Sketch
His hair went curly when it grew out, turned grey at the ends but when he kept it tight in August, he looked a little younger. His footsteps echo straight time, a pared down rhythm like an Anthony Cole kit: snare, kick, and three cymbals scored from some gulag looking pawn shop, scored on a wire, no prices, no fee just a conversation and a handshake: "go down to little Armenia, and do a small favor me." A phone call on a cold phone three in the morning, a favor leaving cops scratching their heads, going blind through the gang files tryin to figure who wanted that guy dead.
He is the starkest chapter in a stoics novel and you can almost hear a Mofro sax in his opiated cough. He’s wearing jeans, and a thread bare flanel shirt red and black cityscape tartan. Streets, running parallel to crossing avenues, boulevards around the collar. Jesus Christ, he’s sexy.
A black string tied around a mystery runs under his cheese cloth undershirt. Some say he carries a razor, or a dime on that string. Others say it's a CN Conductor's watch that he picked up from a junk shop where his old man used to hock trinkets for dollars and dollars for whiskey.
His father flushing years and self loathing, down in the "detritice" of a shitty tavern's well rye. But he never gave his old man much thought, spent less time on himself, not even the writer knew that much about him, maybe they'd nod in passing, passing each other on pages, bumping into one another at the beginning of a chapter. The writer loved him, he made the writer's mind, soul and cock hard watching how he moved; like a pocket knife unfolds itself, stiff, sharp, ready, wary. His glasses were somewhere between Costello and Orbison and his mood depended on if the hotel had a diner or if the bastards made him walk downtown.
His first kiss was under a full moon in October on a blacktop close to Gainesville where tires smoked out quarter-miles like old time daddies in maternity waiting rooms. The kiss tasted like cheap wine, bubble gum and creosote. She never closed her eyes. It’s a kiss he’s been chasing ever since, so that even now he tosses straight dice with crooked hips, lips and limbic mantras chasing The sublime. Chasing the sublime. Chasing. The. Sublime. Adam Dunbar
