They say a basis in fact underlies most legends. They say it all the time, all those Wise Elders in all those old horror films, the high priests, the scientists, the gypsy fortune tellers. On this single issue they agree unanimously.

Cinema _ all art really _ has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure.

Especially on rainy nights like this, they would congregate under the bridge, all the boys from nowhere, the boys who lived nowhere, who had nowhere else to go.

Just as there are broken people, there are broken places on this earth. Some have always been broken. All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges _ block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts.People don__ bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed.

Sometimes sanity just means the ability to recognize the end of the road when you reach it.

My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man's.