On June 21, 1975, he found his first glory hole: “Hanging by my hands from the top of the stall, my legs rattled, I came hard in quick explosions. Bob, I collapsed inside from excitement.” Has anybody adequately described the sheer boredom of promiscuity? I did not have Ed’s patience, although I admired it. He waited in bars, waited at the baths, waited in sex clubs, waited in parks, waited at parties, waited for the orgy to begin. Someone’s outraged boyfriend burst through the door: the swarming limbs absorbed him but then the bed collapsed. He had an affair with a whole family. He had a fling with the Macy’s Persian-rug buyer on a stack of rugs in the storeroom, and with an obese man—it tickled him to agitate so much flesh with so small a button. “He came one little squirt, it sat on his belly, so little and innocent.” Where was I? Walking Lily perhaps. Her piss glimmered under the streetlights and raced down the sidewalk, a glittering stream. The streetlights exercised a principle of order, gathering buildings and trees flatly out of the darkness and into the inky, stately night. I passed a house where a stereo played a love song I knew, conventional lyrics, obvious, a melody climbing predictable changes, and it flooded me with longing.