I used to think that all you had to have was your own space. Then everything would be all right. Once you had your space you could build things, like my old man did. But he found out he knew more about other people’s spaces than he did his own. Before he realized it, the place where we lived got too crowded. Then he died. He didn’t have a chance to do anything. But why talk about Pops. All he knew was work anyway. And there he was building spaces for everybody else instead of taking care of his own. He had a chance, yeah. Got lost in it. He found out too late that he couldn’t even get invited back to the houses he painted or the garages he built on slabs of concrete no bigger than this one but without the bars. Pops built things—he brought space to life. I guess the walls just closed in on him at home, and being poor must have kept him away from the inside of anywhere else.

Now, I was on the inside. On a chance I took myself. Moms couldn’t make bail. Nobody could. So we had to lay there until the trial. Until I could get away upstate. I could have told Moms just how I felt and told her not to worry since she said herself that I’d be better off inside these walls than out on the streets—away from the freezing meatpacking warehouses and the slimy platforms where they load the meat onto trucks or take meat off the truck and put it inside. Whichever way you look at it. Away from the Chelsea garage and the cycles I could never buy anyway. So who cared? Not Moms. She could dry up those tears ’cause they didn’t do no good. Naw, I was on the inside. But that wasn’t all. And it wasn’t Moms’ fault that she didn’t know about the inside or what can happen to a guy here. Pops breaking his neck building walls and then being kept outside. I couldn’t tell her ’cause my lips was swollen.