“Don’t go,” I say. “Who will I complain to?” “I have to get out of here,” he says. “I’m terrified of more suicide bombers, toxic chemicals in the water supply, poison gas in the subway, anthrax. We can talk on the phone, e-mail.” He wants to come over and bring me a small lamp I have always admired. He has painted a two-headed moose and a pine tree on the lampshade. “I just don’t want you to leave,” I say, “and I’m already in bed, but why don’t we meet at the Right Bank Bar tomorrow night. I’ll buy you a farewell drink, if you change your mind I’ll buy you two drinks.” “I won’t change my mind but I’ll meet you at nine o’clock,” he says. When I go back to bed I find my little friend is still there waiting for me.

Steve is already sitting at the bar when I arrive. He looks like a lumberjack, a big guy who always wears plaid shirts and Levi’s. The exquisite miniature landscapes he paints are a surprise. There is a brown box wrapped and tied with handles under his bar stool, which must be the lamp. His face just lights up when he sees me; there is a halo around his head, and the air in the bar seems to be charged with electricity. I can hear it whiz around my head to the beat of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” on the jukebox. The bottles behind the bar are covered with precious gems, rubies, emeralds, sapphires. The mirror is one solid sheet of diamonds. The sudden sense of heightened awareness, this pseudo LSD glow, is what Virginia, the bartender, calls Twin Towers delirium tremens. She says everyone is getting them, they come and go.

“Well, if it’s not Miss Dirty Stories of 2001,” Steve calls out, his halo doubling in size. I sit down on the bar stool next to his. “Miss Dirty Stories doesn’t have anything to write about; she’s a fraud,” I tell him. I met Steve ten years ago here at the bar. We got drunk on Wild Turkey and went off to his place to write a dirty story of our own. The geometry of his six-foot-five, three hundred-pound frame and my five-feet-tall frame did not compute. Skewered on his huge tool, I felt like a tiny cock ring. I could not encompass him and kept sliding off. In the middle of what might have eventually been the act, we both started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Then we decided to dress and go to Chinatown for a very, very early breakfast. Now we are great friends. We commiserate about the vicissitudes of our careers and our love affairs.