The time a New York cab driver, one cute, toothy twenty-eight-year-old with theatrical hopes but absolutely no experience onstage, told me he liked my looks enough so he’d actually “eat” the fare if I would spend the break time he usually wasted on a piss-and-a-burger overlooking the moonlit Hudson with him making out in the backseat, since the meter otherwise kept getting in our way. The time I met a high school boy in Times Square on a class trip and he peeled off the end of a long line and took me back to his little Edison Hotel room while his class did their walking tour of Chinatown; and the pathetic gym bags of his four roommates, white socks and jockey shorts with camp nametags stitched in back by moms, exuded the smell of adolescence at simmer, not unlike piping hot school-lunch Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. The time I wound up with a deaf and dumb house painter who wrote me notes on matchbooks and in his palm and who simply pointed at whatever he wanted and who led me home to his rented room over a Chelsea day-care center where the silence was erotic to the point of a narcotic and the only sound he made was, on coming, a drowned scream like some strangled rabbit’s last. The time I answered a personal ad and the person who opened the condo door was the married president of the college where I taught and we both laughed as I did a mock-military about-face and, wordless, returned to the elevator; and ever after he acted so kind to me, praising my sense of intellectual chance-taking and my enthusiasm that recalled to him himself when young. The time, the time that, the time I found time to, found time … all that matters in the end are the memories of the unstandoffish merging flood, of droplets, ours, the times …

Angie was already known to be as difficult as she was talented. That would legitimately make her very testy, indeed. Our women friends often pointed out: Guys who hustled in the service of careers were called “movers, shakers, comers.” Girls who tried were “pushy manipulative bitches, sleeping their way up.”

One snowy day, on my way to the laundromat, an acquaintance told me he’d just heard a bigtime dealer describe Angie as “her own worst enemy and the classic ball breaker.” As usual, I defended Ang. But I’d begun to feel more and more tired of doing so. It seemed unfair to both of us, how people brought their worst Alabama stories straight to me. I urged them to simply look at her work. They did, but her paintings were so fresh and strange, so laden with exemptions, her art irked them even more.