I looked again at the picture of a man so familiar yet totally unknown to me.

Had my mother been lying from the beginning?

Had she been helping Ken while telling my father and me she thought he was dead? When I think back on it now, it was my mother who had been the strongest proponent of the Ken-dead theory. Had she been sneaking him money the whole time? Had Sunny known where he was from the start?

Questions to ponder.

I wrested my eyes away and opened a kitchen cabinet. I'd already decided that I wouldn't go out to Livingston this morning the thought of sitting in that coffin of a house for another day made me want to scream and I really needed to go to work. My mother, I was sure, would not only understand but encourage. So I poured myself a bowl of Golden Grahams cereal and dialed Sheila's work voice mail. I told her I loved her and I asked her to call me.

My apartment well, it's our apartment now is on 24th Street and Ninth Avenue, not far from the Chelsea Hotel. I usually walk the seventeen blocks north to Covenant House, which was on 41sttreet, not far from the West Side Highway. This used to be a great location for a runaway shelter in the days before the cleanup of 42nStreet, when this stretch of stench was a bastion of in-your-face degradation. Forty-second Street had been a sort of Hell's Gate, a place for the grotesquely amative intermingling of species. Commuters and tourists would walk past prostitutes and dealers and pimps and head shops and porno palaces and movie theaters, and when they'd reach the end, they'd either be titillated or they'd want to take a shower and get a shot of penicillin. In my view, the perversion was so dirty, so depressing, it had to weigh you down. I am a man. I have lusts and urges like most guys I know. But I never understood how anyone could confuse the filth of toothless crack heads for eroticism.