Author’s Note: A small number of you will recognize this story, as it’s from the near-beginning of this tumblr. I am re-posting it for fun, because it’s one of the true ones and it took place in the bar where the reading is on Sunday.

“Matilda, you should dance with Justin.”

I hate my birthday.

I usually find some way to spend it at work and away from everybody. Except that tonight I wasn’t at the office, I was at my part-time job at the door of the bar. Right now, I was guarding it against nobody and using cigarettes to mark out the hours.

Early September and it still felt like August. Students were still away doing whatever it is they do when they aren’t here, tipping poorly and drinking Brooklyn lager for $3.

I found a way to make myself feel okay with telling people it was my birthday. Told myself that it was kind of a mean, angry thing to not tell them, and that I was being childish.

I gave myself permission. I convinced myself I was really doing it for them. Man, I’m full of shit.

Now, it’s never a good idea to get your bouncer drunk, but I guess there’s a special dispensation for birthdays. Whiskey was getting poured into me regularly by 11. We were all lucky nothing jumped off.

Shock and fucking awe, I started to have a good time. Enjoying the smiles over the thick edges of shot glasses. Last call arrived and we closed up shop, guiding the stragglers to the door.

Johnny was behind the bar, Matilda on the floor taking care of the tables.

And then Johnny says:

“Matilda, you should dance with Justin.”

I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because he really wanted to dance with her but had a girlfriend. Who knows why anybody does anything? Maybe he just wanted me to have a good time. Maybe he just wanted Matilda to have a good time.

Drunk, wonderfully drunk, I opened my arms and Matilda walked into them. Tom Waits came from the stereo and I’d never noticed before that night that “Innocent When you Dream,” is a waltz.

My arm went around her, and there was a tangible click. A soft yielding as her flesh connected to the muscle of my arm, and I pulled her close. There are few things in my life that have ever felt as right. Under the watchful eyes of the music and nobody, she tried to teach me to dance.

“C’mon, it’s just a box step.”

“A what?”

“A box step, here, I’ll show you.”

There’s magic in the world when a pretty girl with pretty tattoos is trying to teach you to dance on your birthday. An even greater magic rises when she laughs because she can’t stop leading, and you can’t learn the steps.

“Okay. Lets just two-step.” She gave up. I can’t dance, but I’d never stepped on a girl’s toes before that night.

We two-stepped, and when the song ended I swept her low to the ground and lifted her off her feet. She threw her head back, laughing and her legs wrapped around my waist. By the time I’d set her feet back on the ground I was in love.

Sometimes it happens that way, I guess.

Markie Day sucks cocks. So does Ayisha.

Reading material is limited in the holding cell of the prescinct on East 5th street in the East Village. It’s not like there’s an in-flight magazine, and while the graffiti lacked a certain variety, it was better than nothing. He did wonder how they snuck anything in here that could scratch or write on a wall.

The bars made eight-inch square boxes and extended ten feet all the way to the ceiling with the door set in the center on rusty hinges. In the upper right hand corner of the large cell was a camera.

A fat cop sat outside with the New York Times crossword puzzle. Four other of New York’s finest brought in at tall, skinny Latin guy.

“Got room?” They laughed until one of the cops looked inside and saw the kid.

“We’re gonna take this asshole upstairs and search him again.” He gave his prisoner’s arm a hard shake and the man didn’t react, just kept staring straight ahead as they took him away.

After twenty minutes they returned and dumped some things on the table.

“Can you believe this shit? We found fifteen bags, five heroin and ten coke in this clown’s ass. And a razor blade. A fucking razor!” The cops were laughing, two of them looked impressed. Then they opened the door and put him in the cell where he sat down on the bench as far away from the kid as he was able.

The kid watched him from the corner of his eye, figuring he could climb the bars if his new roommate made a move.

Instead, the man spoke to him. “What they get you for?”

Turning his head, the kid answered. “Skateboarding.”

A long pause hung.

“You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“I wish I was. Why? What they get you for?”

“Assault with a deadly weapon, armed robbery and possession with intent.”

“Jesus Christ, the fuck did you do?”

“Beat an old lady with a pipe and took her purse.

The kid shut his mouth because, really, what do you say to some shit like that? The cops, who were all sitting down and looking inside the cell, started talking to the Latin guy.

“Yo, I see that crown on your leg, papi.” The cop was white and put a disrespectful twist on the pet name.

“Yeah? So?”

“You repping Latin Kings?”

“Why don’t you come on in here and find out, pig?”

The kid stares straight ahead, hoping that they let him go before they decided to come in the cell and throw the man a boot party. The shit-talk flew back and forth until they got bored and left the room. An hour after that, they came and told the kid to get the fuck out of here and keep out of trouble. The kid, grateful that they decided not to book him and take him to the Tombs, gets up and turns to his cellmate.

“Yo, man. Good luck, aiight.”

“No doubt, son. You too.”

The man holds out his hand and the kid gives him a pound. At the front desk he asks the desk cop where his skateboard is.

“You’re lucking to be getting outta here. Hit the fucking bricks.”

As he leaves the prescinct, a six-hour sweating behind him, he hopes that when the cops do enter that cell, the man gets in a couple good shots before they beat him down.

At the bar, between the negative spaces of an empty stool on both sides, I try to remind myself that everything isn’t meaningless because there’s nobody I love in either of them. There’s only so much silence I can wash down at once and these days the doses are deeper than the contents of a rocks glass.

A sweet, liquid yellow rose that catches fire in the back of my throat and I say a small gratitude that my craving for a cigarette is intellectual not animal. The jungle is alive tonight and as I warm my cold blood in the sun of the track lights, I’ve got too much company.

“I know the former editor of Nylon magazine.”

“Is it transgendered? I don’t wanna go to that strip club and end up making out with a shemale.”

“That’s transvestite.”

“No it isn’t. That’s when all they have are tits.”

“No, not him, the editor before him.”

I wish I could plug my ears to drown them all out, all the others. High and loud and at this moment so very interesting. They don’t speak to each other, they squawk and bleat and their eyes never meet. I have been them, they have been me, perhaps even in the space of a single night. I think about those men born as women and their fake tits and about the hearts that beat beneath them and I wonder why nobody ever talks about that.

Then I am glad I have my ears open because that song comes on the radio, you know the one. And as I sing along in a whisper, I hear voices from two others sitting nearby join mine. All of us, an under-the-breath chorus that is remembering something even if it’s just the lyrics, but from the way we all stare down into our glasses, I think it’s more than that.

It’s a piece of wind-tumbled street trash when he picks it up off the sidewalk, a small partial hoop of metal. Probably finished aluminum, but it shone a bit like dirty brass. Turning it in his hands, his cell phone conversation uninterrupted, he takes it back to his chair by his fruit stand and continues to speak into his ear piece, turning the piece of metal over and over in his dark, rough hands.

It’s a piece of wind-blown street trash when he picks it up, but perhaps it wants to be something else.

He reaches into a battered backpack by his chair and comes out with a glue-gun and a plastic bag full of beads. Not cheap, shiny ones like girls of a certain age use to decorate their cell phone cases and jean jackets, but of fired clay from another time, another place. Rough hands turn the metal scrap. His eyes rake it down and across as if he is reading it. Taking up the glue gun, he begins to decorate, setting the tiny beads in pattern and interval.

Customers come to his stand and he sets down his project, he smiles and sells them fruit. His features never crease in frustration and jokes and laughter pass over fruit and money as he sells to regulars from the nearby office buildings. When they leave, he returns to his chair and his labor.

Soon the partial hoop is thick along the sides and thicker at the top with a weaving pattern of blue, yellow and terra-cotta beads, a beam of sun between ocean and earth.

Smiling at it, he moves it back and forth through the air to dry the glue and then places it with care inside the bag along with the glue gun and the beads, a wind-blown piece of street trash no longer. That night he’ll give it to his youngest daughter, the one still impressed that her father comes home from the city with such treasures and that they’re all for her.

Samuel Ringleader the Third learned his trade from a shut-in who lived on the entire top floor of a tenement on Suffolk Street in the heart of the Fourth Ward.

Running. That was Samuel knew best. He was small at his age, and slim. Not much use in a fight though he was fast and so his feet were of more use than a blade. Running was what he was doing when he met the shut-in, running from a fat shop keeper and clutching two apples. He wished that he could trust his pockets to the precious fruit but they wouldn’t fit and there were more holes than cloth in them anyway.

He shook the man in a confusion of traffic, running out into the path of two crossing carriages and sliding beneath the wheels of one. He felt his pants rip and the skin flay off his thigh, but the apples were still in his grasp and when he popped out the other side of the street like a weasel from a hole, he saw the shopkeeper walking away.

“Asshole.” The boy muttered and hoped that his shop was getting looted in the man’s absence. Samuel walked to a stoop and sat, hunching over the fruit and eating in large bites, grinding the stems and the seeds between his teeth.

Behind him, the door opened and a soft voice said, “Nicely done, youngster.”

Samuel snapped a look over his shoulder, but didn’t stop chewing. “Yeah, thanks.” He peered into the gloom of the tenement hall, but the man was too far inside.

“Lotta effort for two apples.”

“When’s last time you’us hungry?” Samuel answered around cheeks puffed with sweet, green apple.

“Better ways to steal, son.”

“Ain’t yer son.” Samuel got to his feet. “Why you hiding in there?”

“Because of that.” An arm reached out of the gloom and pointed in a vague direction of up.

Samuel looked and saw the outside, the sky between the tops of the buildings.

“What’re you talking about?”

“I’m afraid of the sky.”

Samuel laughed. “Who the fuck’s afraid of the sky?”

“More things in this world than you can imagine, boy.”

Samuel thought about this. “Yeah, okay.” And started to walk away.

“Can teach you a better way to steal. Better things than fruit.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Show me your hands.”

Samuel extended his slender fingers at the end of thin hands and slender wrists.

“Catch.” A pebble came out of the gloom and Samuel snatched it from the air without thinking.

“Come upstairs, boy. I’ll teach you what I know.”

“What you want from me?”

“Lost my last apprentice.”

“Crushers?” Samuel asked, wondering if the poor bastard was languishing in the Tombs with the others caught by the city’s fledgling law.

“Stabbed to death on Baxter Street.”

“Oh.” Samuel muttered.

“Here’s the deal, boy. I teach you a trade, you bring back what you earn. We both make money.”

Samuel walked forward, shiftng the blade he carried and came out of the daylight into the gloom. The man was old, older even than Samuel’s father though it had been a moment since the boy had even seen him.

“I’m Edward.” The man said and extended his hand, in it he held the boy’s dirk that he had been carrying behind his belt. “Lesson one, keep that in a sheath and keep a better watch over it.”

Samuel, embarrassed but fascinated, put away his knife and followed the slender, middle-aged man up the stairs to the top floor. All of the windows were hung with black cloth except for one. The place was bare. No furniture except a bed. In the center of the main room was a man-shaped figure, hung all over with small bells.

“Lets see just how bad you are, boy. Empty those pockets and don’t let me hear so much as a tinkle when you do.”

In this way, and many others that nobody shall ever be sure of, Samuel Ringleader the Third learned to be one of the finest thieves in Lower Manhattan.