Then his whole hand pressed my lower back, specifically my ass. “Prego?” asked the master of flight and international dissemination.

“Well,” I stalled. “But …”

I was too recent on the scene to feel ready: getting jumped right here, before our hockey enthusiast. That fur-backed codger had, I noticed, already rearranged his sideline position so he might watch as he (radio still pressed to right ear) kept up with his beloved Canucks.

Something in the insistent touch of this archangel of mechanical flight, something in how—this close—his perfect features looked so overdetermined—hollow-eyed and masklike, something in his intention toward the one deed only, and without prelude or nicety or compliment—something in his sudden erotic sternness, his very frontal perfection—now felt offputting to the point of making me shudder.

As the red glare slid from Poetry to Poe, I could not help notice that, without consulting me, he was already turning me around, then over. Expertly as a mom about to diaper her toddler junior, he wielded some evolved inexorable strength, he wielded much implied half-surgical experience, this slickster grappling me facedown into a far likelier position. I was, in fact, being—wasn’t I?—somewhat gingerly pinned, rump-up. Hello, major experience incoming.

—Sometimes, even in a world as cerebral and abstracted as our New York one—your own beasty instinct hollers at you by means of all hairs on the backs of both your hands: “NO. Not this one! Wrong move, wrong. Haul your sweet cherry ass out of here, pal—preferably right now!”

“Excuse me, I’ve got to go and see a man about a hockey bet,” I said, saving perhaps my life. The steward, proving me immediately correct, suddenly cursed so. Ruddy steam sputtered cumulus, a guttural venomous Indo-European language I did not speak and have not heard since. I elbowed him, found the carved door handle, wriggled backward into open air.

From his red mist, I literally ran. True, I’d left behind my only towel, but oh, to feel unwedged, to breathe.

Even a Purgatorio like this must have a roof.

I followed three flights of stairs and, depending on the banister like someone old, found myself—naked as when my shame-faced mother bore me—on the lid of the baths. Fresh air! Oxygen unsullied by saunas, Aramis cologne or suntan stick, or the hard-luck aroma of the junior high school gym.

This roof, being gay-owned, proved perfectly landscaped. Pointy evergreens rested in round cedar buckets. Boardwalks crossing tar made the building’s top a Parcheesi board of routes that only seemed haphazard. From circular grottos set in far corners, hot-tubs released column-shaped clouds. Those rose straight up. City glare filled each with borrowed light that appeared original—original to this place, original to us—this town’s unwanted outlaw-cowpokes.