He’s a beautiful, lovely boy. He’s welcome any time.

That’s a beautiful cat. He comes and visits me up on my deck. Maybe you can help me haul some boxes from the basement into my car.

CHRISTOPHER FINDS HOME BY KEVIN LAVEY 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 99

Three weeks after we moved back to Baltimore from San Francisco into a row home with a leaky roof—so we found out on day one—a guy from the Arbutus neighborhood where I grew up called me. He said he could “toss some work my way”. Our mothers went to the same church, and they’d talked. Eddie had got a contract to wire some city schools. “This might lead to some bigger stuff but I need to see if you’ve got the kung fu I’m looking for,” Eddie said.

In San Francisco I’d been excessed from my IT job, worked as a janitor in a private school, and right before I left for Baltimore I had been hired by a trash removal company where I would have been trained to drive a truck.

When the HR rep told me I got the trash truck job, I nearly cried I was so happy. Katherine and I had wrecked as a couple. But a…