the day when his current inferiority (an impotency brought on by the fact that his cock had a head like a mushroom, which Dinky, claiming it hurt him when Jack fucked him, had utilized as an excuse to have sex elsewhere, which destroyed poor Laverne and his fantasy of love and sex melding into one by a hearthside yet unbuilt) would vanish, freeing himself up for sparking, roaring fires with the wooing Robbie Swindon, so patiently waiting in the wings.
It was Patty who had decided, when the old Tenth Floor was forcibly closed by the Fire Department—that most homophobic of all city agencies—to open his own place. He’d started saving and he’d looked and looked, with Maxine as a willing, if astringently mouthed companion, for possible premises. After work (Patty had been an accountant in the cookie division of Bronstein Bakeries), Saturdays, Sundays, uptown, downtown, Brooklyn Heights (“Patty, no tripping queen is going to take a subway to Brooklyn to go dancing”) until, on a very cold Election Day Tuesday four years ago, they were shown a parcel of properties on West Street, near Little Eleventh, across from the Hudson, by Alvin Sorokin (whose Immigrant Savings represented them), who told them: “A lease on this piece of shit is yours for any price.” It was a piece of shit, an assortment of ill-matching adjoining sags and warps that would have done Dickens justice; the second floor of one did not greet the second floor of its brother, but Robbie, a Mormon architect who had been expelled from Brigham Young for being caught jerking off in the middle of the night and refusing to name names of any fellow Unnatural Behavers (not that he then knew any), forcing him to receive his degree in the East, showed them in sketches (Dinky had wanted the job but Patty had told him he wasn’t qualified) how neat it would all be when a little money was spread around and how, after knocking out a few of the ground-floor walls, the street level would be dynamite. It would be, as it now was, a huge dancing womb of a place, suitable for thousands, with angled bleachers up to the d.j.’s nest, and, since one whole side had outlets to the street, there would be no Tenth-Floor-exit problem to disturb the awful Fire Department, still carrying on their tradition of unleashed homophobia. Alvin helped arrange a tight lease for ninety-nine years with the owners of the property, the Dippsy Doodle Cake Company, Limited, as Beneficial Nominee for the Lopp Trust. Patty paid $10,000 down, which was all the money he had saved from his cookies, plus $10,000 he’d begged from his aging parents in Brooklyn, plus $2,500 from Maxine and $1,000 from Laverne. It was theirs.
Robbie, always the nice smile, the black turtleneck, the handsome silver bracelet, the muscled gymnast’s body, drew up plans as best he could under the grief of some difficulties pertaining to his current lover’s penchant for fucking around elsewhere. To effect the extensive renovations and purchase the best of sound equipment, additional monies were secured by renting out part of the excess basement space to what Patty at first thought was Tiny Tots, Inc., a job lotter of kiddies’ clothes, preschool to preteen, but which, after opening, turned out to be The Pits, a rather special gay bar. The upstairs partners were naturally upset to find competition quite so close at foot, but after Patty, unknown to Maxine, had paid a few visits to the place—as an exploratory observer, of course—and obtained true satisfaction from one blow job given and two anal intercourses, one given and one received, on his recommendation they decided not to press charges. “Listen!” he’d said, “a little competition can only help.”
The strange bedfellows were to get along just fine, even after The Pits became a wee bit too notorious for the quality for the stage show, all those outré extensions of the anatomy’s natural abilities, all played in various forms of repertoire, thus causing