Timmy and Mark Rothko are walking east on 86th Street, two more white kids playing black. Fucking crazy. They are both wearing FUBU (For Us By Us) with their Timberland boots, sizes nine and ten respectively.

The car Mary drove was a borrowed 1954 three-and-a-half-liter Alma Mercury. Spidery cracks in the leather upholstery snagged against her silk blouse as she shifted her weight to heave the wheel

I was afraid she’d look at me as if I were a perfect stranger who had nothing to do with her and never would.

Once I wrote in violet ink in my boudoir, with slippered feet tucked beneath my chair, where no adversity but a little rain could ever touch me; no adversity, but what my own soul wrought.

Nineteen miles west of town, Drew’s client Mike and his wife Carol summered in a neighborhood of attractive homes along the meandering Bluebird Creek, formerly Bog Creek. The development was known locally as Snob Hollow. While the occupants were not all snobs, there was little time in the accelerated northern summer for mingling with locals, what Bluebird Creekers called “fraternizing.” But the Khourys were different, self-­consciously inclusive, inviting often inappropriate local guests to their gatherings—­gun nuts, fellow Pickleballers, smiling evangelicals, conspiracy theorists, and cabinetmakers—­despite the likely awkwardness. Mike was fond of saying, “You can learn a lot by observing fish out of water” and “I admire their neolithic lifestyles and the curious pidgin with which they pour out their hearts.” So, Drew decided, he was a snob after all, though proud of his politics.

I give thanks. I wonder if their sensors pick that up. I wonder if the monitor registers an unfortunate rise in temperature. I extend these fingers. In this white room it is difficult not to think of bodies.

Early one Saturday morning, Alan “Chester” McChester stood on the marbled concourse of London’s Victoria Station reading the newly expanded Vim section of The Daily Continent. Overhead

In brazil we knocked the doors of poor people. They answered in threadbare football jerseys, in stained mesh shorts, in Havaianas thin as reeds. We called them humble. We called them receptive.

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But you are here, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are a little fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either the Bimbo Box or the Lizard Lounge, It might all come a little clearer if you could slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. 

They sayed she had gotted a white mans education. She had climbed the jet and flied across the ocean to read abroad. They sayed she had a big house in the big town of Meru. A big house and big car like a Prado that all the rich people driving in town. They sayed she had one children. A boy children that go to big school for rich people. They sayed she had a law degree but all she did was obey the orders of the wardens and pray. She prayed a lot. Some of the times she used to cry small small when she was praying. Some of the times she would kneel down but not that many times. The wardens would beat us when we showed funny behavior. Mange never showed funny behavior. Mange toed the line.