Friday night in East Indy; cheap hotels, seedy bars, greasy spoons, and liquor stores with barred windows and gun toting proprietors line the streets and smell of urine, sweat, stale cigarette smoke, whiskey, dirty feet, and vomit. It must be standard street policy for the air there to always smell like the rhino tank at the zoo. 

The bars - or strip joints, they both are frequented by or employ women who take their clothes off for low lives for money - are filled to capacity with the usual clientele; your loners and groaners, your pissers and moaners, your adulterers and perverts. Bleeding hearts who are wearing their heart on their sleeve and looking for love in all the wrong places. An assortment of folded, spindled, and mutilated people sit on bar stools and on street corners and wait for the creaking machinery of fate to couch up a lover who will stay with them this time. Poor lost souls who are seeking a temporary solution to a permanent problem.

The city streets are a carnival, it is burlesque. My senses are accelerated and I can hear the pain and the sin on every street corner. The city moves like an insect. It scurries. Neon beats against the windows like a probe, even in the day. The world around me continues to live and breathe, and as I watch sinners kiss, as I watch them gambol and dance, I am reminded of the fact that somewhere, buried deep within this crazy world, is Spencer - and Ashley, if she was still alive.