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11.09.00, 4:41 p.m.

Today is Mark's birthday! I'm reprinting an excerpt from a longer essay I wrote for his birthday present last year -- STYZINE #50, a compilation of the "best of" Mark's (a.k.a. icki) own zine (called STY) and contributions from friends and family about Mark and all his splendor.

There is a Poloroid of us taped to the wall above my desk, and another true story. I picked him up at the airport, a tiny black cannonball. (I almost knocked him over.) We jumped in the car and sped south, away from the City and toward the bright lights and seedy sidewalks of Las Vegas. We had booked a room in a hotel with a roller coaster and a boardwalk, thinking of future East Coast destinations. I read out loud from Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes and we watched the small towns fly past our windows like so much dust, brown and winter-dry.

The car broke down in the middle of Central California along a two-lane stretch of highway by a brown farm. (Mark pointed to the anti-abortion billboard erected by the barn and said, "Let's not ask them for help.") We had the car towed to the nearest town and ran the five blocks from the auto shop to the bus station, not much more than a shack surrounded by dirt and brush. ("Do you want to go back to the Bay Area?" Mark asked. "Fuck no!") So, out of breath, we caught the late-night Greyhound to Las Vegas, sleeping uncomfortably, or not at all, pulling into the City of Sin a few hours past midnight. (On the bus, it should be noted, I saw my first "Buttweiser" t-shirt.) It was the weekend and all the motels and hotels were booked; our reservation called for check-in no earlier than 11 a.m., so we wandered the Strip, slept on benches outside the wedding chapel in our hotel, sleepily considered the video arcade and pinball machines through security bars. (I suppose the hotel doesn't expect children to be up at five in the morning.) We strolled the emptied streets of the miniature Village re-built inside the hotel, complete with graffiti-ed newspaper and mailboxes, cast-iron benches bolted to the plaster cobblestone floor. (During the day, steam is piped up through artificial manholes and sewer drains.)

And when the good part of the hotel finally opened (the arcade, not the casino which is always shaking, and at which we lost seven dollars in the slots before I pulled addiction-prone Mark away) we stumbled into the photobooth, exhausted, sleep-deprived, cranky, and in love.