(part one)
....throbs to the earlobes.
—John Ashbery
It’s 2am, Tuesday morning. We’re
six guys around a table in ‘The Quiet
Room,’ which is never really quiet, but
tonight it’s quieter than usual. New
faces, old faces. The crazies, the
dependables (such pigeonholing in
the crypt of pigeonholing is always
relative; more relative than you’d
know for a long while, assuredly).
One guy I’ve never once seen lucid
(he sleeps on the top bunk next to
mine; I call him Scrooge, but a
better description of his night-
time ventures might more app-
ropriately garner him the nick-
name Gargoyle. Yes, these are
some of the things that have
occupied my mind during my
stay here of nearly two years
but for the 6 months break
when I was working (and,
lucky me, living on the
streets simultaneously) –
anyway, this is my first time
experiencing him quite lucid,
and we’ve been bunk neighbors
for half a year. He’s the life of
the party tonight! And party it is.
It’s my last night here. I scan the
“barracks” (as I call it here) in an
attempt to envision this small tucked
away enclave of a room a profligate
(in the best possible way) cul-de-sac
of lasciviousness. Our “Sanctuary”
was home (apparently) to a bath-
house. In the Golden Age of those
mostly remnants of nostalgia here
in San Francisco. The men sitting
here tonight defy sex. That’s pro-
bably an unfair assessment based
on my own perspective. But they
do defy sexuality, for certain.
Except one, who’s a dead-on
doppelganger for Kid Rock.
And yet, he “got exposed” to
“fine arts” at an early age,
which, as he keeps saying
(and I certainly keep agreeing),
was “Pretty cool” . . . .
(to be continued)
