My body is fighting me off, a champ encased in a skinny tomboy, hiding in her coat a fat housewife, wanting bon bons and a steakhouse friday night "out" meal (never mind the catholic thing; this isn't the type I'm talking about).  They're all there - arguing and pounding at my head, my hips aching as I twisted and turned on the couch, mumbling on the inside of my head about deeds my ass had committed shameless lifetimes and months before.  Caught somewhere in between cold and sweat, illness and health, my body didn't know what to make of all this - but even as the migraine pelted behind my eyes, and the TV glared with some replaceable old film, I was intrigued already by the mass of information I had stockpiled in my head, wanting to work at it and practice, and the aches and soreness in my lower limbs, and back from the Asian exercise regimen that I now have dedicated myself to for more than a little while. 

Dreams would come, somewhere in between couch folds and bed being mussed, like a surreal catalogue of men and boys in my life, once, now and in the darker zones behind their actual acts and plots - different versions of me in new and unusual places, which somehow I knew, working and walking and doing without pain, exhaustion or migraine.  Waters overtaking me as I squatted in a toilet in the basement, old walkways, and visits, and beaches and homes, and friends and arguments and sex and more of it in different situations - by that point, my libido ran with it and squeezed every last drop of doing from each of those indiscretions, since they ended without my approval, in torrents of vacationary waves, floods and flash forwards, but always something sweeping me to the next thing.  On my own, or not.

In between this massive intent of troubled, achy sleep, I awoke halfway, hearing the drunk men laughing and talking loudly in the silence of the black street below, outside the bar and through my open windows:

"So I found him" (laughter, manly; drunken and expectant laughter) "I found him, at the side of the L.I.E...."(growing echoes of laughter) "turning tricks in front of Yankee Stadium".  My night was kicked to the bottom of the barrel after hearing and remembering that statement of life.

M. Lucia