PhotoCollage: I was living in the States back then. We were vagrants.

He had just been released from jail. I do not know that he had always been a vagrant.

I have always been a vagrant. Never here. Never there. No allegiances to a place. I am always only wandering. Usually from one derelict hotel to another.

I remember him standing by the side of the road with his thumb out. It was cold.

Then the running on the gravel. It was late afternoon and he smelled of gasoline and sweat and gravel and cold.

And jail.

The Sunland Motel was just off the exit. His dope became everything that lives.

The Sunland Motel had been abandoned.

I remember the abandonment. The cold outside. The rhythm of his breathing.

Naked you are as blue as a night in Havana.

"Do you think it will be like this when we die," he asked.

He had played at the lake as a kid. We all had. Skippin' stones across the water.

Now, the cold outside. The inside a ruin.

I remember that the floor was hard.

Remembering. Death was seductive. "Yes."

My gun in the glove compartment.

The place was a tomb and wrecked.

Tables overturned.

To just not go one more foot.

I remember that we were only vagrants -- the taste of it never really leaves your mouth -- and it snowed so hard nobody was going anywhere.

For a long time.