From Visions of Garleyville

The Sewer

I was thinking about how angry Uncle Harry would be and wishing Hank would hurry up, when all Hank wanted to do was look at the girls.

Any other time I would have looked at the girls, too, but the clocks in the shops we passed along St. Mark's Place said we had just barely enough time to get uptown to the Port Authority for me to catch the last bus that would get me home before my midnight curfew.

Hank lived in New Jersey, too, but slept over a lot on this side of the Hudson these days, "crashing" -- as he called it -- with the hippies here so that he felt like he was living here at last.

His folks didn't seem to care a whole lot about what he did, and certainly didn't study his every move the way Harry studied mine.

Harry always blamed me for something, even before he found out I was coming into New York City with Hank. He seemed to think I was stirring up evil in this great city of sin, as if I was personally to blame for all the wrong that went on along its streets, and was perfectly willing to punish me as if I had.

"Can we please hurry it up a little, Hank," I said, as Hank hung out a little too long in front of Village Records staring at a particularly beautiful red-headed girl inside, his crooked grin trying to lure a smile from her, or maybe elicit a wave.

No one, but the tourists, stared strangely at Hank here the way they did in Paterson where he and I often waited for the bus to New York together. People here didn't see his purple Nehru shirt with a collar like a priest's, or his orange bell-bottom pants as unusual. Too many other people along the sidewalk wore as many strings of beads around their necks as he did, and hats more outlandish than his World War One army campaign hat. Many also wore sandals like his, dirty toes collecting dust as they walked.

If anything, people stared at me for not wearing anything so grand, and despite my hair now clearly over my ears, Hank always felt I looked a little "too square" to be hanging out with him, buying me a black felt bush hat with a fake leopard band, something like a cowboy hat with only one side of the brim pushed up.

Knowing Harry would never approve I hid the hat in the basement and fetched it each time I went out, keeping it hidden until I was on the bus headed into Manhattan.

"You worry too much," Hank said, finally allowing me to drag him away from the window.

"And you don't worry enough," I said, both of us repeating phrases we had rehearsed by endless repetition, both on this day and on other occasions, he urging me to remain behind just a little longer each time as if getting me home a little later after each trip would get Harry used to the idea, when it only enraged Harry more.

"If I don't get home on time tonight, Hank, Harry has promised I won't get out again for a week," I said.

"You mean he wants to ground you?" Hank said, his thick glasses glinting in the parade of store lights as he turned to look at me in disbelief. "This is 1968, Kenny. Parents don't ground kids any more."

"Maybe most folks don't, but Harry does," I said. "He's a bit old-fashioned in a lot of ways."

Even then, Hank did not hurry, pausing to eye a few teenybopper girls who giggled at him from near the steps to St. Mark's Books store, they fresh enough to the scene to mistake us for genuine hippies, something that clearly pleased Hank and caused him to wink. He might even have gone over to invite them to his crash pad had I not hooked his arm and pulled him on, dragging him inch by reluctant inch in the director of the Cooper Union building on Astor Place and towards the Eighth Street subway station two blocks west of it.

I would have gone home on my own, only Hank feared I might get lost or worse uptown near 42nd Street, thinking I might get sucked in my the painted ladies there -- as if the five dollars in my pocket could afford more than a kiss from any of them, me, aching for much more, and afraid.

"You can go back," I told him. "You don't have to come with me."

But again, Hank shook his head. "I couldn't live with myself if something happened to you," he said. "All kinds of perverts roam those streets around the bus station. And you are pretty innocent, despite all your time in the Paterson housing projects."

I could have said much more about him, knowing his ill-luck when it came to crime, how he used to get mugged regularly when he came down the hill from Haledon to go to the movies in downtown, Paterson, or that time when thugs cornered him in the Port Authority bathroom. But I also knew that if I made such a comment now we would have such a row about it we would never get uptown in time for the 10:30 bus, and Harry would have my head when I finally did get home.

The truth was I missed Hank. He spent so much time in Manhattan, I hardly saw him in New Jersey at all, and never during the week. I missed the trips to and from Manhattan together and his singing of songs on the bus, how offended the more conservative commuters got when we made our ruckus in the back, drawing glares from the bus driver who promised us more than once he would put us off if we did not behave.

I missed, too, the less sophisticated Hank, the one who did not know Greenwich Village like the back of his hand, who got as lost as I did whenever we tried to find a particular street or address, numerous times both of us coming to the realization we were lost and not caring about it. These days, he still got lost, but also got uptight about it, refusing to ask anyone for directions because that simply wasn't hip, leaving me to ask while he pretended not to be with me.

I missed the singing most, the hilarity of our own voices echoing back at us off the Brownstones and store front windows as we walked, out of tune voices which sounded nothing like the radio versions we attempted to imitate. Hank no longer sang on the street, saying we were just making fools of ourselves.

"So what's wrong with that?" I'd asked, getting only a dirty look as an answer, and when I persisted, he against said, it wasn't hip.

"Hip?" I said. "You never used to talk like that when you lived in New Jersey."

"I didn't know what hip was then."

"I wish you'd never found out," I said. "We don't seem as close as we used to be."

"We'd be a lot closer if you didn't have to run back to New Jersey every night by midnight," Hank said. "It's like you're Cinderella and have to be back in your room before you turn into a pumpkin."

"I don't set the rules," I said as we crossed over the Astor Place island, and under the outstretched point of its huge metal cube, a piece of art installed here well before our arrival, but now a symbol of the place, an oddity that the designer had balanced on one corner, attached to some kind pivot. Several kids were attempting to push it around, like some elaborate playground toy. Hank and I had done as much when we first wandered to St. Marks from the East Village, only now, rust made turning it much more difficult, and four boys struggled to move it an inch.

"So who sets the rules?" Hank asked.

"My Uncle Harry," I said. "He said he didn't want me wandering the streets of New York that late at night with all the strange people."

"Like there's no strange people in New Jersey?" Hank asked.

"Not like there are in New York," I said. "Especially up there by the bus station."

Hank sighed as we came to the 8th Street subway station and swung down into the stairs, several Hari Krishna’s chanting at us and playing their chimes. The stairs smelled of urine and alcohol, and a few bums sat on the cold stone at the bottom, holding up paper cups for us to give them change.

Hank glanced West down 8th Street, to the more commercial part of the Village, that part of the Village we had once mistaken for so hip, though we still wandered to that part from time to time, to hang out on the rings of Washington Square Park's fountain, or take in the skinny fries at the Zodiac Restaurant on Sullivan and 3rd.

It was the world to which the easy teeny bobbers came, when they made their own way across the Hudson, short skirts stealing Hank's gaze. A few lingered near the twin bookstores at the corner of Broadway and 8th, smiling uncertainly at the changing environment so influenced by the rougher and hipper East Village crowd.

"They are so innocent," I thought, hardly more experienced myself, though now beginning to understand how Village life ruined them, twisting their dreams into something perverted, greasy-headed elder hippies like Hank taking advantage of their ignorance long enough to get in their pants, when all they really wanted was a new set of ear-rings or a tied-dyed shirt.

"They don't understand their danger," I thought. "How the wolves howl seeing them, waiting to steal them up to some cold-water flat."

Hank's eyes glinted with admiration and I knew he was thinking of the tabs of acid he had in his pocket to offer such girls as these, entertaining them with bright imaginary colors until he could poke and probe them in his bed, each girl returning home hours later, baffled at the change, not yet fully aware of what had been taken from them.

"Someday, Hank'll go too far," I thought, then shivered, then tugged on his sleeve for him to hurry.

Not all the girls down this way were teenyboppers, either. especially the leather-bound girls with blonde hair and blue eyes with lips and nails painted the color of blood, girls sharp enough for a man to slice himself open on if not careful, walking these streets so boldly they might have owned every inch, or painted every sidewalk with the misery of men who desired them.

Uncle Harry called them whores, but if they asked for money, I never heard it, and Hank seemed to think of them as the coolest of cool, so posh in an East Village sense that he stopped each time he saw one and sucked his breath as if he would never breathe again, staring after them, all visions of teenyboppers gone from his head.

"If only I could get in the right groove," he told me once. "For them to pay attention to me the way they pay attention to people like Abbie Hoffman or David Peel."

But to me, raised on Uncle Harry's sense of taste, such girls made cheap the whole idea of love. Hank seemed to know a lot more about the new world and its rules than I did. But when I asked him how I should handle myself in a certain situation, he only shook his head and told me: "Do what you feel."

"But I don't know what I feel," I protested.

"Then do what ever works, you're own thing, you know what I mean."

I didn't get it. No more than I got what Uncle Harry tried to tell me, in his vague warnings about what might happen if I wandered too often across the Hudson.

"Perverts and pimps," he muttered.

I couldn't imagine him or any of his brothers ever "doing their own thing," so full of rules they tried constantly to lay on me.

"I don't see what's so bad about you staying here over night," Hank grumbled, yanking out 15 cents for the subway fare. As did I, and we both shoved our way through the turnstiles, an odd mix of business people, hippies and people of color sharing the platform, each group trying its best to pretend the other groups did not exist.

At few hard hats glared at us, nudging each other as we passed, mumbling the usual epithet as to whether we were boys or girls.

"I think my uncle wants to preserve my virginity," I said, only half jokingly.

"And you let him do that?" Hank asked. "I thought you wanted to find a girl? I thought that was the whole point of our coming to New York City in the first place."

"It was," I said.

"Then stay with me," Hank said. "We'll go on the prowl and bring a couple of girls back to the flat where I'm staying."

"If I do I won't see you for months, if I know, Harry. He hates you, Hank."

"Hates me? He hardly knows me."

"He knows what you look like from that time you came over with the Arlo Guthrie record, and he knows I let my hair grow long on account of you."

"He'll blame me for the Vietnam War," Hank said bitterly.

"No, only for keeping America from winning it."

Hank glared at me, then sighed. "You're a sheep, Kenny," he said. "You let your uncle run your life for you."

"I don't, for the most part," I said. "I've had my fights with Uncle Harry. But I'm sick of arguing with him about every little thing. I figure if I can live with his rules for a few more months until I'm 18, then I can move out and thumb my nose at him all I want."

"And then you'll move into the East Village with me?" Hank said, grinning his jack-a-lantern grin. "We'd have one hell of a time together, living just like artists."

It was a foolish hope, I thought, we searching for something here that no longer existed, that Jack-Kerouac/Allen Ginsberg kind of life that had vanished with the opening of the first headshop on 8th Street, covered over by commercialism the way the Bickford restaurant had been by theater marquees on 42nd Street.

"Whatever you say," I mumbled, and stared down the tracks for signs of the train.

We heard the rumble of it before we saw the lights, an earthquake on wheels rushing towards us out of the dark tunnel.

"Couldn't you call him?" Hank asked as the train pulled up and the doors opened.

"That would only make him angrier," I said. "What about you? Don't you have to go to work in the morning?"

"I'll go from here," Hank said, then stepped into the car as the doors parted before him, me trailing behind him and into a seat, the cracked leather cold even through my pants.

I stared at myself in the dirty glass as the train began to spin its wheels and the station began to shift, the empty platform giving away to darkness, broken only by the occasional flash of sparks from the wheels. In the darkness, the ghostly underground world revealed itself, full of twists and perversions, full of spaces no longer needed, whole platforms abandoned over time, my face superimposed on it all.

Hank paid no attention to the darkness, his gaze roaming around the car, searching each seat for a pretty face, and finding none, fixed itself on the window in anticipation of the next stop, where he found several pretty girls to admire.

"Wouldn't you like to talk to one of those?" he asked me, nudging me with his elbow.

"Sure," I said. "But what's the point if I've got to go home."

Hank groaned. "You don't get it," he said.

"I'm tired of this arguing, Hank," I said. "I'm going home and that's that."

The subway door closed, and whatever chance Hank had at attracting those girls was lost as the train slipped back into the darkness, like a long, metal and glass snake worming its way though the dark recesses of the city, coming out of its hole for another stop, then another, then finally coming to rest for us at the platform marked "42nd Street."

We clamored out onto the crowded platform, and then shuffled up the ramp to the stairs, the smell of Times Square seeping down to us from somewhere above, filled with the smell of cigarettes and coffee and booze, perfume, hotdogs, and car exhaust. Mingling with this was the human smell, the scent of sweat and the unwashed, of urine and ill-health, swirling up into my head, the single and most enduring impression of New York for me.

I did not need to see the panhandlers or the prostitutes, or hear their requests for cash. I did not need to see the brisk businessmen making their way home from their late hours in the office, or the lazy lob of tourists cluttering up the sidewalk with their oohs and aahs.

But in my mind, I saw it all, the flashing lights of the tobacco signs, the movie marquees, the advertisements for Broadway shows. I could see the light flooding over the sidewalks, that unending flow from electronic stores and restaurants and bars and peep shows, changing the colors of passing faces every few feet. I could hear the car horns, the whistles of the cops, the pop music from street-side speakers. I could hear the chant of beggars and preachers, side by side with the sideshows, and this, too, was New York.

At the bottom of one set of stairs, Hank grabbed me by the arm and said, "Up here, quick!"

"But that's not the way to the Port Author...." I started, then stopped, as he was already bounding up the stairs ahead of me, emerging ahead of me onto the street, where the visions in my head became suddenly and acutely real with subtle variations of all the smells, sounds and sights I had not imagined, strobe lights flashing from windows, men in tuxedos standing on the street, while the endless cycle of news continue to move around the top of the Times Buildings high above our heads. Someone snapped our picture when we stopped, blinding me for a moment so that I lost Hank again.

When I could see again, I saw a string of clocks in one of the windows, each telling me how little time I had to catch my bus back to Jersey.

"Hank?" I shouted, then saw the scarecrow-like figure prancing across the street. But when I moved to follow him, someone else grabbed my arm, a pudgy little man with a fat pink face, sweat dribbling down his cheeks despite the cool air. He grinned, his breath stinking of sausage, and his teeth, stained from cigarettes. He just kept smiling at me, and gripping my arm.

"Go away," I told him, and peeled his fingers off my arm, then looked for Hank again.

duplicates of Hank floated along the sidewalks all around me, wearing the same bellbottom pants and the same amazed expression, each lost in his lust for this city of lights, all making it difficult for me to locate the real Hank. And almost too late, I saw him, plunging down into the subway on the far side of the street, a subway entrance for the downtown train we had just taken to come uptown.

"Hank!" I shouted, then rushed after him against the light as the flood of car began to move across the intersection, a glacier of metal, glass and plastic that sought to crush me as it came. I made it to the far curb inches ahead of the first bumper, then barged my way through the crowd to the subway entrance.

The close scent of people swelled over me, as I rushed down those stairs, me, weaving in and out between their elbows and shopping bags in order to catch up with Hank. I caught a glimpse of him ahead of me and shouted his name, only to draw the attention of a transit cop, standing near a coffee machine, he watching me as I slowed my step, walking fast rather than running, knees aching, heart pounding, my head full of horrible possibilities, as if I might get myself arrested and beaten before I found out what ailed Hank.

"Hank!" I shouted again, when out of sight of the cop, but apparently not loudly enough for Hank to hear. I suspected this as some kind of plot to keep me from my bus, and yet, feared that it might be something serious.

"Why did he walk away like that? Was there something wrong with him?" I wondered. "Uncle Harry is going to murder me when I get home."

I called again, but he was already pushing through a turnstile and heading for a train. I had to stop at a booth and buy a token, and then rush through the turnstile after him.

I only caught up with him as the train squealed in.

"What the hell are you doing?" I demanded, huffing and puffing like my uncle did when climbing the stairs.

Hank stared into the car, as if his attention was caught by some motion, he squinting to make out some figure behind the dirty glass.

"Not now," he said, and shoved passed me and onto the first car of the train, and after studying all the seats briefly, marched on, yanking open the doors between the cars so as to enter the next, then the one after that, me, trailing behind him like a puzzled caboose.

I grabbed Hank arm, bringing him to an abrupt halt.

"Now you tell me what the hell is going on here?" I shouted, drawing attention to myself, as the accumulated commuters looked up.

Hank glanced at me, then around the car, his gaze suddenly caught on a blonde-hair figure seated in the far corner.

"A girl? You dragged me back down here for a girl?" I asked.

"Not just any girl, Kenny," Hank said. "Look at her!"

I looked, and saw the sharp edge of a female razor sitting stiffly on the seat, her hair brushed boldly back to reveal a face that looked as hard and rigid as a man's, but with all the flared touches black eye liner and red lipstick could create, her nails and mouth matching so well she looked to have come from some frenzied feeding of which the main course was blood. Only not one drop of that blood had spilled on her shinny leather pants or shirt, or on the pointy leather boots.

She was the kind of shark Hank called cool.

"Are you crazy, she'll eat you alive!" I said.

"I'm in love with her, Kenny," Hank said in a soupy voice I hadn't heard from him before. "I'm going to go talk to her."

"Don't!" I said and tightened my grip on his arm. "You can't just walk up to someone like that and say you're in love with her. She'd call a cop."

"I don't believe that," Hank said, wiggling himself free of my grip."

"But she doesn't even know you!" I said.

"She doesn't have to. It's all karma."

"Karma, my ass!" I said and tried to grab his arm again, but this time he slipped free of me and made his way down the car, the train now bumping into uncertain movement as it began to leave the station, doors now tightly closed preventing any escape.

"He's doing this to me again," I thought, recalling the time when we were both new to New York and he sought out what he called a real Greenwich Village party, telling me the whole trip in from New Jersey how grand it would all be, peace and love and hippies to make love to. That bottle of wine, loaf of bread stuff straight from a Simon & Garfunkel album, we making our way to some posh brownstone on the far West Side, where we climbed up to the proper floor, rang the bell, and were confronted by a hostess and a room full of people dressed for opera.

And then, later, when he got it in his head to join some Middle Eastern religion, figuring he could make love to a host of chanting women, little realizing until we were fully engrossed in the indoctrination that all the women in the group had taken a vow of celibacy.

Hank halted two yards short of where the blonde-haired girl sat, brushing the loose strands of hair out of his face, his jack-a-lantern grin growing as he made his way more slowly across the remaining space, he, sliding down into the seat beside her, keeping his face facing hers.

"Hello," he said.

The girl's expression never changed. She looked bored, and though she did look at Hank, she seemed as if in another place. "Hello," she said coolly.

Up close, the girl did not look nearly so young as I thought from across the car, her make up so sharp it chiseled her face, high cheek bones and tough eyes, like a man's. She didn't even look at me, even as I slid into the seat across from her.

"Hank doesn't need me," I thought. "He'll just take the girl back to his place and I'll be stuck pacing outside the crash pad door, making people wonder if I'm crazy or not."

I kept thinking of Uncle Harry and how I was now rushing in the exact wrong direction to meet up with him, and how angry he would be when I finally did crawl home.

I would not be home by eleven or midnight, or maybe not even by dawn.

"Maybe Hank's right I should call home, at least," I thought, though cringed at the sound of Uncle Harry's enraged voice, demanding to know what kind of trouble I'd gotten into this time.

"What's the point of calling when he'll just scream at me and demand that I come home?" one side of my mind said.

"Because if you don't call he'll worry."

"He's always a little too worried about me, as if he didn't trust me."

"Well, you have been a bit of a problem child in the past."

"Broken windows and fire crackers don't warrant his kind of suspicion. Haven't you noticed the way he looks at me sometimes, like he wanted me to do something really wrong so he could really punish me."

But subway trains had no telephones, so I sat back and closed my eye.

Suddenly, I was aware of Hank talking.

"I'm from New Jersey," he said.

I opened my eyes again. The girl looked up at Hank and nodded, as if that explained everything to her. "That's nice," she said in the same cool voice.

"Where are you from?" Hank asked.

She shrugged. "It doesn't matter."

"It does to me."

"Why?"

"Because I love you."

The girl stared straight at Hank for a long time, then finally glanced away, not towards me, not toward anyone, but perhaps staring out at the hazy world beyond the windows as I had earlier.

"We're both from New Jersey," Hank went on.

"Both?"

"That's my friend, Kenny," Hank said, implicating me in his foolishness with a tilt of his head. "We come to New York all the time. Go down to the Village, wander around and sing. You know."

She nodded again.

But once started Hank could not stop, spewing out a stream of words, the history of how we got to where we were right now, starting not with his phone call to my house hours earlier, but with our meeting at the movie theater a year earlier, his being fired and our meeting again. He told her about how he always dreamed of living in Greenwich Village, and how difficult it was for us to find the one he envisioned, full of poets and folk music, and Simon & Garfunkel dangling conversations.

From time to time, the girl glanced at him, her sharply painted eyes glinting the way the St. Marks' freaks did when looking over a bus load of tourists, she, grunting at all the appropriate places, thus encouraging him to go on.

At the Fourteenth Street, she stood, took a step and stopped as the train pulled up to the platform and its doors spread wide before her.

"Well?" she asked, glancing over her shoulder at Hank. "Are coming or what?"

Hank blinked, looking even more surprised than I felt.

"You mean it?"

"No, I'm standing here for my health," she snapped. "Now come on, and don't forget to bring along your friend."

Hank yanked me out the seat by my arm, and dragged me out onto the platform, the girl now parading away ahead of us, her shimmering leather outfit ablaze in the station lights. Hank ran to catch up, with me, stumbling along behind him.

"Where are we going?" he asked her as she and he climbed the stairs.

"You said you wanted to see the real Village," she said. "I'm going to show it to you."

"You know where it's at?"

"I know where some of it's at," she said. "It's in a club I know."

"A club? You mean like the Bitter End?"

She gave him a sour look. "The Bitter End is for tourists," she said. "This is a special club, something far beyond what the Bitter End could ever be."

Something in her tone of voice alarmed me, and I grabbed at Hank's arm to alter him, but she had already moved on, and he, jerking himself free of my grip, pursued her.

"Hank," I said, pushing my lips close to his ear. "I don't like any of this."

"Don't be so uncool," he said, and hurried to match strides with the girl, beginning to talk again, the way he had talked on the subway, telling her things she didn't need to know about his father and his growing up in Haledon, about the good war and the bad war and how his father hated him for not loving America the way he did, not caring for the America which his father fought so hard to save, and how if Hank didn't get out of his father's house, one man would kill the other over something as stupid as the cheap Philco Stereo Hank had gotten as a Christmas present when he had wanted much more.

And Hank talked about his voice, about how when he was a small boy people used to call him the new Frank Sinatra or Perry Como, teachers crooning over him because they thought he would be famous some day, giving him special privileges that got the bullies of school to beat him up over, giving him parts in all the plays which earned him the nick name of sissy. He talked of his heroes over time, of Anthony Newley, of the Everly Brothers, of Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

And the whole time, she walked on his voice and her footsteps resounding off the walls of the tunnel, and then the walls of the stairs leading up to the street, and finally off the glass face of the closing stores of 14th Street itself, the daytime crowds thinning like smoke around us, we three pausing to wait out a traffic light, her cool hand slipping into Hank's, and then her other into mine, her eyes slightly altered as if finally, and magically dented by Hank's assault of words.

“Do you love me, too?" the woman asked me.

"Love you?" I said, unable to shake other images from my head, the shadows created by the street lights making me think of Uncle Harry pacing worriedly at home.

"What the hell am I doing here?" I wondered, feeling her cool fingers squeezing mine, wishing Hank would start to sing, the way he always sang in the street, he, she, and me missing only a dog, a tin man and a pair of ruby slippers to make this vision real.

"Well, do you love me or what?" she asked again.

"I.... I don't know."

She smiled and squeezed my hand again, and then led us across the street as the light changed, through the square, then across another street along its western edge, taking us into the dark district of warehouses and aging tenements now in transition, not changing the way Soho changed, but decaying first, the rust and dust and trash strewn across each doorway mingling with the bums and junkies, men and women who stirred at our passing long enough to beg for spare change, returning to their sleep when clearly we offered none.

Whether it was West 15th Street or 16th or 17th or 18th Street, I never noticed, but we turned down one and walked about half way down the block before she stopped, squeezed our hands again, and told us to wait as she eased down the basement steps to a crumbling brownstone apartment building.

"But where are you going?" Hank moaned, already looking lost without her hand in his.

"I'm be back," she promised, and then slipped through a door at the bottom of the steps, muffled music sounding during the moment she slipped inside.

"I knew this would happen," Hank said, in a breathless voice that spelled out his anticipation.

"What did you know would happen?" I asked, the women's spell evaporating as quickly as her perfume.

"That we would get lucky someday."

"Lucky?"

"It'll be something to tell your grandchildren about," Hank said and grinned, his face sweaty and his glasses steamed. Even his eyes seemed overheated.

“If what happens next is what I think, I'm sure it'll be the last thing I ever tell my grandchildren," I said.

"Don't be such a prude," Hank said. "You sound just like your uncle. Why shouldn't we tell our children and grandchildren about our sex lives?"

"Because I don't think they'd be interested," I said, though I knew this wasn't strictly true, remembering that Christmas Eve night last year when Uncle Harry had grilled me over whether or not I had yet made love to a girl, refusing his drunken interrogation until I admitted my virginity.

And then, the girl came back, floating up the inner stairs from some dark place below where I had no business going to, but knew I could no more avoid than taxes or death, the strains of rock music clinging to her heals of her boots cracked on the step as she climbed.

I had not actually expected to see her again.

"It's okay," she whispered. "They'll let you in."

"Who'll let us in?" I asked.

"The people at the door," she said. "I had to make sure. I didn't want to just march up with you knowing how things are with the police and all."

"HANK!" I said and tried to grab his arm, but her words seemed to have stoked his fire and he plunged down the stairs with her, leaving me to retreat or follow. The girl stopped, then Hank, both staring back up at me from the dim stairwell.

"Come," she commanded. "I didn't go through all this trouble for you to chicken out."

"You and Hank go," I said. "I have to go home."

"KENNY!" Hank whined. "Don't do this to me, KENNY."

"He cannot go alone," the girl said. "I told them two boys. If I come with less, they will think it is a police raid and not let any of us in. You come. Or none of us go in."

"Then maybe none of us should go in," I said.

"Let me talk to him," Hank said, climbing the stairs again, his face full of rage. "What are you trying to do, spoil everything?"

"I don't like the look of this, Hank," I said. "It looks, well, dangerous."

"YOU don't like the look of it? After all the crazy things you've done?"

"I didn't do anything so crazy I might get killed."

"What about hopping those freight trains, eh?"

"That's a different kind of danger," I said. "This feels wrong."

"Don't start getting moral on me. Neither one of us will get laid if you start talking like that."

"I'm not getting moral. I'm not talking about that kind of wrong. This feels strange and -- I can't describe it exactly, only something inside me tells me we should just leave now while we still can."

"Well is he coming or not?" the girl asked from below.

"Sure, he is," Hank called back.

"Well, then? Hurry it up. I don't want to stand here all night. It is dangerous."

"See," I whispered. "Even she says there is something wrong."

"Just do this for me," Hank said. "I won't ever ask another favor."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I like her and I've never felt so hot about a girl before. That's why. And if we get inside with her, I'm sure I can make it with her."

His face was so pathetic I couldn't refuse, giving him only a nod, but it was enough. He grabbed my arm and pulled me along as he clamored down the stairs again to join the impatient girl, who grabbed my other arm with a grip so tight I couldn't have escaped without a crow bar.

The air smelled of dust and oil, and that vague scent of closed spaces I'd always associated with warehouses. The stairs were of that same industrial metal and announced our descent in rumbling echoes. If we had been the police, those below would have had ample warning, giving them time to escape or take aim.

I half expected to turn a corner and find myself facing a line of pistols. I thought I caught the scent of gun oil as we went down, the like of which I'd smelled before in the attic of my uncle's house, where he kept his rifles.

"One more floor," the girl whispered.

By now, I could smell other things like cologne and cigarettes, as well as the vaguer. Less acute scent alcohol. And when we came around that last corner and down that last flight, we were indeed greeted by two men with guns, although they had not removed the weapons from their holsters.

"These are the two I told you about," she said.

"Oh yeah?" one man said, the black tobacco juice dribbling down his jaw from the corner of his mouth where a thick, small stub of a cigar jutted out. "That'll be five bucks. A piece."

"Five bucks!" I said, "But that's...."

A sharp glance from the girl stopped me, warning me not to say too much around these men.

But five dollars was a lot of money. A movie didn't cost half that much, and I could buy a half a dozen hamburgers at a regular diner for that.

I passed over all of the money I had in my pockets, four wrinkled singles and four quarters, one fifth of it my bus money home.

"All right," the man with the cigar said to his partner who stood nearer the door. "Let them in."

The girl, who apparently didn't have to pay, led the way in, plunging through the door, and through a veil of smoke suddenly colored with flashing lights, the smell of cologne, booze, cigarettes and sweat roaring over us with the back beat of the music.

I tugged at Hank's sleeve and pulled him close to me as the girl vanished in the haze ahead of us.

"I don't like this," I said. "Why did they lock the door?"

Hank shook head, clearly as dazed by the swirling confusion around us, people stuffed into booths along the walls or clinging to drinks at the tables, even the bar that lay straight ahead across the dance floor seemed over occupied, with nooks and crannies showing to either side where couples in near privacy made out.

"And where did the girl go?" I asked.

"I don't know," Hank mumbled. "But I think I need a drink."

The men at the bar edged aside, and the bartender leaned towards us.

"What can I get you boys?" he asked.

I pulled Hank aside and whispered in his ear. "I don't have any money."

"You don't?"

"I used the last to get in including my bus fare," I said.

"I'll buy," Hank said and ordered for both of us, laying out the outrageous six dollars to cover what other bars would have charged two for.

"Does anything seem odd to you?" I asked.

"Odd?"

"I can't put my finger on it but..." I said, and then, in a flash of insight, it hit me. I grabbed Hank's sleeve. "They're all men."

Hank blinked, staring around as if taking photographs of the place with his eyes, each blink bringing him another piece of evidence.

"Holy...." he muttered.

Each face was that of a man, some wearing various layers of makeup, but all clearly of the masculine gender. Even the lovers in the corners were men, and the dancers clinging to each other on the dance floor.

"I think we should sit down a minute," Hank said.

This time, I nodded and followed Hank towards one of the smaller cafe tables recently abandoned, the empty beer bottles of the last occupant still cluttering its top.

And when we sat, we huddled together, seeking to ignore the flood of stares we got from the single men along the wall, each gaze asking us to join them.

"I wonder if she was a man, too?" Hank asked.

"She did look a little -- well, tough," I admitted. "But what do they need guns for? And why did we have to pay so much to get in? It's not like there aren't plenty of other gay bars around town."

"I wouldn't look too close around you, Kenny," Hank said, taking a deep gulp of his drink. "Then, you'd get your answer."

I glanced around, studying the darker corners where I had at first thought couples were making out, they were not, they were doing much, much more, several nearly naked, several other men down on their knees with their heads bobbing.

"My God!" I said, staggering to my feet. "Let's get out of here."

Hank rose, too, knocking down his chair as he did, struggling to pick it up again as I turned towards the door. But something caught my attention in the corner of my eye, one of those bobbing heads with something of a familiar bald spot at the back. I stared as the head stopped bobbing and the face turned to see what the commotion at our table was about.

"Uncle Harry?" I said....

Email to Al Sullivan

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