“Why,” one friend inquires, “do I feel a strange sense of freedom the moment I enter a decaying neighborhood?” “Why,” he asks, retracing evenings spent cruising the Lower East Side, when walking by “a tenement with a collapsed wall . . . do I imagine giving a party there—or better yet, conjure up a slender fellow, half hidden by the rusted doorframe, inviting me into the rubble to make love, entirely in ruins?”
