Leap

If you were 18 or 20 years-old and living in the mid eighties in New York and if you were in my skin and in my shoes and in my heart you were a club kid when clubs were kings and queens of New York and you were in one called The Fun House this one night and you were with your bud, Adolfo, same age, and each of you were sweat-dancing frenetically with a gal each from Ozone Park who each spoke to the two of you as if we were one by saying "youz guys" this and "youz guys" that and you all four sat in some stairs in the club and one of the gals with green blue eyes the size of stars slipped you a cigarette after she took a deep whiff from it which was unusual but who is you to question a gal in whose pants you want to get into that night and so you too took a big whiff of it it and it tasted sweet and half an hour later Adolfo and you were still sitting there on the same spot and the gals were gone and he is laughing out loud and telling you you just moved the foot of this big black guy with your hands and that the big dude was looking at you like you had two heads but got up and walked away and then next thing we know is we are walking really slow on 8th Avenue or no wait 10th Avenue and it is dawn and you plastered your back to a wall because you are seeing this gigantic hole at your feet all the way down to some center of the earth as if you were on the very edge of such precipice but for half a foot of ground at the wall and as soon as you relay what you are seeing sure enough your pal Adolfo starts seeing it too (or was it vice-versa?) and you have no idea how you managed to peel off yourselves from that wall when the sun was already hitting your faces with the hardness of late July in New York and you both jumped into a yellow cab and decided to spend the day at your place because your mom is traveling and all you two could do that day was to lie on the carpet in the living room and stare at the ceiling and somewhere in the afternoon you both start to come out of it somehow without food or any need for water all day and Adolfo turns half-laughing and tells you with a heavy Colombian accent, "Youz guys, that was was Angel's Dust." And you both laugh because that is what you do.

And if you were still in my skin almost a year later to that date you opened your bedroom closet and this bolt of micro-second flashback explodes into your eyes like a flash of lighting and into your head so you once again felt that entire one-day-trip so highly compressed in the span of a microsecond in your head you almost fell but for both your hands clutching the doorknob as any man clings to driftwood out in the middle of the ocean.

And this photograph of this guy about to walk down a flight of stairs my camera did not register in this picture reminded you of my younger self that day and that rabbit hole to the almost center of the earth. You see it, right? And there is unlimited freedom to anything you feel in life when you are 18 or 20 years old and you are waiting for that girl in a corner in Queens one evening many days later. 

Her name was Donna, the girl with the blue-green or green-blue eyes who hung that number on you and Adolfo, yes you, that night, only to float away into the ether with her friend.

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