John is in for his hip. That’s what the other hot dog men say. One pulls out a hot dog from his bin and says, “This is how long the metal rod will be that will go in his body.”

John comes back weeks later looking like a woman. Sharp bones protrude on his thin wrists. His hair is longer, gray and brushing his shoulders, blowing in breezes off the river. He’s gentle with his tongs, the hot dogs gingerly laid between slit buns.

“I didn’t come to visit you in your hospital,” I say.

“No one did,” he says. “I didn’t tell them where I was. I’m wearing a goddamn dress with no back—all of me for whoever out there to see, I want visitors? No,” he says. “I read books.”

“What books?” I ask.

“Books I’ve already read, the ones I still like.”

“What about TV?” I ask.

“The nurse was always in the way, her pointy hat cutting off all up to the tits of the broads,” he says.

“My father’s gone,” I say.

“Your fucking father never leaves you,” he says. “Fathers hang around your neck and bruise up your skin all your life long. You know that,” he says. And then a man comes to buy a hot dog. He wants onions on his hot dog, but John hasn’t got any. Not today.

“What? No fucking onions? What more fresh hell is there in store for me today?” the man says and he leaves, shaking his head and not buying a hot dog.

“There’s your horsie,” John says and points toward the park at my stallion who’s letting his shit drop from his rear on the pavement.

“Nice, I’m glad you pointed that out,” I say.

“Here, take him this,” John says and he reaches in and pulls up a hot dog and I grab it and run across the street with it dripping and palm up I put the dog under the stallion’s nose and he eats it and then I run, the cop yelling after to me to never ever feed a police horse and that next time he sees me he’ll... “Do what?” I yell back at him over my shoulder as I’m running. “Arrest me? Arrest me?” I yell. But the cop isn’t going to let this go, and he spurs the stallion and he’s trotting after me and I’m running now up the avenue and I’m still yelling, “Arrest me? Arrest me?”

I get to Rena’s house all out of breath and with legs that don’t want to make it up the stairs but want to sit on the lower bottom step and shake while I hold them and slap them so they’ll be still. I’m still slapping when the Hells Angel boyfriend comes down.

“Hey,” he says and “Hey,” I say back.

He’s wearing leather pants and boots and a leather jacket and leather strings braceleted around his wrists and strung as loops through his nose and leather gloves with the fingers cut off and a leather belt and leather straps on his leather boots and he smells like leather and he pats me on the head as he passes me and goes out the door. His hair is long like my hair, and just washed and brushed it seems to float up as he walks out into sunlight.

Up at the house Rena’s not home but Rena’s mother is there and she is shooting basketballs. She’s got a soft foam ball and a net above her bathroom door and she’s shooting from her barstool and Muy Hombre’s retrieving for her, bringing her the ball back in return for slices of orange American single-wrapped cheese. The empty plastic wraps are all over the floor by her barstool and Muy Hombre’s skidding on them when he runs back to her with the foam ball in his mouth.

“I just want to lie down,” I tell her and head for the couch, but she takes my hand and says it’s time I had my ears pierced. She doesn’t have ice so she picks at the clogged-up freezer compartment with a screwdriver and holds the white ice with ridges formed in it from the freon tubes on my lobe. The needle goes in and I faint.

I wake up with Muy Hombre standing over me, the foam ball still in his mouth, and Rena’s mother’s off by the sink saying, “Hold on, sweetie, you’ve had yourself a fall,” but she’s not helping to pick me up and instead she’s knocking more ice from the freezer, intent on my other lobe.

“Let’s do this one lying down,” she says, “so we don’t have you falling again.”

“Big deal,” my mother says when she sees my ears. “Mine were pierced when I was a baby.”

The new holes in my ears throb, clog, and crust. As I sit in Wood, I can feel them leaking, the fluid running down the side of my neck. We are onto mailboxes. Mr. Lenin shows us how to burn our names into the wood with a penlike tool that plugs in the wall. But the boys have found they can burn their names in their arms with the tool and the room starts to smell like their cooking flesh.

“A mailbox, that’s useful,” our mother says and she hangs it on the wall by her chair and when her ashtrays are full and when her empty soda cans are full of ashes, she puts the ashes in the mailbox along with her twisted empty cigarette packs. Jesús hands us our mail anyway, so we have never used a mailbox. I tried telling this to Mr. Lenin before I started making mine, but he didn’t understand.

“It’s for mail, you can always use it,” he said.

“Fuck, forget the mailbox,” I said and I started to leave the room and right before I did I turned around and looked at him and said, “I hate wood.”

There go the hot dog men, I say when I see them get ready to leave, their umbrellas tied shut with frayed rope or ripped sheet, their aprons stained and wet from a hard day of sloshing and tonging around in their greasy bins. Their socks in their sandals stained also, stray bits of sauerkraut dangling on the many-times-mended cloth at the toes, drying there, moving jerkily as the hot dog men move, getting ready to go, closing up cart. They leave like they’re escaping, one by one, silent and quick, leaning over their handles, looking left and right without moving their heads. Any minute ready to crouch down behind their carts to protect themselves from a rain of shrapnel or a spray of bullets.

It is night, the middle of the night, and Jochen the German artist neighbor has hanged himself and the police are in our hallway again and the men in white coats can’t fit the gurney in the elevator and they have to use our stairs and they come through our house and wheel our neighbor through.

“I’ve already cleared it,” my mother says to the men in white coats, almost proud. She means the house, she’s cleared the furniture for our brother to come through.

Jochen worked in oils that stained everything he touched. I can’t see him under the sheet, but I can see his hand, the blue and black and red-stained fingertips, the half-moon nails black as night. My mother reaches out and grabs his hand. “Jochen,” she says.

The men carry Jochen down the stairs, his paint-stained hand now showing from under the sheet, as if he is reaching out to the wall, still trying to paint on flat surfaces.

*   *   *

“I hear Jochen walking through the house at night,” our mother says. “I hear his footsteps.” We say we hear him too. We hear the floorboards creaking in the middle of the night. We smell the oil paint.

“He’s watching over us,” our mother says. Days later we find money in our hallway sealed to a filing cabinet with a glob of red paint.

“Jochen left us this,” she says. I buy food for a week with the money and give the cashier at the E & B the bills with red paint still on them.

My mother thinks of things to do for him. Light church candles, name a star, send money to somewhere. She has one of his small unframed paintings he gave her years ago. She takes it to her office and hangs it in her cubicle. Coworkers tell her what they see in it, all sorts of things. Men without heads. Horses striking. Two moons. The cleaning people spray it with cleanser each night. It seems to change color and crack. My mother says she never saw anything in the painting before, but now in the cracks she sees bison.

“Surely bison,” she says, “I’ve seen them before.” We ask where and she says, “Merde, I can’t remember where.”

She tells us things she did not do in France. She never wore underclothes, like they do in this uptight country, she never bathed every day, she never ate cereal for breakfast. She can go on and on, there was so much not done over there, she says. She says she wishes she could turn around, turn her head back and see it all before her. The sea and the esplanade and the streets and the sardine vendors. She would breathe it in, she says, and then step into it and shut the door behind her. “Click,” she says. She shuts a door we can’t see, grasping a handle that is just the air in our house.