I cannot remember what the young man on the pool table answered. The young man on the pool table wore no shirt. He wore the kind of trousers that young men like him wore, a kind that was allowed.

“Maybe you can tell me,” Nicholas said, “why everybody wears these trousers, with the labels in the back that tell the waist size. Why do all of you want to go around telling the world your waist size? I mean, disclosing it. And maybe you can tell me why it is always, always thirty.”

If the young man said anything memorable, I do not remember it.

“Of course, I can understand the buttons in the front,” Nicholas told the young man. “Everyone knows that they are quieter in movie theaters. But what is the point of broadcasting your waist size on your backside? I mean, exposing it. Why does everybody in the world want to do this?”

The young man indolently asked my brother his waist size.

Of course, it was only Nicholas who could ask anything he wanted. He turned to me and said that we should take a tour of the back.

He said, “Let’s promener.”

“Se promener,” I said.

“Okay, let’s se promener,” he said.

The narrow rooms in back aspired to the spirit of a blackout at the “Y.” Bare, low-watt bulbs led down to darker basement rooms, fervid with the smell of nitrites.

“It’s an oubliette,” Nicholas whispered to me in the dark.

It occurred to me that he could have also called it the new light for bone structure.

Every step meant a brush with flesh.

In a corner, a throng of men circled a group of three. The throng, in frenzy as one body, snapped and hissed instructions to the men inside, detailed orders, graphic and insistent, with which the three men within the circle, moaning, more or less complied.

One of the three men began to roar, then another, then the third. The men surrounding them roared too, broke out in gaudy tribute.

Then I heard my brother’s voice rise over them.

“Oh, come on, boys,” he shrieked. “It doesn’t feel that good!”

I was certain that his inflection had been practiced.

Perhaps two men laughed. But the throng, which had had one thing on its mind, was about to get another. The silence was public, a room making up its mind. For a time that was not going to last, the room was so quiet you could have heard a person die.

Before anyone could get to him, I pulled my brother from the crowd, to a fire exit near the stairs.

On the street, I pressed him up against the fire door. I shouted at him that it was not a good idea to sneer at men having public sex. I shouted that men having public sex were not famous for their collective sense of humor.