Marco!

The book got boring so I marked my page and put it down. She was still too into hers to be distracted by my fingertips as I stroked her back in a feeble attempt to initiate something. This is her place, this cubby hole in Midtown West, and I should know better than to try to run the show. The narrow mind that I am, I try sometimes.

Someone outside her window (she'd rather hear me say 'our', but I can't just yet) is taking the building's trash out of the two wooden bins near the front door. I can hear the bottles clinking together, can almost hear the man cursing us gringos under his breath. How did he get such a job? Why is he automatically Latino? Have I seen him before?, maybe on my glorious zombie stroll back from the bar at five in the morning the other night? You know, the time I stumbled into some Pakistani restaurant since it was the only place open at that hour, took a look at the bearded men around me, mumbled 'Goddamn terrorists', and somehow managed to walk out without becoming the next day's lunch special. It's no wonder she worries about me wandering this town alone at night when she's off taking care of strangers for a living. No no no! She's a nurse, not a prostitute, though one of those approached me in the bar on the infamous Pakistani night and asked if I wanted to hang out. I told her I already was hanging out. She didn't seem to agree, stormed out with a clickety-clack of her heels and a swish of her dangerously short skirt. Later on was a little different. The rats ran away from me as I chased them down alleys. It's a wonder I made it home. I just wasn't made for Manhattan, but I'm trying for her sake. No, in this case I'll say 'our'.

That poor spic bastard's still out there. The bottles are still crashing into one another, he's still muttering curse words that'd make that hooker blush. He's downstream from my existence in this place, praying I'm not pissing in the river. If I didn't empty the bottles then he's going to get a sticky surprise. If he drops one by accident then the homeless woman who sleeps on the sidewalk is going to get cut. Do you know they weld steel rods on top of fire hydrants here so that bums can't sit on them? Have you seen the benches with dividers in them to prevent them from being used as beds? This place is one big sad food chain and that's one of my main problems with it. The social stratification is just too broad and heartbreaking. Give me Suburbia where everyone's relatively equal, at least to the naked eye. I'm looking out the window now at a spire atop a church three blocks away. I'm not sure who's at the top of this chain, but it sure isn't God. He abandoned this experiment a long time ago. I just heard the Devil in the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel-- the Devil, or the collective death rattle of a few hundred motorists filtering into this bustling metropolis to start another day of the race.

And me? I'm embedded like a tick engorged with blood, a jostled Romeo under house arrest trying to keep his head above water while keeping his ear to the ground. I currently have $230 in parking tickets and the unemployment check won't be in the mail for another week. It's a hell of a predicament for a simple man like me. It takes a hell of a woman to make that all worthwhile. Her book must've gotten boring, she's pressed into the pillow. Let me go join that dream of hers. Ours. Amen.