When I was seventeen I related to Rick James much more than I did Janis Ian. The hourly hormonal blood riots took precedence over wistful reflection and introspection. I was working my first real job, managing a corner deli for a cocaine-burned, dissolute gambler named Dondo. Dondo was good friends with my grandmother Grace. When she died suddenly from an aortic aneurysm, I was only ten at the time. Dondo cried. I didn’t, my grandfather didn’t, but Dondo did. I started admiring him from that day forward. Dondo paid me a fair wage, let me hire friends and even gave me a free apartment above his deli, and he wasn’t even gay; on the contrary, he had an attractive, socialite wife and an orange-skinned fitness trainer-cum-mistress on the side. Both women were no stranger to tanning beds, yacht rock or rush hour romance. Dondo also had a Matt Houston/Magnum P.I. medallion level moustache, which he called a “womb broom.”

Dondo would usually show up a little after three p.m. each day, always with a quality case of beer in tow. Between customers, we’d toast beers, listen to classic rock and talk about women, his métier. We’d comment on the madonna/whores that floated past the bay window and sometimes into the store. Reverse S-shaped sylphs with swan lake elegance and perceived electric lust in their hearts. Dondo would say “a kid with your looks could open any one of them up.” I knew that was patently untrue. I was lucky to get some catch-as-catch can action here and there, but hearing an over-satiated swordsman like Dondo say that, well, it made me feel good. It gave me a confidence that was edified by the beer. Then Dondo would lay some of his crude sayings on me. These were mildly disturbing, actually quite disturbing, but somehow rendered risible by the mustachioed delivery. These salacious sayings were always directed at women. Sayings such as “I’d like to nudge that colon”, “All girls look cuter after a good throat spanking”, “Oh baby, smoke that cigarette”, and my personal favorite “I’d tap that ass like Gregory Hines!” Dondo was alright, still is in my book.

The deli was doing good business despite the rodent problems. Dondo blamed this on the mongoloid neighbors, citing their children’s lack of hygiene. He put down glue traps. I objected to them. They were inhumane. He didn’t listen. He owned the place after all. I’d come downstairs to open up in the morning and hear the shrill, plaintive bleating of a stuck mouse; just a tiny gray ball of flesh and fur, no bigger than my own thumb, luminous obsidian eyes wide and wild with fear of death, harm from the human hand. A harmless creature in pathetic circumstances; panic-stricken, shitting and pissing all over itself, violent trembles and spasms, exhausted from trying to extricate itself. With the steady, exacting hand of an inveterate neurosurgeon, I freed each one. The trick was to talk to them with even, assuasive tones, then start pulling at the tail, slowly lifting the rest of the mouse off of the sticky surface. When done right, the mouse just lost a little fur and gained a little respect for the human ape. I transported these emancipated mice via a small, cardboard box over to Campbell ’s Square, a few blocks away. Once the box was open, the mice would leap out and hit the ground running, bouncing along joyously. It felt right.

It was Good Friday, and all the old neighborhood ladies were dressed in bible black, carrying ivory rosaries; passing through the store, saturnine apparitions, buying tissues for the tears and tuna salad sandwiches. There were four Roman Catholic churches in that neighborhood. This made for a dangerous-looking, needle-point skyline. The dolorous church bells seemed to be going all day long. Dondo instructed me to close the shop from high noon until three; on Good Friday the neighborhood became a Holy Ghost town during those hours.

A call came in for a delivery; delivery calls were rare and when they came in, I usually delegated them to my friend Chi, which didn’t go over well. Chi was clearly Chinese, but the old Polish women he delivered to always assumed he was Puerto Rican or Mexican. Being uptight, conservative xenophobes, they assumed he dealt drugs, and the deli was his clever cover. The fact that he drove an Audi 5000 which leaked noisy, god awful, concussion inducing hip hop didn’t help. A few days prior he told one of those calloused crones to “have a nice funeral.” It turned out the woman was actually dying from cancer; her incensed husband demanded Chi’s bowl-cut head and even threatened to raze the deli. Dondo had no choice but to suspend Chi indefinitely. As a result, delivery duties fell squarely on my shoulders like a goddamn Calvary cross. Three bags full of meats, cheeses, onions, ugly Jersey tomatoes, milk, bread, cat food, toilet paper, tampons, the usual. I locked up the deli and headed over to the address, mercifully just around the corner.

The weather seemed disturbed, rife with a kind of ringing silence one might encounter shortly before lightning strikes. The sky was low and gray, a shattered etch-a-sketch window. The sun was straining in vain to poke through, a cigarette pushing through dense layers of silk, only to snuff itself out. The wind was picking up, making a high, lonesome sound all its own and I was right there, standing at the door, staring stupidly at a knitted square, purple and tangerine, hanging from a thumbtack. The shapes on the square didn’t make sense at first, abstruse hieroglyphs or something; after long minutes of perplexed staring, the name “Jesus” emerged. I knocked, a delicate voice whispered, “Do come in.” The voice gave me chills, a graveyard whistle; it raised my hackles. Against better judgment, I opened the door.

The smell was the first thing to hit me, full on olfactory assault; mephitic excreta and fried meat. My eyes were watering and trying to adjust to the lack of light. The room was a cavernous cocoon. I heard insects buzzing, their wings beating past my ears, felt them crawling on my skin, under my shirt, through my hair. Then I saw her. She was there on the scarred hardwood floor, a limbless woman, surrounded by piles of feces and half-dried streams of urine, I guessed her own. Her truncated torso naked and chafed, big sad owl-eyed breasts, the places where limbs used to be rubbed red and raw, reminding me of over used erasers, hair crimped and crisp with dander. “Don’t be afraid, I won’t bite,” she said, with her timorous spine-tingling voice, “Please come over here and place the bags down beside me.” I complied.

As I moved in her direction, I noticed her eyes for the first time; big, bright, lambent, limpid blue pools, impossibly beautiful beneath purple eyelids. Julie Christie “Don’t Look Now” eyes, I thought. Entranced, I placed the bags down beside her. She moved sideways, sluggishly, slow, sad movements, each one wounded me. She put her head inside a purse on the floor, bobbed up and down, produced a $20 bill with her teeth and raised her head to me. “This one’s on us, mam”, I said. She dropped the $20 at my feet, I felt the urge to turn and run, as she said, “I want you to stay, please stay.” Her eyes seemed to shatter. I realized I was shaking and the walls were screaming as they closed in; metallic green flies everywhere, the nightmare air filling my lungs and bile rising in my throat, I got the hell out of there. Running back to Dondo’s corner deli, crying big time; that distinct, sinister feeling of being chased, fully expecting to turn and see her squirming, snailing towards me.

The deli never seemed further away, a heaven on the horizon, old women passing me, staring at me, grotesque black shadow crows, thirsty for Christ’s blood, hungry for Christ’s flesh; church bells tolling hellishly, my shirt spotted with shit carried and deposited by the flies. Memories of those eyes haunting me, assailing me, and still beguiling me; those damn blue eyes, pure pristine portals of peace, how could they be there in the middle of such a dense tangle of tragedy? Twin suns trying to burn through the hideous veil of tears, restlessly searching for rebirth, for love without sympathy, or maybe just a little company. Eighteen years later, and still I’ve never seen a pair more peaceful or blue, and I can’t help but hope they have opened in a better place, closer to closure, brighter than the stars used to be, their light falling hard and clean on everything devoid of it.