Bill enrolled at City College and got a job waiting tables at a gay restaurant on Fillmore Street frequented by older, professional men. His preppy looks earned him more money in tips in a single night than he had made in a month bagging groceries. He and Michael continued to date and to fight, break up and get back together. He played shortstop in the gay softball league on a team sponsored by The Hide ’n Seek, bought Lacoste alligator shirts and 510 jeans at All American Boy on Castro Street and The Joy of Gay Sex and The Frontrunner from Paperback Traffic on Polk Street. He worked out at Muscle Systems on Hayes Street and learned to dance at the I-Beam’s Sunday afternoon tea dances on Haight Street. And, despite his resolutions, he still sometimes secretly veered off alone to the city’s seedier bathhouses and backroom bars where he engaged in activities he kept to himself.

Waldo told him he looked like the poster boy for gay San Francisco. Yet, the longer Bill lived in San Francisco, the lonelier he felt. Back in Eden Plains, wanting sex with other boys was only part of what he had been concealing, and it wasn’t even the most shameful part. Everyone talked about sex. His high school baseball teammates constantly joked about butt fucking and blowjobs and the size of their cocks. Probably, Bill realized in retrospect, at least a couple of them would have gladly allowed him to blow them had he had the courage and the finesse to hit on them. But, with the possible exception of Marco, he doubted his teammates’ fantasies included holding hands at the movies and making out in the front seat of his dad’s car at the end of a date. Had any of them dreamed of the moment when he would look into another boy’s eyes and say, “I love you?” Or imagined the house where they would spend the rest of their lives together?

This is still what Bill believed he wanted, even if he couldn’t square it with the coke and rough sex he secretly indulged in. Those nights of raw exhilaration were followed by days of regret during which he could scarcely face the memory of what he had allowed to be done to him. The names he had let men call him—faggot, bitch, queer—as they plundered his body. He could barely acknowledge that the humiliation as much as the coke or the ecstasy or the meth was what made the sex so gut-wrenchingly intense and, almost more than the drugs, was why he went back for more. Unable to face whatever truth about himself his secret life might reveal, he hid that life from Waldo, from everyone, thus exchanging one closet for another and dividing himself into two: Good Bill and Bad Bill.