Sandy takes a deep breath of beer, and then announces that Osama Bin Laudin stole his birthday.

It's nearly two weeks after the fall, but the shockwaves still travel through the brave face we're all wearing, showing brief glimpses beneath ill-fitting masks.

Attitude, an intrinsic character of New York, is more agreement then fact. In an effort to philosophize the struggle for survival here, people draw lines of distinction between predator and prey. The softest hearts and the weakest spirits claim divine armor in order to justify their success, and those that weren't born tough soon pretend to be so.

We are a pack of sheep in wolves clothing and Sandy�s hide seems tattered of late.

Boys don't cry. They repress. They internalize. They drink an ocean of alcohol to drown all those voices of despair and discouragement ringing inside. Each tear replaced with pilsner, each sob suffocated under a pillow of smoke.

Sandy's awash in beer and cheep cigarettes, and he's announcing that his birthday has been canceled.

With increasing frequency, I find myself catching him in moments of personal honesty, and each time I was surprised at the depth he hides. The failed dreams. The one-night stands that hold stubbornly their brevity. The diminishing creative returns. The three thousand people buried under some two hundred floors of commerce.

Each thorn sunk to the bottom of a lake of Guinness, forgotten save for the bodies that occasionally float to the surface to break the calm.

It's vicarious destruction, and I'm watching the ripples surface, watching as he falters and fractures under the weight of himself. More and more, I wonder when there will be nothing more of him then the footprints of his path. Crumbled and cracked until he falls into his ocean like a miniature Colossus of Rhodes.

Leaving only footprints and ripples.

Soon he takes to blacking out like a drunken duck takes to drowning. His explorations lead him on an inebriated foot-tour of Manhattan, making pit stops at all the bodegas along the way to refill on Budweiser tallboys. Friday nights find him skateboarding through Brooklyn across streets paved with vodka.

Somewhere out there, he's searching for the bottom, but what we all fear and what Sandy secretly knows, is that the bottom is a coffin.

The simple essence of human self-preservation keeps him alive, keeps him from pushing it too far, but we all know that could change at any time. Life proves that the tide can always turn dramatically.

On one particularly cold evening, Nick and I return to the apartment to find Sandy lying half-naked on Bill's bed. Nick is barely able to curb his disgust and frustration as we wake him.

Get up Dildo, this isn't your bed.

Sandy, with a flair for the obvious, stumbles through a realization.

�Hey, this isn't my bed�

Sandy stood laboriously, then shuffled at precarious angles towards his room while Nick fumed and seethed.

Apparently Sandy passed out on a pile of change Bill left on his bed, and as he walked, random coins would fall from their sweat-plastered perch on his back and jingle along the floorboards.

A musical accompaniment for a Johnny Walker.

If Nick hadn't been dealing with this for half a year already, he would have laughed as much as I was, but instead his brow clenched and he muttered about how pathetic Sandy had become. What a waste. What a fuck-up.

Where I saw a musical drunk on a downward spiral, Nick saw the shell of a friend, severing bonds. Burning bridges.

If Sandy was going to be burning bridges for the next few months, I decided I shouldn�t be standing in the middle of one of them.