After college he was determined for something, and strongly felt that something in NYC—but I think, really, that he saw loneliness down every road, like an empty subway tunnel lined with boobs and smiles. And I think that loneliness stranded him here. Half here, like the rest of us, but paying $600 a month to crawl into a windowless basement, unlike any of us.

But to meet him could be the start of an understanding. And to go is an M ride: Hello to Brooklyn, on the way—this Brooklyn, the locked inside of an toy-box, like some blinkless doll covered in crayon. The meaning of Manhattan’s name has been long disputed, but it translates mostly to, “Stamp out the youth,” and Brooklyn could never be translated by my rather poor Munsee…

But here portrayed better in the white eyes of a scratched Indian chieftain, cloaked in white peeling mist, as half-crazy streams of color cut—the barbed wire fence next door blocks off:

• yard long weeds
• twenty-six empty pringles-lays
• at least forty-nine coca-cola-pepsi-ginger-ale
• one conspicuous, half broken bong

This does not stop for Beckett’s door—door, to a door, to a jungle of overused, dirty clothing. Ripped, torn, half-sewn, guarded by headless manakins at night after they pull down the metal storm gates, as if aliens crawled from the ground at twelve o’clock. But really the thing that shakes and beats itself against the doors and windows is the same insanity that has dragged itself through the streets always and always.

And inside, all of Beckett’s roommates are homosexual. One of these roommates was burning toast shirtlessly, staring at me affixedly, as the flies tasted everything. Outside another boy giggled as his piss snapped and crackled on the concrete. His, “sorry,” followed him down the stairs. And so Beckett begins his first story with a throat clearing:

The Yard Rat

—So I was sitting here yesterday, enjoying the weather, this wonderful yard, eating a nice sandwich I’d just bought from Best Deli. All of a sudden, this massive rat ran out of the grass and rammed his head into the bottom of my foot.

Beckett had been sitting, leaned back, legs crossed, flats of his feet perpendicular to the ground. The Yard Rat of 1160 Myrtle Ave., apparently frightened by his own capability for violence, disappeared back into the miscellaneous megaflora, also of 1160 Myrtle Ave., and has not been seen since. We have assumed he is in exile. Had Beckett’s roommates responded to my attempts at conversation with anything but confused boredom, I’m quite certain they would’ve found my, “Have You Seen Our Rat,” flyers hopelessly hysterical and brilliantly poignant.

But back to the story: post-college, Beckett and I have become as lonely people are. We give what we want. And so Beckett’s conversation is a pure isolate of flattery, and mine, a stream of intellectual nonsense. He commends the cure to be philosophically unattainable—or a highly realistic blow-up doll.

And while his thought was yet constructing, my fingers were wiggling violently through the chain-link fence as if I were limping the last leg of a losing race toward forcing a vagina to orgasm—clambering with my tongue out of my mouth to indicate a small black flower just beyond the fence.

—See this plant? (me)

—No. (Beckett)

A thought incomplete leaves like a dream, an orgasm floats away to a dusty library of things that will never be. And I’ve found always found that books and orgasms inherit strongly from oil and water.

—This white flower, here, see that black flower in the middle?

—No.

—Look, it looks like a bug, here. (me)

I flicked the flower, finally.

—Ok. (Beckett)

—That’s a carrot. (me)

Beckett looks up at the top of the fence

—We could pick it. (Beckett)

But now I am away—though I never know where, really. I wouldn’t have picked those carrots—I only ever destroy mindlessly, needlessly, and we could’ve eaten the carrots.

A word is a human is a love is a moment is a life is useless and my voice has slowly died away—toward Beckett’s unborn orgasm that never could be and a world where reasonability is actually reasonable, and not more often a sham for incompetence and insecurity.

Here’s security:

• Everything’s a laugh track.
• The track’s always hollow.
• And it always goes on for too long.

Somewhere, a train-bell tings at the captive humans and a computer, “apologizes for any inconvenience.”