She is having a great night.  She is wearing gold sequins. She is singing.  She is singing in front of people.  She is singing her heart out in front of people and she is singing Phil Collins.  She is just a little bit hammered.

The lights of Hollywood Blvd sparkle like the cheaply-glamorous jackets of transvestite hookers who stand at their posts.  You and I tumble out of a once-famous Italian restaurant with cracked red leather seats and faded pink wall paper, where the stars once ate and drank fifty years ago, but now only those do who wish to say that they did.  We’re drunk and silly and revel in our astute foolishness.  We dance around dirty sidewalks and yell threats at the sky and swagger down the blvd as if we own love like it’s a brand new car bought off the lot for cash.  Singles look on us and think “fucking lucky” or “get a fucking room.”  We fixate on how well we get along, and that we enjoy each other unlike the dating buffet at which we both have feasted yet walked away from still hungry.

Jacob, just fifteen, watched the man-child walk down his Gran’s street almost every day.  The man walked with his head bent, his shoulders hunched forward.  To Jacob, he always looked like someone who was about to break into a run.  Course he never did.  In fact, Jacob wasn’t even sure he could run.

The first time we met Davie blew into the pub, a tornado trailing all lesser mortals in his wake. The room brightened. In a booming crescendo, he hailed a couple of my friends.

Everyone turned to look but he noticed me.

Rain. Falling on the inn’s red-tiled roof  that slants sharply over the veranda. Sluicing over the low-hanging edge of the roof, falling and glittering in a white-water curtain. The veranda, deep and always shadowy even on a sunny day, surrounds the inn and shields the first-floor rooms from the pelting rain. Bundled up in my raincoat, I walk quick-stepped onto the veranda and set down the two bags of groceries and household supplies on the cement floor, next to the entrance door.

His daughter used to say his best pieces shimmered, shimmered like the pond behind their cabin under the moonlight. She’d dance out there, when it shimmered. She’d glide and twirl and spin under the gaze of the stars. “A show for the aliens,” she called it. A choreographed performance. A work of art.

"Nowadays, it’s hard to find a woman,” he says, “with a pretty face and pretty feet.”

I say, “Is that so.”

Laura was a beautiful blond from the mid west, with the perfect hippie vibe and fashion. She always had a stick of Nag Champa burning wherever she went, and a beautiful rainbow of an aura around her. She always seemed to have a sly smile, like she knew even more about the joke than anyone else. Of course I pretty much fell for her the moment I saw her.

I want a friend from the outside who will shatter my tea cup and throw me over their shoulder and take me outside. 

I met him at a skating rink. I was fourteen and tougher than any of those boys who tried to grab my waist with their short-fingered, sweaty hands when a slow song came on. I came to look fly in my Guess jeans. I came to skate backwards fast enough so that the air rushed past me and it felt like I could reverse time.