Chapter 1 

Fid the poet brought me to his agent one afternoon. The agent had a room on the third floor of the old and dangerous Durant Hotel where exotic women, tired and all bedecked, would leave lighting a cigarette and looking around along Durant Avenue for some way to get out of there.

He introdcued me to "Freeman," the agent who preferred using his last name. This Freeman had a huge belly covered in a black pullover. He had a crazy kind of face with long, twisting, thin hair. We shook hands and sat on a large sofa. I eventually found out that Freeman had come from New York and would go to all the college towns looking for people to sign up for his agency.Fid told me there was always some easy m money with Freeman by tutoring forgiegn students or writing porn. Fid had done both and, distasteful as it was, dismissed it all as "the market's revenge on true poets." He had, apparently, just written an erotic novel and was there to collect his pay, "200, paid in $20 dollar bills that Freeman carefully counted out, likcking his finger each time he passed a bill to Fid.

This Freeman was an indescribably mess of a guy with a disjointed body like two piece of a broken stick connected by a strand of fiber. His face was some hideous mask from the undergrounds of New York City where faces are sad and sagging and the eyes large and confused.

David Eide
January 24, 2014