Where are you, Sterling? I've been looking for you since yesterday. I need to talk. I've got those fireflies in front of my eyes again, and you know what that means. I've gone back and forth on the L, checking out all the usual cafes and front stoops on Grand Street. Nothing. Those pierced girls in the out-of-style UFO pants hadn't seen you 'since forever'. Smelling their grape soda breath made me thirsty for a beer--an overpriced one, so I headed back up the L to Bedford Ave.

The lights on the train played tricks with me--I swore I saw you on the crowded stairways leading out of the station. But when I got up above ground you were no where to be seen. Nevertheless, I had a sudden sense of purpose as I stood looking for you in front of the busted, tagged-up public phones. Mirage or not, I savored my bit of hope. I hooked my thumbs in my belt loops as I peered this way and that, my hair and the trash and the dangling lines with the receivers torn off all blowing in the same direction. I glanced around the heavy curtains that insulated the front door of the L Café. Inside, the olive skinned Italian girl who reminded me of my first girl fuck was playing Nirvana for her two tables. I gave her my hey, okay look. On one side of the room there was a sleepy straight couple in hooded college sweatshirts and on the other a serious looking fat guy sketching a beautiful blonde with long veiny arms. She looked like a heroin addict or a modern dancer. All four people were completely absorbed in each other and didn’t notice me craning through the curtains like the head coming through the barn door on Picasso’s Guernica. I closed my eyes and saw an afterimage of blue veins: following that I saw the Nevermind baby in the pool, forever swimming after a dollar. Suddenly I didn’t feel like checking out the heated garden behind the kitchen, as was originally my plan. Maybe you were there, Sterling, reading “Savage Love” in a dingy, left over copy of The Voice and feeling avant-garde, but I couldn‘t be bothered with maneuvering past all those empty, lopsided little tables. Truth be told I was a little out of sorts. My breathing felt mechanical and my head felt woozy. The fireflies had grown in number. I stepped back outside and breathed deeply but silently until I recovered enough to walk the couple of blocks down to the shiny hall of the renovated girdle factory. Now it’s got a plastic sign over it that says “Mini-Mall”. I passed the bookstore with the cats and the plastic covered art and design tomes. I took a whiff of the peony and patchouli scented air inside the Tokyo style frock-shop and paused, unbearably light with Klonopin dulled regret beside the now vacant and locked store that used to sell Hip-hop toys, Belgian comics, and expensive Taschen gag books. There was some Japanese porn in there if you knew where to look, but what am I telling you that for--you probably bought the last of it, ya big... I went around the corner and ducked into other shops, where yeasty smelling boys and girls with meticulous bed-head wrapped $100 silkscreen t-shirts, antique lunchboxes, ironically designed patent leather change purses and other necessities in non-corporate, handmade paper. They carefully tied their parcels together with pashmina yarn and decorated them with twigs, glitter and brightly colored Himalayan beads. I ruffled through the neatly folded piles of extra small clothes and dug my fingernails into the twenty-dollar scented candles. Everything was sweet and casual and pleasantly pricey, but the crack in the dressing room mirror and the dead bug corpses gathered in the retro ceiling light fixtures seemed to belie the possibility of something swift and Godlike and deadly happening in the next second.

I looked for you on streets draped over with slanting afternoon sunlight. The air was crisp and cold--some early-late Fall shit. I put my hood on and leaned the crown of my head forward, like a boxer. I don’t know what I wanted from you, I just need to talk, or sleep or something. I went into another cafe and wrote on the bathroom walls with my pink pantone pen. I’m so excited, I can’t wait, to see you there went in a slight arch over the toilet paper dispenser. I’m so horny, but that’s o.k., my will is good…went to the left of the lime spotted sink.

Call me, OK? Ain't no love in the city.