The door buzzed open. I went up to the fourth floor. I knocked at 4F. No answer. I knocked again. Silence. Out of instinct I didn’t know I had, I tried the doorknob and the place was unlocked. Heart pounding with the feeling of transgression, I stepped in, the lights were on, and I called out “Hello,” like a fool, and then I got hit by a bad smell. There were two large mounds of shit on the floor, right near the door, and I nearly stepped on them. There was also a pool of piss, which I had stepped in. What the hell is this? I thought. I closed the door and again called out, “Hello?”

I stepped over the shit and the piss, and separate from those two grosser elements it was definitely a ragged dump of a place and reminded me of my own apartment. There was a futon couch with white hairs all over it, an old TV, a good-looking stereo, a cluttered coffee table, and at the far end a miniature, nasty New York kitchen. There were no pictures anywhere, so I had no idea if this was the apartment of the Vincent Ettin that I was looking for.

A little black-and-white mutt came from some back room off the kitchen, probably the bedroom. Its tail was between its legs and it looked defeated and humiliated. Not much of a watchdog, it came over to me and I petted its head. I went through the kitchen and looked in the bedroom—nobody was there, just an unmade futon bed, and a lot of musical equipment, several amps and three guitars, all of it new and expensive-looking. The bathroom, which was off the bedroom, was a squalid closet and also empty of human life.

The dog was following me around and I got the idea that if he hadn’t been walked for a while, at least two days for the two dumps, he also probably hadn’t been fed. I found a bowl and dry dog food in the kitchen and set him up. Then I headed for the front door and I noticed two things—the window behind the futon-couch was wide-open with no screen and it led to a fire escape, which would make the place pretty vulnerable to a break-in, though the unlocked door made things even easier, and I also saw that there was a cell phone on the coffee table.