It had snowed the week before Thanksgiving in Watertown, New York. The burg with an unimaginative name, which matched its basic cultural footprint, was a small town west of Fort Drum and nearly on the shore of Lake Ontario, just to the west of the town, and about as far north in the United States you could get without spilling over into Canada. That, in itse...
Chapter One: Earliest Time I have no memory of a beginning. From the time I first had any sense of being alive, all of my efforts were taken up with trying to find enough berries, nuts, and leaves that wouldn't sicken me to make me able to move in the forest and shelter under low-lying branches when the threat of the elements or the Others arose. Even in sa...
May, 1979, Key West, Florida I stopped at the fireplace and stared into it briefly. This is where he burned them, thinking he'd wiped that part of his life out, not knowing that I had copies. I set the duffel bag down and sank into the sofa facing the fireplace. We had fucked on this sofa countless times, but the only time I had seen a fire going in the fir...
I stood behind the boot of the Bentley in the front auto court of the Rivenhall country inn, perched high on the cliff over a horseshoe cove on the sea north of Scarborough, while Felix, the chauffeur, helped Forest DeWitt into the lobby of the inn. When Felix came back, he opened the boot of the car and started handing out the luggage. A valet was there to...
The middle-aged man in the suit was crowding me at the bar at Harvey's in New York's Chelsea district and talking dirty to me. I was smiling and nodding, but my eyes kept drifting over to the table, where a guy a bit younger and far better looking and built was giving me the eye. If he'd just been a bit more definite in his signaling, I'd have broken away fr...
"Have a lovely evening out. You deserve it and it's about time you did it." I tucked the sheet under Raymond at the side and gritted my teeth. I was getting irritated at everyone saying that to me. Raymond's night nurse, Chester, had said it when I'd come into Raymond's bedroom to say goodnight to him. Raymond's lawyer and president of the Asheville Gay Men...
The first time I saw Lester Hodges, the Midwest shopping mall developer and owner, was at the blood fights in Kampala, Uganda, in early November. He had invited his lawyer, Art Brandeis, out to attend the fights, and Art, one of my regular clients, had brought me along. Hodges was an ugly bear of a man, over six and a half feet tall, heavy to the point of o...
Chapter One: Scarred Wedged in the crowd in Times Square below the CNN big screen, next to the tower on top of which Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen were cavorting and waving to the crowd, Nick felt Steven Saylor pull him in close. Someone near them was starting the countdown on the ball drop ushering in 2018 early by thirty seconds and others were taking up...
Chapter One: New Year's Eve 1989 There were four of them on the bed in the second-floor master bedroom of the Baccarat Hotel and Residence Condo building on Manhattan's West 53rd Street, conveniently located near the Broadway theater district. The caterers were downstairs in the living area doing last-minute preparations for Ted Sullivan's early-evening buf...