“I need another blanket please,” Kyoko said to Black. With blanket in hand he nods at me and walks her upstairs. Late night, after a blunt and a 40, I asked him about Kyoko. “Hell yeah I smashed that bitch. She was only 19, nine years older than my daughter, but she said she wanted to have fun. Dawgs…dawgs,” he said, pacing in a circle and clapping his hands. “You know her friend that kept following her around?” “Yeah” “I …
Tag: san francisco
On Minna Street near midnight, I went to a hostel in a narrow alleyway off of Eighth Street. “Like blouw, dare you go dawgs,” Black said, passing me a blunt. He was posting outside when I got there. “Get that head right dun, get that head right.” Black was a Puerto Rican albino with golden eyes. He’s from East New York. “…know what I’m sayin. They used to dump bodies in my neighborhood all the time,” he said. “Yo I …
“You’re not ready,” said Quang over the phone, from his 26th street Manhattan studio. He’s sipping Dalmore whiskey, watching The Traveling Players. “If you’re a writer, you don’t need money to write, just a pad and a pen.” “What do you mean?” I said. “And next time, don’t bring a cell phone. You can’t have this kind of shit and be a writer, every time you have trouble you call mommy and daddy.” “I’m not calling mommy and daddy I’m …
“You see that girl over there with green hair,” Ray says. At a woman across the street, he shook his finger. I knew Ray from New York. We had a mutual friend and we moved to San Francisco around the same time. I bumped into him in the Mission. In a dark corner outside a library near Haight Street, I spent the night trying to make myself as small as I could. People sleeping in their beds surrounded me. I …
I catch myself staring at things longer: deformed pigeon feet stepping into rainbow puddles, the pronounced veins on my weed dealer’s hands, the fading green of a bench in Marcus Garvey Park, the thick painted bolts and beans that elevate the Metro North train tracks. Bushwick, Brooklyn, “Damn son, that shit looks heavy. They gonna let you take that on the plane?” Ezrah said standing on his porch chuckling. Ezrah’s a struggling rapper from the Bronx. “The thing about the …
