I drifted for a while—evicted, sleeping on park benches, air mattresses (half a year in a laundry room—$100 a month for the privilege); I stole little notebooks from the university bookstore and filled them with grim thoughts, suicidal urges, lust, material longings; anywhere I slept I could hear the night trains, under which so many suicides happened, especially in the late ’90s, with the high schoolers doing it. Someone improvised a memorial in a warehouse overlooking the tracks—nine yellow angels taped to the windows, one for each kid. For me those times passed. A man who remembered my parents gave me work; I didn’t drink so hard; I got housed with two roommates, chipped in for groceries, bought notebooks and wrote stories, bad ones. The ideas were there, but not style or economy, though I didn’t know that; I wasn’t reading enough. Leon said to read Huysmans and lent me his battered Against Nature, riddled with bookstore stickers and stars scribbled next to key sentences; the prose was too dense for me then, but I recognized something Leon had said in a bar once: “I must rejoice beyond the bounds of my time, though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness know not what I mean”—it was the epigraph. Leon had nearly a decade on me but it didn’t feel that way; he wore old, good clothes that hung a little big on him; he was restless as hell: he filled his notebooks, chapter after chapter—a novel, so he claimed, about a gentleman in 1920s Paris, an elderly man, a vampire with a waxed mustache, frock coat, quizzing glass, an anachronistic character fifty years out of date. He’d lived too long, his friends were dead, time no longer mattered to him; he stayed in Paris out of sheer habit, much as he continued to drink blood though it had become a drab, perfunctory meal. His last remaining pleasure lay in the vanity he derived from his collection of books and curios; he’d spend weeks awaiting some rare volume he’d ordered. That anticipation became the rhythm of his life, the only thing that kept him from drawing the curtains of his bed for good. We hung out at first, at the bar especially, but Leon grew overwhelming with his talk about craft and his relationship with his parents, and how his father nearly strangled him once. Then our other roommate moved out and I had to start covering Leon’s share of the utilities, too, so I began avoiding him. I spent more time with a woman who became my girlfriend. Often, if I came home during the day, he’d be on the couch, practically naked, typing with the door open to let in air. “Are you eating?” I’d ask, trying not to sound pissed; then I’d drive him to Burger King or Taco Bell and we’d pick up applications with the food. He got a job at McDonald’s. He missed rent that same month. It’ll be just a week late, he said—just until the check comes. When the week was up, he knocked on my door and held out a quarter. “Call it.” “Heads,” I said. “Again.” “Heads.” “Again.” “Heads.” “Fuck,” he said. An hour later, I passed his open door and peeked in: there he was, on his mattress, with a plastic bag belted over his head. “No, no,” I said, “why?” Well, he was broke, he said, he got fired from McDonald’s after just a couple days, he lied about going back, no check was coming, he hadn’t found more work, he was deep in debt to me, his dad, everybody, he was thirty, he was a bad writer. “I can cover you a few more days,” I said, and he said shit, he could never pay me back. I said that was bullshit, I’d drive him around for more applications, drive him to a donation center—had he ever sold plasma? He had not, but he was willing—he held out his wrists—he was willing, if I sat with him. So I stayed with him for over two hours, trying not to look pissed while he talked about how there’s a limit—a point you reach simply by living long enough, and then you’re just yourself, you’re always the same from then on—and kept his eyes on the ceiling as the machine separated the plasma and looped the blood back in.