The troop does yield a raft of friends: first, Kurt, who teaches me dirty words and the uses of pocketknives. I buy my first one, a beauty, at the new Circle K on Craycroft Road; a little silver horse’s head floats dreamily on a black field, so deep inside layers of clear lacquer he could never be touched. When I lose it in the arroyo, it isn’t the knife itself but that chrome profile, mane forever lifted in the wind, that occasions a minor heartbreak. Then there’s Tony Dallesandro, who has an immense collection of little plastic figures of men: soldiers, cowboys, Indians who must always die and die again. The Dallesandros live in a big house in the desert, an atmospheric adobe like Hacienda Bellas Artes, and my mother likes to go for a visit so I can play with Tony while she and Mrs. Dallesandro have coffee; it is a social step up, though there’s a sense that the Dallesandros are to be admired from a distance, elevated somehow just out of our reach. It isn’t only the nice big house. Everyone seems fascinated by Tony’s beauty, which even my father remarks on: he’s a little Tadzio, with curly bronze hair and huge brown eyes, his eyelashes of an unnatural length and curl. He seems to have stepped from one of our slides, a Renaissance allegory of perfected boyhood, though he zooms around his room entirely engaged in the defeat and toppling of hundreds of plastic men.

Some days after school I go to Walter’s house; we’ve invented a game we play in his room, with the door closed. It goes like this: because Walter is my baby, he must take off his shirt and sit in my lap. He keeps his blue jeans on. My baby cries and needs his belly rubbed, needs me to stroke his chest and the brushy stubble of his head to soothe him. That’s all there is to it; when the baby feels better he stops crying and doesn’t need to be stroked, but in a moment he’ll be upset again. I love this game, and in some way Walter’s body partakes of some aspect of the Egyptian cat: his leanness, the sculptural muscle of his little chest and belly. Walter isn’t pretty like Tony, but he’s available, and there is something entirely compelling in his small, solid curves. Why do we always close his door? Because we know we’re pursuing some mystery? Something to be translated, like the hieroglyphics?