“Pete wanted to party one last time,” Waldo said. He looked around. “It’s like nothing’s changed.”

“Nothing has. Still the same shallow fags dancing and groping each other.”

Waldo shook his head at him. “What’s up your ass, Bill.”

“Pete’s dead,” he said. “But the party goes on.”

Waldo, still studying the crowd, said, “Not for long, Billy. Not for long.”

14.

14.

In the days that followed my last encounter with Adam, I found myself thinking about lies. In my experience, lies tend to metastasize and this is as true of lies of omission and lies of commission. Whether the lie is a deliberate falsehood or a withheld truth, it expands until it taints everything. I had told Adam everything was fine instead of being truthful and now I wasn’t able to face him. For the same reason, I could scarcely bring myself to make my morning phone call to Larry and pretend everything was all right. Everything was not all right. I had fallen half in love with a straight guy who did not, could not, reciprocate. The situation churned up feelings I thought I had left behind as a lonely teenager with a terrible secret. They surfaced into my consciousness like bloated bodies emerging from the bottom of a lake, a toxic and decomposing mix of fear and loneliness and self-loathing that drove me into myself.

One night, I passed the bar at the corner of Castro and Market where groups of men sat drinking behind plate-glass windows beneath dim, forgiving lights and a drink seemed like a wonderful idea. Just a couple of shots to warm up my insides and calm down my mind. My hand was on the door when I heard a familiar and, at that moment, unwelcome voice.

“Do you really think that’s going to make it better, young Henry?”

Simon stood behind me, the black cigarette burning between his fingers, his expression unreadable.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” I said.

“Then you’re an idiot.” He pulled his scarf tighter around his neck and approached me. “Because you can drink yourself into a stupor, but whatever you’re running from will be waiting for you when you sober up and it won’t be happy. Or don’t you remember that dance? I mean, it hasn’t been that long for you, has it?”

“Go away, Simon.”

“I’m on my way to a meeting,” he replied. “Come with me.”

I glanced at the bar, the seductive lights, the laughing men lifting bottles and glasses, the handsome bartender mixing a drink behind the long, curved bar and then I thought about a group of men sitting on hard, folding chairs in a church basement drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. I heard Larry telling me, when I had asked him at the beginning of our work together, “It’s simple, Henry. If you want to stay sober, all you have to change is everything.”