THE WEEKEND READ

SCHERHARAZADE NIGHTS by MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

When I was creating FourTwoNine magazine as its Editor in Chief, I had to find ways to do it on a tight budget. I remembered reading and being deeply moved by Michael Cunningham’s elegy for his youth when he was a barback in a Southern California beach town. It had been published in the July 9, 2008, edition of the Washington Post Magazine and I asked Michael if we could have permission to reprint it for a nominal fee. He not only said yes but as an act of friendship allowed me to use it for free. I then got permission from Jack Pierson and the Cheim Read Gallery to use his photographs, “Ocean Drive” and “Angel Youth” from his Angel Youth portfolio that ran with it, more acts of friendship.

When I was in Provincetown for a few days last week, Michael’s wonderful, soulful book about Ptown, Land’s End, was on the table by my bed where I was staying at the Mary Heaton Vorse House. When I saw it, I thought of this elegy about his youth’s end. It too is wonderful. It is soulful

(Above: “Ocean Drive” by Jack Pierson)

(Above; “Angel Youth” by Jack Pierson)

SCHERHARAZADE NIGHTS

by Michael Cunningham

In the only picture I have from that summer, I am standing with the rest of the bartenders out on the beach behind the bar. It's late afternoon, and we are dressed -- we are undressed -- for work. We wear only running shoes and shorts. We seem to have decided, all five of us, to look as stoic and menacing as possible. We have all crossed our arms over our chests, and put on our best Easter Island faces. I'm the second from the right, the one least able to appear even slightly threatening. I weigh about 30 pounds less than the next-smallest man on the staff. The rest of them are Brobdingnagians. Their forearms are burnished brown tree limbs from which a golden fleece could credibly be hung. Their pecs and abs are hammered breastplates. I am pink and softish, untouched by the sun. Standing among them, I am like an hors d'oeuvre doing its best to look dangerous.

Someone -- it would have been Juan or Carlos, one of the barbacks -- must have snapped the picture, and we all must then have gone inside to set up for our shift. Apart from the fact that we decided to have our picture taken, nothing about the day differentiates it from any other day that summer. This is a beach town in Southern California, and every summer day perfectly replicates the day before and the one after. That's the point of beach towns in Southern California. You can turn 50 in a town like that and suddenly realize, to your surprise, that you've grown to middle age, as if all that ease and bounty had made you forget to stay young. 

Inside, the bar retains its perpetual, crepuscular twilight. That's the point of bars, at least bars of a certain kind. They exist outside of time. Many patrons of this particular bar are grateful for a reliable shelter from time's passage. Many are glad to be seen in the dimmest possible light.

Jack lugs a case of beer up from the basement. Duane replenishes the back stock. While the others perform manual labor, I slice limes and lemons. It has been established that I am particularly well suited to managing the garnishes.

The bar, where Judy Garland supposedly once delivered a drunken, impromptu version of "The Man I Love" (Judy Garland is rumored to have sung in almost every elderly gay bar in the nation), is done up in a motif we've come to call "tragic tropical." Brown palm fronds strung with white Christmas lights curl down from the ceiling. Tiki heads scowl from the walls. The bar top is made of glass, and under it bug-eyed Japanese goldfish swim in listless confusion over a bed of blue gravel. Every now and then one of the fish expires, which would not be good for business in any establishment but is especially unfortunate here, where reminders of mortality do not play well to the crowd. If one of the fish goes belly up during a busy night, as they are mysteriously wont to do, we cover the corpse by shifting a pile of napkins or a dish of peanuts on the bar top, though throughout the night it's necessary to keep moving the napkins or peanuts, as unobtrusively as possible, because the deceased tend to float in unpredictable directions.

The following exchange could have taken place on just about any night between May and October 30 years ago. I can only divide that summer into day versus night -- the times I was laboring on a horribly metaphysical novel in my tiny apartment versus the times I was working at the bar. I worked every shift I could get. I had loans to pay.

"Hey, Faulkner, you missed a fun one last night," Jack says, as he stacks beer bottles in the cooler. He means a bonfire they all had on the beach after closing time. I'm not sure whose idea it was to call me Faulkner. It is only one of my nicknames. I am also known as Alice (for Alice B. Toklas) and Youngblood Hawk. None of the others have official nicknames, but everyone is intermittently referred to as honey, bitch, sweetheart or angel. These endearments are employed with particular force when the bar is clamoring and things get tense.

"You know, angel, I'm sort of feeling a little un-fun right now," I say. I'm finished with the lemons and limes. I start slicing oranges and impaling them with sword-shaped plastic toothpicks.

"I'm on the third day of my juice fast," says Jack, his titanic arms lost in the depths of the cooler. "I ran 10 miles this morning. I feel amazing."

"I wrote a phrase this morning. It was disappointing."

"Hey, well, tomorrow's another day, right?"

"Absolutely."

Although I'm more or less used to it by now, I'm still occasionally amazed by how much we (they) all sound like frat boys, albeit frat boys with a central, critical difference. It is, and is not, an impersonation. They (we) are (I like to think) inventing a new kind of person. If gay men have traditionally been aesthetes, prone to the theater and all things French, these new archetypes are brawny and vigorous, and defiantly uncultured. They do not worship from afar the godlike straight men who ignore them -- they are godlike and straight-like. They are studly guys who spend their days perfecting their bodies and their nights breaking them back down with any number of substances, as frat boys have always done. They (we), however, also call one another honey, angel and sweetheart. We love to dance, and aren't ashamed of being good at it. It is possible for any of us, without censure, to admit to any number of forbidden interests: shopping, romance, the entire oeuvre of Abba.

"You think this book of yours is gonna sell?" Jack asks me.

"Hope so."

"Maybe somebody'll make a movie out of it."

I'm not quite sure how to respond to that. I am not, strictly speaking, one of the guys, though they have the good grace to treat me as if I were. I recently graduated from an almost embarrassingly illustrious university and retreated here, to spend my days writing and my nights earning a living. Since I was hired by the bar manager, I've learned that every summer he makes a point of hiring an odd man out -- specifically, a boy who is more clever than he is beautiful, who functions as comic relief, who is (as I've gathered) meant not only to entertain the patrons but to assure them that the wall of air between them and the men behind the bar is at least semipermeable; to be their animal familiar in a world of robust male camaraderie they are invited to observe but not, ever, to enter. My predecessor last summer was a sweet, Rubenesque boy they called Bubbles.

"Maybe," I offer.

"How does that work, exactly?"

"You mean, how do you sell your book to the movies?"

"Yeah."

Again, I pause. I am reluctant to be the kind of person who'd say something like,The book's an interior monologue delivered by a freak in a 19th-century circus, the whole thing is one sentence, 300 pages long, and I don't think Hollywood is going to be turning it into a movie any time soon, though I thank you for asking.

"You sort of have to get it published first," is what I say.

"But couldn't you just send it right to a studio?"

"I guess you could. You'd have to have an agent, though."

"Really? The studios don't have people who read things like that?"

I am now out of answers. As far as I know, the studios do in fact have people who read things like that. I feel suddenly like a tiny, doomed figure in an enormous world, slaving on an unpublishable novel (it is, in fact, an interior monologue, and, yes, it does involve one 300-page-long sentence) while everyone else just enjoys the sunshine and the waves. I don't feel young at all. At the age of 23 I am precociously jaded. I am wracked by self-consciousness and painfully aware of the odds arrayed against me. I believe that the absence of delusions is my only claim to virtue.

"Maybe they do," I say.

Jack, having finished with the beers, straightens up. For generations, pretty girls have been marrying handsome men in order to produce Jack. He is 6-foot-3, with a Cary Grant chin and a medallion of roan-colored hair springing up between the smooth brown shingles of his chest.

"You should try," he says, and goes off for another case of beer.

He's right, of course. Not perhaps about sending my half-finished manuscript to a movie studio, but about not working from a presumption of noble defeat. It epitomizes what I admire and resent about the other bartenders. They don't recognize discouragement. Most of them work here every summer (I am also the youngest, by at least several years), and work at bars in Key West or New Orleans in the winter. If they suffer from soul sickness, if they wonder sometimes what they're doing in the world, there's no evidence of it. In this they are unlike frat boys. Frat boys are enjoying a youthful binge, after which they expect to get serious jobs, marry, father children. The life these men lead extends beyond the horizon line. They hope, as far as I can tell, only for more of what they've already got.

I hope, as far as I can tell, to metamorphose into a composite of them and Kafka -- a careless, sought-after young beauty who writes great novels without apparent effort -- though it would be hard for me to decide, at that moment, which of the two seems less plausible. Freud once wrote that "life, as we find it, is too hard for us," and those words have never seemed more true than they do this summer. I slide another toothpick into another orange slice.

THREE HOURS LATER, THE BAR IS PACKED. As a rule, the saddest cases arrive earliest. This bar is not innocent of pulchritude or promise -- some of its patrons are actually as desirable as the men who serve them. But at 9 o'clock they are napping or blow-drying or having dinner. The true stalwarts, the bar's mainstays, the ones who will drop a hundred dollars or more during the course of the night, are older gentlemen who arrive early and stay until we remind them, some of us ruefully and others brusquely, that the bar is closing now, and it's time for them to go home.

Tonight I'm working the main bar, as opposed to the grotto, aka Star Wars, bar nestled in a niche of its own at the rear. The grotto is done up as a tropical shrine of sorts, with a rough concrete ceiling painted deep blue and a faux window that looks out onto a painting of an erupting volcano. Because circulation is important to their clientele, it is generally a good idea for gay bars to offer a second place to go, so that people can work their way through the main room, checking out the possibilities, as if they had an actual destination in mind. The young and able may go into the grotto bar, but they rarely linger. It was claimed, eons ago, by a shifting cadre of men who have noisily given up all hope; who are truly ancient and/or morbidly obese and/or simply too finicky to have formed any lasting attachment to another human being. It is their club, their domain. They hold court there. They regale one another with stories. They roar with laughter. It would not seem entirely out of keeping if they wore mobcaps and chewed on goat legs. I like working the grotto bar -- I'm the only one who does -- and would volunteer for it if it weren't for the fact that the lurkers who reside there are notoriously stingy tippers. They seem somehow to have developed the idea that the bar staff are part of the family, and that it would be insulting to leave more than the bare minimum when the long night finally ends.

Tonight in the main bar a few of my regulars, men who are no longer in their first bloom but aren't yet ready to retire to the grotto, are arrayed on the stools, which are considered valuable real estate and are not lightly relinquished. Barrett, who orders his martinis "on the stem," is there, as are Gus, a retired makeup artist, and Dermott, a 40-plus-year-old boy toy with an upsettingly dark tan and a Farrah Fawcett haircut.

(I must pause here to apologize to gay people everywhere for the perpetuation of stereotypes. This occurred 30 years ago, when the stereotypes were still being invented. And, bottom line, these are the men who in fact came to the bar. One of the most pernicious aspects of stereotypes is the popular determination to live up to them.)

As I pour a second martini for Barrett, I tell him and the others the latest installment in the ongoing story.

"So. Nick drives through the ghetto with Tom and Joe and discovers that there's been an accident. Marcus has been hit by a car."

"No!" says Gus. He doesn't really mean it -- he's playing along. Toward the beginning of the summer I established what I refer to as Scheherazade nights, in which I tell them an ongoing story and always end with a cliffhanger. I am currently in the middle of the third or fourth episode of The Great Gatsby, with an all-gay cast.

"Sad but true. It's just happened. Marcus's lifeless body is still sprawled in the road. Tom jumps out of Nick's car, cradles Marcus's head in his lap and cries like a baby."

"It was Danny who ran him over," Barrett says, taking a hummingbird sip of his drink. "He was the one driving Jay's car."

I say, "No comments from those who happen to have read the original."

Jack, who is opening beers beside me, says sotto voce, "Other end of the bar, angel."

At the bar's far end there are, in fact, a number of men hoping for drinks. I am, it seems, the only one who pays court to people like Barrett, Gus and Dermott. The other bartenders don't seem to fully understand that someday we will all be Barrett, Gus and Dermott. I won't fully understand, until late in the season, that Barrett, Gus and Dermott would rather be attended to by less loquacious but beefier staff members. They don't want to hurt my feelings, just as I've assumed I was sparing theirs by giving them extra attention.

I move dutifully down the bar to take care of business.

A CROWDED BAR CAN BE AN EXHILARATING PLACE TO WORK. You are in constant motion, and you are extremely popular. By a quirk of fate, gay bartenders are more revered than almost any other branch of the serving classes. Occasionally patrons are peevish or outright rude, but they are the exceptions, and no one on the premises is ever on their side. While it's true that if you abuse the guy behind the bar your next margarita will be a long time coming, the general atmosphere of cordial anticipation among the customers has more to do with the deference people tend to offer to celebrities. The men behind the bar are the alpha dogs. We are not, at least technically, available, in an atmosphere electric with availability or the illusion of same, where for almost everyone the night will end either in good fortune or disappointment. We alone have come here for a simple, straightforward reason. We alone do not risk humiliation or regret at closing time.

Tonight I'm working the main bar with Jack, Bill and Vanilla Bill (he's the blond one). Dwayne has been banished to the grotto. We are good, we four, at sashaying around one another -- it's a kind of athletic dance. We need, of course, to avoid collisions, but more vitally we do everything we can to keep from crashing into one another back there because we must at all costs steer clear of the worst thing that can happen in a busy bar -- the breaking of a glass over the ice. If that happens, the entire tub must immediately be drained and replaced by Juan (who has a family back in Guatemala) or Carlos (who doesn't seem to know how he ended up here).

Jack reaches adroitly behind me for the Chivas. His arm could be an illustration in an anatomy book. Its muscles and sinews are so clearly visible under the supple sun-freckled skin. Jack and the others come from a bewildering array of histories, from abuse and decline to suburban comfort, and although they have managed in this, their prime, to look not only perfect but disconcertingly similar, they do bear the marks of age and use when seen up close. They have, in fact, had a bumpier ride than most of their straight counterparts. Dwayne is missing a tooth, three in from his eye teeth. Vanilla Bill's biceps sports an amateurish, blurry tattoo (this was long before well-adjusted adolescents were getting them). The lumpy, whitish scar that bisects Jack's shoulder was made by his stepfather with a claw hammer.

As he grabs the Chivas, Jack says to me, "Check out the redhead on the right."

I do. There is no doubt about who he means. Standing behind Dermott and Gus, like a dream they're having, is a strapping guy in his early twenties, close-cropped hair and extravagant strawberry-blond mustache (we all wore mustaches then), bright green eyes set wide apart in a broad, lantern-jawed Irish face. He could be, and in fact perhaps is, one of the guys who appear in porn films impersonating firemen or cops -- "Hey, buddy, you press pretty heavy on that accelerator, don't you?"

"Nice," I answer. I am still surprised to find that I'm jealous, in odd and complicated ways, when Jack points out anyone he considers cute. This is one of the trickier aspects of being a gay man in a room full of other gay men. It is possible to desire both your friend and the object of his affections, and to desire their desire for each other. I suspect it must be easier for straight guys, who are joined in competition with half the people in the place for the attention of the other half. If you yearn for your friends and the people they yearn for -- if you have it in you to feel overlooked by every individual you encounter all night long -- it's all too easy to end up back at home eating a pint of ice cream and the questionable Chinese leftovers you'd meant to throw out.

The redhead gets his drinks from Jack, gives him a smile of practiced innocence, and returns to his own friends, two guys who could be his brothers. It is the general custom at this moment in gay history for men to seek out the companionship of others who look as much like them as possible. I wonder if the redhead will send his friends off into the night and wait around for Jack to finish up. Like many people who live with what they consider a deficit of love and adventure, I imagine a world full of secret understandings, coded invitations, and erotic and romantic liaisons. Like many who feel underendowed in a world full of beauty and confidence, I do my best not to feel like an exchange student; like somebody who's arrived for his year at Beverly Hills High wearing lederhosen and a hat with a bristle tucked into its brim.

To console myself I return to Barrett, Gus and Dermott, who have exhibited no immediate need of my services.

"So," I say. "Back at the mansion, Danny and Jay are hysterical. Jay insists that they should have stopped after they ran Marcus down, but Danny won't hear of it."

Behind me, Vanilla Bill rings the gong that hangs over the register, which we all ring whenever anyone leaves us $5 or more. "Yee-ha!" VB shouts. "Now the baby can have that operation." (This is a line I invented, which has become popular with the rest of the staff.)

There is, for me, an element of deja vu in all this. In high school I was the skinny, funny member of a claque of exuberant, popular boys. In high school, however, I dutifully had a girlfriend, who was pretty and kind and slightly remote -- when we had sex I did everything I could not to fantasize about my friends. I was most wrenchingly in love with my best friend, a living marvel of ease and offhand athleticism who called me Buddy, sang with a local rock band and is now in his first year of law school at Boalt.

To Barrett, Gus and Dermott I say: "Danny insists that no one saw the car. To silence Jay, he kisses him, hard and wet . . ."

My listeners glance longingly over at Vanilla Bill, who has the slim hips and sinewy arms of a rodeo rider, then return their attention to me. In retrospect, I'm not all that surprised that they wished I'd leave them alone. Most outsiders do not in fact desire the friendship of other outsiders. Most of them (us) would prefer a nod from the captain of the football team to a deep, compassionate relationship with a fellow geek.

FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER 2 IN THE MORNING. The bar is almost empty, and the lights are doing their best to penetrate the dusky, beer-soaked air. We are having a little trouble convincing two drunken Canadian boys that bars in California do in fact close at 2 -- Dark Bill is handling that. Dwayne has called a cab for one of the grotto regulars, who is sleeping quite peacefully with his head down on the bar top, bald and pink as a gigantic baby. His friends have stolen quietly away, as parents might leave a foundling to the care of someone better equipped than they are.

Because we are all working again tomorrow, we've agreed to come in early and set up, rather than do it now -- ordinarily it is the sacred duty of bartenders to leave the bar stocked and immaculate for the members of the next shift. Still, I am purposelessly restacking the napkins and wiping down the well. I'm glad to see that all the goldfish survived the night.

Jack puts an arm lightly over my shoulders. He is extra gentle with me. I hate that. I do notice, however, that the redhead doesn't seem to have waited for him. "Everybody's going over to Dwayne's," he says.

"I think I'll just go home. But thanks."

"Want to go smoke a joint on the beach first?"

"Sure."

We slip out the side door, walk down the sloping cul-de-sac that leads to the beach. We settle side by side midway down the tumble of broken concrete stairs that lead to the sand. The beach, floodlit by the bar, is almost painfully white. Beyond, the ocean glitters like obsidian. Far out in the water, three little clusters of green and white lights shine like fallen stars. They are oil derricks, unmanned, though I prefer to think of them as inhabited by families who live like lighthouse keepers, in snug cottages that have survived a century's worth of storms.

Jack lights a joint, inhales, passes it to me. It's damp with his saliva.

"So. How's the book coming?"

He has a habit of asking certain questions over and over, as if we'd only been recently introduced.

"Great," I say. This is not in any way true. It's just that I regret my earlier display of dispirit. Jack doesn't care much for defeatism. It occurs to me that he's asking the question again in order to procure a better answer, which I'm willing to provide.

"It's something, to have a talent like that." Jack assumes, sweetly, that anyone who'd write a novel must have a talent for it. I have never shown him anything I've written.

"My feelings about being talented come and go," I say. Although it is not the sort of positive statement I know he likes, it seems preferable to hubris.

"Hey, we all have our off days, right?"

"Right."

"Some mornings I wake up and I just think . . ."

This is the first time Jack has acknowledged to me any sensation other than pleasure in what his life provides. Have we reached a turning point in our relationship?

"Everybody does," I say.

"But you can't, you know, let yourself get crazy over it."

I hesitate. Then I say, "I do get crazy over it sometimes. I mean, I sit there trying to think of the next sentence and then the next one, and it's all I can do not to run screaming out of the room."

"I get that."

We sit for a moment, passing the joint, exhaling heavy gray plumes into the dark air.

I say, "When I was in college I sort of imagined myself like one of those great writers who wrote in obscurity in stinky little apartments and then came out with a work of genius. But now that I'm, you know, in that stinky little apartment, I realize that millions of aspiring writers have done that. We only know about the ones who actually turned out to be geniuses."

"You think you have to be a genius?"

Again, I'm stuck for an answer. Because I'm getting stoned, I decide that it's just too hard to construct a more optimistic version of the truth.

"There are too many books in the world already," I say. "There's only room for works of genius."

"That's pretty tough."

"I am tough. On myself. I've got to be."

"Maybe. Or maybe not."

He puts a hand, tenderly, on the back of my neck. With the touch of his palm, I am visited by a marijuana-fueled fantasy so potent it could be an actual hallucination.

Jack and I are falling in love, against every known law of probability. Jack has depths of soul the other guys can only imagine, that is if they took the trouble to imagine them at all. He's been looking for someone to rescue him from his sybaritic-drift life; he's had enough of vapid muscular redheaded boys, enough of a life made up of juice fasts and 10-mile runs and hanging out on the beach until it's time to go sling drinks again. He sees something in me, something I can just barely discern in myself -- an unorthodox, skeptical aliveness that renders me sexy even though I am not in any way the traditional specimen. He and I will go off together -- I'm all right with Key West; I won't insist on dragging him to New York or Paris. I'll give him books to read, and he'll give me . . . what, exactly? Fecklessness. Optimism. My destiny is not, as it turns out, to wander from place to place (I've been thinking of San Francisco next, or Seattle), renting inexpensive apartments and working in solitude. My destiny is to live with a big handsome man in a temperate climate, a man who is affectionate and wise, if unschooled, who bucks me up and reminds me that the world is vast and abundant, who weeps with unexpected understanding over the books I give him (I'm thinking of As I Lay Dying, and possibly Madame Bovary, to start). I will be like Elizabeth Bishop, gone to Rio to be with the woman she loves.

Clearly, this fantasy has been brewing for a long time, somewhere underneath the layer of my conscious understanding -- how else could it have arrived so fully formed, here on a shattered stair tread overlooking a floodlit beach?

And it is, of course, entirely delusional. I turn my face toward his, thinking we will kiss, and he, with the grace and ease of the oft-pursued, lifts his massive, movie star chin and kisses me on the forehead.

"You shouldn't be so hard on yourself, Faulkner," he says. "You'll get old before your time."

I am, in fact, old before my time, and as it turns out I will never feel quite this old again. The fantasy vanishes into itself like a ball of cellophane tossed on a fire. We finish the joint and head back to the bar to rejoin the others. As we walk up the cul-de-sac, Jack slings his arm over my shoulders again, with brotherly affection. He smells of sweat and Right Guard.

Flannery O'Connor once wrote, in a letter, that one of the swans on her mother's farm had fallen in love with the bird bath, with what she called a "typical Southern sense of reality." Some of us, usually when we're very young, are possessed of our own versions of that typical Southern sense of reality, and if on one hand we're well shed of them as we grow older, it is, on the other, a loss to be mourned. We grow more reasonable, as we must. We learn to want what we can have, and to want what will, at least in theory, be good for us.

It was, as it turns out, remarkable for me to believe, even for a moment, that I might plausibly spend my life writing novels by day (who cared if anyone published them?) and working by night in bars beside my lover, whispering to him in bed, possessed of the least expected of all happinesses, like Red Riding Hood if she'd tamed and married the wolf. It would not, could not, have worked out that way, but for the first and last time I'd ardently wanted something patently impossible with another man who could, at least in theory, have wanted the same thing. I was, in fact, never that young again.

At the time, though, it seems merely to be an ordinary, embarrassing disappointment. When we get to the bar's side entrance, Jack pauses and says to me, "You'll be fine, Alice." He noodles my head. I make so bold as to kiss him on the cheek.

LOOKING AT THE PHOTOGRAPH, I have no idea what happened to the strand of African trading beads I wore, or the Timex attached to a heavy leather watchband. I moved to San Francisco that fall and, after a little over a year in San Francisco (where I met my first legitimate boyfriend but could not, despite my most ardent efforts, get any job better than cleaning apartments), I went to Colorado, and then to Greece, and then to graduate school in Iowa, and then to New York City, where I live today. All those places were variously difficult and fabulous, but in each of them, however trying my circumstances might be, I felt less freakish than I had that first summer out of college, trying to be some kind of latter-day Dostoyevsky in a town that did not contain a bookstore. I sent a few letters to Jack and got two postcards in return, though they too have been lost along the way. Both told me he was doing great, encouraged me to keep writing, and ended with Love XXXXXXX Jack.

It was almost 15 years before I went back there and tried to find out what had happened to him and the others. I had filled out by then. I'd never be porn star material, but I'd lost my boyish softness and grown a passable pair of shoulders. I had published a novel, plus a couple of stories in the New Yorker. I didn't expect to lord this over them -- I knew that the publication of a novel they'd never heard of and a few appearances in a magazine they'd never read would not strike any of them as success. But I was finally ready, in my own skin, to see them again, if any of them happened to be there still. I no longer felt like a beggar at the banquet.

I learned that the guys from the bar were already members of a forgotten generation. Although the bar itself was unaltered, new young studs, impeccably beautiful, mustache-free, were working there. I ventured nervously into the grotto -- would Barrett and Gus and Dermott have migrated there? -- and found that it had been taken over by younger men. The Star Wars crew, whoever of them remained, had found somewhere else to go. The faux window, however, still looked out onto the painting of the volcano.

By calling around, by calling someone who knew someone, I learned that Jack had died a few years earlier, as had Dwayne. Vanilla Bill, gravely ill, had moved back to Chicago to be near his family. No one knew what had become of Dark Bill.

On my second and final night in town (I haven't returned since), I had a couple of drinks at the bar, then went out and stood at the top of the stairs that led to the beach, which had been neither upgraded nor had further degenerated over time. The oil derricks still shone at the dark edge of the nocturnal ocean. Because the gods like a coincidence better than novelists do, a lone shirtless man with a broad, muscular back was sitting halfway down the stairs, smoking a joint.

It's all too easy, in memory, to construct reveries that did not actually take place. I may or may not have stood that night at the top of the stairs feeling like the last, albeit marginal, member of an extinct species -- men who saw no limits to what they might have. I may or may not have felt the sting of life's unfathomable inequity; its capacity for proving wrong, in ways no one could have anticipated, the people who insist that life is good and there's nothing to worry about. There is, as it turns out, always plenty to worry about. The dreadful irony of that time was the fact that we who were fearful and tentative, who shied away from pleasure either because it made us nervous or because it wasn't offered in forms we found acceptable, were right after all, though it is not in any way to our credit. Then again, there have always been the survivors and the fallen, and if the ranks of the fallen are disproportionately made up of simple, hardy young men, that seems to be the way of the world.

All I remember feeling that night is the hope that Jack had not suffered inordinately, that at least a few of his friends had stuck by him and that he, who'd surely never saved a cent and had given no thought to anything as unglamorous as health insurance, had had decent care.

After a moment the stranger smoking the joint glanced up at me, ascertained that I wasn't a cop, smiled noncommittally and turned away again. He was dark-haired, young and perfectly formed. He was looking out at the lights of the unmanned derricks. I lingered a little, and then, because I didn't want to intrude, I left him in peace.