They wouldn’t know that Robert composed his music here (his Symphony no. 1, subtitled The Titanic, was already half afloat). Robert created while stretched out naked. It helped that his eyebrows and lashes were platinum. Leg hair by Harry Winston.

Given his looks, Robert’s talent seemed redundant. He had the goods for immortality, according to “Mr. Copland” as Robbie called him, even after long sleepy weekends spent at Maestro’s Peekskill retreat upriver. Robert’s musical gift felt a spendthrift oversight by some God too briefly in too good a mood.

One snowy Manhattan night, we’d stood outside a famous club where everyone but Warhol got auditioned at the velvet cord. Robert, seeing that we two would not make the cut, called above crowd sounds, “Take off your shirt.” Because he stripped of all finery, I undressed, my breath clouding blue. The bouncer, appraising Robert’s flesh, considered. But I held us back. My chest was a solid A minus, not theatrical Manhattan’s normative A plus.

“Pants,” Robert barked. So we shucked off, despite its being four degrees. And got waved past an awed mob’s tickling furs. I remember the sight of Robert’s pink-gold back tapering before me. The respectful crowd divided, his head was crowned by platinum curls—snow had casually gathered there, forming natural Fabergé leaf shapes. Once into the sound, we checked everything but our jockey shorts. And, shoeless, stripped, we were soon offered hand mirrors spread with powder—white and snortable and, for us then, unaffordable. So, till dawn, we redefined fun. —Copying Robbie, I became immodest as a god.

The Gustafsons could not know how often and successfully their gorgeous charitable boy had entertained in this bed. They would not recognize the names of the many models and film stars of both sexes who had achieved out-of-body bodily experiences here with the help of their cheerful, guiltless Swedish-American boy.

This youngest Eagle Scout in Cedar Rapids history had, around 1980, right here, fucked a Rolling Stone, then his wife, and then once more the Stone, whose rocky butt was surely gathering no moss whatsoever. Here, Robert made history, and most everybody else. He enabled many stars to use these four posts, isometrically. Plaques of bronze have been attached to vessels far less culturally seminal.

The uprights were topped by carved pineapples, huge owl-sized things like phallic hand grenades. Robert had lovingly recalled how his mother, on seeing pineapples anywhere, could never refrain from saying, with the sealed sententiousness of someone thoroughly middle class, “Pineapples symbolize hospitality.” Looking up at these four, I thought, Yes, alas.