Many young artists from our neighborhood, those most rabidly striving, would travel out to some Hampton or other. They crowded into insanely overpriced cottages, time-share bunkbeds. They kept dressing up and going to parties where they hoped to meet the older situation-makers from New York; instead they met only other overdressed underfinanced young strivers paying too much for the right to stalk nobody more hopeful than themselves.

Served the climbers right.

Our Circle, too poor for that, stayed put. We did our homework in town; our task? to now amuse ourselves via each other. For that, it seemed, was what we did and who we were. Itinerant Entertainers. Somehow this felt easier to see during the summers. Maybe we were working up to playing Hamlet as a group. But, for now, we’d been cast as The Players, a crew just glad for the work, and only vaguely aware of its comic drama’s uses here at Court.

Tonight, still living at our entry-level, we could afford the admission-price time-share of goofing off, being the paid fun for only each other. —We were “the talent,” if by default. The sole career that counted on this night of the angels was Delight.

Our company felt far less toxic than the Hamptons’. (A rumor reached us, but then so many did. About a friend of Angie’s from Morton Street who’d caught a cold that went direct into pneumonia that left him so shrunken he soon looked like a pile of leopard-spotted celery, and was, in six weeks, dead. And he’d been a godlike weight lifter, so quickly overtaken. Poor guy, bench-pressed into oblivion that fast. It was just a rumor but it made the rounds and, unlike most such gossip, never quite vanished.)

Summers, New York’s fire department opened hydrants at either end of our block to keep the restless street kids cool, occupied. Through Robert’s open window, we could hear their splashing, could hear our own known urchins pushing each other into cold spray then squealing out of it; we heard the pop and pump of firework munitions created only to look pretty, ending. From time to time one Roman candle’s overheated color would shoot past a window, trailed by that most magical of human sounds: “Ahhhs” uttered from heads lifted toward some spectacle right overhead.

White pigeons, spooked by noise, settled on the window ledge and made their pearly coos and, if you squinted, they appeared almost a dovelike product. Robert’s dozens of crystals, hung from thumbtacks, strung in all four windows, caught streetlight invisible from within the apartment. The pendants proved that someone before this building must now be twirling white sparklers.

We lounged around, half glazed in sweat, drinking cold cold Rolling Rocks, bottlenecks smeared with lime to make beer taste somewhat more expensive. Robert, I noted, sipped only ice water.

Seated on an heirloom steamer trunk, Marco offered us a line from Una-muno, “The devil is an angel, too.” Then we got, straight from his memory, the word for “Angel” in each language Marco knew (sixteen). Was it just us or did these words not sound especially poetic and mellifluous? They flew.