Ossorio’s other clients soon noticed, bringing over sweet contributions. Watching Robert’s steady hands, the old guys made bets about when it’d all fall down. The structure didn’t, not for years yet.

Since the table was rarely wiped clean, since Ossorio respected it as Ours, a changing toylike pile of doodads often held its center. The interlocking white cubes lent our leavings an Incan nobility: Lost earrings of Angie’s, a Santa Christmas ornament found unbroken on the sidewalk, stacks of matchbooks and untraceable keys. And, once, a short dildo nobody would claim but all the regulars nicknamed, made a pet of. All this got wedged into pounds of pretty, then dingy, chunks of sugar. As we slumped here—discussing life and death, meaning art—our voices raised amid the clatter from dominoes and dice, we, still such kids, barely noticed constructing it all, everybody working on another end of it.

Sugar-cube boats wore toothpick-and-napkin sails—a frosted city sprung up here, mutating amid and among us. The sandpile. Anyone’s.

On Being Overly Active Sexually

oung persons, fairly new to New York, hoping to appear cool, must lie about many things. Running with my flashy favorites, I’d begun to fib, as camouflage.

Restaurants conquered, celebrities or celebrities’ support staffs slept with, advances paid. Hard-bitten hipness was often faked. And eventually-just when you’d prefer not—your own pretended speed catches up with you. It shoots you past where you’d hoped to stop. And, by the time you need not fake anything ever again, you’d truly prefer to.

For several years I’d pretended going (many times) to the St. Mark’s Baths. Most everything I’d heard about the place scared me. Though it appeared a hygienic steambath committed to public swimming, weight lifting, and recreation, it was actually a maze devoted to sexual stalking. No panthers worrying their cages can suggest the crouched energy of Type-A male New Yorkers set down in a plywood maze, goal-oriented, on the humid trail of Same.

(Once a week, on slow Tuesdays, they tried Lesbian Night. Then the corridors emptied. Mostly the gals just sat around the TV room, wearing towels, eating potato chips, and telling their life stories.)

The procedure for getting through the front door spooked me most.

If only Robert would go with me. His beauty friction-proofed all entrances; but then I would be lost in the backwash of that very lubricating allure.

I feared making some gaffe during the gatekeeper’s questions about lockers, deposits, codes, towels worn around waists, towels tied shut with the rubberized binding on your cubicle key. It seemed too codified to let a first-timer fake finesse. That mattered to me back then.

As for parading around half naked, I was at my hunky peak and, though insecure as hell, I at least grouchily sensed that.