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By Root 876 0

exiter had been completed. I wondered if drug dealing was being done, since it was being done most everywhere else. Perhaps it was, but that wasn’t the main draw. It took a few surveillance moments to realize that my windows afforded the scenic view to a major cruising spot, this overpass shielding a Pac-Man shadow maze of pickup action. (Pac-Man hadn’t been invented yet, but no other analogy quite dings the bell.) From the detached perspective of my overhead view, the intrigue had the abstract quality of a Jacques Tati comedy, a man on the hunt vanishing down one aisle and reappearing from another one soon afterward, as if he hadn’t found what he was shopping for and was retreating into the shadows again while another man discharged himself from the lane between a different pair of trucks, he too having come up empty. One night I saw a man materialize between trucks in a pair of leather chaps over a pair of jeans that had been cut in the back to bare a heart-shaped bottom, his butt cheeks hosting a cucumber or a dildo shaped like a cucumber—in any case, something dark green was poking out. Had he inserted it himself, or did someone insert it for him and was he searching for the original owner? He paused on the sidewalk in a moment of Hamlet indecision, his “jewel pouch” carrying the seed of doubt, then turned back into the shadowed aisle between the trucks, his night not quite done and for all I knew may have been just getting started.

For those were marathon weekends many of the men in the West Village seemed to be putting in, stamina-testing contests, judging by their grizzled, battle-weary condition on Sunday mornings, some of them still bearing the darkness in their eyes like coal miners who had just come off a brutal shift. I, on my way to pick up the Sunday Times, would sometimes find myself downwind from a couple of sexual platooners who had pulled an all-nighter, a cloud of sweat, leather, alcohol, urine, semen, cologne, lubricant, and industrial might invisibly tentacling from them like a collection of short stories waiting to be written by Edmund White. The look of so many men on those mornings after the night before was the ink-drawn definition of “fucked out.” Evidently, a lot more martial effort went into what they were doing than what their straight counterparts got up to on weekends, more ritual and regalia. Because gay life had been criminalized and stigmatized for so long, forced underground or into pocket enclaves, it had developed its own cryptology, but now the codes were more open, flashing in daylight. A yellow handkerchief in the back pocket signaled one thing, a black handkerchief signaled another, and left or right pocket designated whether one was a top or a bottom, although rueful word had it that there were a large proportion of men who claimed to be tops who were only fooling themselves and disappointing others. (Just as the ratio of masochists to sadists is so lopsided, putting a premium on the latter.) Post-Stonewall, the West Village was one of the prime vector sectors of seventies sex with the safety catch off. Monday mornings it was not uncommon to spot a businessman leaning back in the driver’s seat of his parked car, receiving head from a drag queen before driving off to the office, one way to kick off the workweek. Horatio Street was a short throw from the meatpacking district, when it really was the meatpacking district and not a Marc Jacobs mini-mall, its brick streets, angled shadows, and abandoned atmosphere at night drenching the area with a Brassaï-photograph mystique or Jack the Ripper air, depending on the threat level in your head. The Anvil, which opened in 1974 and soon earned a niche as “a gay bar with a rough-trade rep” (in the words of the Village Voice), was on Tenth Avenue, its main action taking place downstairs. That’s what a large part of the seventies was about, venturing downstairs, into the orphic melee, the gladiator pit of the members-only Mineshaft on Washington Street reputed to be even more of a docking station of battering-ram abandon.

A bystander in my