The first time I met Tracy and Samantha was a drunken night in Detroit. They were living with a pimp named Walter. Walter was a mean mother fucker. He was bald with a gold hoop in one ear and a giant scar across his face. Tracy and Samantha looked good then. They were draped over some rich car salesman's knee. I only met them because my boy Rodney owed Walter some money. It was a bad scene. Walter fronted Rodney some handguns to unload in Cleaveland, Rodney got pulled over ten miles outside the city. He did four months and was back to tell Walter in person what had happened.
When I was leaving town, Tracy and Samantha asked me for a ride to Chicago. I'm not sure how Rodney was getting home or if he getting home at all. I drove them in one screaming ride from downtown Detroit to the loop.
Now I was in New York, three years later, working in the basement at the Metropolitan Periodicals Collection. I sat at a desk surrounded by a square mile of old newspapers and magazines. I had hung up my old ways and decided then, that first morning to become a novelist. I had a beat-up Underwood, a flask, and a lot of time to kill.
Nobody and I mean, nobody came down to that basement. I may have well been working in the city morgue. It was so quiet. In the summertime, they would crank the AC upstairs and it would get frigid in that basement. I'd be wearing a winter coat while sorting through antiquated copies of The Times while the rest of the world upstairs were in shorts and t-shirts. In the winter? They cranked the heater. I'd be under a dripping boiler pipe in a hawaiian shirt and cut-off jeans. It was crazy. But I figured I'd get a lot to write about. Truth was, I couldn't write a paragraph. I had no ideas. I was rotting in that place.
