The rooftop was the only place on the Lower East Side where the sky was bigger than the buildings. On the street the sky was a ribbon between the rooflines. A strip of blue or gray or black depending on the hour. On the rooftop the sky was the whole thing. The sky went from horizon to horizon and the horizons were New Jersey and Brooklyn and neither one of them was close enough to matter.

You got to the rooftop through a door that said do not open and everybody opened it. The door was at the top of the last flight of stairs and the door had a lock and the lock was broken and the lock had been broken since the building was built because nobody fixes a lock on a door that says do not open. The door was the building's way of saying I am not responsible for what happens next. What happened next was the sky.

The rooftop was tar. Black tar that softened in the summer and held the shape of your shoes until October. You could read the rooftop like a guest book. Every shoe print was a visitor. The sneakers were the teenagers who came up to smoke. The boots were the maintenance men who came up to fix the antenna. The bare feet were the woman from the fourth floor who came up to do yoga at sunrise and the bare feet were the most mysterious prints on the rooftop because nobody on the Lower East Side did yoga in 1975 and the woman from the fourth floor was ahead of her time by thirty years.

I played guitar on the rooftop exactly once. The sound went up instead of out. On the street the sound bounced off the buildings and came back to me changed. On the rooftop the sound went up and kept going and did not come back. The rooftop had no echo. The rooftop was the only stage on the Lower East Side where the music left and did not return. I played one song and the song went into the sky and the sky took it and I never heard it again. I went back to the street where the buildings held the sound close and the echo was my audience and the audience was reliable. The sky is not a reliable audience. The sky takes everything and gives nothing back.

The rooftop was where you went when the apartment was too small and the street was too loud and the fire escape was too exposed. The rooftop was privacy that pretended to be public. You were outside but you were above and above was a different country. The rules of the street did not apply on the rooftop. On the street you kept your eyes forward. On the rooftop you looked at the water towers and the water towers looked back and the water towers were the only things on the Lower East Side that were higher than you and the water towers did not judge because water towers have seen everything.