He slid in behind the rhino-skin bar and read over the menu.
Each drink was called the colonial name of a contemporary country.
There was the Ceylon Sling, the Indochina Surprise, the Rhodesia Twist.
He ordered a Gold Coast: banana, pineapple, rum and oil decorated with a replica of a sacred religious icon on the end of a toothpick.
He was about to order a Bay of Pigs Pate' when right in front of him, crossing the room like he owned -,it, which he did, was Ronald Home, head landlord of the world.
He had that look that celebrities have, like they're on television even when they're standing in front of you because their makeup is always perfect and they always seem to be correctly lit, not to mention well fed.
He still has all his hair, Peter noticed with a slight twinge of admiration.
Horne was headed straight for the door marked Bwana.
I've got to follow him, Peter thought, leaping from his seat with the determination of a man on a mission.
I've got to see what his dick looks like.
"Wait a minute, buddy," said a huge goon in a loincloth and war paint.
"The boss is in there."
"I know," Peter said clutching his drink.
"But I've got to go too."
"No one watches Horne piss," said the faithful savage in his South Brooklyn accent.
"Those balls are worth their weight in gold.
In fact, they're worth a hundred times their weight in gold."
"But urine is urine," said Peter.
"Look, fella, I got my orders.
Now why don't you let a slave girl fan you with a peacock feather for a few minutes and wait your turn."
Peter was mad.
This was where his wife stabbed him in the back.
He wasn't going to be pushed around by some strong-arm in a gold lame' jockstrap.
"You listen to me," he said, waving around the toothpick so that its replica shrunken head kept just missing the guard's oft broken nose.
"You've got a morally dubious job here, do you realize that?
Why don't you go into something more fun like repossessing family farms?"
That made him feel good.
That made him feel real good.
"Get the fuck out of here, right now," Goliath said, and before Peter had a chance to think it over, he was back on the hot sidewalk feeling better, better and stronger than he had in a long time.
He had made his stand.
He'd shown Kate and he'd shown that little bitch too.
Peter jogged home triumphant.
He worked out at the gym.
He ran errands.
He went to the hardware store.
He went to the shoe repair.
He went to the Xerox store across the street from the bowling alley.
I"Hi,'' she said.
"Hi," he said.
"Do I know you?"
"We met bowling.
Remember?
I had a copy of Mourning na Becomes Electra."
Oh thank God, thought Peter.
He could have gotten down on his knees and reached up from his heart to heaven.
Thank you for bringing this woman to me.
When Shelley agreed to go have a cup of coffee after work, he knew how much he really needed this.
And he knew that he h could really like her too.
She was beautiful and New York sexy, 0: ethnic.
He could learn to love her.
She would grow up soon.
I She'd be terrific at thirty.
to "Doyouwanttogotoheaven?"heasked,sittingacrossthe I -table.
`-`No," she said.
"You mean to tell me that when you die you don't want to a go to heaven?"
"Oh, when I die, yeah.
I thought you were going now."
al She's smart, he thought.
She's funny.
ci When they made love for the first time that day it wasn't passionate love.
It was cool.
But he knew the passion would -come.
There was already an immediate tenderness and easy familiarity.
Shelley pulled at his penis like it was a fun new toy.
ar He loved when women played with his dick.
Engagement or -absentmindedness were both sexy in their own ways.
It I "It always surprises me how big balls are," she said.
"The ar -way that everyone talks about pricks all the time you'd never it know that balls were anything in this world.
Except for gay men.
-They like balls.
They call them `baskets' or maybe that's with a dick too, but they like them `low-slung."" "How do you know?"
he said, worried for a minute.
"You're st( not gay, are you?
You're not bi or unsure or in transition?
You're be - I heterosexual, right?
You choose cock."
tri I"Don't worry," she said, a little unnerved.
"My brother is -gay.
We talk about that stuff all the time."
"Well, I need a break from it," he said, taking her in his arms.
"So let's not,talk about it when we're together, okay?"
"Sure," she said and then she thought it over a bit.
"Sure, why not?"
She had just dropped out of her senior year at NYU which made her plenty young.
Young enough that Peter didn't even ask.
Later she asked him, "What makes a man a good lover?"
And he said, "Take your time.
Make sure she gets enough clit.
Touch everything."
Who was the person he had become that afternoon?
Peter had never seen himself so romantic and funny.
Well, not never, of course, but seriously not for a long, long time.
They walked out together that night, along the edge of Chinatown where they could smell the bok choy cooking out of every window.
They could smell the leftover fish in the garbage and see people taking an easy smoke for the first time all day.
Peter had a new woman's hand in his and it was softer, warmer and a completely different shape.
There was a cop car parked on Canal and Mott.
There's always a lot more crime in the summer, people get sweaty and crowded together.
They get bored and want new things in their lives.
They get angry very fast.
"Let's check it out," Shelley said, so they joined the pack watching from stoops and street corners, leaning on doorframes and the trunk of the patrol car.
"If you look at the light," he told her, "you can't see the light.
You have to look at its effect on objects.
The whirling white and red on top of a police car is meaningless without the faces it stripes.
Without them it is only an appliance.
We have to explore each object beyond its functional identity."
She hooked her fingers in the back belt loop of his pants.
"You know, Peter," she said, rubbing her palm against his stomach as they stood watching, "it must be very lonely for you because you think you're the only one watching.
But that's not true.
I'm watching you, Peter.
I see you."
Has any man ever been that happy?
Thursday night after work Molly stopped by Daisy's place with a six-pack plus a couple of extra beers.
The double feature that day had been Persona and Cries and Whispers, two proto-lesbian classics, but one really had to be in the mood.
On the way over, she ran into Charlie who was, as usual, looking hungry and wanting to get high.
Usually getting high was the priority, but every once in a while he had to take time out from selling nickel bags on the corner so that he could quickly eat.
"I don't mind feeding him," Molly had told Kate once.
"Because everyone needs to eat."
But that did not erase the fact that he brought in three times as much money a week as she did, but still managed to be homeless because it all went to drugs.
That's why she got pissed off when, once in a blue moon, he would try to guilt-trip her for having a home when he didn't.
She also knew that while drug addicts are real people in that they get hungry and cold and sick and die, there is a big hunk missing from them somehow.
And for that reason, they couldn't be treated as fully human because they would just rip you off and exploit you every chance they got.
But this time Charlie was hungry enough to want to eat, so Molly sat down with him at the counter at Jeanette's Polish Home Cooking.
She felt like talking for a minute anyway, and could not trust him to not pocket the waitress's tip.
The fact was after all these apprehensions that Charlie was really okay and if drugs hadn't taken over his entire life, they could have stayed friends.
"I'm telling you, Molly," he said, wolfing down a chicken cutlet with two vegetables, "this country is filled with wasted potential.
You got those white boys running everything and it's so built-in they don't even know that they're running it.
I don't mean the big boys I mean your regular white man on the street.
Lets face it, I could sit in the White House smoking coke all day long and I would still be a better vice president than you-knowwho.
But there are revolutionary possibilities out there.
As soon as people get their priorities together then we'll see some radical action."
Molly hated when Charlie ran this rap.
He'd be an armchair radical if he had an armchair.
"Charlie, your only priority is cocaine.
Don't give me this revolutionary bullshit."
She felt bad the minute she'd said it, though, because he looked humiliated, which made her acknowledge that they weren't equals since he was dependent on her for food.
Therefore he couldn't tell her to go fuck herself because he wanted to eat.
So she just paid the check and split.
-At Daisy's everyone was sitting around the table doing a mailing of the People with AIDS newsletter.
They were humming and chatting.
The radio was blasting pretty loud from the salsa station, so feet were tapping and bodies were alternately moving and tightly bent over piles of envelopes.
They folded, stuffed and -stamped sheets of newsprint that might save some lives and would definitely increase the quality of others.
First there was Daisy, a combination aging Latin hippie and T librarian.
She was one of those people who always had really interesting information and had a hard time letting other people have interesting information too.
Still, she was great in front of a room where it was a one-way thing.
Daisy wore bifocals on a black string around her neck and had gray hair that had never been cut.
She was what is known as a "neighborhood person."
She knew every single face on the block, what they needed and whether she could help them find it or not.
Then there was her lover, Trudy, who used to be a cop.
Trudy knew all the laws to the letter and so, whenever there was a demonstration planned, she was in charge of "cop-duty."
That meant keeping an eye on the boys and girls in blue at all times and recording all the infractions they couldn't keep themselves from committing.
"Give me a break, sweetheart," some cop would inevitably say.
"That's the fourth time you've written down my badge number in the last half hour."
"I have to write it down every time you do something illegal," she would answer.
"If you don't want it written down then don't move."
She drove them crazy every chance she got.
They couldn't get away with the male cops searching female arrestees.
They couldn't get away with stopping picket lines.
"Picket lines are legal as long as they keep moving," she'd yell out, opening her little blue memo pad.
"And you know it."
"Cops," she'd sigh every now and then.
"What a bunch of punks."
Then there was a really quiet girl with black black hair and a devilish grin.
That was Sam, Trudy's sister, who had just hitchhiked back from Oklahoma.
She wore a powder blue cowboy shirt and one of those string ties with a silver Navaho tie clip.
They called her Sam because she looked exactly like Sam Shepard.
Her real name was Dorothy.
Sam didn't say much, she drank slow and folded and stuffed and sealed envelopes all night long.