It was hot and muggy when we pulled up to the brownstone at 73 West 71st Street. My cousin, L, helped me lug my suitcases and backpacks up the winding stairs to the top: Apartment 3A. The long narrow room was just small enough for me to touch the walls when I stretched my arms out. Tiny does not even begin to describe it. A sink. A four burner gas stove. A butler refrigerator whose top was the room's total counter space. A loft bed whose ladder kept you from opening the front door all the way. A shrunken bathroom that made you step over the toilet to get to the shower. A small square of linoleum just large enough to open a butterfly chair in under a floor to ceiling window that looked over King Gyro below and then south to all of lower Manhattan.
Among the things you left behind (that you could not carry to Atlanta where you would play a German tourist in a Tennessee Williams play): A pocket collected works of Shakespeare, a stereo I would break when I sent it to you in the mail at Christmas, and a laminated piece of paper with the rent on it that I would lose before I sent the first check.
It was a move that changed my life forever and that was changed more by all that happened in the world the next day.
But from the get-go, I felt we were roommates even though you were never home.
