Then this nice guy—who seems to hail from an large affable Maryland Catholic family—this Dean’s educated right hand starts massaging all the city tension from your upper back, your neck. All the crisscrossed wire cording required to hold up yonder Brooklyn Bridge. Tense much?

Unlike the totalitarian mitt of the Eurotrash steward downstairs (he’s surely found someone else to jump by now), there’s this kid-brother feeling in the touch of my young Dean here. How much of his decent life is communicated through the morse code of one supple cushioned paw. Anything can happen. Soon you permit the trusted hand down along your spine and it’s under the shared water and with and on your lower half, and is truly getting to know you. Hello. Is it not a joy to trust someone this brand-new to you and find you mostly can? And so follows tender Pastoral Symphony sex here in the open in the middle of New York.

The corner privacy of a most public space, the openness of a great mineral city that likes to watch the innocent gambolings of bare winter animals sunk gullet-deep into hot water behind evergreens set among towers erect full-time, year-round. Act now. Constant upright inspiration.

The prigs won’t tell you how sweet and rollicking the peasant dance was. Before such accurate lightning struck us.

Oh, but if our parents had known just the half of it (young Dean’s and mine, Robert’s preacher and his choir-director wife, and Angie’s doctor-waitress, camped forever at the edge of Savannah society)! They’d have sent thickened detectives to abduct us. And that might’ve saved some of our lives. But it would’ve meant our forever after being tied up back home in old childhood bedrooms—the Fifty Years of Aviation wallpaper, the suspended models, the tall tin horse-riding trophies—we prisoner-artists bound and gagged but safe, subjected to factory-recall on Country Club Boulevards all over America.

From Other Galaxies

ngie had a date, it flopped. She had another date, with the med student, he was forty minutes late and she hated herself for even being present when he showed, barely apologizing, convinced as the Israeli Army in which this Moishe had served, and whose funny stories he served Ang and the waitress, soon especially the waitress. Angie finally threw the contents of her waterglass at him … “Mainly as something to do. But it was a mistake, it just drew them closer together, Moishe and the blond blotter waitress. Why am I like honey to gay bees and Raid to the little yellowjackets I could use a big one of?”

We would see other clusters of gay men, also with a single complete-looking stylish woman in their midst; each group believed itself the most gifted, and therefore entitled to be, in all of New York’s history, loudest.