Michael Brandonisio

Strictly Confidential

His plane from Majorca landed on the tarmac right on time. A limousine was waiting to take him into the city.

After he settled into his townhouse, he put on a big thick handlebar moustache, the kind actors do when playing cowboys in old westerns. It was also like the moustache one of his colleagues had been seen wearing around town a few weeks earlier. That sighting had been reported in a newspaper by a well-known gossip columnist. There are many reasons for gossip columnists to fabricate, but respected ones do not.

He inspected himself in the mirror of an armoire before going out. He jumped into a taxi and headed downtown, over to West Street. It was a sunny Friday afternoon. There weren’t many pedestrians around where the taxi dropped him, mostly car traffic on an adjacent six-lane highway.

He was wearing a black leather bomber jacket with a faux fur collar and a pair of dusty pink, flared pants. The pants were slung low at the hips. They had gone out of fashion a number of years earlier. His leather ankle boots were black with thick heels. The outfit made him look a little out of place, but not too much. He walked with his shoulders hunched, but it wasn’t very cold or windy.

His eyes narrowed when he spotted a photog coming his way. He looked the photog straight in the eye. The photog recognized his famous eyes and gave him a wink. They walked past each other. He kept on walking. The photog stopped, turned and snapped a picture of him walking off. He kept going towards an enormous abandoned warehouse. He liked the clean, crisp air by the riverside.

The photog went home, put Roxy Music’s “Street Life” on his stereo. Listened to it repeatedly as he developed the film he had just shot. Come on with me cruising down the street / who knows what you’d see, who you might meet seemed apropos.

The picture did not get into the papers. The photog kept it in a drawer. Never told a soul about it for a long, long time.