I was eighteen years old and sleeping on the couch of the dingy apartment I shared with Naomi, John, and Brad. 

I didn’t have a bedroom of my own, so my nights were often disrupted by the comings and going of my roommates. Naomi’s late hours arriving home from her job at The Wild Zebra “Gentlemen’s Club” that our apartment shared a parking lot with. John’s drunken rages at Naomi, fueled by convenience store malt liquor, jealousy, and impotence. Good nights meant broken dishes and bad ones meant broken bones and another trip to a new emergency room with a sobbing Naomi defending his latest outburst. Brad was a quieter presence, eyes sleepy from whatever he’d smoked and occasionally even interested in a book I was reading. He’s a background player in my memories of that time, shadowy and indistinct…

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