He pokes the box below his bar stool with his size-fourteen foot. “Every time you turn on this lamp, I hope you’ll remember me,” he says. “Yeah, I’ll remember that when the going got tough, you ran away.” The light goes out of his face, and he looks sad. “Come on,” he says, “give me a break, a lot of people are leaving. They don’t want to raise their kids in the city.” “But you don’t have kids,” I interject. “I am a kid,” he answers. “Anyway, weren’t you going to buy me a farewell drink?” “Yes,” I say, and motion to Virginia. She is wearing a low-cut, red leotard top to show off the tattoo of a butterfly on her chest. “Our usual, two Cuervo Gold margaritas, straight up, no salt. And make them extra strong, I have the Tower tremens.” “Who doesn’t?” she answers, and then I say, “Can you believe this big oaf is leaving us?” “Yeah, I know, he told me,” she answers. When she brings our drinks over and makes change from the twenty I put on the bar, she says, “The next one’s on me.”

Steve raises his glass and clinks it against mine. “To a better life,” he says. “I hope so,” I reply. “Besides it’s gonzo crazy here,” he adds, then he tells me about a big loft party he went to on Saturday night. It was mobbed, everyone was making out, people couldn’t keep their hands off each other. “It was like one big, extended daisy chain,” he says. “People were screwing on the couches, in the bathtub. There was a woman on her knees in one corner giving men blow jobs. Can you imagine? There was a long line in front of her.” I ask him, “Did you go stand in line?” He doesn’t answer; he hangs his head, maybe hoping I don’t see that he is blushing. He changes the subject. “There was probably Viagra in the punch,” he says. “Fear is a more powerful aphrodisiac,” I state pompously, as if I’m an aphrodisiac expert. “You must be right,” he says. “It’s the end of the world, what else is there to do but have sex?”

Then I tell him about my hermaphrodite dreams, and we finish our drinks. Steve motions Virginia to bring us another. “Maybe you should go to the Eulenspiegel Society,” he says. “Make your dreams become a reality…I’ll be in town till the end of next week, I’ll go with you.”