Surrender
T WAS the late nineties. A kitchen floor upstairs in a place we rented on the corner of 53rd and San Pablo in Oakland. Days spent not giving up control, white-knuckling it, coming up with as many ideas, as many ways as I could to go visit my brother before he died. He was sick with AIDS and living in D.C. I stripped at clubs in North Beach. Only I hated. His roommate answered. He’d already been dead a month.
