I am in a predominately gay neighborhood; rainbow stickers on car bumpers and around the seatposts of mountain bikes seem to be everywhere. Kinky storefronts openly profess the absurd. It's no wonder I miss the entrance to the driveway into Western Book Bindery and end up having to circle the block. The architecture of the windowless structure is crudely obscure, built from cinderblock, painted battleship gray, and surrounded by a silver chainlink fence topped with rolling coils of barbed wire. I nonchalantly look about the outside of the Bird before unlocking the doors. I grab the folder of Bea's poetry and go inside.

Three of my senses are immediately assailed. First, I cannot see. I remove my sunglasses and take care of that right away. The constant whir of some mechanism within the bowels of this building dulls my hearing and I jump when a woman touches me on the shoulder. I smell, what do I smell? Paper. Old paper. The kind of paper of which scrapbooks are made, those recently rescued from far too many years in a dank basement or a dusty attic. Ardis knows why I am here, we spoke earlier on the phone. She gestures for me to follow as she leads me over to the man who will bind these pages into a hardcover book.

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