There were a multitude of doormen on Park Avenue, I was thinking; a long-standing doorman must know what rules applied to closing Park Avenue to traffic when it snowed. That snowy night, we weren’t on Park Avenue long enough to ask a doorman—we didn’t actually see a doorman standing out in the storm. What we did see was a skier carrying his skis and poles on one shoulder; he was coming toward us on East Sixty-fourth, between Lexington and Third, the little Barlows’ block. Unfortunately, the skier wasn’t a real New Yorker—he was from Minnesota, as much in the dark as we were.

“Maybe they only close Park Avenue if it’s snowing on a Sunday night,” the skier said. None of us could remember if the last time we’d skied on Park Avenue had been a Sunday. That it was late at night, and there was more than enough snow to ski on—these were not hopeful signs. We sensed we weren’t going skiing.

“We’re too out of it to live in New York,” the snowshoer was saying when we got to the apartment, which was unlocked. Damaged Don had let himself in, and he’d turned on all the lights, but Don hadn’t relocked the door. Two out of three wasn’t bad for the Damaged Man, I was thinking—three out of four, if you counted Don’s daring to ride with a militant prostitute. “Maybe we should go to Great Falls with Don—maybe we wouldn’t be so out of it in Montana,” the snowshoer was saying, but Don’s singing in the shower discouraged us.

“Don’t give Ronald Reagan eight years,” Don sang. “He talks tough to commies, he kills all the gay boys, but that does fuck-all for our fears! Please don’t give the Gipper eight years. No, don’t give the Gipper eight years.”

It was Don’s plague song, clearly. Notwithstanding the importance of the plague, there was no discernible difference in Don’s cadence or tone—his plague song was as doleful and morbid as any Damaged Don song. In the shower, the Damaged Man sang like a drowning man, yet Elliot and I were relieved to hear him keep repeating the same verse. It seemed there was only one verse to Don’s plague song, so far. But later that night, when Don was singing in his sleep, the snowshoer and I were awakened by a different verse. It sounded like a last verse to us, but how would you know with Don? How could we have slept through the middle of a plague song? We could only hope the Damaged Man hadn’t written the middle; we hoped his plague song would forever be in progress. In his sleep, Don still sang like a drowning man.