The Alleyway

This narrow alleyway was renamed for a famous author on the tenth anniversary of his death. On most days you will find his mistress parked there on a plastic milk crate, her face swollen by bargain spirits. She charges five bucks for a look-see at two love letters the famous author wrote her when the going was good and he was away. The papers are heavily creased and strung together in some places by yellowing Scotch tape, but the handwriting , the pitched H’s and anemic A’s , if you follow such things, is unmistakenly his.

In one letter, he gripes about the blandness of the egg sandwiches at an artists’ colony in upstate New York where he is holed up for the winter, and refers to her genitals fondly as his kitty-cat, at which point you look up at his mistress, hoping to see a shadow of beauty play through the wreck of her face, a delicateness that surely must have been hers for the great author to have expended his prodigious talents on, however prosaic the content.

A few months ago she began insisting that customers don latex gloves before handling the letters, the same kind the girls who work the registers wear in Chinatown. If you spend longer than two minutes reading the letters, she will pluck them from your grasp like the guillotine door at the peep show. You will turn away, but be drawn back by her offer to have a stroke of a hat with a nutria fur shell, the same one the author wore in the photo that accompanies the first edition of Velvet Bombs.