the hell storm and Saint Ann’s Warehouse had canceled all shows due to the flood overflow of water from the East River. Lenny, the promoter, was an unfortunate casualty, so there was no following him to another club to get gigs. Apparently, he died trying to salvage however many bottles of cheap liquor he could, but overstacked the cases in the tiny back hallway and they collapsed on him like one of those unlucky hoarders on cable. He always said he’d die in that place. Lenny turned out to be a prophet. Even though Cecilia couldn’t stand him, he did give her a place to play, a chance, and for that, she was saddened by the news. Maybe because she realized she was the one who probably knew him best. A sad circumstance for them both, she concluded.
That night, the night she left Sebastian, she squeezed into a turnstile with a guy, piggybacking his Metrocard, gaining access, and a bruise on the ass, at the Jay Street station. She played guitar for change and then maintained her routine of buying a bottle and sandwiches for Bill at the corner bodega—he liked their cuts of meat and would eat only from there. He was a beggar, and a foodie. An unlikely combination, but then again, so was Bill. The most sophisticated, fey man she’d ever met, always dressed for something. “You never know when the end will come, or the beginning,” he would say. She grabbed a shower at the Y and popped into her staple vintage shop, owned by a girl named Myyrah, an up-and-coming designer, straight out of F.I.T., who dressed her for shows. She loved Cecilia’s style and often took credit for her design ideas. She used CeCe for fashion shoots, as a muse, and in exchange, Cecilia got handmade, one-of-a-kind clothes. She picked up some things to wear, threw them in her guitar case, and then applied some of Myyrah’s makeup before heading directly home, to the roof, to Bill.
“Well, look what the dubious devil dragged in,” Bill said, looking up and seeing Cecilia standing there like a long lost soul mate that he thought he might not have ever seen again. “Our Lady of Snow.”
He didn’t ask her if she was holding, aside from the snow reference, which he knew she’d pick up on if indeed there were anything to give. He was relieved to just see her. For a junkie, that meant everything.
“How did you survive the tornado up here?” she asked, but what she really wanted to know was How did you survive without me?
“Cockroaches and junkies,” he said in his slurry, crackled voice, “always survive.”
She was comforted by that, as he knew she would be.
“They’ve been looking for you,” he said stoically, sincerely, concerned.
Cecilia was used to this kind of “out of mind” talk from him, but what she wasn’t used to was his sincerity and intensity when he said it. It was like he was twenty years younger and completely sober. A flash of a man who used to be. Someone who cared for her beyond his exterior and weaknesses. Beyond drugs.
“They won’t find you here,” he said. “I’ll make sure of that.”
She gave him his sandwich and then a bottle of cheap whiskey. He barely came up for air, thirsty for the bottom of that bottle.
“Easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get a rich man into heaven,” he said, realizing that Cecilia didn’t have any money but still managed to bring him food and drink. It always meant something to him, but now, it meant even more.
As the night fell, she told him everything. She confided in him, every intimate detail of what happened in the church. What they saw, what she experienced, what she felt. About Sebastian.
He hung on her every word. Every detail, as if he were taking a verbal shoot-up through his veins. He dared not ask anything, for fear that she would lose her train of thought and forget a morsel of detail. He watched her lips and felt butterflies in his stomach as if they were two girls talking at a sleepover.
“Why didn’t you bring some of that shit home?” Bill asked at the end of the story, insisting that Sebastian had likely slipped the three of them some major hallucinogens like the ones Bill once got on the street right across from the hospital that housed Sebastian in the psych ward. Cecilia felt betrayed by Sebastian, but at