Precipitously it became Friday and I tried to reconstruct the week.

Tuesday night I went downtown.

John and I were going to see Badly Drawn Boy at some tent or something at the South Street Seaport so we got in a cab and disembarked on those cobblestoned and narrow streets, narrowed further by the burrowing ConEd crews and scaffolds; that other city down there.

There's a mall down there you go into, a cheap one. A perfunctory place. Beyond terraced tourist traps along the boardwalk. And empty, like no one ever goes there, or maybe it was just too late, but what's the difference. The true Mall of America.

We walked through, lost. Zoltar the Seer stood frozen in his booth beside a grove of hardy atrium plants.

He looked like my older brother's ceramic Ringo Starr piggy bank from way back then.

Just then an older black man leaned over the balcony on the floor above. The tent is that way, he said.

The show was very good and their lead singer seemed a little crazy.

A strange and sparse crowd, in this peculiar, circular, circus tent, a bar and tables around its perimeter. One guy, straighter than you could believe, a suit and tie, shave and a haircut, two bits. He had a woman with him, tonguing his ear. Or was it a woman? Clutching his neck. Was it a man? She pawed his tailored-pantsed ass. A monster? Replicant? She'd lift her nyloned leg and hug his trunk a little in her knee.

Was she a building? Or a tree?

A motorcycle.

There was in fact some babbly debate about her. What she was. Some had it that she was a whore. And the debate reverberated until it seemed one person, one guy.

John wanted to kick some guy's ass.

He said something to the effect and I nodded and smiled noncommittally and sucked a piece of ice from the bottom of my whiskey.

We left before the second encore.