So he called to tell me he’d been roughed up
at the riot in Tompkins Square.
Something real had happened, about developer money
and the future of housing, about how the cops had started it
and how the local tv would misreport it
and how the money and the cops would of course win.
I took the portable phone out into the herb garden
where the salt mist of the dawn was clinging prettily.
That was the summer I lusted after a compulsive liar
I saw every day at the general store in Sagaponack,
the store where a loaf of bread cost, reliably, five times
what any loaf of bread had ever cost.
One friend with money and a film production company
drove me over the dunes in his jeep at sunset.
The ocean was brown and stank of iodine where bluefish
spawned
and the gulls mobbed and dived.
We cast for a while, caught nothing.
The local birders had planked paths through the dunes
and we lay on the smooth boards, weeping, smoking dope,
and watched the stars move much too slowly.