"Come on out, the dark is beginning..."

Hey, Michael DeCapite has an excerpt from his second novel, RUINED FOR LIFE!, up at the 3:AM Magazine site (click on the above title if you dare), and here is an excerpt:

There was a sensation of stepping out, in Manhattan. A downplayed fear, an eagerness. Of rejoining humanity, slipping into the current. History’s now and you’re it. I drove down Avenue A, which was congested on a Friday night.

Cooper waited in the car while I went to the coke store on 4th Street. It fronted as a bodega. The only thing they stocked was tartar sauce. There was a wall of tartar-sauce jars behind the plexiglass at the counter. There was a soda cooler back there too——they made you take a soda to baffle the cops. I pushed a folded twenty through a hole in the wood and walked out of there with a packet of coke and a grape Shasta. I popped open the can, took one sip, and dropped it in the trash.

Meanwhile, Cooper was chopping lines on a paperback. I put the car in gear. “Let’s go up to Times Square and get a drink.” We rolled to the light at Houston. He did a line, the light turned green. He held the book and handed me a rolled-up bill and I shifted into third gear, leaning over with an eye on the road and Houston rolling by. Cooper moved to New York with his band and lived on mustard and bread behind a candy store in Red Hook when it was still possible to move to New York and starve. He had talent and attitude to spare——he was a natural. He’d taken his licks on the street and in the bars and his band was just about the best band I’d ever heard. They were a few years ahead of their time, so nothing happened. He started other bands and knocked around and still nothing happened. He should’ve been rich, which he knew. It was a case of too much of nothing, that’s what we had in common. Nothing. He wiped...

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As for myself, I too knew Cooper, and in fact lived with him behind the candy store. He would often erupt with an evangelical, nay, Biblical fury about certain songs or records. Even now, his endorsement of the following song is embezzled in my brain: