Something was pricking my scalp. I pulled out one splinter after another, but they were over all of me now, and I scratched and pulled everywhere. Not wood from the warehouse floor or the rickety pier, these were glinting steel blades with my name on them. Faces I’d seen before inched from corners of the room, closing the gap between here and there, now and then. Mouths opened and sneered. Teeth got sharp. Tongues wagged and breath steamed up around me until I sank into the sheets. Now a boy’s voice. Then many voices. “Jesseeeee.” A steel blade getting close. Closer. “Jesse!”

“I won’t hurt you,” said Rooms.

Outside the bedroom window, police sirens hollered up and down the streets. Where the hell were they then?

I imagined how Metro came up from the IRT exit and entered our block from the corner of West 12th and Bank Street. He passed the shut newsstand. It was almost morning. Metallic edges of light cut back the night. Metro walked with the same aching sound I knew from my own scuffling feet. I could almost hear the brush of denim between his thighs, see the arch of his pelvis as he swayed arms and hips as if he owned the whole street. His eyes tried to focus on the walk; his head leaned carelessly to the side. As he neared our building he was not alone. Other shapes crawled into the street, filled it. Cigarette smoke trailed out from an alley, and the figures of boys appeared out of nowhere, riding spray-paint fumes, crackling marijuana seeds, and waves of stinking beer.

Four, five, maybe six teenagers. Maybe they were the ones. The same ones I had seen before on my way home from rehearsals. Even then their smell of a quick, cheap high had been toxic. One time they spotted me and yelled, first one, then another until I was trapped.

“Hey, nigger.”

“Yeah, you.”

“Naw, man, he ain’t no nigger. He a faggot.”

“Then he a black nigger faggot.”

They laughed. I walked faster, almost running, and reached my block in a cold sweat from pretending not to hear them. But I did hear them, and the sweat and trembling in my knees would not go away, not even when I reached the door and locked myself in.