XIV

i

There was a club on Folsom called the Penitent. At the height of its notoriety in the midseventies, it had been called the Serpent’s Tooth and had been to San Francisco what the Mineshaft had been to New York: A club where nothing was verboten if it got you hard. On the wild nights, moving down the streets of the Castro, the serious leather crowd had counted off their pleasuredomes on the knuckles of one well-greased fist and the Tooth had always been one of the five. Chuck and Jean-Pierre, the owners of the club, had long since gone, dying within three weeks of one another in the early years of the plague, and for a time the site had remained untaken, as though in deference to the men who’d played there and passed away. But in 1987 the Sons of Priapus, a group of onanists who’d restored masturbation to the status of a respectable handicraft, had occupied the building for their Monday night circle-jerks. The ghosts of the building had smiled on them, it seemed, because word of the atmosphere there soon swelled the number of the Sons. They organized a second weekly gathering, on Thursdays, and then when that became overcrowded, a third. Almost overnight the building had become a paean to the democracy of the palm. An element of the fetishistic gradually crept into the Thursday and Friday assemblies (Monday remained vanilla) and before long the leaders of the Sons had turned into businessmen; they leased the building and now ran the most successful sex club in San Francisco. Chuck and Jean-Pierre would have been proud. The Penitent had been born.

ii

The club wasn’t particularly busy. Tuesdays were usually slow, and tonight was no exception. But for the thirty or so individuals who were wandering the Penitent’s bare-brick halls or chatting around the juice-bar (unlike the backroom, this was an alcohol-free party) or idling in the television lounge, watching porno of strictly historical interest, there would be reason to remember tonight.

Just before eleven-thirty, a man appeared in the hallway, whose identity would be described variously by people who later talked about the evening’s events. Good-looking, certainly, in a man-who’d-seen-the-world kind of way. Hair slicked back or receding, depending on who was telling you the story. Eyes dark and deep-set, or invisible behind sunglasses, depending, again, on who was recounting the tale. Nobody really remembered what he was wearing in any detail. He wasn’t naked, as a few of the more exhibitionist patrons were, that was agreed. Nor was he dressed for casting in any specific scenario. He wasn’t a biker or a cowboy or a hardhat or a cop. He didn’t carry a paddle or a whip. Hearing this, a certain kind of listener would inevitably ask, “Well what the hell was he into?” to which the storytellers universally replied: Sex. Well, not universally. The more pretentious may have said the pleasures of the flesh, and the cruder said meat, but it amounted to the same thing. This man—who within the space of an hour and a half had created a stir so potent it would become local myth inside a day—was an embodiment of the spirit of the Penitent: a creature of pure sensation, ready to take on any partner heated enough to match the fierceness of his desires. In this brave brotherhood, there were only three or four members equal to the challenge, and—not coincidentally—they were the only celebrants that night who said nothing about the experience afterward. They kept their silence and their fantasies intact, leaving the rest to chatter on what they’d seen and heard.

In truth, no more than a half-dozen people remained purely witnesses. As had happened often in the long-ago, but infrequently now, the presence of one unfettered imagination in the crowd had been the signal for general license. Men who had only ever come to the Penitent to watch dared a touch, and more, tonight.

Two love affairs began there, and both prospered; four people caught crabs; and one traced his gonorrhea to his loss of control on the stained sofa of the television lounge.

As for the man who’d initiated this orgy, he came several times, and went, leaving the couplings to continue until closing time. Several people claimed he spoke to them, though he said nothing. One claimed they knew him to be a sometime porn star who’d retired from the business and moved to Oregon. He’d returned to his old hunting grounds, this account went, for sentimental reasons, only to vanish again into the wilderness that always claims the sexual professional.

One part of this was certainly true. The man vanished and did not return, though every one of the thirty patrons that night came back, crabs and gonorrhea notwithstanding, within the next few days (most of them the next night) in the hope of seeing him again. When he did not appear, a few then made it their private mission to discover him in some other watering hole, but a man seen by the yellowing light of a dim lamp in a secret place is not easily identified elsewhere. The more they thought about him and talked about him, the less clear the memory of him became, so that a week after the event, no two witnesses could have readily agreed on any of his personal details.

And as for the man himself, he could not remember the events of the night clearly, and thanked God for the fact.

iii

Drew had fled home after the encounter on the stairs and, ferreting out the pack of cigarettes he kept for emergencies (though God knows he’d never anticipated an emergency quite like this), he’d sat down and smoked himself giddy while he thought about what he’d just experienced. Tears came, now and then, and a fit of trembling so violent he had to sit with his knees drawn up underneath his chin until it passed. It was no use, he knew, trying to make a sane appraisal of what had happened until tomorrow, for a very good reason: Before setting out for Will’s house, he’d dropped what he’d thought was a tab of Ecstasy, just to ease him into a more sensual mood. At the beginning of the evening, before the drug had kicked in, he’d felt slightly guilty about not telling Will what he’d done, but he’d been so careful to present himself as a man whose drug days were behind him that he feared the date would sour if he told the truth. Then the Ecstasy had started to mellow him out, and the guilt had vanished, along with any need to expunge it.

So what had gone wrong? Something venomous in the tablet had turned round and bitten him, no doubt of that. He’d had a bad trip of some kind. But that wasn’t the whole answer, at least that’s what his instincts told him. He’d had bad trips before, a goodly number. He’d seen walls soften, bugs burst, clothes take flight. This delusion had been qualitatively different in a fashion he presently had no words to describe. Tomorrow maybe, he’d be able to articulate how it had seemed to him Will had been a conspirator with the venom in his system, feeding the madness in Drew’s veins with an insanity all of his own. And tomorrow maybe he’d also understand why, when the man he’d just made love to had come out of the bedroom, his head low, his body running with sweat, there had been a moment (no, more than a moment) when Will’s face had seemed to smear, his eyes losing all trace of white, his teeth becoming sharp as nails. Why, in short, the man had lost all semblance of humanity and become—for a few heartbeats, something bestial. Too wild to be a dog, too shy to be a wolf; he’d looked, just for a moment, like a fox, yelping with laughter as he came to do mischief.