9th and Hennepin

It was a cold night in the city, the kind of night when the people you pray never notice you are looking for the other people you pray never notice you. A place where a man could vanish into nothing but a chalk outline and a bar tab. The street ended at a waste of dark water and marshland, where the city’s refuse was dumped. The wind came off the river, cold and sharp. Ride the King’s Highway, baby. People came here to die. Most of them just hadn’t received the news.

All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes

And vice versa. “Cherry Lick” and “Candy Squeeze” sat behind the glass like little glazed glands, bright with sugar and grease. The names sounded like the lost women you’d meet beneath a flickering streetlamp, women whose real names nobody bothered to learn but were probably Debby or Ann. Everything on the sidewalk had been stepped on, pissed on, spat on or forgotten: splattered guano, smudged dog shit (you hoped it was a dog), the occasional bloodstain nobody cared to identify. A grotesque thoroughfare of wrong turns, dead ends and bad decisions. Weird scenes inside the gold mine. And I declare, there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there.

And the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky like a tarp thrown all over this

The moon itself had been gnawed on like a rat’s carcass by other rats. It hung there, grim and broken, like someone had tried to take a bite and left the remnants of a half-chewed corpse hanging in the sky. The sky was a black bruise under a dirty tarp, the stars buried somewhere underneath. Even heaven looked boarded up, like a discarded movie set, washed clean of its glamour and left to fester in the dark. God switched off the porch light and went inside to watch a bosomy Charo and a boozy Glenn Ford trade squirms in their seats on Hollywood Squares.

The steam comes out of the grill like the whole goddamned town is ready to blow

The bricks were black with old smoke and older sorrow that had worked their way into the mortar. The buildings leaned toward one another like conspirators too tired to whisper. Every wall seemed to know the same secret: you weren’t getting out. Everybody here was a stray mutt with a human face, nosing around for food, affection, narcotics, a little heat — anything that might postpone the moment when the night collected its debts. It wasn’t survival any more. Survival implied a future. This was simply postponement of the inevitable. A long procession from nowhere to no fixed address, eternal abode of old men with broken teeth, stranded without love.

And the broken umbrellas like dead birds

Dutch had been dead on his feet for years. The nag shuffled along because something outside him hadn’t yet given permission for it to stop. He had that look men and and horses get when the world has been kicking them for so long they no longer bother to flinch. The universe had him by the scruff and was dragging him down Violin Road. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, but even they had entered the Sing Sing execution chamber with jauntier steps and lighter hearts than Dutch.

And all the rooms they smell like diesel and you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept there

I’d sit in the stairwell with my coat pulled tight around me and sleep in your hat. The curtains hung in the corner like somebody had died there and nobody had bothered to remove the shroud. I’d slept in worse places. That’s what you tell yourself when worse is all you’ve got.

And no one ever brings anything small into a bar around here

The girl behind the counter said this without looking up. Tattooed tears on her cheeks. One for every year he’d been gone. Ink doesn’t cry, it dries. Ink just stays there. As inconspicuous as tarantulas on a slice of angel food cake. She had the kind of face that had once stopped traffic and now merely made men remember they were lonely. A little razor-sadness wreckage around the eyes. A little frost at the mouth. Beauty, if you could afford to look at it quickly. But around here beauty was cheap whisky: hot going down, gone before you could name the taste lingering at the back of your throat. Whatever bony structure there had once been was turning to muck. If you got close enough, she smelled like a great aunt’s boudoir that had been closed too long. “I shall like it here, Pip, away from the world and all its complications.”

And everyone is behaving like dogs

The Southern Pacific trundled past with a roar that shook the windows and rattled every loose thing in the room. Steel screamed against steel. The whole building trembled like it knew what was coming. Ride the snake, ride the snake ... to the lake, the ancient lake. Get on, or get left behind. The train went through and took the night with it, dragging sparks into the dark. A dead man watched, then went back to being alive. He’s old and his skin is cold. Might have been me. Everything in this place was permanent in exactly the wrong way.

And I’m lost in the window

The clock kept moving without going anywhere. Minutes dripped out of it like dirty water from a leaky tap in one of those single-room occupancy places with a filthy communal bathroom, a mini-fridge with a door that won’t close and a dresser that makes you want to jump out the window. The same hour came around again and again, wearing different faces. Whisky on the breath. Musty smell on the clothes. Somebody laughing too loud three stools down. Somebody stunted and wormy crying into their sleeve. Somebody with dispirited linoleum eyes telling a story nobody believed. That was you. Not the person you’d meant to become. Not even the person you’d been. Just somebody who had survived long enough to become unrecognizable.

Till you’re full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin

The booze couldn't fill the hole. Neither could the cigarettes, the fucking of strangers, the money, the pills, the promises, the little private religions people invented between closing time and dawn. Eventually everything you carried spilled out. Your debts. Your lies. Your life. You became just another penitent dragging his shadow behind him, waiting for somebody to mistake it for company.

And you spill out over the side to anyone who’ll listen

It didn’t matter who listened. Or if anyone did. The words kept coming. They came out bitter and wet and poisoned, like water wrung from a filthy rag. Blue ruin filled the glass. Blue ruin filled the room. Blue ruin climbed into the lungs and settled there. Everybody had something to confess. Nobody had absolution. So we spilled ourselves onto the counter, onto the floor, into each other’s ears, desperate for one human being to stay awake long enough to hear us. Nobody did. Fifty-seven channels (and nothin’ off). Chilly, wet fog and sounding foghorns. The occasional click-clack of a lone taxi on wet asphalt. An umbrella on fire.

I’ve seen it all

I’ve seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train: faces sliding past in the dirty glass, each carrying its own little catastrophe. Men going home to rooms where nobody waited. Women smoking beneath fluorescent lights. Children asleep against windows. The sick, the legless, the blind, the insane. Everybody moving. Nobody arriving. Petals on a wet, black bough. There was no revelation waiting at the end of the line. No hand reaching down through the dark. No clean morning where the debts disappeared and everybody got their old lives back. I would’ve left a long time ago but I was already gone.

I've seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train