We’d tried everything to lift Robert, thirty-four, from his old-man stupor. We played him his favorite music: Mahler’s Fourth and Ninth; Peter Pears doing English folk songs; lots of Bach; three shrill emotions from a Callas Norma; one whole summer’s Donna Summer disco ecstasy. And I mean loud. Only after nurses complained did we clamp headphones directly onto him.

Above Robert’s famous blue gaze, we held postcards—works by painters he loved best: “Here’s some Balthus, a Francis Bacon, here’s your top Vermeer … and, mmmm, Bonnard—look, a table in the garden, sunlight through trees, wine, fruit, nice lunch waiting. Like?”

Nothing.

We told Robert his own best jokes. Punch line hollered—“after all, what’s time to a pig?”— we hovered above the face.

Still nothing.

Even whittled, the face had stayed so beautiful it was hard to look at, but for new reasons. Rote breaths, one at a time, decided provisionally to, maybe/yes/no, continue.

Robert must’ve overheard: “His parents’ flight gets in from Cedar Rapids at, what? noon? And, since they say they ‘don’t feel comfortable paying New York hotel prices,’ his folks asked to crash at Robert’s place. And we just couldn’t think fast enough to say why not … Of course, somebody’ll have to wait over there and greet them, and explain about the six keys, and warn them against taking sugar cookies to that lunatic Serb Rasta man next door, and where not to wander after dark and …”

Robert had lain silent for three weeks. This boy so gently forward in life now hid far back in a cave he must’ve told himself he was learning to almost like. He lived beneath the manhole of a mask he left us on his pillow. Where his sexy raucous grin once worked, find only an “Occupant” sticker. By now, his body was crafted mainly of aerodynamic holes. “O! that this too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.” Hamlet predicted a disease. Our friend’s body, once lusted after citywide, had become all chiseled bone, Henry Moore’s finest work. “Human form” rendered as hat rack.

“The prettiest boy in New York of his decade.” You only get ten of those per century and here lay the incidentally living remains of the greatest beauty of the late 1970s Manhattan nights. Robert, his platinum hair once shaggy as some fashion-conscious Tom Sawyer’s, Robert in a tailor-made bottle green velvet suit (created “on” him by his next-door neighbor, an ancient African-American seamstress who’d once Singered acreage ruffles for the Ziegfeld Follies); Robert pedestaled upon platform shoes as steep as cinder blocks; Robert sporting a tasteful rhinestone lapel pin shaped like, what else, a single star! It helped that he moved like a high school band major on Orange Bowl Day. His exceptional male stuff got so strutted, you laughed with the joy of watching him maneuver it, his.