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TIME to get the hell out of here.  I don’t want Zeke to think I’m stalking him.  I swing a load of freshly laundered towels into the trunk of my car – my car! – and slam down the trunk lid.

It is Saturday morning, a few weeks after Gert Logan and I went to purchase the five- year-old Toyota that I’m swinging laundry into.  I’m parked in front of the newly renovated Logan’s Laundromat on Stringer Street.  The washing machines in the basement of my apartment building are quite functional, and okay, there are at least a dozen Laundromats in East Orange where I can separate my whites from my coloreds, but my man don’t own nary one of ‘em.  He owns this one: his name hangs over the door in big black letters.  It is etched into the storefront window and branded onto the side of the laundry carts and thumb tacked onto the bulletin board next to the vending machine, advising any of his patrons to call him at such-and-such number in case there is an emergency.  And I know I shouldn’t have, but I dialed that emergency number not too long ago.  I’ve been calling him for days, and his lack of response has got me all jittery.

I drive past Logan’s Liquors, Logan’s Produce and Logan’s Delicatessen.  No sign of him.  I give up my search and drive through the streets of Newark until I find myself on Gina’s block in the Ironbound section.

The Ironbound gets its name from the elevated train tracks that bound it on the east, the Conrail tracks on the west.  It is a neighborhood bound in iron, virtually isolated from the rest of Newark, with a lush green park named Independence at its center; that center is surrounded by Portuguese restaurants and bakeries, green grocers and florists, bars and novelty shops, all united in their effort to keep the center sweet smelling and sassy, to keep it peaceful, to keep it . . . soft, maybe, by turning its back on the soot from the factories and the grit from the refineries and the noise from the trains that travel hard on posturing iron arms.

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