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said.
    â€œIt’s a sick thing,” Kit confided. “I don’t know what to do about it, but she’s pretty helpful to the band.”
    â€œThey don’t have to live with her.”
    â€œNo, you’re right,” she said with a wistful shake of her head. “I wish Betty could get her shit together. She’s a mess.”
    I felt sympathetic but it was time for me to leave. “It’s good to talk to someone who has their shit together,” Kit said as I was going out the door.
    I felt embarrassed. I was a bigger mess than they were, but I guess it didn’t show as much. I could always put up a front. It was my only natural talent.
    â€œI’m not so together,” I told her. I felt strangely compelled to be honest. “I started out a writer, I wrote plays. Now I cook in restaurants and sell drugs for my roommate. I don’t do much of anything worth noticing.”
    â€œI bet you’re a really good writer,” Kit said with a confidence I never owned. “I’d really like to read what you’ve done.” Her sincerity made me blink.
    â€œI’ll show you something,” I promised. “Whenever I get around to doing it again.” I didn’t want to talk about that.
    She brought me to a closet and pulled out a black brushed-velvet pinstriped suit that she said didn’t fit her. Sylph, the singer in her band, had made it. She made a lot of their clothes. “Why don’t you try it on,” Kit said shyly. I thought it looked too small. “No, try it,” she said. I did and it was perfect: snug jacket, narrow legs, totally rock ’n’ roll.
    â€œKeep it,” she said. “I want you to have it.” This embarrassed me, too. From what I could see, she didn’t have much to give away, even if she was semi-famous.
    Kit had come on the scene sometime in the 1970s, with a band that set a new standard for New York punk rock. She hadn’t known much about playing guitar, but what she didn’t know she invented. I’d seen articles about her in the Times and write-ups in every punk news rag there was. She was given featured roles in a couple of underground movies too—arty, low-budget, feminist super-8s. People were watching her. She had fans. Great things were expected. Now I was wearing her suit. Who says fashion is frivolous? Putting on those clothes changed my life.

JUST A CHIP
    It was hard to go straight home after work, every night, alone. I had to unwind, and in the after-hours bars a girl could get pretty loose. Sometimes I stayed in Sticky’s office, doing lines of coke while he and Rico counted money and talked about their wives. Their wives were always on their case; these guys were married to the store. Flint was a bachelor, but he had the cancer to deal with. It gave him moments of excruciating pain, so at closing time he’d give himself a poke in the rear with Dilaudid and go home to sleep it off.
    I was there to give Big Guy a little space at home, but a couple of nights a week he went to the Mineshaft and the Anvil and the Crow’s Nest, waterfront bars with steamy back rooms and unlit basements where a guy could get it on man-to-man. I never asked what actually went on there, I didn’t want to know. There are rules of privacy I think roommates should respect.
    On Saturday nights Big Guy and I went home together and sat up with the Sunday Times crossword, trading tales of the week about people at Sticky’s. “I love New York,” he’d say, whenever we called it a night. Then one day in the Post , there was a headline about the spreading “gay cancer,” an infection that attacked homosexual men who took it up the ass. It was killing them by the dozen. I was certain Big Guy was more the voyeur, but this story made him squirm. He grew remote and forgetful. “I’m shipping out,” he said at last. Every day he went to the union hall to wait for a