12:03 p.m. Robert’s innocent folks would now be waiting at the brushed-steel luggage carousel. Most domestic flights to Manhattan land at La Guardia. Theirs arrived at Kennedy—as if their trip were international. And, considering the distance they had come from Lutheran Youth Fellowship socials on the Iowa bluffs, to this world of skeleton gods and boy-children forcibly undressed, to 120 blocks of talented people selling their abstract ideas first, and then their bodily presentation of those ideas, and eventually, in several cases, their bodies—considering the Gustafsons’ flying into the joy of careless rapture naked, with today’s total stranger naked too, and the single night (the night he wore the 1970s inaugural bottle green velvet suit), the night a whole decade elected Robert “The Sexiest Boy Alive in Town Right Now,” this poor couple’s flight, it could’ve been interplanetary.

If they didn’t already know some of this, the poor things soon would. In his kitchen, I picked up an old Easter basket; I emptied it of vintage fountain pens, commenced harvesting raunchier images from under the fridge door’s magnets. Now to open Robert’s freezer, find an igloo with one central peephole and—in it—a single geological cannoli, one half-pint of sludgy Stoli circa 1979?, plus nine small brown glass screw-top bottles. I dropped these into my container, singing, to console myself, “Pickin’ up poppers, puttin’ ’em in de basket. Pickin’ up …”

I felt glad, at least, that his folks wouldn’t find their ancestral tool-trunk stuffed with peach-fuzz swimmers. And, God willing, I’d at least have purged the place of their son’s few store-bought boners.

Basket over arm, I finally opened the broom closet. One broom tilted there, leaned on by a dingy mop. I had expected oh three dildoes, tops. I found about thirty.

Thirty dildoes are a lot of dildoes.

They were piled knee-high, like cordwood. Propped, bald, ridged, and spired. Set on end, they formed a little onion-domed Kremlin. Some used adjacent cleaning products as their splints. Clumped there, the dildo quorum appeared unionized yet disgruntled. —Like toys caught in the act of trying to become the Toy-maker. Here were Toys that’d crawled up off the floor, yeah, into an erect position, okay—but had not evolved much beyond.

Striving? yes.

Brainy? no.

They seemed to sniff up toward me, weak-eyed rats, startled by daylight. Their pointed ends—the business ends—considered my new scent. The dildoes resembled some half-familiar form of household tool (actually, I guess they were). But their reiterated shape fell somewhere between a vacuum cleaner’s “wand” and the fuselage of an old-timey batter-beating Mix-master. They seemed hybridized with that lanky, shameless, duck-faced go-between, The Plumber’s Friend.