Carol

I met Carol when I was in my early twenties. She was sweet and funny, with a gravelly Jersey accent and a streetwise tomboy persona. I don't know how she ended up homeless and turning tricks on the streets of Sin City, but we crossed paths in the circle of transient addicts I was running with at the time and took to each other immediately—the fast bond of street siblings that often occurs between the desperate and the damned.

She was rough and crude but with a dream still left inside her. She got excited about simple things; a few extra bucks from a generous client or a nice outfit from the discard container out behind the Savers thrift store and her face would light up with a smile and a contented laugh. Most people I met in that world were like that: frayed and weary but vital. Buoyed by a particular kind of survivor's optimism. This tenacity was an essential tool for survival. For the sick, the mad, the shadow dwellers—all those who had slipped through the cracks while no one was looking, who had gone untended or unseen while the neglectful mechanics of the world were playing themselves out in homes and schools and institutions all across the many lands that reared us—hope was sometimes a dangerous thing, but its absence was fatal.

I had a shabby apartment in a complex a few blocks off the Strip, paid for by way of a succession of manipulative, guilt-soaked phone calls to my mother, who had not yet become able to ignore my narcotic insanity. At some point Carol and I struck an arrangement: I'd spend my days out hustling and scavenging, and she would be off turning tricks for her Johns, and at the end of the day we'd meet at my place to pool our take and score some dope. She would shower while I made us a beggar's meal, and we'd get high, eat, and talk awhile before nodding off next to each other on the cheap full-size mattress included in my weekly rent.

We were never physical. It was a relationship of emotional proximity and guarded v