One Of Those Evenings in the City That Take You Back

This evening I had dinner with my friend Matt at the Peartree Café and got caught in the rain on the way. I sent my friend Elie home with what I thought was a spare umbrella, but which turned out to be the only umbrella in the goddamn house. I got soaked running to the corner store, but I was able to buy a cheap one there and made it to dinner with Matt, looking only slightly like a soaked elderly racoon. Matt was very kind about it all. Matt and I met in the dog park some years ago, and a close friendship was forged from that initial meeting. He's joined us in Palm Springs for two Christmases, and I named the high school in Enter, Night after him. Tonight I told him that I had modelled the protagonist in Wild Fell, Jameson Browning, on him. He reacted with his usual kindness and grace, and I think he only very rarely wonders how he wound up with such a mad person as a friend. He's very, very cool.

After dinner, I did a run downtown to get some coffee from the Second Cup at the Eaton Centre. Yes, of course there's probably a closer one, but I'm a creature of habit, and that's where I get my coffee beans for the morning. It was one of those muggy, humid early-summer evenings in the city. I wrote an essay about those evenings many years ago called "Red Nights: Erotica and the Language of Men's Desire." It was reprinted in my second essay collection, Other Men's Sons. I'm sure every city has nights like those—sensuous nights when the humidity caresses you lightly, like strong hands with a gentle touch, but Toronto has a  dark blue bouquet of them in the early part of the summer every year. They make me feel 20 again, and not in any zippy, fountain-of-youth sort of way either. Simply that they tend to shift time around, shift the moment around so that it could be any moment, any time, any year, during any part of the life continuum.

The photograph above is of me at 20 when I was a student at the University of Toronto, dreaming of being a writer (a poet, in actual point of fact, God help us all.) The bracelet sitting on top of it was designed by Billy Martin, the New Orleans artist who wrote several brilliant novels as Poppy Z. Brite, but has now chosen to make his career in other artistic pursuits. I miss his novels, of course (who doesn't?) but his jewelry is exquisite. I would never have worn something that beautiful in 1982, even if I could have afforded it, but there we have it: past and present fuse on nights like these.

This afternoon, I went over the jacket copy for Wild Fell, bringing the whole anticipatory process a step closer to fruition. When I was downtown at the World's Biggest Bookstore (where I used to work, again, dreaming of being a writer someday) I looked the book up on the system. There it was. The new jacket copy hasn't been uploaded to the system yet, but it all looks mighty fine.