“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”  –Oscar Wilde

He’s fumbling with a flashlight.

I’m drunk tonight, stumbling home.

I shouldn’t stop.

I stop.

He’s fumbling with the batteries, his movements erratic.  One into the slot with the spring (these fucking springs, he says) and then another but it slips and flies and it’s on the ground next to me.

I’m sitting on the ground next to him.  He’s beautiful, really.  Hairy, muscular, his face the sort one would wish to smile upon each morning.

He smells of piss and shit.  “You heard of dialysis?” he asks.

I nod, I light a cigarette, I give him one.

“I’ll need it when I’m 40,” he says.  “The heroin does that.  I can’t piss.”  And then he’s crawling on the ground looking for a battery.

“How old are you?,” I…