Perhaps it was the need for attention, for contact (I was eager to give as well as receive), that prompted my prowling the streets of the city. I milled in crowds, drank in bars, downing bushels of olives. I plunged into the thick goulash of New York, moving with the fierce tide of its abrasive, unmanageable, shock-infested aborigines. I loitered on corners in the heat or the rain and I learned a lot. But I was always the outsider, a fish in a merciless net, living out the golden days of my youth in a kind of melancholy confusion—until the day Grady assigned me, much to my annoyance, to the task of an errand boy.

He was reading some chemistry tract and munching on Maalox when I entered his office toward the end of that day. I dropped my copy on a corner of his desk; he didn’t look up. As I turned to leave, “Got a job for you,” he said, unfolding his long, wedge-shaped body from the chair. He pushed his glasses up on his forehead, as if the twin ridges above his eyes had been made for them. “One of our people is tossing a little bash tomorrow night. He has an amusing hobby—collecting film.”

“Classics?”

“All kinds. He’s rather eclectic. There’s a picture he wants to run at his party. I’d like you to pick it up for him.” He handed me a slip of paper with an address on it. “And this…” he held out several crisp bills, “should cover it.”

Grady’s directions, unlike his office guidance, were explicit and precise. Subway to City Hall. Avenue of the Finest, where five or six of whose eponymous heroes, unpressed and blue-jowled, were tenaciously oblivious to the sidewalk hordes, the Manhattan wallahs, the moldy old drunks, the overmedicated adolescents, the rubberheads, the mumbling, fumbling derelicts scratching and talking to themselves, the tourists, all agog but pretending not to be, lugging cameras and heading for ground zero. New York, New York, God shed His grace on thee.

Beneath the ramp, between the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge in its rise toward the river, was a series of vaults made available by the city to the private sector. Climax Productions was nestled among them, a dark concrete crypt with the barest amenities of an office and few of the refinements of a keep—a low table, a couple of unmatched kitchen chairs, a butt-sprung couch, and three closed doors marked, respectively, PRIVATE, STAGE, and HIS/HERS/ITS.