One Sunday, the sky was wide and blue like it is on many summer days in Michigan. Traffic was sparse on Woodward Avenue. Rodin’s thinker, was thinking in front of the Art Institute as we climbed the steps up to the three arches. Then we passed into the opening gallery with Diego Rivera’s frescoes of auto factory workers, powerful in their muscular frames, pulling and lifting, and the owners and bosses small and in the corner with their notepads. In the Kresge Court café, Allen and I sat reading the New York Times and our friends were there at other tables, also reading the Times. Above billowing parachutes filtered the sunlight. Bill Tyler was passing from table to table selling his poems for a quarter. Later he might come by to visit us, drunk if he had earned enough during the day.

One Sunday in the Spring of 74, we stopped on our way out of the museum to talk with an old man, Art Frazier. Art took photos for 50 cents each. Like a magician he would put his hand inside a black sleeve into an old wooden box camera. We watched as our images were slowly revealed on a white piece of paper in a square plastic cup of water. He took two photos of us, the first visual recordings of our twenty-five-year love and friendship. I was wearing my felt hat, and we were both wearing worn levi’s. Allen has his arm around me. Back then we wore the same size levi’s and shared a lot of our clothes, even though he was seven inches taller and twenty pounds heavier.

Art reminded me of the picture man who in the early 1950s used to ride his horse past my grandmother’s house on Alter Road, his homemade camera on the saddle. As a little girl, through the window of my grandmother’s living room, I would watch him as he’d pull his horse over, waiting for the streetcar to pass.

Allen struck up a friendship with Art. He wanted to sell his camera, and Allen wanted to buy it. We had some money left after our trip to Montreal, so Al made a deal with him, and in the Spring of 1974, we went to his room in an old hotel, near Stimson and Myrtle Avenue. The room reeked of bug spray and alcohol. His camera, he explained, was the prototype for the Poloroid. I took notes as he explained to Allen which chemicals to buy, how to mix them and how to use the camera. When we left with the camera and bags of supplies, I never saw Art again, but I’m sure Allen stopped by to see him now and again because he was like that; he liked listening to people tell their stories. He had a very heartfelt way of connecting with others.

In the following spring, we found a flat at 4711 Avery Street with four bedrooms. We had a few roommates, a couple of dogs, lots of books and guitars. The branches on the big elm tree in front of the house were leafless, and many of the houses on the block were abandoned and in various states of disrepair, but our flat was full of activity—cooking, dancing, music-making. My brother moved in with us, then our friend Mike Clarey.

I was going to school every day while Allen still worked in the bars; Bob sometimes took classes, but mostly he played the guitar and wrote songs; Mike worked for an ambulance company and every night he’d tell us stories of despair and emergency. Upstairs, there was another group of young people—Ralph Koziarski and Diane with their little girl, Gary Saner, Tim and some others. I remember the sounds of Ralph first learning how to play his saxophone. On the weekends the ceiling would vibrate from their wild dancing.

On the roof of the house, our landlord and good friend Eric Shreve had built a small apartment for himself. He was about fifteen years older than us, and he’d grown up in the house. He cultivated marijuana plants outside in the summer on the roof and inside in the winter. His classical music drifted downward into our flats.

At first, we experimented with the camera, setting it up on its wooden tripod in the yard of our flat and on the streets in the Cass Corridor. We practiced mixing the chemicals and playing with the settings until we learned how to use it. There were three small stainless steel tanks under the wooden box.  We would reach inside the sleeve into the box, clip the photo in front of the lens, pull the lever to take the photo, then we’d move it into the developer tank, then lift it from there to the tank with the stopper, and then the bleach fix. When the photo was ready, we would take it out of the sleeve and put it in acetic acid and water (or vinegar and water if we didn’t have the chemical). Then at the end, we’d put it into a small plastic container with water and color, either black or brown for a sepia finish. The customers would watch as their images slowly appeared. Even though everyone was familiar with Poloroids, it was still like a magic show.

The photos that still exist are mostly those we took to adjust to the outdoor temperature. How much chemical we would use and the amount of time the photo was submerged depended on the weather and the amount of sunlight.  In our first practice session, we stood against the back of the house and tried to follow Art’s directions.

Looking at these photos, I remember how playful Allen was, taking on various personas and always teasing me. In one photo, he’s sticking his hands through my armpits; his white hands glow against the dark background of our house. Then a double exposure of our roommate, Mike  pointing out and away at another Mike, one a ghost and the other appearing slightly more alive. The shadow is the light revealed by the chemicals. Mike was always quiet and kind of shy. But then he’d do something radical like jump out of an airplane in a parachute, catch the wind and glide downward. Maybe at the end of the day we’d go into the house and bake bread, everyone taking a turn at kneading and rolling.

In this photo, Eric looks to the side, the light bouncing off his white cutoffs. He was one of the few men I knew back then who was openly gay. Gay men didn’t usually hang around the Cass Corridor, gay women, but not men; they hung out in another neighborhood, I think near Palmer Park. I remember Christmas Eve a few years later in Eric’s apartment, Ave Maria blasting and those big lazy marijuana plants growing in the bedroom. Our six-week-old baby was lying on the end of the couch wrapped up like a papoose.

Once after we moved a few blocks away, I was home alone with two sleeping children, and I heard someone trying to break in downstairs. Allen was out with his friends. This was many years before we had cell phones. I tried calling the Del Rio Bar but he wasn’t there, so I called Eric. He came over with a rifle circling the house, but the intending intruder was already gone. Detroit had a very high murder rate at the time. One of our friends, Dennis Pruss, had a poetry magazine called Murder City Poetry.

In another photo, I’m wearing a striped tee shirt, hands on my hips, one foot over the other, a skinny body under a big flannel shirt, a pack of cigarettes in my breast pocket. Around about then, I guess we were supporting Phillip Morris. Written on the back, $5.00, apparently the day’s take, not exactly a lucrative photo enterprise, even then. Here I’m wearing Allen’s shirt, worn and intimate. His shadow bent at the crease between the wall and walkway.

Bob named his cat Marfil after rolling papers —I loved holding her big body against my chest. Allen leans against the wall, one foot over the other. A few months before Allen died he said the reason he never quit using drugs was because he never felt normal without them. The odd thing is for the longest time I didn’t know he was still using. I never noticed anything different about him because he was always able to maintain a calm and clear mood. I suppose this is similar to the way we can’t tell when a person is taking an anti-depressant under a doctor’s prescription. He never had that option.

The light makes a dark spot and then the chemicals reverse it. Allen is leaning not on his left knee, but on his right knee. Everything is its opposite. I see his hand resting on his knee. I knew those hands in reverse very well.

Our neighbor Ernie moves his hands so fast that he leaves behind a white blur. His children and grandchildren lived in the house next door. He must have been a child when his family came to Detroit from Appalachia, maybe in the 30s. I remember riding my bike down Avery Street away from the tree and down to his little beer and pop store on Warren. High on acid, I coasted along under big half dead elm trees. I quit taking psychedelics after a while because Allen had to go into the hospital for open heart surgery because of damage caused by his drug use. I wanted him to live; I didn’t want to encourage him to continue using drugs. Also with psychedelics, I almost always plunged into a never world of darkness and it took weeks to resurface.

When we opened our front door, the dogs would leap into the living room and then back out the door, racing around the neighborhood and that tree where Bill and Ann Kennedy are leaning; In this photo they are still in love with each other. Not too long after they went their own ways. Bill would often egg me on, saying outrageous things about women. “All she needs is a good fuck.” I’d fly into a rage and he’d laugh at me. There was something kind of roguish and charming about him even though he was definitely sexist and would not have done well in the age of “Me, too.” Allen must have recognized some tenderness hidden behind his macho stance because he was always there for Bill.

A cigarette in his mouth and his beard wild and unkemp. My brother tears open his shirt, almost as if he wants to throw his heart on the sidewalk. Of course he was posing; he is actually a gentle caring person, but maybe there is some truth here related to the extent of his suffering after spending a year in Vietnam and being wounded. Every so often, he and his friends would gather on the front porch and blast their electric guitars, sending the dogs far down the street.

All those legs in this photo belong to our upstairs neighbors, Diane and Gary. When they held parties, everyone would dance so hard that the entire wood frame of our house would shake and tremble from their stomping feet.

Dennis looks young and easy-going. I remember him apologizing, endlessly apologizing.  It was easy then to just think, oh, that’s Dennis, so guilty and too young to be so apologetic. We were young, too. His white shoes on the avenue, feet open at an angle. Drinking too much was ok, too. We knew nothing about his childhood and we didn’t ask.

Joe Hendricks crouches down beside his bicycle. Once Joe and I rescued our motorcycles from a city warehouse where Allen and I had been storing them. A friend called saying the garage doors were wide open and they could see our cycles. Someone might steal them. Allen was out of town, so I called Joe to come with me. As we were walking the bikes west on Forest Avenue in the dark, the Detroit police stopped us. They refused to look at the titles I had in my pocket. Instead they handcuffed both of us and put us in the backseat of a police car. Because Joe was black—we were sure of that—he was locked in a cell in the basement while I was handcuffed to a chair in the station. The police laughed at me. Then they made some phone calls and discovered that the motorcycles were indeed mine. So they delivered both of us and the motorcycles, now with new dents, back to our flat. Here Joe kneels down in this photo and poses in front of his bicycle. Bob tells me on the telephone that he ran into Joe some years ago and he had become an evangelical Christian.

I don’t remember this guy’s name, but I remember his anger and that his father was a political figure, maybe a judge. He was using drugs one night and he fell asleep with one leg over th eother. From then on he walked with a cane.  Blurry me with my head moving faster than the camera. I smoked three packs a day. My father worked for Chrysler. Loop. The loop of my shoulders and arms. The light actually makes a dark spot on the paper and then the chemicals reverse it. So Allen is not really facing that direction with that dreamy look.

David Snow pats his belly while he leans against the sandy bricks of the Bronx Bar beside his friend Keith. The top of David’s head cut off, perhaps when Allen tried to fit his tall body into the frame. Or maybe I took this photo. David’s smiling in a timid way, kind of hinting at the child he once was, and not with the cynicism he sometimes expressed. He and Al were like brothers. Years later he moved to Portland Maine where he continued to make his art and where he worked as a drug counselor. After Allen died, he came to visit me in NYC; he gave me an autobiography of his grandfather, Wilbert Snow, a poet laureate of Maine and the thesis advisor for Charles Olson’s MA on Melville. He recalled Sundays at his grandfather’s house when Olson was there. All the links that tie us together before and ever after. Wilbert’s autobiography, Codline’s Child, now sits on the shelves of the Poet’s House with David’s inscription to me.

Written on the back of the photo of David and Keith is: “Cowboys & Outlaws.” Some years back David wrote and asked for this photo back. I sent it to him, thinking I had scanned it. In 2008 he died, living longer than most of Allen’s friends. I couldn’t find the photo, and it was important to me that David be part of this story. Then in May 2018, I found an email address on line for one of David’s brothers, Jacob; I wrote him and he wrote back immediately with a scan of the photo, lots of scratches; apparently carried in David’s wallet, reminding him of his earlier life and friendship.