But one can ruin one's life waiting for hopes that linger in the back of one's mind to come true, as one can ruin one's life lingering in the back of a movie theater, motionless, while other people live and move on a two-dimensional screen.

--Richard Friedel, The Movie Lover

The Confessions:

I avoid saints. You see, saints are more than just statues of martyred men and women, a rosary grasped in one marble hand, the other raised in benediction, more than just lifeless statues forgotten in the corners of cathedrals, in the centers of remote villages in France or South America. Saints live, watch silently from those villages, crying, bleeding, sweating, they stir to life in those cathedrals like the statue-turned-flesh Madonna had sex with in her music video.

I confess my guard rises whenever I meet someone with "St" as a prefix to a surname, whereas "Silver," "Gold," or "Wein" ease me immediately. Even people with saintly first names, Peter, George, John, Mary, Theresa and such, put me on edge. I mean, have you ever heard of a St. Abraham, St. Moses, St. Rachel or a St. Herschel for that matter?

St. Valentine's Day is always just "Valentine's Day," and I ignore St. Patrick's Day altogether‹I don't trust holidays that lack gifts or some particularly interesting food.

Once I had a serious case of hives and chose the emergency room at San Francisco General instead of St. Luke's, a hospital much closer to my apartment.

When I go home with a one-nighter, and conduct my forensic search of his bathroom cabinets for AZT, Zovirax, pentamidine inhalers, and other telltales, St. Ives shampoos and conditioners unnerve me almost as much as the others.

Growing up in the 80's, I never comfortably watched St. Elsewhere or reruns of The Saint." As a matter of fact, the only saintly presence in my childhood was in a photo album hidden behind all the others. Inside was one faded photograph, yellow with wavy edges, a photograph of the entire family taken in Germany in the 20's. Next to it, a newspaper clipping about the S.S. St. Louis, a boat full of German Jews that landed in Florida early on in the War. It returned to Germany, amnesty refused. I also confess, however, that none of this applies to my feelings about the St. Mark's Baths. I have never been to New York before, but if it is indeed Oz, then the old St. Mark's Bathhouse building is the end of my Yellow Brick Road. Of all the famous bathhouses and places for sex‹the Everard Baths, the Christopher Street Piers, the jungles of Fire Island and such‹the St. Mark's overshadowed the rest. It epitomizes the wild life, the uninhibited heyday of the 70's and early 80's that I missed out on. Sex, Discos, Sex, Drugs, Nightlife, Sex, Studio 54, men prowling in tight 501's and tank tops even in the dead of winter, men behind their mirrored aviator sunglasses, the friction sound of corduroyed thighs in Central Park, the weekendlong parties, bar to bar, club to club, the blow jobs from warehouse to warehouse. It was a wild, idealized life, both foreign and familiar, one I only know second hand from the fictional adventures of B.J. Rosenthal and Fred Lemish. I hate reading of the way things used to be. I grow jealous of what I missed. Still, I close my eyes, hold the finished book to my chest, and do my best to clutch at those elusive literary straws. Or after I see some movie, I stare at the empty screen in the empty theater long after the last credit rolls up and the ushers start sweeping popcorn and fallen Milk Duds.

I imagine the St. Mark's Baths as a beacon, a focal point to queers in the 70's and early 80's, Athens to the philosopher, North Beach to the Beatnik, Schwab's pharmacy to the starlet, Haight Street to the hippie, Sicily to most of Chicago‹The Old Country, a glorified former homeland, an idealized, dreamed-about land, the other side, a place that combined the way things were with the way things should be, a place where, once gone, only The Good is remembered.

I once saw a short film about a teenager staying in New York with his older cousin whose lover had recently died. The older cousin gave the younger a pair of the dead lover's shoes that, with morbid practicality, happened to fit. When this kid put them on, through the magic of short films, they transported him back to the old days, the late 70's presumably, where he awoke engulfed in a dark haze of Marlboro smoke, the mint of poppers, the rainbow flecks of a mirrorball, and the glory of Gloria Gaynor. The shoes took him to a disco, where leather queens with their rugged Village People good looks stalked from behind their handlebar moustaches. Club queens in tighter than tight white denim, gold chains, and Keith Partridge button-downs, twirled around in dervish circles. H.G. Wells meets Armistead Maupin with some help from some not-so-ruby slippers.

Had St. Mark's actually been a converted cathedral, deserted by the priests with the oncoming of East Village beatniks, hippies, artsy fags, drop-out students, the pierced and tattooed? Was it built with huge brownstone slabs the size of pyramid stones, with vaulted, oaken doors atop 40 marblewhite steps with gold handrails? I imagine the East Villagers converted the cathedral for sex: glory holes in the confessionals; a sign saying RECTUMORY over the rectory-turned-leather dungeon; naked go-go boys writhing with Pentecostal fury in the alcoves once occupied by Virgin Mary statues; shinyblack garbage bags ducktaped over the stained glass; the gargoyles strategically placed like porn shop voyeurs; pigeons nesting in the belfry, then flocking to the skies like the swallows around San Juan Capistrano when the bells of St. Mark's rang for the most phenomenal orgasms; and finally, the cathedral's original statue of St. Mark bound in S&M fetish attire: zip-up leather hood, harness strapped across his robed chest, cat-o-nine tails clutched in a marble hand that had once held a crosier.

But no. St. Mark's wasn't some 90's sex club in San Francisco with theme nights, two for one coupons, and themepark rooms with entire floors of pup tents or neckhigh with foam. St. Mark's was a bathhouse, a place I have never been since they were all but extinct by my junior high school years in the late 80's. I imagine St. Mark's gloriously towering above the brownstones and graystones of Greenwich Village, its steeples bathed in sunlight. It hived with the life of The Village: the leather clones that buzzed from bar to bar, the made-up pretty boys, the downtown business men, the Chelsea punks, the NYU students, the timid Jersey kids. All found grace within St. Mark's walls. The great crowds streamed in and out, lined up around the corner. The men circled the block, circled the massive cathedral, circled like Muslim pilgrims around the Kaaba at Mecca.

I imagine every one within was goodlooking, gym-toned, young, and with none of those bristling moustaches or Brady Bunch Men perms of the 70's. Muscled, airbrush-perfect bodies lounged in the private rooms, lounged in Chippendale calendar poses, like those prostitutes you hear about in Amsterdam windows. The mint of poppers wafted from room to room like patchouli at a Grateful Dead concert, enticingly sweet, intoxicating. Clouds of steam swirled down the hallways, and the men circled each other as they wandered through the clouds with white towels wrapped around cut groins and slim stomachs. They eyed each other, silently chose among the angelic bodies, the naked angels in the clouds.

One beckons me into a private room. I close the door as he draws back his towel with a magician's flourish. We spend long hours passionately kissing, and he'll call me the next day. We spend long hours of passionate sex before . . .

Who am I fooling? What do I know from bathhouses? Nervous, unsure of the unspoken rules, the bathhouse etiquette, I'd feel inadequate, scared to death, as tense and confused as Arnold Beckoff with his beer can in that back room. And on top of all that, even in my fantasies I can't escape the fact that I would be having hot sex in a hot zone.

In the mid-80's, New York City closed the bathhouses. I imagine St. Mark's the day after: All the clones and queens, the uptown boys in their Lacoste shirts, the leather daddies in their chaps, the boychicks from Brooklyn‹all standing around the locked oak doors of St. Mark's murmuring their disappointment. I imagine them confused and shocked as they read the notice tacked up on the doors by the Health Department, as confused and shocked as those who read for the first time Martin Luther's Theses tacked up on the door of Castle Church. Some walked by, heads down, ashamed, penitent. Some walked by with smug smiles, thankful for the end of a so-called sleazy aspect of their community's life. The closing cast a melancholy, a depression over the whole Village, the whole city, a sadness and disbelief not seen or felt since the morning after Kristallnacht.

"What kind of nonsense is this?"

Perhaps I've confessed too much to my matchmaker.

Kelly Grossman, abuser of the word "babycakes" and transplant from New York out here to San Francisco, always has someone for me to "just get a little acquainted." She knows I'm taking my first trip to New York, a birthday gift to myself, so she gives me the number of a friend of hers who still lives there.

"Enough with the bathhouse. His name is Kale, and the two of you should hit it off. You're both young and bitter as all of shit, and can be sarcastic with each other until you fall in love. Give him a call, huh, babycakes? Will it kill ya to just get a little acquainted? You both have hippies for parents, so you should have lots in common."

"Sounds like our parents would have more in common."

"Give him a chance, will ya? I mean, you're an Aries and he's a Scorpio. Worse case scenario, good sex."

"Why's a nice schadchan like you relying on astrology? What would your rabbi say?"

"By any means necessary, babycakes. Especially with picky queens like you."

"Hey!"

"Anyway, his name is Kale and he has a sister named Chard. Get it? You'll hit it off. I think." "Suddenly unsure?"

"Well, he hasn't been the same since he joined that meditation cult, uh group, I mean, that meditation group."

"Grossman?"

"He's the same, honest. Just a little more mellow. Hey, has the Grossman ever steered you wrong?"

"The bartender with the Zoloft?"

"OK, one time."

"The poet with the heroin?"

"OK, OK. Should I take blood samples before your every date, now?"

I hate being set up by Kelly, which is about every week, but you never know. I still subscribe to the philosophy that there exists The One. Still, each trial makes me feel awkward, on the spot, like Amy Irving sitting before the big-mouthed, big-lipped, big-haired Sylvia Miles in Crossing Delancey. "Just get a little acquainted, huh? It'll be good for ya. Give ya something to really fantasize about, and not that crazy bathhouse."

But what about that crazy bathhouse? What has happened to it since it closed?

I imagine a forty-year-old Queen, one of the rich, single types who in the 70's bought rundown Victorians, renovated, remodeled, restored them to their former rococo glory, and collected healthy rent checks every month.

The Queen discovered plans for the old building's demolishment, plans for it to be paved over with a Starbucks' Coffee or a Noah's Bagels or some 90's strip mall. The Queen still remembered the old days of St. Mark's, the swirling steam clouds, the honeysuckle of amyl nitrate. He was one of the frequenters, one of the few who lived to remember, but didn't much tell. So he bought the ruin, and even briefly considered renovating and rededicating it to the Villagers somehow. But he didn't. He never even visited his purchase. As a matter of fact, he avoided walking down St. Mark's Place altogether. He didn't know exactly what he'd find, didn't want to know. He dreaded the thought of that Twilight Zone episode where the Nazi captain some years after the war returned to the concentration camp where he had seen to the deaths of thousands. The captain returned only to find pale ghosts in striped uniforms. The ghosts held a trial, judged, found the captain guilty, and sentenced him to endure the same pain he inflicted on them. It drove him insane.

The Queen knew he wasn't responsible for the tens of thousands. But he feared the dead faces of the leather queens, the faces of the wide-eyed Iowa boys fresh off the Greyhounds, feared their voices and faces would resemble the ghosts from that Twilight Zone episode: eyes starved and darkcircled, arms rail thin, skin ashen, strained deathbed voices that called from within the old cathedral, a raspy litany of "Why aren't you here with us? Why aren't you here with us? Why did you survive? Why aren't you here with us?"

So the Queen purchased St. Mark's, but the guilt and fear and nostalgia have kept him from the East Village. He hasn't visited what I imagine the reality of St. Mark's to be: The City replaced the Health Department Notice tacked up on the door with a CONDEMNED one, and put up a chainlink fence around the entire building. The plaque commemorating it as once the home of James Fenimore Cooper hangs in tarnished neglect. Plywood, warped and faded from the angry New York elements, crisscrosses the windows, bandaging them shut. The paint, once a taupe, beige, ecru, or some other 70's color with a useless French name, flakes off in large patches exposing dark lesions of the brownstone concrete beneath the once bright skin. The inside fares no better, and after years of rotting, wasting, cockroach infestation, being eaten away by rats and termites, the walls crumble into plaster ashes upon the floor.

Just another building, another of the condemned. Other older queens remember as they walk by. Some point discrete fingers and whisper to one another of ten, fifteen years earlier. Some move a little quicker, their hands plunged a little deeper in pockets of their worn leather jackets, baseball caps pulled a little further down over peppersalt beards. Still, others gather before the chainlink fence, gather in the shadow of the ruin, their black denim jackets faded and patched, fringey holes at the knees of their 501's. Some come in wheelchairs, and with their bony fingers, marble pale, they claw the chainlink. Others as thin as the walkers they lean against, bow their gray heads down in solemn silence, in humility. Some remember the dead, the near-dead, and give thanks for their own survival. Eyes closed, some rock back and forth, and from a distance, the queens before the St. Mark's ruin seem to be davening, praying like the black-clad Orthodox Jews before the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

It hits you with the first sentence of whiny Brooklynese from the baggage claim girl at La Guardia, an accent you attributed only to hookers and secretaries from the movies, a dream, a New York Dream that inspires you to stand in Times Square and throw your hat up like Mary Tyler Moore, while "They say the neon lights are bright, on Broadway" rolls through your head, the dream that takes you to Tiffany's just to see if John McGiver with an Oxford accent really works behind the counter and will offer to engrave your ring from the Crackerjack box, and every time you pass a HELP WANTED sign in the window of a vintage clothing store or used book store or dark cafe with worn couches and those green library lamps, you think, hell, I could apply, have my roommate send all my belongings in huge steamer trunks from back home, and start a new exciting life of a cosmopolitan bohemian (bohemian because, after all, you're just squeezing out cappuccinos for $7.50 an hour), but who cares because you plan on falling in love, and of course all the men are young versions of Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman, sensitive brooding types with roses at their fingers and Keats at their lips, and they're as sexy as Mickey Rourke (before the cosmetic surgery) and do incredibly sensual things to your naked body with ice cubes and honey (sorry to conjure up any unnecessary Kim Basinger images) and he's your Ideal, an activist/painter/sculptor/performance artist, and the two of you find that perfect studio/workspace in that Bauhaus brick building with the industrial elevator, and your penthouse apartment has 30' ceilings with windows just as high that look out upon water towers, gravel rooftops, the Brooklyn Bridge that lights up like a Christmas tree every dusk, and you toss leftover French bread to the blanket of brown and gray pigeons flocking on your rooftop, bread that your Robert Dustin DeNiro Rourke bakes for you weekly because he's also a chef, and you decorate your apartment in mid--80's minimalism: parquet floors, one-color paintings by Rothko and Newman, a thousand-dollar telescope poised at the window, hammock-like couches, a Persian area rug or two, big and glossy A Day In The Life Of Somewhere books untouched on your wrought iron coffee table, and you throw dinner parties for your avant garde art gallery publishing filmmaker poet painter friends whom you and Robert Dustin make fun of after they leave, and the two of you spend long hours in the park where you feed more pigeons together and fly kites with Marlo Thomas caricatures, and then he takes you to that little restaurant with the checkered tablecloths and bent silverware that serves the most incredible spaghetti and meatballs and you eat silently and stare into the deep brown of his eyes by the light of candles burning in empty chianti bottles (the ones in baskets, you know the type) while Edith Piaf croons on a transistor radio, and most importantly you two lounge on the edge of huge concrete fountains downtown, fountains with Poseidon and Aphrodite and water sprite statues in the centers, and right when Robert kisses you the water shoots fifty cascades down like fireworks and this scares more of those New York pigeons who fly up like wedding doves, and the two of you never leave the city except to spend white hot days on a Fire Island beach or a day in Brooklyn which of course hasn't changed since the 50's when Gary David Goldberg ran around playing stickball, with egg creams at drugstores, and the sounds of Dodger games and suppertime shouts from grandmothers, and you'll go to Brighton Beach to hear loud Neil Simon mothers and to play chess with old men who curse in Yiddish when checkmated, but otherwise you have no reason to leave Manhattan because your life with Robert is full and wonderful, every morning he goes off to work, leaving you most of the day to explore and wander the streets, most of the day to follow those cinematic shades, those shadowy straws you've clutched at for so long of a gray, crisp Woody Allen morning after a rainy night, and you feel just like Mia Farrow or Barbara Hershey walking down those wet avenues lined with brownstones like perfect brown teeth, and you look great in a billowy Donna Karan trenchcoat with a fringed, green muffler wrapped around your neck, Big Band music from the forties in your head, and the sound of iron gates sliding back off doors as the neighborhood businesses open energizes you, the neighborhood butcher shops, the barrels of sour pickles, and you smell fresh salmon and oranges and Nicholas Cage is baking fresh bread in a sweaty tank top for you in one of the bakeries, and Joe at the flower stand gives you a carnation because you never forget his birthday and you always ask about little Sal and Eddie, and you know every one else on your block including that yenta Mrs. Kravitz who leans out her window in a powder blue housecoat, her head a mess of scarfwrapped rollers, her nose in every one's business, and she leans out fanning herself with her crossword puzzles on hot days and watches the children and dogs splash in the water gushing from the hydrant on the corner and yells out, "Be careful! You'll break your necks!" and you pass out lollipops to those kids, and the cop on your block gives you warm, John Candy smiles, and you walk to 5th Avenue among the Mona Lisas and Madhatters where all the women smoke cigarettes as sexily as Anne Bancroft and move with the grace of Audrey Hepburn's feline bones, and you never know which one of the women is really a mermaid, and they were right when they said the neon lights were "always bright on Broadway," even though it's the middle of the afternoon, but the Enjoy Coke sign is just as breathtaking, and when you're tired of walking and before you spend the rest of the day at the theater, you relax in a small diner on 42nd Street where the cabdrivers pontificate their pearly wisdom, and if you're with the only true love you ever had and he walks out that diner door never to be seen again, the waitress with her maraschino red bouffant will pull a pencil nub out from behind her ear, point it at you and say through her bubblegum, "So go afta him already, are ya crazy, whatcha waitin' for?" and you run and catch up to him, and the two of you kiss right there in an intersection among the polyester anger of Wall Street men and honking limo drivers, and it rains because all important New York kisses happen in the rain, and you kiss, and you're in love, and those pigeons fill the screen as the camera pans out, the music plays, the credits roll.
The Pilgrimage:

My first trip to New York. I arrive courting the intention of abandoning my life in San Francisco to work in a bookstore, live in an incredible apartment and make it, even though all I have is "one thin dime," determined that life begins at Grand Central Station, trees grow in Brooklyn, roses in Spanish Harlem, and miracles happen on 34th Street. I'm armed with Kale Berman's phone number, the New York Dream, and a Neoplatonic shred of romantic hope. Kale Berman. He'll be The One, and Kelly Grossman will gloat all the way to the wedding. He'll be sexy and literate and sexy and the whole meditation cult thing is something he only does once in a blue moon to relax his literate, sexy mind that fantasizes about me nonstop between the three novels a week he reads, which lays to rest my worries about a transcendental group of Moonies and Krishnas.

I call Kale my first night in New York. He is pleasant (but rather undynamic), boyishly cute (short, 5' 6"), smooth (not a hair on his chinny-chin-chin or otherwise), thin (probably aerobicises thrice daily), and not at all sarcastic or loud (probably thanks to the meditation cult). He takes me to a subterranean catacomb of a restaurant in the East Village where we dine on spinach crepes and Sanka. Afterwards, we go next door to play pool at a sleazy bar, a haven to East Village truck driver types (if such exist), where a dieseldyke in a stretched HERE COMES TROUBLE t-shirt serves us Wild Turkey Manhattans (which are no better enhanced from being there). Kale and I drink, play eight ball, and drink about two hours and forty dollars away.

We discuss the differences between life in San Francisco and New York. He destroys the visions of my 9_ Weeks apartment with stories of his four room flat he shares with five people, and how his job at Starbucks barely covers rent. Here I am in the Emerald City and Kale is turning into Frank Morgan behind the curtain. Mary's hat I toss up in Times Square flops down on the sidewalk like Rhoda's. We drink, discuss apartments, our lives with Kelly Grossman, and as we leave the bar, it's pretty clear that our evening will end with sex.

I don't realize we are on St. Mark's Place, until I spot The St. Mark's Inn. Was this once the baths? Have the small rooms been converted into hourly lodging for the pierced and tattooed, the hustling, the speed freaks looking for a place to suck down Quaaludes after weekends of indulgence?

"Joshua?" Kale calls from ten feet up the sidewalk, shifting his narrow hips. "Why are you stopping? Still wanna go back to my place?"

"Kale, do you suppose this i