One night at the Snug as I sway on my stool, percolating with sugar, liquor, and highly contraband toxins, I get flirted with. Across the bar from me is a woman who gives me the heavily mascaraed eye. She is wearing a Floridian orange halter top and a jean skirt, but just barely. I don’t return her look; I concentrate on the bar, its scrum of glasses and empties. The woman isn’t discouraged, though. She comes over to my stool, her anemone hair clouding my peripheral, and starts twirling a swizzle stick suggestively. She is, I now see, an ex-Goldfish, a pharmaceutical rep to whom Herk once said, “Do you have any of that new erectile dysfunction drug? What’s it called . . . Boobsinall? Oh yes, I can tell by looking that you’ve got it. Do you ever. You’ve got Boobsinall and all!”

“Aren’t you that movie star?” says the Goldfish.

I focus intently on the menus standing butlerlike on the bar.

“That one from the serial killer movie? You know the one. The really cute killer, so cute you can’t believe he actually is the killer but he is the killer and you can’t help pulling for him, hoping he’ll get away with it, because you wouldn’t want all those good looks to go to waste in prison?”

The mixers are stacked upside down and bunched together like a drum set.

“And then you start thinking maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if he serial-killed me just as long as he did it with his hands....”

The bottles are all lined up straight, labels facing front, their pourers striving heavenward like openmouthed birds waiting to be fed.

Pick me, each one says.

“You’re him, right?”

I shake my head, but in New York a denial of celebrity is often an affirmation, and this only encourages her.

“Can I get an autograph?”

Dimly, I consider dropping some tissolet into her drink.

“We can go into the bathroom and you can sign it anywhere you like.”

She tries to brandish her tits at me, moving them side to side while giving them the upper-arm concertina, but succeeds only in making herself look like some kind of expired meat on a stuttering rotisserie. Her ass sags heavily out of the bottom of her skirt like a beer belly.

“Yeah,” she says, “you’re him. I can tell. You’ve got that same quiet sexy criminal look. Tell me, is it true that you’re going to play the Rat Burglar in the movie? I always thought you would be perfect for him!”

A movie?

A fucking movie?

Such is my disgust that I almost say something so crass, so Schermer-like, that I know I’d never forgive myself. But I don’t; I reel it in. My substitute reaction is to make a helpless squeak of distress and bury my head firmly in my arms upon the bar until she leaves.