We had all chaired our high school prom decoration committees. We now met at interviews for the same job, which none of us won, being a bit too visibly “artistic.” We seemed latent nonteam players—despite the blue blazer. (Borrowed, it, alas, looked borrowed.) Still unemployed, we adjourned to whine over coffee.

I lost the job (writing-editing The Gasket, a rubber industry newsletter). But I found Robert Christian Gustafson.

I first encountered said youth in a polished-deco-stainless elevator, going down. I had no particular feeling yet about the rubber industry. I stood behind this tall person, also studying the clocklike needle marking our descent. A smell rose off his back—the newly starched white shirt seemed worn by some kid who’d just mowed his folks’ two-acre lawn. He looked gold and smelled green. Gilt ringlets blocked my view and seemed the spinning arrow’s fulcrum: Cupid head.

The interviewer had told us, “Expect our call”; we knew better. Leaving through a checkerboard lobby, he was drawing slow-burn looks, not noticing. He stood six feet, but so much beauty taffy-pulled to that height made him seem a sailing ship. I followed, already noticing others’ noticing for him (surely someone had to). Here I was scrapbooking for a (literally) perfect stranger.

One old guy, his mouth clamped around a nasty unlit cigar, wedding ring cutting his finger, did this comic double take, scoped out the blond’s ass. Girl? Oh no, boy, oh well, a boy that young, why not look, long as you’re lookin’? Sir, my sentiments exactly.

Catching up, short of breath, as if auditioning as Beauty’s executive secretary, I only knew I had to stop this youth. Soon backward walked I, before his silver-yellow fire-engine advance.

“Don’t tell me.” I let my Southern accent go more molasses. “International Rubber hated you. For exactly the reasons they should have fallen on their knees. You’ve been in the city from ten to fourteen days, and you’re an artist just fantastically talented, and you think nobody knows or understands about your caliber of talent, but I do.”

“Because you are gifted, too, right? I mean, like, extremely.”

“Ditto. —Coffee? My cheapest legal vice. With refills, if you put a lot of cream and sugar in it, one cup can get you through the afternoon.” We spoke our names, told our “fields,” our minor hometowns, we shook hands and scanned each other from the knees—to the telltale groin—(two groin boys) and up, still smiling when our eyes rendezvoused back at either’s face, and we were already friends.

Gustafson lived, turned out, one block from me. “Lucky for you,” he said, “I’ve been here five whole years, going on a century. I know things.”

“Such as?”

“Best getting places. Certain amazing people. The ropes.”

I nodded, “Okay.”