Torrents backed me into a storefront doorway. Red Hook, Brooklyn: lousy place for strange doorways. I was 17: a rookie cement salesman. Something closed on my leg. I leaped, spastic, halfrooted, one foot in the air. Scared. It was a nude male child, tongue out, bare feet standing on my salesman’s shoeshine: bronzed and grotesque as a suburban lawn ornament. But what disconcerted me—I was abruptly in a living room. It alarms the senses: to be, unaware, immersed in someone’s personal ambience and so eerily close to the neutral street. I smelled it: strange foods: furniture brought to redolence by the damp. She took my elbow from behind, hand encrusted with dangerous rings; a slap meant 15 stitches. “Your fortune, yes? Yes.” She held another child: Rather, it stood muscular on her elbow, some climber in a tree’s crook. Rain made deep pocks on the sheet wet pavement. The child below was trained, a shill. I understood the shape of my calf from his tough hands. She led me inside. I walked, a baboon parent, kid on my leg.
She sat me defenseless. I’m short: I’ve ridden comfortably over the wheel of life. The pillow chair disappeared, disappeared under me. Knee caps rose above my head.
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