I counted thirty-two, then quit. One was red and white and blue. Most showed that sickly pink shade combining chewed bubble gum with old eyeglasses’ nose rests and ear hooks meant to simulate Caucasian skin tone. Others, browner, Latin or African, appeared tree-sized, ropey saplings. And all were lasciviously detailed: lariats of vein, cobra cowls that flared—fair warning.

They gaped up at me like an open-mouthed choir of retarded children, looking heavenward.

Some, I recognized, were actual casts from living porn stars; there was a Jeff Stryker, a monster, but somehow Roman in its genial fluted civic beauty. One such menace proved double-headed as the Russian imperial eagle.

III.

12:12 p.m. How, in twenty-four minutes, to get this rictus of disembodied yearning uptown? I couldn’t afford the round-trip cab fare. Taking yet another day off work meant the usual: tending my dying buddies was not just exhausting; during these condensed, hypnotic years, it’d gotten extremely expensive. The Sickness followed a Health of almost its equal: our early frisky New York days.

Under Robert’s kitchen sink, I found a huge blue Tiffany’s shopping bag (the show off!), plus a Lord & Taylor one featuring an Old English plum-pudding Christmas. These bags would make fine protective coloration for my smuggler’s chore. When uneasy in Manhattan, assume the city’s protective camouflage: feign shopping.

Opening my backpack, I piled in Robert’s porn. Then at the kitchen’s corner, I knelt, commencing the loading of dildoes into toney, neutralizing shopping bags. You couldn’t just throw these things in helter-skelter. Too many to fit. So I worked, tongue pressed between teeth, as if building some Scout-worthy, log-cabin doghouse. I crosshatched nearly three dozen dildoes, dovetailing, relying on my early expertise at boyhood Lincoln Logs. (No offense intended, Mr. Lincoln.)

First I wondered, “Robert, what did you do with all these things?” Then of course I knew, and switched to alternate imagery. (“If only you’d stuck with these,” I said aloud. I’d lately found I was saying things aloud a lot in public, aloud to friends alive and dead and dying. Teasing them, mostly. It was rough on strangers but seemed to help me, so I kept doing it. Why not? Apart from hospitals, I’d had little social life since about ’84 on. I mostly picked up people at memorial services; I’d briefly dated a male nurse. And now, this tired, when it came to muttering aloud on streets, at least I didn’t need a prescription; at least the jokes to departed loved ones made them seem less shadowy. Made me feel half-opaque. And, hey, the price was right.)

My backpack weighed with thin Swedish boys outdoors, I hoisted two shopping bags containing maybe fourteen pounds apiece of premium-cut dildoes. “This here pecker pack mule’s about to trot uptown. Head ’em up, move ’em out, Rawhiiide!” Such quips helped give me strength. Don’t ask why.