I was partial to The House that night. Me and Ducks and Swish were about the Dark Corners that evening, just as the sun began to sigh away, and it wasn’t long until we began to feel the bumpage kick us up out onto the street by way of the bouncer and with the rocks softening our hands, we made our way down to Butentoch. We walked in formation without realizing it, me and Swish flanking Ducks, speeding his crapped loafers one after the other, faces being tossed all around the side of him. He had his mind on his pockets again. His right hand kept tapping his hips and me and Swish kept looking at each other, worried.

            From Third to Sixth we checked every all-purpose we could find, but no sign of Tickets or his runners. The loose chase seemed to have slipped aside for the moment. Ducks was on top of everything, not even pretending to look or see. He had the vibe tonight and was not to be stopped. Not much of a patrol. They were his streets again, just like always, just like forever.

            Me and Swish were shoulder to shoulder behind him, afraid to talk. He’d been on the cards again, and they’d told him to reconcile. Reconcile, he told me. I sensed things larger than me at work but was not really intimidated. He knew, you see, and that was the comfort.

            “Rudden, hold,” Ducks said, turning around.

            Swish stopped with me. I couldn’t match his eyes though he wanted me to, though it was our thing to do in these situations, for solidarity, for just a re-affirmation of everything. No. My neck itched but it was already past time, if he’d even been paying attention. His soul and feet pausing became just another thing for me to cast aside when everything was over.

            “Held,” I said. “What’s the cause?”

            “Nothing at all, nothing imperative,” Ducks said. I got it.

            He turned with a smirk and walked and poor Swish trailed.

            Ducks spoke as he walked. Every so often he would peek his head over his shoulder and peek at Swish, skipping a touch behind. His silver windbreaker made his spread arms seem even more questioning, pleading harder for an answer. His lip curled as always, and sad eyes seeking an answer. Someone who knows, someone who sees a great deal, but one in the end that can’t digest the whole meal. His analysis borders on the sloppy. Low self-esteem and poor self-image allow him to be picked on. Adopted. These are his issues, this is what he learned back then. The good talk initially did nothing but frighten him. But then, better, and now, worse. And nobody knows where to now.

            So Ducks spoke to him, not me, while walking, still as if teaching!

            : “Swish, there are simply moments that one experiences that are outside the realm of normal physics. These do not seem visually or perceptively illogical because our mind is prepared to take in any stimulus. Therefore we do not register anything as being surreal, during these im-physic-al moments,” Ducks glanced over his shoulder, and then put his gaze back towards the avenue, where we’d be turning here, at Sixth, to get to Butentoch, at least if we wanted to avoid any major patrol. Ducks: “Have you ever been sitting in normal conversation with someone and then just fssst-- it happens-- fssst-- imagine the experience that would cause a person to try and explain it by putting their index finger to the center of their forehead and go like this-- ‘fssst’-- and move their index finger away from their forehead at a comfortable speed? And perhaps say, as if explicating it all, ‘neuron’?”   

            An even shorter glance to Swish. I rolled a marb out and sparked. I felt good enough to volunteer something: “If we don’t find Tickets tonight he ain’t going to give two shits.”

            Nothing.

            Ducks: “Think of the phrase brain fart and think of the context in which they use it.”

            I grew even more confident with my first exhale: “He didn’t even say shit last month, Ducks, you know. He’s got in-house problems with their Games, I hear.”

            Ducks, to me, with a nod: “Supreme over-confidence or faith in the flow?”

            “No big difference,” I said, generating another half-step. He turned, leading us onto Butentoch. I followed gracefully, then Swish, palms spread to receive the streetlights panning down on him.

            “Hah, my friend, you are wrong,” Ducks said. I smirked to have such dialogue. Ducks: “Partly due to both, on an equal level, but the effects of the individual groupings of words are remarkably different. This is the game tonight. You know by now not to ask the why of these things. I think even both of you can feel that. You guys can hook into that. But listen, see--” He stopped down the corner from the house, the playing cards in his hands. Swish was tilting again. He looked even more bearded and wonked than usual. His eyes bugged, but he was new to the bump so we metaphysically forgave him, for whatever that is worth.

            “Listen. See, the part you guys play is urgent. Even in a setting like this where you feel like observers. But take part by observing. Know what that is. Know what is there for you to sink your teeth into by sitting there and watching the events unfold.”

            Ducks was right. I bit my teeth to the curb and waited for the next dictation to propel my feet forwards. A slow nod from Swish was it apparently. We continued, brisk and slick in the cool, hanging-on winter’s night, so unfair, given the stretch, and the penance, sufficient as I had thought, was not enough of an insulator against what we were all about to do. There were stairs, and Butentoch was alive again after all these years. The best thing to see would be the looks on all their faces, the looks on all of them when we strutted in the place, Ducks in his glory and his ridge badge, fresh from the mountains and back! Oh, for my eyes to taste the sight, and wonder and soak and propel and grab and be attentive to the object, to extend and see, really see! The looks on all of their faces, the looks, and Swish, even! And I knew even then that even though only one person’s face out of the dozens would matter. That was before the old brownstone stairs, just like the old days, and the folded aluminum door and the queer light that snuck in, just like it used to, like just from the side like right now!

            Like I said, I was partial to The House. More for the scene than anything else and for the people something like that would normally attract, and, well, produce. It was the atmosphere, all over, and I could feel it again outside. I watched Ducks eyeball the three skinny tramps lined up like bowling pins against the foyer, all shaded by off-white curtains, their silouhettes absorbing those of lanky houseplants off to the side, leaning in. Long hair and long skirts, we could tell.

            Swish was rolling a marb. All tongue and slobber and shaky hands and dust on the sidewalk. Ducks waited patiently, for we were certainly not to be disturbed by anyone on Butentoch, especially in front of The House. Six months had not changed it or the avenue, which was as silk as ever. A steady wave of stragglers, or paired off rollers coming from the Warehouse. A typical Friday. The new City had been kind to Butenoch Avenue, especially this strip. Even the ever-stoic Ducks was glad to see the rebirth of it all.

            Ducks was reading my mind again, because he said, watching Swish: “What do we hope to accomplish here tonight? Money? A good laugh? Some silent vengeance?”

            “Not vengeance, Ducks,” I said, rapping Swish on the arm as if to get his attention, though he was transfixed. He spilled some more twig and frowned at the ground.

            “Not the old fashioned kind anyway. Expect a more esoteric satisfaction. Expect our presence to have very little surface effect. But ah, especially, for they must, must have heard about our deal with Tickets so they must figure the old game will be back.”

            I rocked and took the marb from Swish and stuffed it with some of my own bag. Want something done right...

            Ducks lamented briefly. “I’m trusting they’ll be able to be on point about the significance behind this. The big picture of it.”

            Swish, apparently feeling some kind of disappointment from being removed from his rolling duties, followed Ducks’ eyes. “We hope to accomplish locked glares and some business and some pleasure.”

            Ducks, slightly annoyed, peeks up: “No, no my friend. We go in there to rock them and earn their money and place ourselves officially back in the scene, as if we never missed a beat, as if the puzzle had never been taken apart.”

            I was ready to launch. I took three blues from the pile of assorted red and blue rollers Swish had in his cupped palm, extended towards the middle of the isosceles triangle our bodies and shadows formed under the direct light of the streetlamps. I dry swallowed them and passed the sealed marb to Ducks to spark. Ducks was trying to choose between the two, I could tell. He went for the reds, he always does, that’s just his way. Swish shot the rest of the rollers in his mouth before I had a chance to see just what remained. He was chewing, wincing, and Ducks sparked the marb and we all waited, hands in our pockets, as the three slim figures in the foyer of The House wavered slightly.

            “Do you have the rocks?”
            I took the dice out and showed him. Ordinary white dice, three of them. From the bodega by my Queens space. So plain and ordinary and perfect they seemed to radiate. They carried my hand and rode my mind, inseparable.

            Ducks approved. At the Corners, any of them, you never know what you’re in for. The House is the regular scene, the clean scene, the only legit game. You can make a bundle anywheres but at The House and really anywhere on this strip of Butentoch (south of North Street anyway) you know you win what you put down, you earn what you show. Nobody’s ever lost a foot or a fingers or an ear on Buetentoch. It’s one of those rare havens where the whole point of the thing is understood and welcomed and loved for the artistry of the dice, the artistry of the random, the spirituality of drugs and dice and women and men, and the whole glorious mess of it all.

            I was running high, real fucked and tuned. Swish looked ready to hit ozone and Ducks looked centered enough. I was ready to make the move when one of them did. And it would have been Swish before me for some reason like always, if Ducks hadn’t taken the initiative and moved quick after the marb was roached and we stepped it up a bit and approached the stairs, as people on the street just turned their heads, not even knowing us, not even caring who we were, the way people just check each other out sometimes, when doing something final and resolving like leaving a train, shouting loudly, or turning to enter a building.

            “Impressive,” Ducks said. Above us one of the six long arms behind the door grabbed the knob and turned. They all looked shorter and more unfamiliar than their cutout shadow outlines, but far more beautiful than at least I could have expected. And their arms were tan and soft looking. There was a drone of music that faded in as we neared the entrance.

            And I noticed that we all glanced up towards the number of the building, good old five-seventy-five.

            By this time, it was probably close to ten o’clock in the evening. And don’t all nights just seem complex and ripe with possibility at that hour, especially if you’re outside and stomping around and looped and rolled and wonky and just ready, don’t they? Seem ripe? Don’t they always?

            Ducks lead up the stairs and me and Swish followed behind him, like bodyguards. Me two steps behind and Swish one off me, to my shoulder. There were twenty three steps, and we walked up them real slow and heavy. We could see the door open but nobody came out right away and I didn’t know if  whoever it was had sensed us, the imminece of it. But not so. I looked up at Ducks and he was looking right ahead, at the door. As if knowing. I tell you Swish was on it behind me. I could feel it coming off him. I heard him slide his palm against the guardrail, cold and black and metal. He rode up. I waited for a face.

            It wasn’t Gloria but it could have been. Ducks knew it to! And he separated up another step and nodded gravely and sensually at her, smiling. She passed with a smile she kept from Ducks, making the eyes she gave me as I caught them shine like mad! The door ten steps away was pulled shut. The curtains rose and settled, the two shadowed women inside seemed like water. Ducks jogged up the last few steps. Swish was blown away but carried it. He was in the motion too. We gathered at the top of the stairs.

            Ducks knocked. “Gentlemen, I would say get ready but it’s too late. How about if I say ‘welcome’.”

            The door opened. “She’ll be here,” Ducks said. All of a sudden it was Athletic and he had just aged 32 months. I looked at Ducks and for the first time he was cocked, I saw him cocked and I completely ran loose. His hand was all on top of Swish’s head and he threw his arms around all of us. Athletic, man, the Dean of Buttentoch, how the hell have you been buddy. Hands were firmly shaken all round. Nod looks had become our logos in the old days. We’d all aged to him, right after that door swung. Ah but all was the same. Ducks was casual; as Athletic turned to lead us in he flinched my shoulder and squinted like see?

            I steped into the door and the light changed everything immediately. It was the same plant, it hit me, just grown. It was Frisco, was one of them, the other was fresh. Frisco of course. We went into the foyer knowing we’d get names later. But we had to get to the Angle quick, to get it full face, naked and crisp. Breakfast cereal, Swish said once indescribing it. I reminded Ducks as he took off his coat.

            “The ignition switch,” Ducks said.

            We all took off our coats. “Crisp, yes, but something more. The self contained universe of the internal combustion engine has enough rage for one Street. This right here is where it starts. Our motion is the ignition switch.”  We hung our coats on the hooks by the Business door and moved. Gloria’s was there, Chuck Ready, Sarah P and Welsh, all of them. We blew up as we descended the stairs. Quick this time.