city through which I walked was a sister to Weimar Berlin. Two wild, depressed cities in a nation stupefied by inflation and unemployment, two countries humiliated by lost wars—World War I, Vietnam—chafing under the decline from greatness into shabbiness.
And all at once a gimlet eye opened in my mind as I reviewed Michal’s story. Something was amiss, as Dr. Schussler had sensed. Margarette Rothman may have been youthful during the time of Weimar, but not so young that she would not have been aware of the larger world. There was something of the fairy tale about her story—yes, the patient had hit upon it exactly. All that was needed was a viscount or two to turn the whole thing into a bad Victorian novel. The three-hundred-year presence in Berlin. Ballrooms, the art gallery, the famous painters, the salons. What about the hyperinflation, the poverty—all the misery shown in the work of the Weimar painters—the desperate whores and ugly fat cats of Otto Dix’s paintings, Grosz’s amputees and maimed war veterans—where was all that in her story? How many lies had she told the patient? Or to herself?
Suddenly my chest began to reverberate. Doom-bah, doom-bah, doom-bah, doom-bah.
Someone shouted at me, Come on up, Pops! Come on up!
What was happening? Where was I? I had been lost in my own thoughts, and now I looked up to see an open balcony, the source of the doom-bah rhythm pouring down upon the street. The sign on the balcony said “The Metro,” and it was from its second-story patio that the shout had come. A dense crowd of men filled the patio, all of them naked above the waist but for something crisscrossing their chests—leather straps studded with metal, I saw.
Come on up, Pops! yelled the voice again amidst hoots and whistles and proffered beer bottles, and men bumping hips and groins.
Where was I? I asked myself again, wheeling around and back until I found the street signs above the three-cornered intersection: Market, Noe, Sixteenth Street.
You’re in the Castro, old man! came the voice, as if understanding my confusion.
The Castro. Yes. I had walked out far enough to have entered “the Castro,” the “gay Mecca,” as it was called, a district I had not visited before nor had intended to visit now. I looked down at my watch. Eleven-ten. At midnight, the “owl service” would begin on the N Judah line, at which time a bus would be substituted for the streetcar, using a route I did not know. I should ask someone for the nearest tram stop, I told myself, and ask soon. I continued walking outbound on Market toward Castro Street itself, where there was a great crush of people, among whom, surely, would be someone who could direct me to the N Judah.
But when I turned the corner onto Castro, I was so amazed by the scene before me that I forgot my intention to ask after the streetcar. It was as if I had entered yet another city, this one inhabited by lumberjacks, cowboys, leathernecks, roughriders, policemen, firemen, musclemen, bikers—such was the demeanor of the hundreds of men (thousands?) who thronged the street. As I tried to negotiate the sidewalk, I was thrown from store window to gutter, into groups of lean, bare-chested men, then into ones covered in leather; next set amidst youths in tight T-shirts and jeans; then put shoulder-to-shoulder with stout, half-naked, extremely hairy men; and so on through the many types, each expressing such a stark and heavy masculinity that my senses were assailed with odors of maleness—now sweaty, now cologned, now something I could not identify but which seemed concocted of leather and tobacco and the chlorine of ejaculate. I thought, I must get off this sidewalk!
At that moment, a bar door opened and I was swept inside by the crowd.
Deafening music assaulted my ears. It was dark but for strobing blue lights, which revealed the bar’s inhabitants in epileptic flashes. So displayed, each face suggested menace—a false impression, I struggled to see, as it was soon clear that this bar catered to the milder tight-jeans-and-T-shirt types—but a suggestion clearly intended by the establishment, which had painted the walls black, and the floor black, and had illuminated the back bar with the sort of red one imagines as the color of Hades. Many eyes turned toward me. I did not belong there, they seemed to say. And I very much wished to leave—desperately wished to leave!—but again a scrum of bodies swept me along, and