We used to say about him he came flying north, just like he was on wires, like some backwards gravity. And once here he found he couldn’t go back south again because a fear he had – of finding his black mother’s body in the garage, eyes tedious with indictment, damp dress rucked up on her big mushroom-skin thighs and coquettish for a son’s caress, leaned like sleep against some late- model Buick, idled into emptiness: That old rot-sweetness of tragedy, straight out of our puritan wet-dreams. No, we weren't surprised when it finally happened, but to him instead and hanging in the place of gas: a tie slung from a walk-in closet rod in some sterile air-conditioned real estate uptown, and his drunk undefeated grin, old red clay on his dragging Oxfords, and a god too proud or gone to let them catch his weight.