My Dearest Laura,

We were at a Korean karaoke joint somewhere in the shadow of the Empire State Building. It was my first time in New York, I was there on a whim. I‘d been doing landscaping down in Philadelphia for the summer. I’d never been there either, but I’d been drifting north for a few seasons, hitting the highways or the rails, hard stuff, violent, but I liked it, I was good at it. A man hit me and I’d hit him back, eventually you get the look of a man of the road, a man who likes his solitude. Mostly I’m making a living in those provincial southern cities no one gives two shits about, Mobile + Birmingham + Knoxville, Roanoke. Philadelphia not really a shade different, mostly in ruins, crawling with drifters + homeless + unsavory sorts, so I got myself a cheap room on Green St, a room that was dreary and dour no matter what the weather or time of day. I hope you’ll excuse my refusal to shorten Philadelphia to Philly, as casual conversational rules dictate; I’ve always loved the word, the way it circles around your mouth like a smoothed stone. It’s probably the most beautiful thing about the whole place. Cities like to brag about their food or their museums or their night scene, but cities don’t endure any more than men, and especially not New York, though everyone there acted like it was God’s kingdom or something, even though most of them were sinners and heathens to the marrow. My companions were a couple theater queers from Eau Claire, Wisc, and Valparaiso, Ind, respectively, tall blonde corn fed boys who thought they were the most special little doe eyed things in this world just on the facts of having grown up in the Middle West, sucking cock, and liking Rogers and Hammerstein. I told one of them that DeLillo’d written a play about Valparaiso, Ind, and he asked me who the fuck DeLillo was, and then I asked what he thought his German great-grand-daddy would say if he’d known he’d spent a few months on a fetid, stinking, heaving steamer just so his great-grandson could sing show tunes and take it in the ass. He left me alone after that but the other one kept rubbing my thigh and trying to get my dick hard, which wasn’t too bad; I like being flattered as much as the next person. I wasn’t at all surprised men liked me, though one had never tried to fuck me before. I had good luck with women. I have my father’s eyes, glittering and soft so that people trust me instantly, without any reason to. This has been beneficial in many of my pursuits. There was a woman with us, too, me and the fags, a buxom and voluble black woman, a little bit older, beginning to slough away in the face, though she hid the entropy well. She sang jazz at a few places uptown, rough and tumble places she said, lighting a cigarette and wedging the toe of her high heels against the base of my ball sack. Her voice was imposing but turning to gravel with the years, the high notes had long been put to bed. She shot heroin in the bathroom and went incandescent. I was drinking whiskey. These were the kind of folks who hung around a person for their novelty more than anything. They all thought NY was some light within the darkness when obviously NY is the darkness that consumes all other light, faint and spectral as that light may be. They took me around marveling at their lives, at being here in the great city even though New York’s just like any other city only a bit bigger, noisier, brighter. I never thought size alone was cause for celebration, though the theater queer stroking my dick assured me it was. We were at a little Bohemian café in the East Village by this point, filled with folks just like my companions, singers + writers + fags + narcissists + dreamers all smoking hand rolled cigarettes and drinking coffee in this candle lit basement, most of them hopped up on coke or booze or heroin, all telling themselves the same reassuring lies about their place within the cafe, the city, the universe, etcetera. Our group dwindled, the queers took each other home, and the black singer offered to come back with me to my bed. I was crashing at the Y in Spanish Harlem so instead she took me to her place, a converted warehouse that felt cavernous and shambly, her possessions all patchwork and messy like a gimmicky restaurant that’s aiming for disheveled charm but only achieves chintz. She got out a bottle of Spanish liquor and told me the story of its origins, a boring story involving bullfighting and a volatile ex-boyfriend. She poured us drinks and told me about growing up in Harlem where her daddy played piano + was always out on the town + stank of booze + week old cigarette smoke + foreign perfumes, and how she started singing with the gospel choir as a rebuke to him and then gave in to her true calling, which was jazz, just like her daddy, it was hardwired into her DNA and her mother never forgave either of them for this. She turned her back on the church, started closing down the Harlem jazz bars with her father, started singing for the Italians in the Bronx, too. She told me she liked riding the 6 home and watching Yankee Stadium materialize from the matutinal haze like a glorious apparition, a beast from some violent communal past amongst the project high rises. It’s amazing the things a person will tell you if you just shut up and listen, how lonely and eager to talk everyone is, the artists + the stock brokers + the butchers + the queers + the drifters + the divine messengers. She took me to bed, I’m not picky about my women. She’s the kind of woman you won’t admit to desiring, the kind you desire from some deep reserve of anger and spite, the kind you want so badly your body feels singed by the heat of your desire, literally boiling, and then you finish and the regret, the shame, obliterates all else you’ve ever felt about yourself. She had stretch marks like dried river beds, boils like the satellite images of volcanoes on the surface of Mars. I’ve always remarked on symmetries like this, the ways micro + macro converge, like the veins of a leaf and the tendrils of a river delta, how blood spilled in water resembles some vast and distant explosion of the cosmos. She wanted it from behind, she wanted me to put a knife to her neck. It was one of those long gleaming blades used for filleting meat. She grunted and I had the knife against the soft tendons of her neck, and then the blade was going through those soft tendons, fraying them fiber by meticulous fiber, an accident I told myself at the time, though later, though now of course, I’ll confess it was curiosity, that fine threshold between incidence and intent that allowed me to keep going. They snapped, the tendons, like rope under pressure would snap. She plunged forward like an animal shot mid-stride, and gurgled something, some guttural elegy of blood and sinew. I finished and had another glass of Spanish liquor + looked at her body + the blood + my heart was rabid, this was all new + exhilarating + terrifying, like the greatest sexual pleasure of my life and also religious transcendence. I’d been naked so I showered quickly before the daylight broke and stole enough money for a few train rides then snuck out the back fire escape, walking as calmly as possible though my body felt like a hundred million atoms all racing in different directions. I hopped a train to Pittsburgh and then hopped another train to Chicago and finally worked my way out to St. Louis, feeling like I was finally back on some familiar terrain there, back on the river silt and the languid river air, and that was about the first day I finally started to calm down, my body started to feel like one whole again instead of a hundred million different bodies. I finally began to accept that no one was after me, finally stopped looking behind me or studying every window to see if I was being watched. Then the desire started to assert itself, a desire that I hadn’t known existed until then, or a desire that I’d buried so far beneath normal urges that I’d never been able to make out its plangent calls.

Please write soon. I send you all my love.