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magined Magda putting her hand on mine when I told her all my troubles. Then she would lift my chin with her fingers. “Poor dear,” she would say. “Poor dear.” For Magda, I knew, must be the answer to all the questions my life was asking.
By the time I strutted through the door of the diner, I convinced myself I would go home with Magda. There she would offer me something to drink and perhaps I would spill it on my shirt and then she would offer to clean it and make me take off my clothes. The possibilities were endless and shot through my imagination like hot stars. But the circumstances were inconsequential; it was the end result that mattered. For, as the night wore on, she would take me upstairs and lead me to her broad and well storied bed, the promised land, and there she would make a man of me.
But, I arrived earlier than usual, and the diner was so crowded it felt like a different place.
“Where’s Magda,” I asked when some wrinkled old lady came to take my order.
“She got a day job,” she said and asked me what I wanted.
What? In the hope of living happily ever after with Magda I left my father’s house with nothing more than a duffel bag of clothes. I had no money, no experience and, as the waitress asked me again what I wanted, I had no idea what I was going to do without Magda.
“Hey kid,” the manager eventually said to me. “This isn’t a hotel.” Then, pointing his finger to the line of people in the doorway, he told me that this was the busiest night of the week. “If you’re not going to order, then you’re going to leave …now.”
Beyond the thin windows of my momentary haven the wind was whipping up and the temperature was dropping. Soon it would begin to snow.
Outside was a black and evil world. It was a world filled with all the strangers my mother ever warned me about: drug addicts and drag queens, transvestites and transients who ate out of garbage cans and middle aged men who prowled the streets like predatory animals looking for boys my age to molest and then to murder. I was on my own now, in this wide and unwelcoming world.
My father was right, I thought. I wouldn’t last a single night on my own and, while I sat and stared into the distance, I wished I could call my mother to pick me up and take me home. But that was not the case.
“But where did Magda go?”
“How am I supposed to know,” he said over the din of the crowd and continued pointing the way to the door.
I had no choice. I had to leave. So began the rest of my life.
***
After what seemed like hours of trudging through slanted curtains of windblown rain and sleet that turned to snow, my feet were numb, my hands were cold, and the snow on my head melted and dripped down the back of my neck. When I reached Magda’s neighborhood, an angry Pit Bull rushed me, barking and snarling, as I approached the first house, looking for an address. Though a chain link fence separated us, I did not trust it and hurried on until I crossed the street and was a few houses away.
Forty years earlier, I later learned, these were called starter homes. But, those who started here long since moved away. It was now a neighborhood of Diego Ts and domestic disputes. Driveways were littered with crushed beer cans from weeks before and the occasional Mexican family of three or four generations poured out of the doors and windows of a house built for a single family. The years took their toll on the cheap materials and poor construction and, for those who lived here now, these houses were nothing but a dead end.
When I found Magda’s house, I stood beneath the nearest street light that was not burned out and looked at the address written on my hand. The house was small, with only one floor which was not even as large as the basement of my house. Though the lights were on inside, the door was dark and uninviting. But when I rang the doorbell, all I could think of were her comforting words and the welcome I, a wayward traveler, buffeted by the snow and whistling winds of winter, would receive.
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