He stepped up to the bar. “A Coke,” he said to the bartender. He felt the need for a schnapps but it would have sounded like he was trying to be chummy. Drinking as a male bonding ritual.

The teenagers were also waiting expectantly. They had grouped together right behind him, including the back in the leather vest, now returned to its original position. He was trapped.

A man dressed in suspiciously elegant clothes who says “Pardon me” and sips Coca-Cola—they’ll think I’m a fag for sure.

(Of course, they themselves are potential prey for fags. I ought to tell Rönnekamp about this place. They’re all set up for it with their Elvis coifs and tight jeans. Their being, their Dasein and Sosein, as their philosophers call it, is bursting out of their tight jeans. My Sosein hangs on the clothesline—a counting-out rhyme for adolescents.)

“Eighty,” said the bartender, took a bottle of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator, pried off the cap, stuck a straw in the bottle, and pushed it toward him.

—The world-famous trademark, top-of-the line product of the synthetic beverage industry, spouting hundreds of geysers from Karachi to Caracas, conjured up from the crust of our spinning planet by a wave of the hand of powerful business interests, from Dallas, Texas, to Paris, France; from Heidelberg, Iowa, to Heidelberg, Germany: Take a Break! Shove your hard hat, bus driver’s hat, or filling station cap off your forehead, lift the bottle in a toast to the milk-and-roses face of the blossoming girl at your side (warmhearted foreman’s smile exuding solidity), her spring-fresh, Pond’s-Almond-Cream face—lift the plump bottle—conveniently ridged like a hand grenade—and its starry tingles in salute to the glistening Colgate teeth of that fragrantly clean daydream of a creature in her summer blouse, straining two full, bulging handfuls of proffered pleasure toward you: eros of consumer excess—holding up for your inspection the giant economy-size, small-change, fractional economy, it’s the turnover that counts, billions from Greenland to Palm Beach, from Sauerland to Tierra del Fuego, from Flanders fields where poppies grow to Maya-Land, Watusi-Land, Singhalese-Land, and old Atlantis, webbed and crisscrossed by superhighways and airline routes, bald eagles and ibises, land of tourist brochures, a Hindu lad waves to the stewardess from his zebu’s hump, igloos, silent ivy-covered castles reflected in water-lily ponds, Rob Roy, hero of the whiskey tartans, Cesare Borgia of the Dukes of Supercortemaggiore, oil rigs boring through the megalithic tombs of the Lüneburg Heath, stockyards in the Zane Grey prairie, like swarms of ants the buffalo herds trickle away over the distant horizon into a gigantic jar of Bovril meat extract, Quaker-Oats-Land, Singer-Sewing-Machine-Land from the calving polar ice caps to the coral coasts, from the foam-flecked strands of the Spice Islands to the rocky islands where seagulls flutter and the atolls are alive with crimson fish—

the cherry-slim, invigorating beauty arches toward you, soap-fragrant, firm to the touch, the coolly fogged consumer grenade, the geyser of synthetic sensual satisfaction, extracted from the wilderness and sterilized on a distant star, the juice of meteors . . .