Mickey Acuña is a man suspended between a vague past and a
vaguer future. Emerging from the landscape of the
Southwest, buffeted by life and licking his wounds. he moves
into a YMCA to wait for a check that is coming to save him
and that demands an address. As days and then weeks pass
wihtout its arrival, he picks up work—first odd jobs and
then shifts at the cash register of the Y—and hangs out with
his neighbors, playing handball, drinking coffee, shooting
pool, getting drunk, falling in love or lust with women he
meets, works with, passes on the street.nnIn the vacuum of
the Y, Mickey finds himself becoming the unwitting center of
a community starved for human contact and for meaning:
Sarge, with his fast-food coupons; Omar, with his drunken
rages and obsession with the vanished Lucy; Rosemary, whose
abundant physical presence both attracts and repels him.
Gilb captures the rhythms of the Y's residents—desolate,
resigned, needing love—going about their confined lives.
And Mickey, who is detached, who is both suspect and
suspicious himself, not quite one of them, fights to
maintain his distance and his freedom, until the narrative
converges abruptly around him a profound and shocking
conclusion.
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