On my last night, Max abandoned me to hang out with people from a special club she wanted to get into, and I found myself sitting against the net on the tennis courts, smoking a joint in the dark with a group of her friends. I got stoned fast and told them that I thought time itself was a smokescreen, a construction designed solely to prevent us from discovering that the moment we were in was both the past and the future.

The handsomest of the group said dismissively, “You think about a lot of stupid shit.” The others laughed.

I went back to Max’s dorm, took a long hot shower, burrowed into my sleeping bag, and cried. In the morning, she came in as I was leaving, gave me a careless one-armed hug, and absentmindedly told me to stay in touch.

I didn’t visit again. Our letters transformed into emails, which became infrequent and then simply annual obligations. After art school I moved straight to the city—first to that sublet in Brooklyn and then my loft on Dutch. Max was already living in a brownstone off the Bowery with her boyfriend, Petey Delano, the aggressively bearded, amateurly tattooed downtown artist whose Polaroids of her naked body wound up at the Guggenheim after he shot himself in the bathtub.

She got the brownstone.

One night, when I was twenty-three, in the days leading up to Ohne Titel, I saw one of Marlin’s wheatpasted posters. FAMILY VALUES, it said. JES WINSOME. HIGH LINE. FRIDAY AT 8.

Cady and Atticus were out of town, so I called Max to see if she wanted to go.

“LOVE to,” she said, with complete enthusiasm. “Absolutely. I keep hearing about Pine City. I want to see them up close.”

We met at 34th Street, climbing over the chain-link fence and crawling through the holes in the wooden blockades all the way down the then-abandoned freight railway to the very end, where it abutted the meatpacking plant on Gansevoort Street. Over a hundred people were already there, a scrum of ripped denim and eyeliner, buzzing and crawling over the piles of trestles and pockets of wildflowers that burst through the gravel.

Jes had hauled full Marshall stacks, a projector, a twenty-foot screen, and six VCRs up there. Her film combined clips of Phyllis Schlafly protesting the ERA; Pat Nixon, rigidly sprayed into a pantsuit atop a garden chair in Arizona to discuss her shopping habits; Nancy Reagan on 60 Minutes, wounded by “scathing” criticism of her White House redecoration; Tipper Gore in front of Congress, gravely laying the blame for 1985’s teen suicide rates at the hands of popular musicians. Their comments were stacked and clipped and looped until there was nothing left but the fragments of their voices, edited to say, “We betrayed you. We will do it again and again.”