After the beer, the walk, the joking, and then the film, I couldn’t have guessed that our earlier argument might’ve still been raging in Miguel’s mind. He led the way to a bar on Fourth Street called The Bar. Only when we entered did I realize that it was a gay bar. I don’t know how well I disguised my apprehension, but it was the very first time I was ever in a gay bar. I immediately sensed that Miguel still wasn’t convinced about my assumed sexuality.

After ordering beers, Miguel started with sidelong glances while assuming a well-trained unassuming posture. I kept my eyes on safe inanimate objects, the pool table, the wayward bottles, and so on. Finally I heard him utter, “What do you think of these two guys?”

“Real nice,” I replied with no idea of where he was looking.

“Okay,” he replied jokingly. “These two are ours.”

“What?” I winced in disbelief.

“They are ours,” he enunciated. I looked up and noticed his stare, deft and fixed like a matador’s sword preparing for the final kill. He knew I was full of bull. It was time to either awkwardly laugh and tell him the truth or bluff it right to the end.

Miguel’s upper lip was twisting and rolling now as if beset by Parkinson’s disease. Following his line of vision, I saw two guys who looked like they were the result of the crossbreeding of storm troopers and surfing bums. Was there any escape route? I considered the plausibility of announcing some dreaded venereal ailment. But then Miguel probably wouldn’t permit me to work. Slowly they stepped out from the screen of disbelief and started sauntering over.

“Hi,” Miguel said smilingly.

“Hi,” they said back. Everyone seemed familiar and, except for my sudden dumbfoundedness, the procedure seemed to be so gracefully lubricated that I wondered whether everyone already knew each other.

“Warm day, wasn’t it?”

“Precious for a February.”

“Spring’s just around the corner.”

“And summer’s just around spring’s corner.” They sounded like placidminded housewives leaning out on adjacent window sills.

“You should join us. We’re going back out to the Golden State tomorrow.”

“Gosh, I’m getting sweaty just thinking about it.”

I stared at the ground and listened to everyone contribute a line to this potpourri conversation. It was a three-way dialogue that amounted to nothing more than a show of good faith; all meant well and were sane and shared common wants. Now Miguel started walking over to the bar with one of them. The remaining one, the hulkier of the two, was left standing with me. I maintained an autistic fixation of the filthy tiled floor, but evidently he found even that cute because he just kept gazing at me.

“Hi,” he softly bellowed. I finally looked up. Tiny tributaries of sweat collected down the sharp part of his face, as if he had just arisen from a pool; apparently he had danced to an excess.

“What happened to your arm?” One couldn’t help but notice the missing sleeve and the bandage.

“An accident,” 1 quickly replied, hoping to avoid any sympathy that might turn into affection.

“Looks kinda cool.” He touched the surrounding area, tenderly nudging my arm under a soft drop light. Lowering his nose to the spot, he sniffed it: a dirty bandage with a dry line of blood crusted along the exterior.

“You can have it when I’m done,” I said, referring to the bandage. He accepted the offer and proposed buying drinks in return.

“I don’t drink.”

“How about a walk?”

If a walk meant what I suspected then I was a gimp. But all the while, I felt Miguel’s microscopic stare haunting me for results. If I could just walk with this guy until after the bar closes; he wouldn’t be able to return to make his report, then I could dump him. And since this guy was leaving tomorrow Miguel would never be able to confirm anything. He’d have to believe whatever I told him.

“Good idea, let’s walk.” He got his leather night jacket, and we both gave farewell nods to our companions and left. All were right, it was a beautiful night, but it felt more like autumn than spring. The glacier of winter’s cold was still ahead, not behind us. We walked without any destination, which was okay with me because to establish any destination in this vocabulary of clichés and euphemisms might sound like a commitment of some kind. For a New York night, the sky was clear. Aside from the many lighted skyscrapers, which were New York’s consolation for having no visible constellations, I could make out the star, the big one in the northern sky. We strayed westward. And since we were only on Second Avenue there was a lot of westerliness before us.

The oddities of the night included a crab-like man hunching under a huge ghetto blaster angled on his shoulder and back. It was playing “Purple Rain.” Turning north, we journeyed to the corner of Saint Marks Place and Bowery, and as we passed the Transient Hotel, we were propositioned by a hooker who couldn’t intuit our alleged longings. Passing Cooper Union, we walked around an array of garbage, which was street vendor merchandise, unsold and abandoned from earlier that day. Looking north on Fourth Avenue, I saw the clock at the Metropolitan Life Building and the outline of the Empire State Building, an attractive view that was to be barred with the erection of the Zeckendorf Towers in ‘86. Walking through the parking lot on Astor Square, we swung south down Lafayette past the Public Theater. On Houston Street, we noticed a makeshift abode: an old table covered with boxes adjacent to an old sofa—an ingenious housing project for a group of derelicts. Making a right at Houston, we passed the NYU projects with the Picasso centerpiece. There, the wanton one initiated a conversation. “David Byrne lives in one of those apartments.” I could think of no reply.

We turned south on West Broadway. There, through the store windows, we saw art. I wasn’t sure whether or not he was making an advance, but as we were nearing Spring Street, the wordless one took out his penis and urinated against a metal pull-down gate that had the word BOONE painted on it. As the stream of urine trailed from the gate across the sidewalk and into the gutter, he mumbled with a grin, “Wanna taste?”

“I’m a believer in nice, slow courtships.” To this he sighed tiredly.

“Then you should move to my old town,” he replied. “That’s why I left.”

“And that’s why you came here? For the more accelerated life?”

“Well, that and the culture.”

“What do you mean, culture?”

“You know the opera, dance, Broadway. This is the center of culture. Isn’t that the reason everyone comes here?”

“I came to New York for the roaches, the filth, the sense of intimidation, the foul odors, the violence and…oh yeah, the sky-rocket rents and the over-population, not to forget the freezing winters or the insanely hot summers.”

“If you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?”

“Don’t like it!” I replied. “But where else can I get all this?”

The guy wrinkled his nose boyishly and made a completely innocent expression that made me laugh. He was cute, handsome, and seemed like a decent, intelligent guy; it just wasn’t my ballgame. I started to feel bad that I was just using him. It was a shame that he wasn’t as cold as everyone else. I had no business being in this situation, but I wanted my theater job even if making this poor guy into a fool was the price. One loses a little bit of one-self with each cruel gain. I decided to limit the humiliation as much as possible. I gave the guy a sporting slap on the back. I noticed a clock in a store window, the bar was still open so we proceeded slowly south toward the dawn rising over Canal Street.

People were starting to come out of their little holes, a new day was stepping up to the mike. Soon, the bar would be safely closed, it was time to relieve the misery of this wounded yesterday. We cut a left on Canal and exchanged some notion of going to Chinatown.