a dead roach. I didn’t clean up because I’m not his fucking mother, but also because everything needed to remain as he’d left it.

As I was sliding the platform back into place, I saw it: in the corner near the jumble of electrical cords plugged into surge protectors. Nearly invisible, black leather against black walls: a handsome old medicine bag like a 1940s small-town doctor would use to make house calls. I wouldn't have even seen it if not for the giant purple double-ended dildo stowed behind it, revealing its outline. 

I went back to the kitchen and fetched a pair of tongs, then pulled the dildo out of the way. The bag was locked; its keyhole tiny. 

ME [to myself, crazy]: Where, oh where, could I possibly find a tiny key? Try harder, unoriginal motherfucker…

Sticking my arm into the aquarium up to my elbow, I fished the key out of the aquarium’s treasure chest. I wiggled it into the locked box, and it opened with a tiny click.

++++

Taking a deep breath, I reached my hand inside, felt around. This is a list of what I found:

• A hard rubber ball, steel O-rings, black leather straps. A ball gag.
• A pair of police-issue handcuffs. Heavy, well-oiled. Not novelty cuffs from the adult toy store.
• A foot-long Crocodile Dundee-ass hunting knife. Antique, bone-handled, smelled of pipe tobacco. Sharpened to a razor’s edge. 
• A small square packet of folded clear plastic. Labeled “Painter’s Tarp.”
• A black leather bi-fold, bound with a rubber band. Inside: two rows of stainless steel surgical tools: scalpels, forceps, clamps, and a menacing three-clawed hook.

My heart started beating faster. I kept digging:

• A massive steel pistol, full-loaded, safety on. A Magnum Research Desert Eagle. Plus five spare magazines.
• Two rolls of matte black duct tape.

++++ 

I sat on the greasy gray linoleum of Shane’s cummy bedroom in a circle of sex toys, surgical implements, and weapons, speechlessly adding up all of these data points: 

He was into S&M? Cool; far be it from me to yuck anybody else’s yum.

Into vintage weapons? Why not? He was also a collector of Japanese toys and a B-movie nut. 

The loaded gun? I was less comfortable with that, but this was America. 

A surgery kink? Again, not my jam but I won’t kink-shame that.

But.

Putting all these things together? I sat there for a long time, searching for the benefit of a doubt, attempting every type of cognitive gymnastic move at my disposal. There had to be some other reason for those specific items to be stored together in the same to-go bag.

In the end, there was only one conclusion: for the last few months, I’d been living with a serial killer.

part 05: just take it

Obviously I needed time to process what I saw inside Shane’s black bag.

But every time my mind’s eye glanced upon Shane’s murder kit — his knife, the loaded pistol, the rolls of duct tape — something in my belly turned to ice and shivered uncontrollably.

It wasn’t just that I’d opened all the windows to let the freezing Hudson wind air out the sour stink of our apartment. I could barely even sit in my own bedroom anymore, even with the door closed, without feeling his orgy cave slash maybe-murder hideout right on the other side of our shared kitchen. The bedroom I was paying market-price rent for — and probably his rent, too — where he’d been rolling around on my saggy futon like a neglected dog, leaving behind sour sweat and blond hairs.

Sitting outside the kitchen window under the electronic billboard was easier. Breathing frozen car exhaust from the Holland Tunnel kept my body connected to the rest of the city, not hidden from view inside the apartment, where there was nowhere to run if Shane suddenly reappeared. 

Posted up with a thermos of instant coffee and half a pack of American Spirits, I sipped and chain-smoked with a violence: shoulders arched against freezing rain, exhaling fire, cursing myself for being such a bobo.

How could I have read Shane so wrong? My whole life I've been a shitty judge of character, but none of my previous toxic entanglements had left me cowering like actual prey under their shadow. And on top of all that, our cats instantly hated each other, which should’ve told me all I needed to know.

I looked up at gray winter clouds, thanking heavens I didn’t bow to that Shane went away for a minute, that I didn’t have to face my toothless boogieman right now and pretend everything was fine. Was I safe? How much time would pass before I wasn’t? Where the fuck did he split to, and what was he doing out there? Was he on murder holiday? 

Probably not. He’d left his kit bag behind. But there was no coming back from this. No reality existed where I could possibly continue living with him, even if we avoided each other completely. Even if I let him hold out hope of fucking me. 

My safe harbor in a storm was washed right off the edge of the map, and out here there were monsters.

++++

Work that evening melted off slow as molasses. My supervisor Michael assigned me edits to a PowerPoint called “Economic Opportunities in US-Occupied Iraq.” I spent all night suckling the teat of evil to pay for my imminent next move, but it helped me distract myself from the clock running down on my shift.

For the first time as a vampire temp, I dreaded the end of my night. I didn’t feel safe going home. What if Shane was there? 

At the end of my shift, I walked uptown, away from the subway towards Times Square. It was like an empty movie set: lit up with megawatt lights like a stadium for no one but a ranting hobo emptying a trash can with his hands and a slow-creeping Honda Civic that pulled up next to me to ask if I needed any pills. I turned down a side street, headed toward the flashing lights of a 24-hour internet cafe. Flanked by Japanese tourists on orange plastic chairs, I peeled off layer after layer of clothes while sweating off my nerves in the heat of the radiator. Every minute or two, I double-clicked the dirty mouse to refresh the Village Voice’s apartment listings page.

++++

My days before work were spent viewing unsuitable apartments and being told:

LANDLORD: Your credit score’s too low. I can’t take a risk without a guarantor.

TWO ROOMMATES LOOKING FOR A THIRD: We won’t share a lease with a temp worker. You need a W-2 as proof you have steady work.

SINGLE FIREMAN: You seem nice but… I’m looking more for a hot college student who’ll clean and give massages in exchange for a rent break-type situation.

My nights became routine, over and over again in the internet cafe, searching for apartment leads. Increasingly frantic and at an increasingly higher vibration of caffeine. The end of the month was closing in, and there hadn't been a peep from Shane.

He did say we could just settle up when he got back home, but I had no idea if that meant weeks, months... I just knew I didn't want to be there when he returned.

++++

And I was being stubborn, too: I really didn’t want to leave Manhattan. There was a special feeling in the pocket universe by the Holland Tunnel: a feeling of being in the city’s veins, a part of it all flowing in and around that downtown westside nexus, that I fucking loved.

But the doors to the city weren’t opening for me to step outside the serial killer’s apartment share. There would be no shelter from my shelter. No place I could feel safe.

++++

To calm my nerves, I began drinking more, spending more time at The Ear. I’d hit the happy hour before clocking in, walking into work still swishing a minty mouthful of travel-size mouthwash from Rite Aid. Hitting the bar so early was the only thing that let me get through an eight-hour vampire temp shift, where every night I burned in the clock’s countdown wondering if tonight I’d come home to find Shane sharpening his surgical implements. Hitting the bar early also kept me from bumping into Elaine again. Sex wasn’t even on my mind anymore; I was too deep into the wrong headspace to want it. Instead, The Ear became my office, a place to field calls and texts, set up apartment viewings for the next day.

The stress of that, the alcohol, the fried happy-hour food all started taking their toll on me: I was bloated, sleepless, depressed.

++++

One Thursday happy hour, I was parked alone at a two-top in the corner, trying to keep sour cream from dripping off my potato skins onto my work clothes when I got a text from a landlord I’d called days before:

TEXT: studio you called about got RENTED but have small 1BR in PK SLOPE Bklyn $900. call Dennis if interested

My first year or so in the city was spent in Brooklyn — but Greenpoint, so a whole other Brooklyn — and Park Slope was a place I’d only been once during a very weird hookup. I didn’t know it at all. 

What I do remember was the long subway ride, how far out it was from the action… but the possibility of having a place of my own was enough for me to text back: 

ME: can I come by tmrw?

++++

Popping out of the Q train onto Flatbush Avenue was my first morning in real Brooklyn. The train exited near an old movie house advertising a kung-fu double feature. There was a narrow shopfront selling Jamaican beef patties served on fresh coco bread, a taste of home that hit me so hard my eyes rolled back on their own. I ate one, grabbed two more for the ride home.

The apartment was a few blocks down, off Sixth Avenue. I passed underneath a hand-painted wooden “charcuterie” sign next to a very dirty antique furniture shop.

When I reached Saint Marks Place, it was brownstones and tree lines all the way downhill, beaten up by crime but loved by families and weirdos for decades. A few doors in from the corner was Dennis’s building. I passed a shirtless old Nuyorican biker in a black leather vest, his fingerless glove wrapped around a bottle of cheap rum. He burped and winked at me behind his sunglasses.

I rang the bell. Waited. Waited.

I texted Dennis. He texted back that Willy the Super was on his way.

I sat on the stairs of the brownstone and waited some more.

The old biker finished his rum, tossed the bottle across the street. It landed gracefully, soundlessly atop someone’s black trash bag. Then it hit me:

ME: Hey, are you… Willy?

His ears perked up, like a dog’s. His voice was gravelly, the sound of police-busted block parties and wild nights:

BIKER [screaming]: What?! 

ME: I said, are you Willy?

WILLY [still screaming]: Yeah meng, I’m Willy! [taps left ear] Sorry I don’t hear so good no more. Too much heavy metal! Watchu need?

ME: I’m, uh… Daniel…? Dennis said you could show me the apartment?

WILLY: Yeah, meng! I got the place cleaned up all nice for you!

Willy cackled with recognition; he was missing the same front eight teeth that Shane was. What the fuck was going on in this city?

He grunted to his feet and led me up the brownstone stairs and into the glass vestibule, his boots tracking dirt up the carpeted stairs.

WILLY: This is an old house. Used to have a big, biiiig ol’ family here. When Dennis bought it, he carved it up into lotsa lil’ apartments…

With a sweeping arm, Willy gestured for me to follow the wooden railing to a narrow door at the corner. When I reached to open it, he slapped my hand away:

WILLY: Not that one, meng! Some other dude lives in that place! [points to door to immediate right] This is the studio I’m a-sposed to show you.

ME: Studio? The ad said it was one-bedroom?

He opened the door for me, and this was most definitely a studio, not a “small 1BR.” In fact, it was tiny; calling it 300 square feet would be generous. Charging $900 a month for it was blatant chutzpah. But it was less than I was paying Shane. Less space too.

I looked around the single room: there was a ratty chandelier hanging from the ceiling, a dusty marble fireplace that had been covered over with a brass grate. Nice wood floors though, original moulding. 

WILLY: You wan’ the tour?

I nodded and Willy threw his arms open wide, turning around slowly:

WILLY: THIS IS IT! [cackles] You wanna take it?

I looked around another minute. There was a tiny kitchenette with a stove, a microwave, and a sink; just enough floor space for one body to rotate between appliances.

ME: It has its own bathroom, right…?

It did. I thought it was a closet, but the bathroom was built out from the wall, enclosed in a box. It contained a toilet installed too close to the wall and a mildewy tiled shower.

WILLY: Pretty small, right? You prolly want something bigger?

I thought about myself, my cat, the serial killer I was currently living with. 

ME: I think for me it’s perfect. Can I leave a deposit on it?

He licked his lips, rolling something over in his mind before he replied:

WILLY: Naw meng, that’s not such a good idea. [snaps his fingers] You gotta call Dennis and then GO SEE DENNIS! He’s way up in THE CITY! You gotta pay him first, meng, then you can get them keys!

I nodded and reached out my hand to shake his in thanks. Willy took it with a strong, moist grip:

WILLY: Welcome to the hood, meng! I mean, maybe…

++++

The next day, I had a 12 pm appointment to meet Dennis at his condo building in Tudor City, near the United Nations. He had the concierge take me past the mirrored-gold letters framing the lobby up to a second-floor conference room overlooking the East River. 

The winter sun rippled off the river’s surface, shining directly into my eyes as I tried to present myself as a “responsible low-risk tenant” to Dennis. He’d already asked for my social security number and his assistant, Ariel, went off to run my credit.

Minutes later, Ariel came back into the room, placed a small stapled packet on the table in front of him. Dennis looked down at the packet and then back to me. His lower eyelids drooped from rounds of nip/tuck surgery, the skin of his face reddened by broken blood vessels rippling across his nose and cheeks.

He picked up the packet, licked his thumb, flicked straight to the last page. His droopy blue eyes focused for a moment, then he set the packet down again:

DENNIS: Four months’ security, plus first and last.

ME: So, like… [doing the math] six thousand dollars?

DENNIS: Less. $900 times six is $5,400. [sneers] You don’t work in finance, I guess.

My heart sank: I knew how much I had saved and I was about $300 short of that number. This little studio would zero out months of savings right from jump.

ME: Can I ask why? Four months’ security seems like… a lot.

DENNIS [clearing his throat]: Where are you from, uh [checks packet] Daniel? Obviously, not from New York.

ME: South F-Florida, D-Dennis. 

I’d almost called him “sir.”

DENNIS: Look, your credit’s in the toilet. This city runs on risk and housing law favors the tenant. If you lose your job and can’t make rent… well, that’s why we call it “security.” 

He concluded by clapping the packet of papers with his left palm, his fingers soft but his heavy gold ring loud against marble:

DENNIS: Pay the $5,400 today, and you can move in tomorrow.

ME: Can I pay tomorrow?

DENNIS [getting up from his chair]: Already you’re a pain in my ass. Sure. Tomorrow.

++++

Miraculously, my estimate was dead-on: I was actually almost $300 short. But my brother and my friends were all scraping by just like me. Nobody was in any kind of position to lend me that much so close to the end of the month. 

++++

I went back home defeated. I had no idea where that $300 was going to come from, and I had to be at work in a few hours.

Thankfully there was still no sign of Shane. Still, every time the vestibule door downstairs creaked open, my body froze on animal instinct. I held my breath and I counted the clomping footsteps up the stairs, exhaling only when they continued past our door to the floors above.

For the next few hours, I paced the length of the apartment, my brain cycling and scheming and hypothesizing until it exhausted me and I collapsed onto a futon that still smelled faintly of Shane’s sour sweat. 

Hanging my head over the edge of the bed, my hair brushing greasy linoleum, tears of frustration slid down across my eyebrows and forehead. My freedom was $300 away, but I owned nothing of value beyond my PS2 and some games. I absolutely couldn’t sell my rickety old MacBook, my only instrument to break the vampire temp orbit.

I caught my own upside-down reflection in the floor-length mirror that came with my room. My reddening face was filling up with blood, veins in the corners of my eyes pulsing. Behind me, on the floor beneath my lone plastic crate of books was the 19” Zenith TV that also came with the room. I’d used it once or twice to watch bootleg VCDs… maybe I could get some money for it? There was a 24-hour pawn shop on the southeast corner of Canal and Church.

But I shook my head in the mirror at myself. I was no thief. Besides, what could I possibly get for an old piece of shit TV like that?

++++

And yet: this thief found himself planting one foot in front of the next, navigating across Canal Street’s nubs of near-invisible black ice. That old Zenith dug into my freezing elbows as I struggled with the weighed-down milk crate, using my ass to push open the door to Fonseca Pawn Shop.

The three Fonseca employees inside watched me enter like predators, slowly gliding on separate trajectories to meet me at the single intake window behind bulletproof plexiglass. I’d never been inside a pawn shop before, but I’d seen enough of them in movies to know how they worked. Dropping the Zenith on the counter first, the workers chuckled:

FONSECA #1: Haven’t seen one of them bitches in a minute. Give you ten bucks.

I was shocked; it was worth even less than I expected, but I had no leverage here. I followed that with my boxed-up PS2, some games, a few of Shane’s unopened plasmo kits:

FONSECA #2: Boss, what the fuck are these?

ME: They’re collectible model kits, imported from Japan. Mint condition.

The three Fonsecas exchanged a look, shrugged together. Then I placed Shane’s gun on the counter.

Fonseca #3’s hand reflexively disappeared beneath the counter, in case this was a robbery. It wasn’t. He nodded to #1 to stand by the door. It was shady business time.

FONSECA #2: Boss, this your piece?

I nodded yes.

FONSECA #3: You got a license for it?

I shook my head no. They smiled; they’d seen me coming a mile away.

Fonseca #2’s hands reached for the pistol but didn’t touch it:

FONSECA #2: May I?

I agreed. He picked up the pistol; cocked it. With a sigh, he ejected its loaded cartridge and the extra shell in its chamber, placing it back on the counter with a clunk:

FONSECA #3: You fuckin’ for real, boss? Walking in here with a hot strap?

My nerves escaped in a chuckle:

ME: Sorry, I— I forgot to check. I just wanna get rid of it.

Another look passed between them. They could see “mark” written across my forehead.

FONSECA #2 [waving his hands over the whole lot]: I give you $260 for everything.

That was definitely a rip-off. I must have made a lemon-face as I countered with attitude:

ME: That’s not even enough for the gun, man.

FONSECA #2: Aight, $320. Final offer, boss.

I took it. Of course I did. I covered my landlord deposit, plus I had enough for a decent celebratory lunch.

++++

I went straight to my bank and put $300 on a cashier’s check, ran back uptown to Dennis’s office, came out with my house keys. Stepping back out onto Second Avenue, a flock of iridescent pigeons exploded out of my heart into the sky. I called in sick to the temp agency, laid a performance on thick, and took the crosstown bus back to Canal to pack up my shit.

++++

Upstairs in the apartment, I was shaking. I packed up Wedge in his carrier first, then threw everything I had into a duffel, a backpack, a cardboard box. I looked around my room to see if I’d missed anything.

That’s when I caught the slightest whiff of bong water, weed smoke.

The kick drum that was pounding in my ribcage leaped upwards a foot and began bashing both lobes of my brain. Every blood vessel in my eyes burst at once. The world turned red. Blood. Emergency.

As silently as I could move, I peeked outside my room into our shared kitchen. I didn’t see Shane, but his backpack was lying there by the front door. And from his aquarium-lit fuck-cave, Captain Galaxy slow-blinked back at me, the fat little shit.

I waited another three minutes, holding my breath before I knew: I was going to have to make a break for it. But I gamed it out: if I carried my shit out the front door and he was in his room, he’d hear me. And if he wasn’t home yet, I could run into him on the stairs, or in the vestibule, or even outside on the sidewalk. None of these scenarios ended well.

Feeling for my new house keys in my pocket, I took them out and kissed them for good luck. Locking into my energy from his carrier, Wedge chirped at me: it was time.

Slowly, quietly, I slid open my bedroom window, swung my legs out onto the fire escape, and began placing my items outside. I slung Wedge’s carrier strap over one shoulder, the duffle bag over the other, backpack straps over both. Looking back at my now-empty room, I caught my own face in the mirror. Terrified. Then: footsteps from inside. The top of Shane’s face peeked past the door frame into my vacated room, to the open window, to my terrified face staring back at his, frozen:

SHANE: Daniel? Hey! What the FUCK?

He turned and ran back out the front door, I assumed to intercept us around the back of the building. To do what, I still do not know.

Leaving my box behind, I let go of the rail, dropping down to the second floor, again to the first, then my feet hit crumbling asphalt and anthills of broken auto glass. I had one minute, maybe two, to get gone.

Scrambling through the back alley, crossing the street into the $19/hr parking lot, I huddled with my cat and bags, hyperventilating so loudly I knew he’d hear me.

Shane came around the back of the building, his blue eyes casting all around the alley, the sidewalk, to the parking lot across the street where I lay balled up with my knees against my chest, heart pounding from inside my ribcage to run — just fucking run.

His gaze didn’t leave the parking lot. He knew how far we could’ve gotten on so little time, he knew the survival move I’d made. Licking his lips, he started to cross the street, coming right for us. The light changed and a stream of cars blocked him from crossing.

That’s when I saw the taxi, coming from the other direction, its cab number illuminated: it was available. My knees unlocked, extended, and launched me out from behind the parked cars into the street, my hands waving frantically for it to stop. 

As its tires squealed to a halt, I wrenched open the door and leaped in blind faith like a spawning salmon. Shane stormed right out into traffic to peer in at us through the opposite window:

SHANE [spittle flying]: HEY! WHERE ARE YOU GOING, YOU LITTLE… FUCKER!!

ME [to the driver]: Go! Go, go, go, please go!

My taxi driver — a gentleman whose NYC taxi license identified as Pradeep Subramanian — smashed the gas pedal without hesitation, only making eye contact with me in his rear-view mirror as we left Shane in a cloud of ethanol-blend fumes heading uptown on Varick.

I lay back, my cat in my arms, my face sticking to vinyl seating that smelled like a thousand unwashed asses, thanking every god ever dreamt into existence for sending that yellow cab my way in that precise moment.

And then: every muscle, every nerve in my body relaxed. I sat up to give Pradeep Subramanian my address and then collapsed again, en route to a new home.

Lying on my back, my consciousness spread outward through the cab’s windows as we rolled through valleys of concrete buildings under a pulse of streetlights that suddenly gave way to suspension cables and sky.

I sat up, blinking away tears. We were leaving Chinatown via the Manhattan Bridge. From the front seat:

PRADEEP: My friend, if you are able, please tell me what that was all about.

His dark eyes met mine in the mirror again. An angel of kindness, with a twinkle of good humor.

ME: That was my… roommate, but I’m pretty sure he’s also a serial killer. 

PRADEEP: He certainly had very serial killer energy, my friend.

ME: I— I don’t know why he was chasing me, but I— think he was planning to murder me after I wouldn’t have sex with him. I barely got—

My voice just… sputtered out. I was so tired, for so long. Pradeep’s head waggled as he considered my story:

PRADEEP: My friend, you Americans are all fucking crazy.

++++

My first night in my new place, I slept on a bed of folded clothes. After situating Wedge with water and litter, I walked down to the corner bodega and bought cat food, potato chips, an Italian hoagie sandwich, a can of Guinness.

After eating one of the best meals of my life, I lay on my dusty parquet floors with Wedge snoozing on my chest, looking up at the cobwebs in my chandelier.

This would be my home, I thought to myself, for a few years at least. 

And it was.

++++

For a long time afterwards, I’d considered tipping the police off about Shane. But I had no proof, nor had I actually witnessed any crimes, unless you count the bikini briefs with the cum spot.

Also, I had stolen from him, so surfacing to prosecute him would reconnect us again, which I did not want for any reason. The Fonseca Pawn Shop had receipts with my driver’s license on file.

So I let it go, all of it. And I never saw Shane again. 

But for the next decade, wherever in the city I moved, whenever I was in the vicinity of our pocket universe, I looked over my shoulder, watching for any sign of that blond hair, that toothless grin.