West Town: Mid-Summer, 1995

We spend the summer nights with heroin and sex and music. We stay up til all hours with all the lights on, cutting pictures from magazines to hang on the wall, all our talismans of hope and fame. And we roam the neighborhood, JP and I, in the middle of the night.

We walk down Ashland, past Augusta down to Chicago and beyond, across the bridge over the expressway. We walk past an abandoned church, where JP stops and dreams about acoustics. “If we could get in there, we could record the album inside,” he says.

He wraps his arm around my shoulder and kisses me on top of my head. “Babygirl,” he says, “we’re going to be amazing.”

We come up over the rise of the expressway bridge and find a man approaching us, weaving a little as he walks. He is unshaven, drunk, obviously homeless, and instinctively I take a step back and hide behind JP, a little. The man starts to speak, going on about his family that left him, his car that got stolen, and by the way do we have eighty cents?

JP is completely at ease, and he hands the man a dollar and listens to him talk as I try to bury myself in his shadow. Not so much out of fear, but out of shame at my fear.

We walk away and I can feel JP’s silence, like the space where there used to be a rotten tooth.

“What were you afraid of?” he asks me in the end. And I have no answer.