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canes, with walkers, crutches, in wheelchairs, and crawling. Some are carried in, draped between two friends, feet dragging behind. One has a glass eye he keeps losing. One has FUCK YOU tattooed on the inside of his lower lip. A few have tears tattooed on their cheeks, which means they’ve killed someone. Some have scars from the corners of their mouths to their ears, which means they squealed. Many fingers are gone, or half gone, to heavy machinery or knife fights. Some earlobes have been nibbled off by rats. One guy was set on fire—now the burn scars rise up his neck like flames. A few of the old guys have hernias—their stomachs have fallen into their testicles, which now hang enormously between their legs. Kenny has had the same cough for five years, so he cannot sleep upstairs. At one point David’s teeth were giving him trouble, so he got a book on dentistry from the library and began to learn on himself. He opens his mouth and shows us, how he’d pulled out the infected tooth with pliers, super-glued tiny nails in its place.
    That first summer twenty or thirty guys could be sprawled out on the benches and floor of the Brown Lobby. We put a cap on the number we will allow in after nine, send the rest back into the night. As the nights get colder more men show up, and a temperature is agreed upon, maybe forty-five degrees, if it gets below that we won’t turn anyone away. The lobbies will be open and the men can wander in anytime. Still, some freeze to death outside, those that can’t make it back, those that forget there’s someplace to go. As fall becomes winter the numbers sleeping in each lobby increase, until by January there are a hundred, a hundred and fifty men sprawled out. Clusterfucked, now there’s nowhere to even put your foot—guys stake out corners, tabletops, benches, any square of open floor, and still more come, without anywhere to fall but on top of someone else, who yell and kick and punch the intruder off. Some end up playing cards and smoking beneath the gloom of an exit sign or in the shaft of light coming from the open door of the piss-soaked bathroom. Some wrap their bodies around their possessions and feign sleep. Some pace and mutter, bend to pick butts off the tile, their fingers orange with nicotine. Some piss themselves in their sleep, and the piss spreads out, soaking those unfortunate enough to be in proximity. The weekend supervisor calls himself “Captain Yusef,” and he calls the 3-to-11 the “Can-Do Shift.”
     
    After work we go out drinking, to the Rat or the Middle East or to Chet’s Last Call, to hear the Minutemen or the Pixies, the Del Fuegos or Galaxie 500. Motorhead or Flesh For Lulu. Or just to drink, to lean into each other and shout over the noise, to put our lips to each other’s ears, to see how it feels to be that close, another’s voice vibrating inside our brains, barely understood but enough. Enough to drive to her apartment after closing time and stay. And then the next afternoon we’re both back in the Brown Lobby, listening to the reading of the log. Only now I’d been in her room or she’d been in mine and we know more about each other, we’d seen each other naked or felt the other’s nakedness in the darkness and we’re both sheepish but charged up by it all and we know we’ll go out drinking again after the shift only maybe this time alone or maybe just go straight to her apartment.
     
    Often I feel like a glorified security guard, often a guest is asked to take a walk because there isn’t time to deal with him any other way. And if a guest begins to “escalate,” to “go off” (Look! here comes a walking fire!) , it threatens the whole building, poof , up in flames. Some days it feels like an unending play, a play that began from an idea, the idea of bending down to someone struggling, but that idea kept expanding, like some theory of the universe, until it grew so large that it will be impossible to ever stage. It has become nearly