He looked at objects around him…couple of Bibles…two tangerines…some house plant an ex-girlfriend had given him years ago that he watered everyday as if it were a pet…a coffee maker whose pot he sometimes used to piss in if the bathroom down the hall was occupied …dusty old desk with bills and receipts layin’ there…never thrown away for some reason…just kept there next to a mug with a painting of a Victorian house on it…

There were two empty whiskey bottles he had on a small table…polished ’em off last year…hadn’t had a drink since…he looked at the copper cup he drank Kentucky Mules in…now it was filled with orange peels and sage…

On his nightstand there were books by Chekhov…Joyce…An American Dream, by Norman Mailer…kept alternating every night…from Russia to Ireland to America…from Russia to Ireland to America…words filled his dreams…characters kept him up…thinking of Bloom’s Dublin…being a patient in Ward 6…combing the streets of New York City after committing a horrible crime…literature lives within us…it creeps inside…least it made way inside him…

And he had a pair of work gloves that he hadn’t used in years…cloth with rips in ’em from when he used to clean up ’round construction sights and roofing jobs…that was a long time ago…

Spent his days lookin’ out windows of a rented room on the city’s southside…he would just stare out at the sun…or the clouds…lookin’ at snow as it fell…or rain forming puddles in the gravel parking lot…cars movin’ in and out all day long…an old Dodge…Chevy….a couple of Ford pickup trucks…beat to hell…

The old man just looked around at all he had in his life…a wool cap…Padre Pio medallion…pages and pages of a manuscript he’d never finish…a New York City library card with a picture of a lion on it…the card reminded him of all the places he had been…New York…Boston…Philly…D.C. …Paris…Toronto…Montreal…never learned a foriegn language…spoke in a Midwestern dialect…

In the end he had more memories than stuff…more memories than stuff…and he was happy with that…