Francisco Delgado

Rochester, New York

I tell people I’m from there but I’m really from a small town just outside of it and it’s all the same, anyway.

New York was always just a place behind Carson Daly on TRL, San Francisco a postcard picture, and heaven seems sillier by the second.

When I was seventeen and had a license, I drove my best friend, who was eighteen and had a steady job, to a hotel off 390 and I slept in the lobby while he tried to get a headstrong hooker to have sex with him.

Now we go to bars to meet girls. We talk with them and dance. Or dance with them only. We never get any phone numbers, though. Never get any invites back.

If the trek from one bar to the next is too far, we’ll step into a dive for a quick drink. The suck of air that occurs when we open the doors is one and the same with the collective dump of oxygen after Scott Norwood’s missed field goal.

We never forget anything. But we never learn.

We always thought we’d find girls here but it looks like we’ll have to go somewhere bigger and farther away.

I used to think I’d find music here but all the bands want to be Limp Bizkit and all the coffeehouse singers want to be on Lilith Fair.

The late-night porn store proprietors know us by name and fetish.

The closed factories in the distance look like crooked teeth eating into the sky.

Sun’s coming up. It always does.

And every time we leave, we count down the seconds until our return.

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