Read South by South Bronx for Free Online

place so empty. The living room was all windows, curtainless. A furry recliner in front of the TV. A VCR lay a few feet away, snaking its cables along the wood floor like umbilical cords. At the foot of the chair a bottle, empty but still standing post.
    The bedroom used to be a dingy cream color. Once Mink saw words scrawled in black paint on the wall: YOU SPENT IT. Letters trailing paint in rivulets the way blood snakes along cracks in gravel. (Maybe a tequila joint dream?) The words had been painted over. It was all blue now, almost underwater but bright enough to include sunlight making the surfaces sparkle. It was an outdoor blue, a summer sky-blue, each time vaguely different: YOU SPENT IT. Or maybe Mink had dreamed the words, thinking of time SPENT doing nada and being SPENT or having SPENT himself doing nada , and he had done a lot of nada there. Talk and drinks and joints and a good place to end up after a party or maybe Alex was just inviting and he had three women who wanted to come along so
    (Monk sometimes partook of)—patchouli girls in sandals. Kisses full of air. That temporary anna joanna bobanna mindless endless fuck—Alex and Mink after laughing—Mink could never remember a single name and wondered if memory loss was contagious. The room was the same, but the bed, wasn’t the bed different? It hadn’t been floating in the middle of the room like it was now, almost like
    an island
    some land of enchantment land of some enchantment, some moment waiting to happen. Stolen, snatched, something that passed by. What had escaped him? How had so many years passed into nada ? How did he become thirty, how did his work become OLD SCHOOL? Though he had only killed time here on four or five occasions, he now felt the weight of time wasted, SPENT. Time that would not come back again. Brushes crispy dry. Oil paint flaking, old paper crinkling up. Time falls like a hammer.
    â€œShe’s still asleep,” Alex said.
    The woman lay amid sheets like a painting. Like renaissance, like a well-lit stage. Alex was saying something. His lips were moving but Mink didn’t hear a word. He was tripping island tripping time tripping PUERTO RICAN style which is from one hanging vine to the other, smooth and flow like Tarzan if Tarzan could be Puerto Rican, and why wasn’t he? After all, jungle, vines, loincloth—Mink was imploding, looking at this woman on this island of bed, floating in the empty nada . A time trip. Snaps from a book. A coily haired blonde frolicking in the woods. It was Eva Braun sleeping there, lying on a hundred-mile island like she washed up on shore after a SPENT life with a madman. Mink was painting the curve of her ass jutting up soft hills, valleys of a mussed sheet. Nothing covered her from him—stormy winds, cream vanilla flesh. Cherryred toenails. Scratches and cuts around her ankles (it had been a rough landing)—it’s Eva Braun, he thought, sleeping on the island. Last time all she got was a bunker and that acrid almond aftertaste. A ripoff, a scam, a horizon of barbed-wire detention camps. A multilayered concept of some towering dimensions overwhelmed Mink hurricane style. White black red armband and it figures she would be sleeping—giants always sleep when they find a nice crib, don’t matter who was lying there first, because to them maybe Puerto Ricans always appeared as inch-high Lilliputians
    (I don’t care what the story says, I DON’T WANT NO GULLIVER POPPING UP AROUND HERE! Giants are a problem. It’s not so much where they go, as the collateral damage they leave behind.)
    a ripoff a scam a tired slogan rolled out after a cataclysmic event, a whole train of thought. Mink walked slowly around, far to near, never too close, as if he could feel the invisible velvet rope. Could see every bit of her except for those bits Rubens covered with raiment and gossamer shit. She radiated words. Mink was looking at a painting. He was getting