I took her by the shoulders and shook her, hoping to gauge just how drunk she was. “You are doubting Robert?”

“But I mean, how can we be sure? And it’s so frustrating that he hasn’t fucked either one of us. Don’t you find?” And then she hugged me, sobbing and sobbing, burning a cigarette hole in my lapel. “He’s ruined my evening and he’s not even in it yet. Did you see him wearing that faded cerulean blue T-shirt last Thursday? With his eyes. It’s not fair, Hartley. Angie needs a dildo discount. About thirty would hit the spot.”

What drawbacks did our four-star sex drive court? Certain Braille-sized body lice called Crabs (we kept insecticide in our medicine chest alongside the toothpaste). A urinary irritation we found was tided The Clap. (This was a complaint that serious penicillin most always quelled [see same medicine cabinet].) Such sex-life disadvantages seemed as giddy and essentially polite as we were, and maybe just as slightly beside the point. The few by-product problems sex offered seemed, like most of ours then—the woes of over-carbonation.

And, naturally, we risked the standard peril: Having your Heart Broken. That old malady, like another impending sickness nearly as clever, even today has no known cure.

Except of course, the usual. Time.

How Shall We Mainly Live? Who to Mostly Be?

n memory, from this cliff overlooking fifty, the thousand parties meld into a single auction, one catered emergency. Robert’s friends alerted him to bashes, he included Angie and me. I arrived in the neighborhood first. You could usually hear it. The disco bass so loud, an aquarium half a block away could experience total fishkill in forty minutes flat. You found the rental chromium coatracks in the hall; fur coats swooned over it, black sequined evening bags lay under mink hems like startled eggs just laid there. You heard three Romance languages being shouted. You smelled the hemp and tobacco smoke, colognes in jousting competitions. You let yourself in, head held aside to fend off volume and the crush of strangers checking you out before you found a secure planting place to stand still, to gather strength, and glare back, seeming invincible because bored preemptively. Not “on the make” but “made.” Not “new here,” “known here.”

These rooms of dancers with too little space to wave their arms, of talkers with ideas too subtle to express above rock this loud, they register in memory less as festivals than firesales. Odd, the emergencies themselves emerge in retinal memory as discrete parties—arrivals, drama-middles, exit lines—with hot foods served, dress themes observed, a young English film actor throwing porch furniture off somebody’s terrace down onto cabs below and no one stopping him but everybody watching.

In this citadel of overstimulation, you can be cut off from your funding source and, for a good while, not quite notice. Reeling home one dawn, thick-mouthed and weak-eyed but somehow spiked with a sense that this was real life I lived among the doors and windows and dicks and names and streets, I came upon a flower vendor setting out his wares.