One fellow had outdone himself. He’d draped his booth with towels of a moorish pattern, sand-colored silk softened the lightsource. Some tasteful sandalwood incense burned. Mideastern music whined from a hidden ghetto blaster and, on his person, a wide brass bicep bracelet, actual saffron harem pants. I overheard one toweled peruser tell another, “Little Turkish Delight back there deserves a big E for effort. He’s not that cute really but the poor queen’s done more to that room than I did to any of my science fair projects. I’m gonna give myself to him. I’ll consider it a form of group thanks. So you guys each owe me one, okay?” We, strangers, laughed.

In towels, we stood here, glad for this odd sensibility linking us: our love of hopeless comedy, our appetite for outrageous effect, our honest fellowship that springs from sinning very often and extremely well.

Now I slid into a smaller steamroom lit by one red bulb. It felt safer here. This looked like the set of the newest Bob Fosse musical I’d just seen in preview for seven bucks. Only two other patrons present, a relief.

One watchful old man listened to his transistor radio (it was that long ago), scratchy coverage of a hockey game. The other person, a spectacular youth; he was perfect as any platinum Aryan poster-maker’s hope for his own one son. Such an ideal specimen seemed to belong, cast in wax, lording over some glass case at the Natural History Museum. “Homo sapiens” definitive. His nudity had such fierce authority, such frieze-worthy geometry, not even busloads of Connecticut schoolkids would dare giggle at it.

We nodded—amid staticky reports of some goalie’s face-to-ice despair after allowing a score. The young man soon made slow seductive small talk in a German-Italian-Britishy accent easy to like, hard to place. His naked manner was assured, urbane. Even in such red glare, his sudden white smile, the whites of his animated eyes exerted the glamour of some silent screen star. Lordy Mercy, happy hunter, me.

He sidled nearer. The long legs, easing ever nearer, gave comic ducklike suction sounds across wet tile as I felt readier. I slid my key on its elasticized band around my wrist. The light in here was blood red, poetic. The guy appeared handsome as Robert. I would later say so to Robert—my friend but not, as yet, my lover.

Here, in this tiny room, one face per customer, the best-looking boy at St. Mark’s was about to be mine, all mine. I was, as usual, already making a story of this beauty before we’d even established skin contact. I asked what he did. A flight steward, he said, someone who “touched down” all over the world.

“Spreading joy?” I asked, my tone trying to sound dry amid the therapeutic vapors.

“D’accord,” he responded. “Spreading, anyway.”