That’s when Johnny Cash jumped on the bed beside Kennedy and started wrestling him, but laughing, and Kennedy started laughing and before you know it Johnny Cash and JFK were in some kind of embrace, laughing. Johnny visited Jack in New York, later on, and it went the same. Rushing so hard on Max’s Feelgood Formula they went limp and giggling in each other’s arms like a couple of sugar-high schoolgirls, which is when Cecil B. DeMille and Yul Brynner came in rolling Capote in an outsized baby carriage. Marlene Dietrich, came in behind them, cracking the whip the way she learned to do in Rancho Notorious. Tennessee saw the two handsome men rolling, clenched, on the California King, and got down on his knees and clenched his hands in front of him and began to pray. “Oh Lord, thank you for amphetamine and for Jonny Cash’s pompadour and John Kennedy’s ass.” At which point Mother Theresa did her patented “Waif Of The Night” Dance, planting first one flat foot and then another, with Fosse leading—he’d taught her to snap her fingers and hip-thrust—in a sultry, incantatory manner. Mother Theresa sported surprisingly supple limbs. She liked to throw up her skirts and show the Calcutta landing strip she’d shaved above what she called her Pubis Charitis. “Look but don’t touch, boy!” “If you weren’t a living saint, I would bite your nipples off,” is how Yul Brynner introduced himself to Mother T. Yul, the second Dr. Max extracted the needle from his cheek, loved to tear off his shirt, swing it over his head and demonstrate his ability to raise his right pectoral and lower his left at the same time. “Well, gentlemen, here we are,” Kennedy said, “and the funny thing is, none of us are homos.” Tennessee Williams flicked his cigarette at the bed. “Speak for yourself, sweetcheeks.” “I am,” said Kennedy, “I meant no insult to you ladies.” “I like you,” Capote slurped, though it’s hard to hear him through the baffle of Mother Theresa’s surprisingly ample breasts. Dr. Jacobsen fixed the savior of the Untouchable’s packages of liquid injectable amphetamine she could smuggle back to India under her skirts. Not everybody loved the Mother of Charity. Did taking money from dictators, like Ceausescu, the butcher of Romania, make her a bad person? Hitchens. Was Mother Theresa bad for giving a murderous dictator the chance to feel good? Did it matter when the beneficiaries were the lost and starving? Surprisingly, Cecil B. DeMille could be the crudest of the high achieving High Speed Elite. Speed made him randy. Though he was never less than polite. “Mother Theresa, would it be a terrible imposition if I were to ask you to let me fondle your breasts? I miss my mother so much.”

The Professor did all the voices, sometimes lying on his back. His enthusiasm was contagious. He sprayed when he got excited, and if any transmittable bacteria were lurking in his spit, you’d find out about them when you came down with beriberi, or whooping cough, or whatever killer infections and parasites lurked in his fluids. You don’t mind the professor, on the fluids level. He never seemed that interested in sharing any. No, when you stepped, for the first time, into his book-strewn cat-box scented room, you expected attack, expected a constipation-furred tongue-down-the-throat. (Men who lived alone, men who took mass quantities of stimulants, men who had that cracked-glass fractured sheen in their eyeballs, as if they knew things so profound the knowledge was starting to shatter the vessel that contained it—men like this were not dangerous; they were fatiguing.)