I sleep close with the other sleepers each in turn...

Last night, I attended a party with M., a friend who would wish to remain anonymous if she knew I were writing of her here. She's a fellow graduate student: smart, willfull, and beautiful. And she's recently begun seeing a bartender and "Philadelphia hipster" who lives in Old City. He is 32, has brown hair (dyed black when I met him), a toothsome smile, and large dark eyes (a little tired, but kind). For all I know, he'd make a perfect boyfriend (and I saw nothing to suggest the contrary). Still, before the party ended, I had turned to M. and whispered that I thought she could - simply put - do better.

Of course, that judgement, so "simply put," is anything but simple. And, for many reasons, is anything but fair. And yet I make it, and am - as I mean to suggest in this sleepy posting here - likewise made by it.

There's much I might cite - ready signs not easy to misconstrue - to describe Rich (for that's the name I'll give him in my blog). His smile, his friends, his dress, his history (or what he gave me of it), and the tastes that he professed. But they signal too clearly, illuminate too well, and there is little room amongst them in which to situate myself. I use that metaphor, that word room, without innocence. For it's Rich's room, after all, that I'd like to conjure here tonight.

It has dark blue walls (a window) and a door with an old-fashioned hook-lock. A bed, a table, a dresser. In or near the center there is a large box of a TV (upon which sits a model of the X-Men's Gambit). An X-Box and a tall stack of games beside it. There is, on a shelf, a collection of Transformers (the action-figures) arranged in lines. And other figurines too, the details or names of which escape me. In the corner by the foot of the bed there are two beautiful electric guitars, propped in their stands, and a rectangular amp in front of them. And above all, I should note the odds and ends, ephemera, the debris of life: papers, change, photos, magazines. It could have been the bedroom of my childhood, except my bedroom was often carefully arranged, had an antique writing desk near its center, and was - from as early as I can remember - overcrowded with books. In Rich's room, as I observed in surprise last night to M., there was not a single visible book.

What I mean to suggest in this description - and what the experience from which it is formed suggested to me - is likely obvious, and I will not write it here. It was obvious, I imagine, to M. as well, who - as we sat on the bed for a moment - identified each object aloud as my vision passed over them. Obvious perhaps - and yet she stayed, found me a cab at the end of the night and returned to that bed alone. She was happy - till the morning at least - in his room. And not in spite of it.

All day long, meditating on M. and this room, I've been envisioning another's with it: Kenny's room. A room I've never seen but in a single photograph snapped in 1979. Kenny's room is small, much smaller than Rich's - and messier. The stack of games is replaced by a pile of clothes, the guitars a turntable. The debris that's gathered is much the same, though more compacted perhaps. And the deep blue of Rich's walls is instead here a grimy brick, across which hangs a sheet or tapestry of blazing, patterned red. In the photo, the sheet, like a curtain, is folded back, and beneath it - an object on display - is Kenny, asleep without blanket or pillow. Asleep without coverings or clothes. Where today is Kenny (if, that is - unlike so many of Nan Goldin's early subjects - he lives today at all)? Does his life (or does his death) still bear the room for such sleep, or at least such sleep as I see there?

My judgement, simply put, stands, as it always has, in question. And the words, as they do, move and multiply. Room becomes room; sleep becomes sleep; Rich, rich, M., am. They double upon each other, make games with my desire. And I hear them - write them as I hear them - and others like them, whether in the day or in the night, alone or in company, on the street or in my apartment where each space is a space for the printed word. I hear them, as I do tonight, as they congregate in patterns, novel and familiar, old:

Pier that I saw dimly last night when I looked from the windows,
Pier out from the main, let me catch myself with you and stay . . . . I will not chafe you;
I feel ashamed to go naked about the world,
And am curious to know where my feet stand . . . . and what is this flooding me, childhood or manhood . . . . and the hunger that crosses the bridge between.