He was a nice guy, who'd taken me in after my brother bought a condo after we'd lived together in a one bedroom basement on the street for ten years.  The guy had been through a hard time.  I was friendly with his sister, a sweet quiet woman who approved of my interest in the feral cats of the street.  Her cancer had returned.  He'd sent me a nice card with a sailing ship on it, when I had to put down Arlo the cat who got sick from the feline leukemia.  I moved in, depressed, saddened by the end of a chapter, and I had a new cat at this point, Miss Kitty.  Dan and Anna had gotten her from a feral litter in the backyard of their original fixer upper on Mozart.  She fit in my hand when I first took her home, a tortoise shell calico, runt of the litter.

My new neighbor was very good to me.  We were both quiet guys.  And we'd go about our monkish lives.  I worked the bar at a place called the Austin Grill back then.   I really just wanted to--as I still do--collect information and write about it, or just write, but wasn't moving so fast at it, and a copy boy runner job at the Washington Post, even those were rare back then in the early 90s.  He'd save me articles, leaving them out for me, one of a large picture of Lance Armstrong riding up the road to Sestriere, in the 1999 version of the Tour de France.

It was still the quiet street, and rather than move into the basement, he suggested I take the first floor.  And there was good in that we could be here together.  Looking out for each other, even from different planes.

But then, around the edges, things got to be a little bit weird.  I called him once in his office, a friendly check in.  "Are you hard," he asked me.  Once I was visiting with him upstairs, early on, and he confided to me that we were like two prisoners, together here.  He was embarrassed, but wanted to suggest that we could ease each others burdens, in an intimate way.  Oh.  Okay.  I don't blame him.  That's just the way it was.  And I write, as one always does, merely as a way of shining a light and trying to find some form of "truth."

And then came the "I know what you do," implying he knew of a colorful nightlife, sexual in nature, all takers, speaking with a certainty, my secret homosexual wild insatiable pleasure. There were now rumors around his place of work, in this small town of Washington, implying something about me, and in some way about him, so he said.  "I know what you do."  Sure.  Meanwhile I'd probably been at some shitty old dive bar, after my shitty and grueling shift, for which I never got enough thanks, Austin Grill, next door at the old Grog & Tankard.  We couldn't afford to go to JP's the strip joint, too loud and too much stress anyway.   The Grog had live music, and some of it was actually quite legendary.  Ben Andrews.  Rest his soul.

He'd frequently be quite a guy, kind, he had a sense of humor...  But there seemed a lot at stake, my being there...  And I couldn't afford to move.  I had this job, as a bartender, and I figured it let me maintain my position as being some sort of writer, figuring out something along the lines of Buddhism.

And then later on, much later, I didn't really know what to make of it all.  I tried to get out, as he suggested I should, but then he would be very kind again, retracting...  then changing his mind again.  The gentle guy, a kind person, a decent man who, after all, was trying to help me out, had helped me out financially, no doubt about it, but then changing his mind, as it were... We had the Tour together, our old Celeste Bianchi bicycles, our calico cats, our interest in spiritual matters.  Read the Psalms, he would write in his notes to me, and he meant it.  He had an impressive and quite real interest in the Great War;  he'd been to the Somme.  Ypres.  He'd make a pilgrimage just about every year, and he'd always send me a post card and then tell me about it when he got back.  He'd been through things with the family deaths left at his doorstep.

And then he retired.

Toward the end, he helped me buy a guitar, an Epiphone Casino, not the Gretsch I might have secretly preferred, but a decent hollow body guitar--for that Beatles sound--at a good price.  By the time it arrived, around the July Fourth holiday, with my mother just coming into town, he calls me upstairs, after a knock on the door.  Because of me, he implies, his family has disowned him, alienated.  Again, I must leave.  He looks at me, somehow satisfied, perhaps it seemed to me, of putting me on the spot, just so I cannot much enjoy my mother's visit.  I have to listen to him now, because he's talking about my future, which is now suddenly very real, after all this lull of literary accumulation, piles of manuscripts, beautiful notes we'd write back and forth...  Our mutual following the Tour, the Tour de France.

Before that he had offered to help me with a small surgery, offering to take me down to GW Hospital.  My brother calls and insists, having connections at the hospital.  He's coming up from the basement with his laundry basket.  The Pope is in town, I'm heading out to try to go see the Pope down by Saint Matthew's.  I explain it to him, how my brother wants to take me in.  "Fine, fine," he says.  Later that day, I'm back and watching Pope Francis's homily when the knock on the door comes...  "Let's just wrap all this up by the end of the year," he tells me.

Finally, it all came to an end.  And then I was out on my own.  Without much time to prepare for a big move after living where I'd been for twenty years....


I do my yoga now.  There is sun again now.  I take long walks, down to the great river, and sometimes out along the old towpath along the canal.


Just about the nicest fellow, a teacher, a most gentle being.  But I don't talk to him anymore.  So it goes.

We all deserve forgiveness.  We all must take care.