QUOTE : Yeah, babe," he assured me, whipping open the shower curtain. His body was a freckled mess of jerking muscles and stubble. He shaved his chest almost daily. He had a scar on his rib cage from where he'd been stabbed in a bar fight, he told me. He had all kinds of stories. He said back home in Cleveland he used to hang around with gangsters. He spent a night in jail once after beating up a pimp who he's seen kick a German shepherd - a sacred animal, he explained. Only his story of burning down an abandoned house when he was sixteen had the ring of truth.