Ray Watts and Bodine Hutchinson were once minor rock stars, playing in their band “The Nightcrawlers.”  Now they live in Hudson, NY. Ray looks to Bodine for advice on everything from women troubles to matters of life and death (not that they feel all that different to him.) Bodine still gigs and is always trying to get Ray to join him, because Ray is the best rock-and-roll guitar player Bodine knows.

Ray has spent his years since the band broke up making the weird art he displays in his gallery, “Ray of Darkness,” on the ground floor of a Victorian house:

“Bodine called it the “House of Usher,” and it definitely had a gothic vibe. It stood tall and unnaturally thin, like a severe old man, its ornate cornice a brow, and tucked beneath it a single round cyclopean window. What that architecture course back in art school had taught him was an oculus.”

In addition to Bodine, Ray has Liz, until he doesn’t…It’s always been a great mystery how an unregeneate bohemian like him and a Manhattan corporate lawyer could ever get along.

Bodine now writes computer code by day and plays digital Robin Hood by night as a white hat hacker. He lives in an abandoned movie theater a few blocks from Ray. His office is in the old projection booth and his bedroom in the old offices. The theater proper houses a private museum, featuring items from anonymous people signifying every form of loss: obsolescence, rejection, heartbreak and death.

Bodine has had a long string of lovers stretching back to the band days. But he’ll always have Ray, and his hound Mingus.