2220 3 MAY 91
Sweet Pea wears pink.

He and Graham book the hotel Windsor, one night in Bangkok, a truly heady dream come true. Room on the pool deck overlooking a Buddhist temple. Splashing together, all afternoon. Going to a live sex show that evening, in-and-out and close-ups, on a revolving stage. Knees touching under the table.

That evening slipped away -- down the Lethe. The Lethe is a river of forgetfulness out of English literature, where the farther you go, the more you forget. Much as I wanted it to last, my dream of how that night might have been stole away under Sweet Pea's self-control.
"You’ve got your bed and I’ve got mine. Right?”
"Right."

Separate beds, separated heartbeats, keeping that way and breaking the cycle I should have broken at his age, when I slept with the fag who picked me up in Rochester New York. Back then I couldn’t sleep, knowing that fellow wanted me. I got my ass licked and with his head down there he told me I was beautiful. I barely had a hairy chest, and in my rock climbing prime had the belly of a rock. And I had hair. But this was a one-eighty. I was the man. Sweets, the boy. And he wasn’t inviting me to go down on him. I didn’t offer but I blame that on the US Navy. An outright solicitation of a fellow service member rates the Big Chicken Dinner.

He recalls sex with Roscoe Browne, “Grady” in “Sanford & Son.” The judge in “Legal Eagles” with Robert Redford. The poet who came to Diablo Valley College with Anthony Zerbe, and gave Graham his phone number.

“Do you think you’ll really get published?” Sweet Pea asked me in Bangkok after I posted the package to William Morris. Like the time he asked, “When are ya gonna grow some hair?
“I think I have a good chance,” I said. About the book.