Maxie hands her the twenty dollars. She looks like she could cast a spell. “You better be glad Roscoe ain’t around. He’d be on all your asses for this lousy twenty bucks.”

We rev up for the ride downtown. Cuddles brushes off his jacket and climbs behind Lou at the handlebars. “I was just shitting you, Lonny, about that faggot stuff. You cool, man. I seen you. You cool.”

“I know,” I tell him. “I know I’m cool.” I slap him on the back. I climb up on Maxie’s bike. I ain’t grabbing tight this time. In a minute we’re gone.

Jesse

Jesse

What was I doing eighty blocks uptown with this woman whose eyes were windows on me? How did I get here? Took the A train to 59th Street, changed to the Broadway #1 local, got out at 86th Street, and walked two blocks south, two blocks west. Watched for traffic leaving the West Side Highway and came this close to jumping into the filthy Hudson.

Inside, Rooms asked me, “You were lovers for a long time?” She joined me on the couch. It was her couch, her apartment.

“Yes.”

“I can’t imagine what it was like.”

“Neither can I, sometimes,” I said. “No, that’s not true.”

“I didn’t think so,” she said.

I left the couch and paced the floor, then touched the windows. The walls were full of posters of dancers and company tours. Metro and I never got around to decorating our walls. They stayed bare and white.

“You want to talk about it?” said Rooms, following me with her eyes. I went back to the couch and took her hands, feeling the grains of her knuckles as I spoke.

I had signed the lease on the apartment on West 4th Street a few weeks before Metro and I finished college. It was a three-room walk-up close to the IND lines at 14th Street and 7th Avenue where the 1, 2, and 3 trains run. I had studied the subway map, memorized the numbers and color codes of the train routes. Metro had to visit his family and arrived in Manhattan two weeks after I moved in. He figured out the routes for the BMT, the IRT, and the IND, the bus lines and the shuttle system faster than I did. He had been to Paris where they have a better network, they say.

This was our first year living together. The rooms were small but had four windows and two exposures. I could watch the sun rise and set. Our bedroom was large enough for only the bed and a tiny desk where Metro wrote when he worked at home. “You couldn’t find anything larger?” he once asked.