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escaped from the pogroms of their native Dienstag to peddle rolls and nuts and eventually parlay cakes and cookies, pies and pizzas, into a fortune in the New World (reported in last Sunday’s Financial Section of The New York Times as producing a record fiscal profit from all divisions, 29% over last year, $2.03 dividend per share, $146,000,000, Abraham Bronstein, Chairman of the Board), would undoubtedly suspect foul play of the most heinous sort.
    “God is finally getting his revenge,” Richie would hear Abe sadly confide to Walter. “For my success. For my hubris. For my not loving my Richie.”
    Even at this moment of climactic triumph, Boo Boo wouldn’t cry. “Unh, thanks,” he said to his kneeling benefactor, who had actually swallowed the stuff, a feat which always amazed Boo Boo, who wouldn’t stoop so low.
    “What’s your name,” the balded one asked, creaking to an upright position and liking even more what he saw. “You have a phone number so we can do it again? Indoors.”
    “My name is Tex. No phone.”
    And Boo Boo walked away.
     
     
     
    Patty, Maxine, and Laverne were the best of friends and had been ever since they met dancing years ago at the old Tenth Floor. Each danced in a similar style, two legs implanted solidly on the ground, movement only from the knees and hips, the former back and forth, the latter side to side, hands discreetly undulating in and out and only within a modest circumference from the upper torso, eyes always straight ahead or closed. It was either a lazy man’s dance or a wise one’s, since its lack of caloric intensity allowed, with the aid of a few chemicals, for non-stop participation midnight till dawn and was, for all its rootedness to earth, still quite graceful.
    Jack Humpstone was called Laverne because he was, with Manny and Moe, partners in the flourishing discotheque, Balalaika, and because there were three thirty-year-old friends and partners named Manny, Moe and Jack, they were christened, faggot-style, Patty, Maxine, and Laverne.
    Patty, who was tall, thin, balding, hyperactive, and completely unable to delegate authority (“Listen! it’s easier to do it myself than to trust just any slag”), was definitely in charge, to the relief of the other two, who still pursued independent careers. Maxine, who was Patty’s lover, and who was addicted, in moments of stress, to dressing up as Elizabeth Taylor, was hefty, bouncy, and sharp (“Closets, schmosets, everyone’s out of the closet. Now where the fuck are the men !”), and currently sold women’s shoes at Lord and Taylor, where the ladies always asked for “that young man who knows my feet so well.” He and Patty had been together for seven years, and Maxine was not aware that an itch had now descended on his lover and it wasn’t coming from crabs.
    Laverne, who looked like John-Boy Walton with his neat and trim body, his youthful face and demeanor, and his slightly off-kilter hillbilly smile perking under his close-cropped steel-blond hair, was a schoolteacher in White Plains (“They are as retarded in Westchester as they are everywhere else”), where he tried to instill a love of English literature in heathen, suburban minds. He was a Southern Baptist boy from Birmingham, Alabama, and he was as together as anyone could be with an itinerant preacher for a father and a mother who was Betty Crocker All-State Finalist twelve years running, and who had discovered his own sexuality while a scholarship student at Washington and Lee, not with one of his classmates or instructors but with his Uncle Jeeter back on the farm—and who had just extricated himself forcefully from a six-year affair with Dinky Adams, to whom he had given himself in innocence and expectation, and by whom he’d been intimidated out of both
    But Jack was now going to a dyke shrink who had offered the hopeful, positive suggestion: “Mr. Humpstone, I think you may be a heterosexual manqué, ” and so perhaps not distant would be