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I got there a few otten as far as her twelfth birthday, by which ti for two years and had just started s marijuana The story went on to include all the popular che IV heroin and cocaine, along with shoplifting, street prostitution, and the black-market sale of her infant son It took a while to tell but it hadn't taken all that long to live; she was only nineteen now

Thelasted an hour and I stayed until the end My attention faded after the speaker finished up, and I didn't contribute anything to the discussion, which was ostensibly on the topic of anger I tuned in now and then when soh to break in on my reverie, but for the most part I just letIt was a nasty world outside and I'd been seeking out the nastiest part of it for the past few hours, but in here I was just another alcoholic trying to stay sober, same as everyone else, and that made it a very safe place to be

Then we all stood and said the prayer, and then I went back out into the godda and woke up hung over, which didn't seem fair I'd slopped down quarts of bad coffee and watered Coke and breathed in acres of secondhand smoke, so I don't suppose it was out of the ordinary that I wasn't ready to greet the day like Little Mary Sunshine, but I liked to think I'd given upwith the booze Instead my head ached and my mouth and throat were dry and every minute took three or four minutes to pass

I sed some aspirin, showered and shaved, and went downstairs and around the corner for orange juice and coffee When the aspirin and coffee kicked in I walked a few blocks and bought a paper I carried it back to the Flame and ordered solid food By the tione I still felt a profound weariness of the spirit, but I would just have to learn to live with that

The paper didn't do a lot to elevate e story was a hts, an entire family of Venezuelans shot and stabbed, four adults and six children dead and the house torched, with the fire spreading to a pair of neighboring dwellings Various evidence see-related, which eneral public could feel free to shrug it off and the cops wouldn't have to bust their hu in the sports pages, with both of the New York tea a squeaker to the Eagles The only good thing about the sports neas that it was trivial; nobody died, and when all was said and done, who really gave a daive a daes and read about another drug-related homicide, this one in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn, where soun on a twenty-four-year-old blackbusts That didn't elate me either, but I have to admit it disheartened me a little less than the loss to Philadelphia, which hadn't torn me up all that e 7

A twenty-two-year-old man named Michael Fitzroy had attended irlfriend She was an actress with a couple of commercials to her credit, and she had an apart for actors at Forty-second and Ninth They were on their way to her place, walking hand in hand down Forty-ninth Street, at about the same time that a woh of life as we know it

She acted on this decision by opening herand throwing herself out of it Her apartment, as luck would have it, enty-two stories up, and she picked up speed on the way down according to that forh school physics class, the one nobody reh at the moment of impact to kill herself, and to do the saot to her predestined spot on the paveirlfriend, one Andrea Dautsch, was uninjured, but the story said she becaht

I flipped through the rest of the paper The alization of drugs, and I read what Bill Reel had to say on the subject I read the co e 7, and I read once more about the last moments of Michael Fitzroy

I don't knohy the story moved me as much as it did The fact that it happened so close to ho to do with it The Cleary wo I'd walked past hundreds of ti on my way to scout out the Tiht have been there when it happened

I thought of Marcus Aurelius, and how everything happened the way it was supposed to I tried to figure out how this had been true for Michael Fitzroy, as he trudged the road of happy destiny to his girlfriend's apartment The News reported that the woht years old It also provided the infor

They say God's will is unfathomable, and it certainly looked that way to me Some celestial force had evidently decided that twenty-tas as old as Michael Fitzroy was supposed to get, and that the highest good of all concerned would be best served by having hi, naked lady

Life, I'd heard soedy for those who feel It seemed to me that it was both at once, even for those of us who don't do much of either

Early that afternoon I called Toht hi to call you," he said "How's Fun City?"

It had been a while since I'd heard it called that "About the saals?"

I hadn't even noticed whether they'd won or lost "Really so at your end?"

"He's in New York I keep cutting his trail, but it's a big city He threatened a woman yesterday, an old friend of Connie Sturdevant's"

"Nice"

"Yeah, he's a sweetheart I ondering if you heard anything from Cleveland"