“This would be circa - pronounced “cheer-ka” in Italian; it’s the same spelling - the 1930’s. We had a lot of young men on my block in the Bronx; Belmont Avenue between 181st and 182nd Street. We hung out in different groups; the younger with younger, the older with the older. On one side of the street were apartment buildings, and on the other were brownstones. We were sitting on the steps in front of the Florios’ brownstone. About ten, fifteen guys. Mixed ages. Just to set the scene. Now, you must remember these are different people, some going to school, some with no jobs. If you had a part-time job, it was the parents, not us, really. But things were bad.

Now, there’s a story about my shoes if you like that. My shoes flapped open. If you had a hole in your shoe, you found a piece of cardboard and you made an outline of the shoe with a pencil so it would fit in the shoe. And that would serve for a few hours. By the way, my socks had holes in them all over, too, because I was walking on concrete. But then after that it progressed to the point that the sole itself separated from the shoe entirely. It flapped in the front entirely. Now, I went to school that way. Elementary school. Grade five or six. That’s just the way things were, you weren’t ashamed or anything.

Now, I had a teacher in my class, a nice older lady and she would read everyday. Nobody’s Boy. It was a pathetic book; things were always very depressing in those days. The kid in the story was nobody’s boy. Exactly what it meant. The class was always silent because the book hit them in the gut. Now, one day she put down the book and said, “Anthony, can i see you after class?” And I was a bit of a pain in the ass and I thought I did something wrong. I threw spitballs and whatnot. Now, my father never hit me, but I would get a stern talking to sometimes and I was afraid that would happen. So the class left and I stayed in my seat and she called me up and said, “Anthony, I would like you to come with me to Tremont Avenue. I’d like to buy you a pair of shoes.”

It hit me like a shot in the head. I didn’t even answer. I got up and ran away. I was embarrassed by it all. I saw her the next day, and she didn’t even mention a word. She knew she struck a nerve. This was one of the episodes that happened in the dark days of the depression on Belmont Avenue.

Now, on Belmont Avenue, I was known as some sort of - at the age of 13 or 14 - they called me The Professor. I knew about things that most kids didn’t care about. I was an artist, I drew aeroplanes with the names of the plane and the types of planes and the engine — I had a book of ‘em in my pocket. Plus i worked in the pharmacy and I got a dollar a week. I loved to work in the pharmacy because Harry Goldman - he owned the pharmacy - was a very nice guy and I would sit in the store and read books. He was Jewish and came from a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. But there was a pharmacy at the corner of 181st and it was owned by Silverman. And Goldman bought the pharmacy from Silverman.

Now, this poor Jewish young man was in a neighborhood that was ninety-percent Italian. A lot of people came in and they didnt speak English; they were all from Italy. So he liked having me there. He said, “Tony I’ll give you a dollar a week. If you want to fill up some bottles of cough medicine and put the labels on, I’ll watch what youre doing, you’ll be ok.”

He figured I was a kid he could rely on. I never told the kids I made a buck a week, they thought i made five or ten. But anyway. One day, this younger man, about ten or eleven - he lived on the next block where the fire department had a house between 182nd and 183rd Street - but he came down my block because it was more interesting, I guess. One day he came down and looked upset and I said, “Hey, whatsa matter?”

He said, “You know, I don’t like to go to school.” So I said, “Well, what do you do?”

He said, “I play hooky, I sneak into the movie house.” I said, “How often do you do that?”

He said, “Three or four times a week. I tell the teacher I’m sick, I have a sore throat. For a couple weeks. She said she wants to speak to my parents.”

Now, he came to me because, obviously, I’m The Professor. He thought I could solve this problem. I said, “Don’t go back to school tomorrow and say you have a sore throat; a sore throat might last two or three days, but you gotta come up with something better. Tomorrow you gotta say, before you see my parents, you have to know that im suffering from chronic appendix. Because, if it’s chronic, you cant go bouncing around, you can hardly walk. You say, the doctors are watching it to see if they have to operate. So he said OK.

I saw him a few days later and he was much worse, his chin was on the floor. And I said, “Whatsa matter?”

He said, “I’m in more trouble. The teacher asked me why I didn’t come to school, and I said, ‘I’m suffering from chronic independence.’ He didn’t know the difference! So the teacher says, you go down to the principal and tell him that. So he went down the principal and told him what happened and the principal wanted to see his father. And now he was in big trouble with the teacher, the principal, and his father because he didn’t understand “appendix” from “independence.”

Now, that’s a true story. You think I would make up that story? Whatever I tell you, it’s 100% true. No bullshitting.”

Doesn’t matter who you were fucking last night. Man, she could have been eighteen years old, with nipples as hard and juicy as the mouths of whiskey bottles and a body that swallowed you whole and kept you in the dark with a tallow candle like how the Leviathan swallowed Jonah until he was ready to repent.

Or maybe he was one of those strong, smoldering punk kids, the kind who fucks for ten separate schizophrenic personalities and who is always ready with another magic condom and another dirty story like some kind of Vaudeville comedian. Maybe it was a couple: a scared little Midwestern pair of honeys who needed a bed for the night and who said they were into what you were into, and you agreed, even though you found out pretty quick that they were lying out their sweet coupled-up-in-love asses.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter how sweaty, dirty, and evil you got last night, and it doesn’t matter what you penetrated and for how long. When you wake up, it’s always the same old drag.

You have to see what the world did and you have to do something back.

You hope last night’s paramour/s will sleep for awhile, because then you can softly pad to your computer and tap your mouse to wake it up and check your “inbox,” your “alerts,” and your “feeds.” You can see what blew up. You can see who declared war and what celebrity got caught skinning cats to masturbate with the furry, warm bloodsleeves.

You can see what new books are out. You can see who’s been reading your magazine, and who’s been stealing your quotes, and who hates you today.

You spend an hour letting the world drip into your brain while your conquest/s toss/es and turn/s, and then you spend two hours spitting fire back at the world. Drip, drip, drip, suck, suck, suck, WHOOOOOOOSH. You seize on something you like (something important or something you know about), and then you hammer that little nugget of information into something new and strange, and you send it back out there for other people to worry about, for other people to chew on, mock, or worship. Or maybe you’ve got something brand new you’ve been carving and it just needs a few last minute touches. You polish it up and you roll those bones and see what you get.

Then you wake up last night’s nightcap and you fuck ‘em some more instead of cooking breakfast (hell if you have any food), but this time it’s different.

You aren’t a journalist. You are almost a journalist. You aren’t an editor. You are almost an editor. You are writing, but you aren’t living a writer’s life. You are almost a writer and you are almost alive. You are almost drunk. The shit you spew is almost good, but it’s also almost pointless. What you do every day is almost a waste of time. It’s almost heaven to express everything that hits you almost every day so fast and cheap, but it’s also almost like holding your hand in boiling water and taking notes about how fast the skin peels off.

This time when you fuck, you feel the fire of the screen burning behind your eyes, and no matter where you look when you rut and root, you see a mouse pointer tracking your consciousness like grit glommed onto a contact lens. You are fucking like clicking open windows, trying to get to the source of something, trying to cut all the way to the gut of holy computer truth. Your eyes burn with alpha wave fever, and your fingers caress clits and foreskin the same way you caress a laptop trackpad. There’s no orgasm: just the same feeling of release as when you “post” your latest “update” to your website and you can lean back in your swivel chair, spent.

Your wrists ache the way your heart used to ache.

What the hell are we doing to ourselves? Are we almost human? Or are we almost something else?

- Miracle Jones