Somehow, I’ve lived, grown, flourished, and fled Falls, by many, many states and jobs and beaux, and somehow, it’s 1990: The newest of my escape-hatch tree houses is called Greenwich Village.

We speak of a lovely Saturday night in spring, and I’m carrying sixty dollars’ worth of rubrum lilies, careful that their red-black pollen not stain my pristine clothes.

I am bound for a party whose parchment invitation insists overartfully, “Come as you would be, and as you are, but, if possible, tonight, in white, dear.”

So, feeling good after a day of writing fiction that spawned four actual living, kicking sentences, I am gussied up in white bucks, white ducks, a pale tie, an off-white shirt—and I’m feeling nautical but nice when I hear a passing hot rod yell one word that I, in a naval mood, believe to be “Farragut!”

I get hit full-face. Two Jersey-flung paper cups, one full of warm beer, the other all cold Orange Crush, and I am soaked.

I hear laughing as they roar off. I’m left here gasping, doubled over. The shock of it has knocked the wind clear out of me, but nothing worse. I set the flowers on a stoop. Take stock. There’s a small cut on my forehead. Could one piece of flying ice have managed that?

“Everything’s fine. No harm done,” I tell myself. But I am so stained and sogged. I smell like someone else’s four-day binge. I look down at the lightning bolt of orange sogged from my chest to the once-white crotch. I realize that even if I dash back home to change I have nothing white left to wear.

One block north, I dodge into an alley. These lilies are trembling so, like still-living things. I hide against the hoodlums’ coming back for me. I know, through friends beaten or worse, that these New Jersey boys—if they got off a “good one”—tend to circle the block and swerve on back for further fun. I imagine fists next time, or hammers. This season, they favor hammers—the gay-bashing fashion accessory of choice. Innocence, my own, makes me wonder how they ever knew I was one. Duuhh! (Probably, I overdid. All the Wildean lilies, right?)

Caught, I’m moved to explain to them: I don’t usually walk around all in white like Mark Twain, who claimed to be straight. Shamed, I consider just skipping the party. Maybe I’ll go late, when a spotless entrance will matter less. I pull out the sogged invitation, double-checking the address.

We’d thrown White Parties all year. “Come As You Are” ones had recently been done to death. I now reread tonight’s prissy, funny, self-defensive “theme”:

COME AS YOU WOULD BE, AND AS YOU ARE,
BUT, IF POSSIBLE, TONIGHT,
IN WHITE, DEAR.
R. S. V.P.