Joy Ray lives on Great Jones Street upstairs from Sticky Mike's Frog Bar, a nightclub in front of which Rocket, drunk and loping towards the subway, was once robbed at gun point. There is a synchronicity to this that does not escape us whenever we rehash our pasts in the smoky bars and Cuban-Chinese diners of Eighth Avenue. After Rocket had been mugged and assaulted-not shot, but pistol-whipped—and was lying on the sidewalk getting his bearings back, Joy Ray, wearing a black tube dress under a long, brown camelhair coat, exited a cab in front of her apartment. In passing Rocket's supine body she dropped fifty-seven cents in change onto his back. Then, having made her substantial blow for the day against homelessness, she made her way upstairs to continue working on a portrait she would later title Hama1iб in Yellow and Green, the very painting in front of which Rocket would be standing, five weeks after my brother Neil died, when I met him for the first time. All these circumstances w…