It was a warm evening for late March. Lucky for me. The bath’s roof garden felt jammed right up against the skyline. From here, you felt you could reach forth one of your male, King Kong paws; you could play chess with all the famous skyscrapers waiting on their grid. Signifiers, dildoes, bishops. Who’ll jump whom? Many of these lit-up structures had once been World’s Tallest, former subjects of Hart Crane poems, John Marin water-colors.

The Chrysler Building glowed, fantastical, Industry’s toolmaker Deco wetdream of itself. I, itemizing landmarks like some out-of-towner, tried to calm myself after that scuffle with the German. How rude. Unfair, being poleaxed by some guy that so outweighs you.

Being up high in the middle of a city this great, you could read by its byproduct light. Scraps of cloud passed over me, half ticklish. Odd, I felt safer now I was nude out here in its harsh soothing blaze. I still had my locker key! And I felt chaperoned, by Wannabe Has-been Manhattan itself.

Beyond rental office towers’ serrations—a free and melon-colored moon rose.

One Moon. To Let. Short Monthly Leases Avail. Act Now.

This far aloft, light seemed a genial voyeur, half a companion.

I swallowed belated panic at that guy’s scary strength. Breathing deep, I found myself near crying. Mom? Dad?

Plank fences screened nude men from nosy neighbors. You felt an absolute privacy out here. Safe except from the eyes of God or very good binoculars off the Empire State.

To stand undressed out of doors in the winter night of New York. I recalled my boyhood treehouse where, that hidden, my first impulse was to strip.

Emerging from hot steam, you find your wet body glossy with reflected light from the Empire State. The concept itself is Art Deco, pure Broadway in its earnest artifice. People wishing to escape the countryside band together. And, through their own hard density, they formed a carapace, an alternate, a vertical and yearned Bucolic. Five hundred thousand little towns candle forth into this one big blaze.

God, but I love New York! An addiction undying.

One silhouetted stranger, as endearingly tentative as the air steward had seemed cruel, is now circling this tub, is asking in a ripe baritone if he might please slip into the churning water pinwheeling here beside you. “How hot is it?”

“Fairly.”

“Thought so.”

Something to say.

You exchange first names, one dumb joke and the briefest of career résumés (Dean, a commodities gold salesman from Laurel, Maryland, near Baltimore? Owns two cockatiels, collects eighteenth-century miniatures, often up here on business). Winter air across your freckled shoulders feels brisk, but the genitals’ water boils, Barbados with a fever.