In the spring, before the gutter-stenching heat of summer cloaked the air, barbecuing down in the close and friendly darkness of East River Park was one of our favorite ways to waste time. Night used to sling itself over our heads during those crazy electric humming times. Hung low, that vast, dirty canvas sheltered us, its skin spattered with a spray of stars and distant jets. Listening to the slap of the river’s waves, watching the motorboats cruising back and forth, their engines humming a mechanical backdrop to our barking and strutting. Distant flashing police lights and sirens keened and streamed over the bridge into Brooklyn. Drinking bottles of cheap whiskey from a bodega, kicking back on a bench, tossing stones into the hungry dark of the rippling river, we were the street-kings of all we could see. But then, in those days, that was always true.

Occasionally, dealers on bicycles taking a break from hustling on Avenue C would sweep through the shadows, sleek and silent and malevolent. They rarely bothered with kids getting fucked up in the shadows. It was when the furies of cats on foot rolled through that you had to be ready to split post-haste. Once, a fist of wound-up wildboys appeared down by the far side of the bridge, juiced on each other and 40-ounce Buds, rippling waves of threat in 360°. So we snap-decided, it being the better part of valour, to cut out. They kicked over the 50-gallon drum we used as our barbecue, the embers rioting wildly into the dark. But they didn’t see us, didn’t even look for us. They just kept on gliding, their shouts dropping away into the night. No real hassle, just part of the deal being that close to the action.

Otherwise, there was generally nobody down there, maybe the odd crusty, dragged-down wino passed out in the cool, damp grass, snoring a rip-tide of rip-saw. We always picked the same spot, near the Williamsburg Bridge, where we could see the cops in their cruisers long before they could see us. Sometimes we would climb up and hide in the trees and then whip dirt clods down at the couples strolling along the river.

That last Spring, way back before time really began for us, we were kicked back in the grass, after eating the dogs and burgers we’d heisted from Safeway, still passing the bottle around and flying high on a couple of dime bags. Then Rodney clocked a sneaker standing in the grass about 20 feet behind us. He tripped over there and didn’t come back. It took ten minutes for anyone to notice, and when I sang out to him, he mumbled back something I didn't catch. So I walked over. He stood stock still, transfixed, staring down at two junkies lying in the grass, stone dead. One of them didn't even get the spike out of his arm, just toppled right over onto his side, his right arm curled beneath him and his legs still crossed. Eerily still, you know, the way dead folks almost always are. Even in the dark you could tell that they had been there for a few hours – their skin was already grey and waxy. All I could hear was Rodney breathing ragged and shallow.

Vincent and Matt came over to check out the scene. We started talking about what to do. Matt didn't much care what we did, as long as there was still drink to be drunk. Vincent wasn't really down for getting involved in a big scene, maybe even getting locked up over a pair of stiffed addicts. Rodney never said a single word. In the end, it was just too much of a weird drag hanging there any longer, chasing the dragon so close to the dragon’s last meal. So we split back to my joint to kill the booze.

Settled into my cluttered, back-building, top floor apartment that looked out over the grit of Houston Street, we talked about the new ghosts. Trading and embroidering our street-tales, the booze and the buzz had us all fast-talking, except for Rodney. He just sat in the same chair he’d dropped into when we checked in. He hugged his knees to his chest and didn't say a thing all night, other than occasionally giving out with a stunned "wow", real hushed and glazed.

I called the cops and told them about the stiffs, not from my apartment, dig, but from a box down on the corner. I'm real paranoid about pigs tracing calls, getting my number. The cops are pretty high-tech nowadays. They just can’t be trusted.

Around dawn Rodney finally spoke, said he was taking off. Standing uncertainly in my tiny hallway with his hand on the doorknob, he mumbled, "I... I never seen any dead guys before... and there was two of them, man! What a blip! I never woulda featured that it'd fuck my head so much, so hard. That shit was too heavy. I'm out, baby. I’m out." Them dead junkies really messed him up bad. First time he checks a corpse and he gets two of them at once. That's gotta suck. Nasty, sulfur-smelling wake-up call. You could see in his eyes that he couldn’t stop hitting that rewind button and loop-tracking the clip over and over and over.

Me, now, the whole scene didn't phase me too much. Dead junkies in the park. Whatever. I lifted a killer switchblade off one of them when I cruised their pockets for drugs and cash. I figured, what the hell, it's not like stealing or depriving them of anything they would be needing anytime soon. Besides, some other asshole would have gotten it, or worse, one of New York’s Finest when they carried the bodies off to the fridges. Fuck the cops getting it - it's got this stunning pearl handle. You don't see those too often. Twelve-inch stiletto too, real nice. Looks like it came straight out of Tijuana or some shit.

And Rodney? Never saw him again after that night. Heard that he split out of his pops’ place up in Spanish Harlem one night without telling anyone. Cut everything loose and moved in with his aunt somewhere upstate. I guess he needed the silence of the countryside to scrub that loop-track out of his head. I know people like that. The City just gets to them. Gets to running too fast, gets too loud and frantic and suddenly one morning they wake up and every inch of it fits too tight. After that it’s just grass and trees all day long. Man, I’ll tell you what, I think that scene would lay me out faster than a speeding bus. All that open country and shit. My counsellor in high school once called me a "distinctly inner urban creature." Yeah, that’s me: rats, concrete and subway trains. But Rodney, I guess it just didn’t work that way for him.

Anyway, that night down in East River Park saw the end of the barbecues. And the beginning of something much worse.

These New York City streets belong to the soles of my battered feet. So many years have heard my footsteps echo off the tenements’ stony faces. Countless harsh mornings have unfolded above me as I leaned, lonesome and shaking, on a corner store’s battered grillfront. I've walked these same streets in both desperate poverty and fleeting wealth, in times of jangling horror and in moments of godly triumph, while the seldom changing concrete remained my sole companion.

Sometimes I’ve searched these ravaged streets for a familiar face and found only the whittled remains of people I almost knew. Torn and bloodied from the barbed wire they’d run through since I’d last seen them, they clenched in groups inside derelict doorways like bleached and bandaged figures from the silent war reels of my history. I’d never stop, could never look too long in to those scratched mirrors.

There was a time when friends matched steps with me on my restless, pointless journeys, friends who seem now to have moved on to new sidewalks, new corners or heard death call their name through overdose or violence or AIDS. Once we walked, syncopated and jazzed, crossing Avenue D to the projects in search of satori, in search of release, in search of the answer. Lovers, too, pushed to match my long strides or held close, arm-in-arm. Too often their pace would outstrip mine in fury or frustration, while I’d lag and drag behind, cool and arrogant, quietly ashamed.

If I could get just one of them back, we could lock step to relive our labyrinths of intricate hunts, revisiting our scenes of dissolution, dropping into hollering rock joints bathed in electric blue sounds, until dawn comes slinking by, trailing its pink and blue scarves along the tenements’ skyline.

Now I’m left alone with my half-blind racing stumbles, running from both lawman and pusherman, each hungry for a skinny strung-out target. My beat sneaks shuffle edgily in place. "I’m just waiting for my man." A lifetime of waiting, wearing down the ghetto sidewalks and counting off the bombed-out blocks. A lifetime of desperate longing for that glimpse of salvation on a bicycle gliding my way. A lifetime of clenching that last ten dollar bill, folding and refolding it until it’s worn down to a nine dollar bill.

So many years and in so many patterns, the designs of my journeys are pointless now, invisible, futile. I’ve zigzagged erratically or magnetically straight, fuelled by hungry determination to score a single day’s peace, only to find those cement trails lead to more horrors, more horror-kicks, more horror-thrills. But never peace, never the one thing that moved further away the more I searched.

Winters were hard on a junkie in New York. Winters were when I felt most like a ghost, invisible and alone, pacing the deserted streets. But at least in the pure, white drifts, I could actually see proof. For once, no one could deny that I existed, that there was real substance within my shoes. I had made an impression on the earth, however fleeting. Walking backwards down the street I could watch my footprints unravel before me. There, in the whirling dervish of flakes, I could at last find myself, like slipping round the other side of my shadow.