Soon after we said Up Yours to International Rubber Gasketry (which never called), after we memorized each other’s siblings’ names and birth order, we learned each other’s exact junior and senior prom themes. I still recall Robert’s gym masterpiece was “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” The welter of gym plumbing and steampipes he upgraded to being the Bakelite wheelroom of Captain Nemo’s submarine.

We lived exiled to eternal bachelor pads; but we’d arrived here free of childrearing’s time-drain and expense. They assign you ugly vents and ductwork? Make a line of it.

We had not impregnated our hometown sweethearts; nor had we been impregnated. We were none of us the fair-haired letter-sweater son that Dad hand-groomed to stay home and take over his Budweiser distributorship.

That was our form of luck.

Blake wisely instructs certain prudish stay-at-homes, “The lust of the goat is the glory of God.” And we billy-club aficionados already knew this, thanks. Sex was among our several unacknowledged art forms. So early in our careers, most of us were still better at it than our sundry vertical artistries. —In those, we’d not yet found a way to be just natural (as we helplessly were the second that our pants fell down).

But, in New York, you could get famous even for that.

—We, barely unpacked, already painted (self-portraits, the model always being present, moody, and cheap), we wrote (self-portraits of young persons arriving in great cities that, happily, we were far too artistic to actually, like, call New York), we sculpted (torsos not unlike our own, if just a bit more “defined”), and we composed.

Robert’s starter chamber works were early Straussian tone poems in which yearning Coplandesque adolescence met caterwauled Bartok car-horn cello-scratches indicating a confrontation, the Iowan Lutheran Bucolic being eaten by the Godless Urban, get it? And, barely out of Port Authority bus depot, we fucked. Actually, in the depot, if memory still services.

After one year’s art school, I’d found I might just make a better writer than a painter. As with most land-poor Southerners, my family tended to mythologize its struggles, enlarge its charms and holdings. In New York, I farmed out such diehard traits and glories to new friends.

Having no money, we naturally moved into your cheaper neighborhoods. There still were some then. Instantly, on the street, Robert and I recognized others like us. Leashed urban dogs scout only at ankle height only for leashed urban dogs of a certain scent, size, and use.

The town then mainly seemed child artists, also freshly drawn to Manhattan’s clearinghouse and open ward. I owned a typewriter. At least I knew what my work would be. In Manhattan, when you’re this underfunded, even small self-knowledge can give a kid a big head start.

At thirty-three, I’d already finished grad school, worked odd jobs, taught in California and North Carolina, but somehow I still looked like a kid.