At way past eleven a silhouette in the all-night grocery store, reaching to the shelf.

Went out with C. and her ex from Hungary. He's a heavyset man with red hair in a pony tail who speaks very quietly and hesitantly and smokes Camels nearly all the time. There were times when he was trying to say something and C. would lean over to him, lean in a little, and grin, sort of taunting him or cajoling him, spit it out. I was kind of manic and generally dissatisfied. We were at the Knitting Factory to see Luna, a good band but it was kind of a mistake. They play droning, soporific indie rock. The kind of music that, on a Thursday night for Christ's sake, makes you feel like a little kid with your parents in a museum or something, rocking back and forth on your cramped feet with your jacket on.

The lead singer said he'd played with Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs recently and Tuli said, "The war against Iraq will be very short but the war against America will be very, very long." No one really reacted to this. Should we applaud? Yes? No? Wait. The singer broke the pause by saying, "That's what he said!" and there were some relieved guffaws. 

I'd been thinking, in the rain on the way to the club, walking the footbridge over Varick, scared by the soaking-wet corrugated metal steps. I thought, this is the age of the American Empire. We've had the British Empire, the Spanish, the French, the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, the Chinese, the Greek, the this, the that. Now for better or worse it's the age of the American Empire. And the trouble is, an empire is never good. It may think itself well-meaning, aligned with God, a defender of justice – was this not the British imperial view? – but it can't be. By virtue of its power and its dominion over others it is immediately corrupt.

But beautiful too. And doomed.

Here's what I remember, for now: the stunted jut of my arm as I lay prone on the snow and deep, dark maple syrup on the table at the restaurant. 

I walked back from the Ear Bar after work, walked across on Spring Street to the 6, and I walked by some dumb shoe store on a corner, a long narrow shoe store, and I remembered having been there years ago with A., and I remembered how smart and ornery she was, and how much I loved her, and I muttered "I love you" over and over under my drunken steaming breath until I passed the store, like you hold your breath while passing a graveyard.

His Name Is Fritos. That shall be the title of a short story of mine. Yesterday on my way from work to Barbara's a guy sat down near me on the F train. Too close to me it seemed – there were plenty of open seats but he took the nearest one against the wall, perpendicular to my bench. He was a thin, young Hispanic man with a wispy mustache, a gold chain, and curled hair bulging under his baseball cap. He was eating Fritos. At first I didn't, but then I caught a whiff of that unique Frito smell, that salty-sandy smell, momentarily delicious but so transient, so insubstantial. And I thought of the word itself for the first time, how it's a Spanish word for a fried thing, but I'd managed to never in my life recognize it as a Mexican-influenced thing: to me Frito was all-American, garishly so; as American as Crayola or Dr. Pepper or Visine, blissfully artificial and pure Yankee.

But they stole the word.

And I remembered the real reason I get this American-flavored taste when I think of Fritos: when I was maybe nine, we were in the hills of Northwestern Connecticut visiting my mom's cousin and her rich small-town family. She'd married an oil executive and had a Barbie doll-blonde baby daughter whose beauty was fated to be ravaged by alcoholism and depression. But I digress. This girl, then a teen, was introducing my brother to someone I think, and she momentarily forgot his name, and she took the opportunity of her misstep to say this:

"Fritos! His name is Fritos. I've got to go get more Fritos."

And she glided into the kitchen to pour more in the bowl.

The sidewalk on 103rd, usually rat-infested, was frozen over glassy.

This morning I awoke at B.'s in Brooklyn to the shriek of newsradio: "… THE SENATOR REPEATED THAT PEOPLE SHOULD AVOID NEW YORK CITY SUBWAYS…" I slammed it off and got back in bed, faintly nauseous from the wine the night before, and pulled a blanket out of a tangled pile over me, and thought about devastation, bombings, poison gas, and whatever fate awaits us all.

If I'm Dead

If I'm dead
I won't see the peeling paint
at 51st and Lex
as I ride the escalator to the E

D. the bisexual from Brooklyn told me about a party on Saturday, at her dorm at Pratt. I was at work, obsessing over some fine point of the project.

"What kind of party? Cool kids?" I asked her, by instant message.

"Yeah, cool kids. You need to wear a wig. I might be able to make you one."

I begged off, using my nagging throat cold as an excuse.

Truth is I'm not that attracted to her, curiously. She's got a great body, she seems to be a competent artist, these would seem to be the things that matter to me. But her tongue is too invasive in my mouth – we were kissing the other day and she kept parrying and thrusting with it and I closed my mouth a little, trying to discourage her. "Give me your tongue!" she said brightly and hungrily, as though she were addressing a waiter at the Carnegie Deli. I did, reluctantly, but the entire exchange left me woefully unexcited. She has naked lust, too much enthusiasm. I like restraint and friction, uncertainty and tension.

I've been falling in love with women on the subway recently. First a few weeks ago (months? Days?). She was with a guy, some nondescript yet clearly phenomenally lucky guy; a man I hardly noticed but for the hot envy that welled up in me. She had dark hair and Russian features; she looked a lot like J. but better somehow, more self assured. She had a small, perfect mouth that made a little frown all the time and she had pronounced, slightly slanted eyebrows. She had the slightest underbite. What struck me about her was her control over herself and the ease, the authority with which she interacted with the world and others, whoever they might be. She and her boyfriend were evidently accompanying friends from out of town on a tour around the city. She declared that they had to have New York style pizza, of course, and in the morning of course they had to have bagels. With that delicious underbite. Her eyes half closed the whole time, her eyes, half-closed.

And just the other day there was a Hispanic girl across the train from me who was one of the most beautiful humans I've ever seen in my life. She wore wire-framed glasses; she had flowing, elaborately styled hair that was red at the tips and black at the roots; impeccably flawless olive skin and a sensuous mouth framed by such a complex and ravishing mechanism of dimples, muscles and subtle creases that every expression she wore seemed to be definitive of some aspect of man's longing or perhaps of truth itself. Her spectacular face lent her a talent for smirking. She was accompanied by a taciturn Hispanic kid, maybe her brother or cousin (her boyfriend? Maybe, but he was overweight, and so standoffish and dismissive of her that I could not imagine he saw her the way I did), and once when she turned to him to react to his mumblings she said "Serious?" in such a streetwise-homegirl way and with such a wry, wicked smirk that I nearly lost consciousness. But it was when she was at rest that I found her the most alluring. She'd look blankly the other way, away from her neighbor, her hands deep in her coat pockets, and as her face softened into a curious mask I was left only to imagine the meanings and powers of its potential forms.

The other day I waited for the 6 at 51st and Lex, late for a Tuesday, 12 or so, among a curious band that included two lost stewardesses and a short Hispanic man leafing through an enormous coffee table book about George W. Bush. A man emerged from the corridor and traipsed past us, chanting-hollering: "I got the last dance. I'm a gonna get the last dance. The last dance. Yep. I'm gonna do the boogaloo. I got the last dance…"

I went to the kitchen for water before bed and I saw a glow on the floor and I could tell that the moon was shining fiercely through the window; I remembered P. C. told me how bright it was, and I looked out and there it was peering above two dark silhouettes of buildings. Two windows at the end of the building on the right were lit and cast a white glow on the building to the left. Suddenly there was a flicker. And then nothing. It was a window in the other building and again it burst into golden light, but stayed on.

Been salivating a lot and spitting on the train tracks, and I think I'm comin' down with something.

Last night we met after work, a whole lot of us, at that terrible place the Cutting Room. A. D. dreamed up the event, a kind of holiday cocktail hour that had nothing to do with the holiday, but not the place – she had wanted to go to Dewey's on Fifth, which was way crowded. So we end up in this place with awful dressed-up and made-up people elbowing and jostling and generally violating the delicate, unspoken protocol which governs the lane before the bar. We were seated on stools some of us, others standing. A. introduced me to Steve, a friend of her boyfriend Michael, and right away, the way he launched into a self-deprecating and not very funny joke about being the guy no one knows, he struck me as somewhat lost and pathetic. He had wide, ingenuous eyes.

There was a sort of running joke between P. C. and Rachel about how all they ever talk about is sex, bodily functions and real estate, and this phrase penetrated the rest of our group by osmosis. I had ordered food and was bringing a slice of precious, overpriced gourmet pizza to my lips when Steve asked, bizarrely, "What category does that fall under? Sex, bodily functions or real estate?"

I examined the pizza for a moment, as though I were searching for the answer.

"Strangely enough, real estate," I stated, then took a bite. I looked at him, my mouth full, and added, "Location, location, location."

This was not terribly funny of course – just weird – but he laughed very, very hard – too hard – and for a long time. 

Later we went down to the Silver Swan, that old-time German beer bar, and it was clear that Steve was totally hammered. At one point he returned from the bar to our table gripping a hard pretzel. He had a manic, strained expression on his face. We all stopped talking and turned to him, warily awaiting his next move. He extended his arm almost ceremoniously and placed – sort of proffered – the pretzel on the red tablecloth, and – mission accomplished – collapsed into a chair, not to be heard from very much again.

We drove to the Presidio and stopped where a street took a right angle right and straight ahead the earth seemed to completely fall away, and in the distance was the Bay. We parked the car and got out and walked down the steps, the Lyon Street Steps, shouldered by ornate, shuttered Venetian-style homes with terra cotta roofs. It was all beautiful and precious and I wondered what it would be like to be one of these joggers, rich healthy San Francisco people, running up and down the steps and stretching against the stone walls of the flower garden.

For all its precious boutiques and pricey clothes shops and restaurants, and its good-willed hyper-liberalism, Haight-Ashbury has a faintly menacing quality. Punk drifters sitting on the curb staring us down as I backed in the car, as though to say this parking space is ours. Hordes of pierced-face, purple-haired youth walking three or four abreast, owning the sidewalks too, everything under the white sky.

We split up and I wandered listlessly, eventually hanging out in an empty radical bookstore and flipping through little stapled and Xeroxed lesbian art mags and tracts by tired revolutionaries. 

To realize that we need new contexts to recognize such values as honesty, and even beauty.

I was walking through Midtown after work yesterday, in transit between train and bus, down the Madison Avenue valley between dark glass buildings with shuttered delis and sandwich shops below. There was something bright and awful splattered in the middle of the sidewalk up ahead. Others walked wide arcs around the mess, which seemed deliberate and meaningful in its placement, like an art installation. I approached it and saw what it was: a plastic container from a deli buffet exploded open, pasta and carrots and barbecued chicken; rice and beans; macaroni and cheese, everything radiating from the center and a single white plastic fork pointing away.

The graffiti tag on the poster in the subway is the grinning boy again but now he's on the surface of the crater-pocked moon, its horizon curving behind him to affirm the otherworldliness.

Later we staggered down Canal in the cold rain to a party in a warehousy building in TriBeCa. It was a lesbian party – a dozen or so in the dimness of a vast, sparse apartment. Some were still celebrating Halloween, looking sort of demented in obscure, indistinct costumes while everyone around them was normal. It was decided that I had come as a man and everyone laughed. We drank some more, some punch with god knows what. There was a microphone and an amp set up for some reason and people would approach the mic and say things or sing off key a bit and step away fast, as though evading a calamity. I spoke to a short and wide-eyed woman named Catherine or something, who said she was 38 but looked like she was in her mid-twenties, and I kept telling her I couldn't believe it until she begged me to stop.

There was a desultory aspect to the party, and I can't even remember if there was music but there must have been, and it was dark like a cellar, yet the mood seemed happy. They were running and jumping on a big inflatable ball, rolling over it on their bellies and landing harshly on the floor on the other side. Gleefully flirting with injury.

Something about B. made me nervous. She was jumpy, manic, impulsive. When she had a thought she'd go "Oh oh oh!" and blurt it out at once. And there was an aura of mischief around her too. There was that time she told me she had the credit cards of her bosses at two jobs where she'd been fired. She told me once, what if I ordered things and had them shipped to your house? No one would ever know. I changed the subject.

Met S. and B. and V. at a bar and then we went to a gallery on Broadway and Canal where some friend of V.'s was curating something. There was free booze there, not just the typical rotgut red and white, so that was good, and I had mandarin vodka and orange juice. I glanced cursorily at the art, pointless painted ceramic pieces like a large white squash. A thin blue wedge emerging from one wall, head-high. A blue pot with its lid resting beside it. There was a makeshift catalog, just one printed sheet of paper, lying on a shelf by the guestbook. The prices began at $10,000 and peaked at $26,000.