I’m saying how frightened I was and he’s taking it all in; and
shit I can drink like any man, you know, I mean, I can drink, I
don’t fold, and I say I can outdrink him and he don’t think so
but I fucking do because he stops but he keeps ordering them
for me and I know I’m going to be crashing soon so I’m not
concerned, there’s nothing I have to do but sleep, alone,
warm , inside, and we get to his place and I ask for his keys and
he says he’ll open it because it’s hard and he opens it, it’s a lot o f
locks, it’s locks that slip and slide and look like they have jaw s,
they m ove and slide and spring and jum p, and the door finally
gets open and he says he’ll take me up and inside the door
there’s steps but first he locks the locks from inside, he locks
them with his keys and he says see this is how you do it when
you come in, don’t forget now, and he pockets the keys and I
think I have to remember to get them so when he leaves I’ll be
able to lock the door behind him, it’s unfamiliar to me and I
don’t want to forget, and then there’s the steps, these huge,
wood steps, these towering flights, these creaky, knotted
steps, these splintery steps, there’s maybe a hundred o f them,
it’s so high up you can’t see the top, so you go up the first
twenty or something and there’s a big, em pty room, more like
a baseball field, it’s not like an apartment building where
there’s other people on the first landing, there’s no one there
and it’s em pty, and there’s another twenty or thirty steps and
it’s knottier and there’s holes in the middle o f the steps and
you’re trying to get up them without looking like a fool or
falling and there’s another floor that’s some cavernous room
with canvases and boxes and it’s brown, all brown, stretched
canvases and paintings wrapped in brown paper for shipping
and huge standing spirals o f brown twine like statues and
brown masking tape and these vast rolls o f heavy brown tape,
the kind o f tape you have to wet and you use it to reinforce
heavy boxes, and there’s brown boxes, cartons, unfolded and
folded and there’s brown crates, it’s a kind o f dead brown
room, the air’s brown, not just dark but brown as if it’s
colored brown, as if the air itself is brown, and the walls and
the floor and everything in it is dull brown and it’s not a room
in the normal sense, in the human sense, it’s more like an
airstrip, and you keep climbing and then there’s this next
floor, it’s big like a fucking commercial garage or something
and it’s completely covered in paint, oil paint, you could park
a hundred cars in it but the whole floor is thick with dried red
paint, oil paint or acrylics you know, like the blob’s all dead
and it died in here, the paint’s fucking deep on the floor, it’s
shocking pinks and royal blues and yellows so bright they hurt
your eyes, I don’t mean the floor is painted like someone put
paint on a brush and used the brush to paint the floor or a wall
