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their families (unaware they were homosexual) understood less than if they had been killed in a car wreck. They were tall and broad-shouldered, with handsome, open faces and strong white teeth, and they were all dead. They lived only to bathe in the music, and each other's desire, in a strange democracy whose only ticket of admission was physical beauty—and not even that sometimes. All else was strictly classless: The boy passed out on the sofa from an overdose of Tuinols was a Puerto Rican who washed dishes in the employees' cafeteria at CBS, but the doctor bending over him had treated presidents. It was a democracy such as the world—with its rewards and penalties, its competition, its snobbery—never permits, but which flourished in this little room on the twelfth floor of a factory building on West Thirty-third Street, because its central principle was the most anarchic of all: erotic love.
    What a carnival of people. One fellow came directly from his tour of duty in the Emergency Room at Bellevue on Saturday nights, and danced in his white coat sprinkled with blood. A handsome blond man whom the nation saw on its television sets almost every day eating a nutritious cereal, came to stand by the doorway to the bathroom, waiting for someone to go in whose piss he could drink. Chatting with him was a famous drug dealer from the Upper East Side who was sending his son through Choate and his daughter through Foxcroft, and who always dressed like a gangster from the forties. They were talking to a rich art collector, who one day had resolved to leave all this, had cursed it and gone to the Orient the next day to live there; within a year he had reappeared standing beside the dance floor, because, as he told his friends, Angkor Wat was not nearly so beautiful as the sight of Luis Sanchez dancing to "Law of the Land" with his chest glistening with sweat and a friend stuffing a rag soaked with ethyl chloride into his mouth.
    The art collector walked up to talk to a handsome architect who had also tried to escape this room and the life, and society, which flowed out from it, as a river does from a spring. He had decided one night he was dissipating himself, he had looked in the mirror and decided he was going to waste physically. And so he bought a car and drove west till he found a little shack high in a mountain pass with not a single mirror in the house. Four months of snow, and two of flowers, in the pure mountain air, however, did not arrest the progress of these physical flaws. They were age itself. And so one morning in May, with flowers on the meadows and the valley beneath him, he decided to go back to Manhattan and rot with all the beauties in this artificial hothouse of music and light. For what was this room but a place to forget we are dying? There were people so blessed with beauty there they did not know what to do with it. And so the doctor who came direct from the Emergency Room (whose dark, bearded face was that of a fifteenth-century Spanish saint), the archangelic son of a famous actress, the man who had driven west to leave time behind, breathed now the air of Olympus: Everyone was a god, and no one grew old in a single night. No, it took years for that to happen...
    For what does one do with Beauty—that oddest, most irrational of careers? There were boys in that room, bank tellers, shoe salesmen, clerks, who had been given faces and forms so extraordinary that they constituted a vocation of their own. They rushed out each night to simply stand in rooms about the city, exhibiting themselves to view much as the priest on Holy Saturday throws open the doors of the Tabernacle to expose the chalice within.
    Nevertheless Malone, the night Frankie nearly beat him up on the sidewalk outside the Twelfth Floor (a commotion I was unaware of long after it had occurred, since I had arrived early that night to watch the place fill up with dancers and hear the music that began the whole night, as an overture begins an