I MISSED VIETNAM, AS STRANGE AS that sounds. I missed that rough-hewn fellowship of men and the allure of those dusty villages. Most of all, I missed the sense of purpose, however delusional, that I had found there. So, when my friend Mel called me in Charleston to ask if I wanted to go back to Vietnam as a civilian, I told him yes without a moment’s hesitation. Mel and I had been friends when he worked as a staffer for Admiral Zumwalt in Saigon. Now he was working at the White House and had an interesting scheme up his well-starched sleeve. How would I like to organize some Vietnam veterans who would return to the war to do good works in the name of “Vietnamization”? (That was Nixon’s term for leaving the war in the hands of the South Vietnamese, without losing face or appearing to surrender.) He would be up for reelection in a year, so he needed a distraction from the hordes of antiwar veterans spreading like crabgrass on the mall behind the White House. He despised those long-haired peaceniks, obsessed over them, especially a cocky Yalie named John Kerry, late of the Brown Water Navy, who had created the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and was getting press for it.

That’s where Mel’s scheme came in. What Nixon needed, Mel felt, was a counterpropaganda force of veterans who were not ashamed of their role in the war and were willing to talk about it to the press. But such an entity had to be organized, and it should not, under any circumstances, appear to come from the White House.

And so the Cat Lai Commune was invented. I named it that to give it a hip, countercultural ring, though no one seemed fooled, since most of the group were good ol’ boys recruited from conservative veterans’ organizations. After a month of preparation, ten of us boarded a chilly C-140 transport plane, flying out of Alaska for Vietnam with a load of helicopter parts and a ton of blood. Once in Cat Lai, a port town in the lower Mekong Delta, our job was to build a twenty-unit housing complex for disabled Vietnamese naval veterans. It looked less like a complex than a motel, and a crappy one at that, since only a few of us knew how to lay cinderblock or install windows. I earned my keep by writing inspirational pieces about our experience, one of which was published by William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review. Though there were Vietcong nearby, we worked without guns or uniforms, unless you count the royal-blue nylon T-shirts we wore to identify ourselves to the locals. For two sweltering months we were a high-profile, right-wing Habitat for Humanity.

Our main job, of course, was to talk to the press. Both the Associated Press and the New York Times drove out from Saigon to meet these odd-duck veterans who had returned to the war as civilians because they believed so deeply in the cause. Gloria Emerson, the celebrated Times correspondent, seemed to smell a rat but decided, incorrectly, that we’d come back as an act of penance, having committed atrocities of one sort or another during our time in-country. My usual rap was that most veterans weren’t like John Kerry and his followers: we were proud of our military service and had not ended up as “potheads and radicals.” No one guessed we were doing the work of the White House, specifically the team of Chuck Colson, Bob Haldeman, and John Erlichman, the infamous Dirty Tricks Department that would eventually cost Nixon the presidency with the Watergate burglary.

Back in Charleston, I kept in touch with Holger Jensen, the AP correspondent I had met in Cat Lai. I was already longing to escape the closet-sized steam bath of South Carolina, so I asked him if he could set me up for a job interview at the AP. I arrived at the bureau in New York with my cumbersome reporter’s scrapbook under my arm—all my greatest hits: the Spanish moss blight, the Chitlin Strut, the Gone With the Wind hoax—but they refused to look at it. They said they wanted to see how well I worked under pressure, so they put me in a glass isolation booth that looked like a discard from a fifties quiz show. There, in less than half an hour, I arranged the pertinent facts of Lucille Ball’s 1961 wedding to comedian Gary Morton into a plausible AP story. Thousands jammed the sidewalk outside of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church as America’s favorite redhead blah, blah, blah . . .

Three days later I got a call at the News and Courier, saying that I had passed the AP test, and that, luckily, there was an opening in the bureau in Buffalo. I didn’t say no on the spot, for fear of sabotaging the offer, but back at Tradd Street, Miss Beth, in a rare moment of lucidity, confirmed my suspicions. “Honey, from what I hear tell, Buffalo is one place you do not want to shuffle off to.” I put off answering the AP for several more days when, to my mortification, they called me back. They’d just had an opening in the San Francisco bureau. Would that be preferable to Buffalo?

I had seen San Francisco on my way to and from Vietnam. I had stayed at the Powell Hotel off Market Street and taken a cable car into the hills. A Gray Line tour bus had taken me to the gravesite of my favorite nonexistent person, Carlotta Valdes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. My friend Peggy Knickerbocker, then the wife of fellow Navy-man and Chapel Hillian Jay Hanan, had pointed out the Chinese movie theater in North Beach where the Cockettes performed (What did she just say?) and taken me to a party in Sea Cliff, where one of her friends, a straight guy I didn’t personally know, embraced me with alarming tenderness when he learned I’d just returned from the war. (Southern men, in my experience, never did such things for fear of instant emasculation.) When I processed out of the Navy on Treasure Island, I had stared across the crystalline blue bay at the shining white towers of the city and wondered, ever so idly, if I could see myself living there.

It had certainly seemed preferable to Buffalo.

I MADE TWO significant purchases before I drove west to California: a white Opel GT and an Irish setter–colored houndstooth tweed suit I had seen advertised in Playboy magazine. The Opel GT, if you remember, was a sort of low-slung mini-Corvette. You practically had to lie down to drive it. You yanked a crank near the gearbox to make the headlights rise out its sleek, featureless nose. It had no trunk whatsoever, or even a hatchback, so there was barely enough space behind the seat to stuff my new houndstooth suit and my framed ancestral portrait of Grandpa Branch. That suit, by the way, came with a pair of matching knickers as an alternative to the trousers. Clearly, I thought I would be someone considerably more debonair by the time I arrived in California.

I mentioned my new job to a trick I’d picked up at the Battery. “Oh, you’re gonna love San Francisco, honey. They have fifty gay bars there.” My response was as primly aghast as you might expect from a young Republican with a white Opel GT and a knickers suit. “No way. I would never go into one of those.” Needless to say, I was in one of those on my first night in town. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I felt a tinge of melancholy when I broke the news to Miss Beth. She was becoming foggier all the time—and more than a little infirm, so I worried, probably without warrant, that my absence from her house would be difficult for her. I knelt by her chair in the shop and shared my excitement about having a chance to live in San Francisco. She understood completely. That city is just as lovely as Charleston, and the people are so elegant. The ladies put on gray suits and white gloves just to go shopping. To me, this sounded suspiciously like Kim Novak in Vertigo, but I let it go. Maybe San Francisco had actually been that way, once upon a time; maybe Miss Beth was remembering that time and not the Hitchcock movie. I chatted with her a few minutes longer before she cut short our conversation by asking me my name. I told her my name, though she had known it very well for several years.

Well, you’re a very nice young man. You should meet the young man who lives upstairs. I think you’d like each other very much.

In her genteel senility, Miss Beth had just fixed me up with myself.

It was the perfect benediction for my road trip west, since, after a lifetime of stifling pretense, I would finally get to meet myself in San Francisco.

I HAD DRIVEN as far as Clinton, Iowa (pop. 26,000), when an unimaginable phone call interrupted the trip. My friend Tom, an artist and a fellow member of the Cat Lai Commune, had invited me to stay in his houseboat on the Mississippi River. We were having dinner in town that night in his parents’ dining room, a quaintly antimacassared scene out of Norman Rockwell. Tom’s mother took the call in another room. We could hear a succession of polite murmurs before she brought the phone to the table, yanking the cord behind her like a torch singer with an obstinate mic. She looked like she’d just won the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes.

“It’s the White House,” she whispered to her son, covering the receiver with her hand. “A Mr. Holderman . . . Holleran . . . something. They want you in the Oval Office on Tuesday. President Nixon wants to see you, Tom! They’ve been trying to reach Armistead, too! Should I tell them you’re here?”

It occurs to me now that I could have missed this moment completely. I’d been on the road for four or five days, with five more to go, and I wasn’t checking in with anyone along the way. Had I not been invited to stay at Tom’s houseboat, had Bob Haldeman not called at suppertime, I would have been unreachable on my cross-country odyssey, thereby missing out on one of the more surreal episodes of my life.

The president wanted to “recognize” us for our volunteer efforts in Vietnam. The urgent necessity that this happen on a particular day—this Tuesday!—should have been a red flag. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, though. I was thinking about how much fun it would be to call the AP in San Francisco and tell the bureau chief I’d be a few days late for work because the president wanted to see me in the Oval Office.

All was revealed on a crisp blue morning in October, when our limousines nosed through a crowd of protesters at the White House gates. Nixon’s nemesis, John Kerry, had been planning this demonstration for weeks, so we were there to show the world that Nixon cared about veterans. It also gave him a good excuse to stay indoors during the protest. But even from the Oval Office you could hear them, a rolling surf-roar of outrage led by a charismatic young Turk who would one day seem as stiff as Nixon himself in his unblinking defense of unpopular foreign wars.

When the ten of us entered the Oval Office, I recognized the niche by the door, those three little shelves with a scallop-shell cap whose contents have changed with each new president. Nixon—or, more likely, his wife, Pat—had chosen half a dozen ceramic pheasants for that spot. I had already seen those birds in a magazine when Elvis Presley came here to be made a “Special Agent-at-Large for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.” There was no such position, of course, but Nixon, having received an earnest letter from the King, had agreed to the meeting in the belief it would make him look cool with “the kids.” Elvis, we are told, wanted desperately to atone for having inspired the Beatles, whom he regarded as a deeply degenerate influence on the youth of the nation.

I myself witnessed Nixon’s burning need to be accepted by the young. There were beads of sweat on his upper lip when he stepped forward to shake our hands, and his body language suggested nothing so much as a jittery freshman at a fraternity rush party. We were just a bunch of twentysomethings, and he was president of the United States, yet he hadn’t a clue as to how to be natural with us. It didn’t help that he was using a dry professorial tone that might have succeeded as a speech but failed utterly as conversation. (“Now, let’s see what would happen if we were to get out just a bit too soon . . . a month too soon, three months too soon, four . . .”) It sounds strange to say that I was suffering for him, but I was. His discomfort was palpable.

So, as leader of the group, I made a little speech of my own, trying to inject a lighter note as I told the president about our lack of experience at building houses and the way that Gloria Emerson, the Times journalist, had grilled us about the atrocities that might have secretly motivated our return to Vietnam. That got a rise out of him, if not exactly the rueful chuckle I had imagined. “Yeah, of course,” he muttered with the darkest of scowls. “She is a total bitch.” She was already on his Enemies List, I realized, and there was a whiff of brimstone in the air that made me decide to drop the subject. (When I saw Emerson again at a booksellers’ convention in the nineties, I couldn’t resist telling her about Nixon’s response. She loved it as I much as I thought she would, and said she would wear that designation as a badge of honor.)

The president, as it turned out, saw only one chance to be one of the guys, and he took it when we were talking about our affection for the Vietnamese people. One of us pointed out that our mamasan, the middle-aged woman who cooked our meals in Cat Lai, had always warned us when the Vietcong were around.

“And those little girls,” said Nixon, looking directly at me. “When they’re riding down the street on their bicycles with the tails of their silk ao dais blowing in the wind . . . they look like little butterflies.” This observation might have sounded sweet had it been made, say, by Mrs. Zumwalt, but coming from a man with jowls and five-o’clock shadow, it seemed drenched in drool. I realized, to my horror, that Nixon was trying to talk sex with us—a little wink wink, nudge nudge with the troops—but, as his lousy luck would have it, he had chosen to do so with the only cocksucker in sight.

I told this story to the noted historian Douglas Brinkley in 2002 when he was writing a book called Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War. (In those days Kerry was energetically preparing to run for president in 2004.) The next time Brinkley called me in San Francisco he said that he had just checked out my account of those twenty squirm-inducing minutes with Nixon in the Oval Office.

“Checked it out? How?”

“You’re on the tapes,” he said.

The tapes. The tapes. From the tape recorder Nixon had secretly installed in the Oval Office. I was on them?

For a moment I thought I’d been caught red-handed. Storytellers have a way of improving their stories over the years, and I am certainly no exception.

“Did I remember it correctly?” I asked nervously.

“Actually,” he replied, “it’s better than you remembered.”

This is how Brinkley put it in his book: “As fine a humor writer as Armistead Maupin turned out to be, the transcript of the White House tape recording of this meeting reads even funnier than does his remembrance of Nixon’s small talk.” As proof of this, Brinkley offers this word-for-word comment from the president after he made that remark about the little butterflies: “It’s quite a sight. They told me when I was there in ’56 that a Vietnamese mother tells her daughter that she is to carry herself like a swan. And I don’t mind saying, just among our . . . and I’m no expert on this thing, but the Vietnamese women are actually not all that attractive. But I have never seen clothing that does more in, shall we say, a spectacular way than it does for the Vietnamese. But you all know that!”

I SAW NIXON one last time when I returned to Washington the following year for his inauguration. I spent most of that time loitering in bunting-hung ballrooms with other blazered young men, but the event that lingers in memory was the night I sat in the Presidential Box for the Inaugural Youth Concert. There was a blue velvet rope between me and the First Family, but they were all just a yard away: Pat and Dick, Julie and David Eisenhower, Tricia and her new husband, Edward Cox, and old Mamie Eisenhower herself, the former first lady, now a fragile seventy-five. Toward the end of the evening a self-confessed Republican rock band performed an atonal update of “If You Don’t Want My Peaches, Don’t Shake My Tree.” I could tell that Mamie was jarred by all those pounding decibels, but she kept on smiling gamely as she plugged her gloved fingers into her ears.

When the audience began to clap along, Nixon tried to be a good sport and join in the fun with “the kids.” I could see him clapping from where I sat, and it was a pitiful sight. Somehow he missed the beat every time.

For at least a year after I moved to San Francisco I proudly displayed a framed photo of Nixon and me shaking hands in the Oval Office. I figured it would start conversation, and indeed it did when I brought guys home from the bars on Polk Street. Almost to a man, they reacted with looks of revulsion and mild panic, as if they had just realized they had been picked up by Jeffrey Dahmer.

After Nixon’s resignation I took the picture down and never displayed it again.

ON MY FIRST night in San Francisco I slept at the Press Club, a fusty old residence on Post Street with frayed chenille bedspreads and clanging pipes. I was staying there as a guest of the AP bureau chief until I could find a permanent place to live. The club was for journalists, as the name implies, but in 1971 women in the profession were still refused full membership because men swam naked in its pool. That sounds promising, I know, but the place was not even remotely gay. For that, I had to walk a block uphill to Sutter Street to a club called the Rendezvous. How I knew that, I couldn’t say for sure; I may have stumbled across a stray copy of the Bay Area Reporter, a gay handout whose initials conveniently spelled out the word bar.

It took commitment to visit this place. You couldn’t just look both ways and slip in off the street to check out the crowd. Once past the door you were faced with a dauntingly steep staircase that offered no clue as to what awaited you at the top. There would be no easy escape. It would be like that scene in Advise & Consent when all those shadowy faces at the bar turn to cruise the anxious newcomer. I was on the verge of bolting when, somewhere above me, the voice of Barbra Streisand reminded me that we’re just all children, needing other children, and yet letting our grown-up pride hide all the need inside. So I took a deep breath and began to climb.

It was worse than I thought. They were slow dancing with each other, all those men on the dance floor, slow dancing to Streisand under twirling colored lights, as if that were the most normal thing in the world. There was a DJ on one side spinning records in a glass booth that looked like a radio station. The call letters on his mic were KYKY. I didn’t get it. I thought it was a real station, in fact.

Tacky doesn’t scare me anymore, but it did back then. I didn’t stay long at the Rendezvous, and I don’t recall a single face from my first-ever visit to a gay bar. I wasn’t recoiling from pickup sex; I was already beginning to get the knack of that. On my way to San Francisco, after that surreal audience with Nixon, I got stranded in a snowstorm in Laramie, where I had picked up the desk clerk at the Wyo Motel. I had chatted him up so long that he finally invited me behind the desk to watch a TV movie, a remake of Death Takes a Holiday with Yvette Mimieux and Bert Convy, which I had endured in its entirety before working up the nerve to invite him to my room. He told me he would meet me there. When he finally showed up at my door, fat snowflakes caught in his flaxen hair, he was holding a six-pack of beer I’d never seen before. This would welcome me to the West, he said, since it was made with Rocky Mountain springwater. I didn’t like the tinny taste of it, but even Coors, a brew I would later boycott for its antigay policies, paired well enough with a plump, pink penis on a snowy Wyoming night. And I did feel welcomed to the West.

So it wasn’t the prospect of sex that had rattled me at the Rendezvous but a sudden vision of institutionalized queerness. Was this how I wanted to do it, after all—with the twirling dancehall lights and the slow dancing and an overall air of lurid tattiness? Nowadays I would relish the chance to be in such a place, a room wiped clean of techno music and video screens that didn’t look like some chrome-trimmed sports bar in the Indianapolis airport. For that matter, I would love to be able to slow dance with my husband without feeling the least bit silly.

But I’ve never been quite in sync with the times.

THE AP BUREAU was located on Market Street, in the Fox Plaza building, a looming concrete tombstone that marked the grave of the grand old Fox movie theater. The work of a wire service, I soon learned, was a never-ending treadmill of words—not unlike the Internet—since the news was never “put to bed” the way it was with newspapers. There was always the other wire service, the UPI, running neck and neck with you. Even worse, you were rarely offered a byline to inspire you to do your best work. I was told by more than one person that the AP doesn’t make stars, and that seemed true enough, with the exception of the blandly named Bob Thomas, who worked at the bureau in Los Angeles and covered movies.

For my first assignment I was told to follow a four-mile peace march through Golden Gate Park to the Great Highway. I’m sure this had everything to do with that detour I made through the Oval Office a fortnight earlier but no one at the bureau was ungracious enough to rub it in, or even mention the warmonger Nixon. That march gave me my first taste of San Francisco Values, not to mention jubilant public nudity, so I collected wacky details and shared them with my coworkers back at the bureau. I liked most of those people, and they seemed to like me. One experienced and chipper young woman who sometimes ran the desk at night was especially helpful. She would whisper to me what the sport was (“That’s basketball”) when I had to take scores over the phone, thereby sparing me the humiliation of having to ask the gruff-sounding guy on the other end of the line.

Others were not so kind. When I reported to work one evening, a disgruntled veteran of the bureau, clearly resigned to never becoming chief, poked his finger in my face and said: “Listen, bud, I’ve got my eye on you. People tell me you’re lazy and you talk too much and you waste too much time polishing your stories. That shit doesn’t cut it around here, so just watch your step. Understand?”

I did understand, depressingly enough. I had spent far too much time working on a feature piece about the king of the Gypsies in the East Bay. But that story was fascinating and full of rich details, and never before told, so I wanted to make it sparkle. And if I was a little talkative sometimes it was only to allay the grim gulag atmosphere of that room. But I wasn’t lazy, dammit. Who were the “people” who were saying that? And why had they left it up to this asshole to tell me?

I was sure I was about to be fired, so I fell into a crippling depression for the rest of the night. On the way home, in the sickly green twilight of a Muni bus, I resolved to think of nothing else for the rest of the ride. It’s an old trick of mine: banish every thought from your head except the one that’s tormenting you and you’ll soon grow weary of it. It’s a sort of meditation on misery. You’ll be forced to stop torturing yourself. It worked that night, and it was still working the next morning when it occurred to me that I wasn’t important enough to be fired. I could keep this job forever, doing grunt work ad nauseam, like this bitterly unhappy man who had just tried to break my spirit. I could do that, but I would not.

I resigned a month later. My delicately worded letter to the bureau chief explained that I wanted to look for something “more creative.” The chief said he was disappointed to see me go and warned that it would be hard to get work as a feature writer at the local newspapers. He proved to be dead right about that.

Flash forward to a new millennium and a book signing in a large California city. An older man has been in the line for my autograph for at least an hour, so I tell him I’m sorry about the wait. He brushes it off with a wave of his hand.

“Do you remember me?” he asks.

I don’t remember him, so I say what I usually say when someone puts me on the spot like this: “Help me out here, would you?”

He tells me his name and says that we worked together at the AP.

I recognize him instantly as my tormentor on that demoralizing night. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I say, wondering if he remembers how he treated me. He doesn’t seem to remember a thing, so I don’t bring it up. He thinks we were good buddies. I sign his book Thanks for the memories, keeping the last laugh to myself.

MY FIRST APARTMENT in the city was a furnished front room in a yellow Victorian house on Sacramento Street. It had flocked wallpaper in a vibrant shade of whorehouse red, like most of the fern bars in town; I loved that about it. I would be living alone, so, for company, I bought a mynah bird at a pet shop on Fillmore Street. He had impressed me when he said HOW ARE YA? in the shop, but unfortunately that proved to be his only impersonation beyond an ear-piercing whistle that suggested someone had left a tea kettle on too often in his presence.

The apartment was a block from Lafayette Park, so I soon discovered how busy the bushes were at night. It was a Pacific Heights sweater-and-slacks crowd, which struck me at the time as sort of hot, and I could invite guys back to my place after checking out the goods. Most of my fellow bushmen, however, wanted to get off right there on the spot, despite (or maybe because of ) the threat of the police. Squad cars would make the loop at the crest of the park, flashing their high beams to flush us out of the brush like so many quail at a Dick Cheney shooting camp. As soon as we saw those beams, we would scatter and go bounding down the steep open lawn to Gough Street, yelping like pups. Or at least I did, on more than one occasion. The one time I went to another guy’s place—where I had naturally presumed he lived alone—his lover came home and saw us and pulled a full Jacqueline Susann on me, shouting SLUT as I grabbed my clothes and stumbled down the hall. I was laughing when I got to the elevator. I was a slut. And beginning to enjoy it immensely.

I had several subsequent hookups with one of the guys I met in the park. It never got serious, but I really took to his friend, Nancy McDoniel, a young actress from Missouri who played Nurse Ratched in a Little Fox Theatre production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Though she brought an icy hauteur to that role, she was kind and warm and elegant offstage, and we were good friends in the seventies until she moved to New York for acting work. Our friendship informed the one I would eventually create for Michael Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton—a naive gay man feigning sophistication with a slightly more naive young straight woman. Nancy, like Mary Ann, also had a “good-time Charlene” roommate, a United Airlines stewardess, as we called them back then, who kept bottles of Jade East and Old Spice in her bathroom cabinet for the convenience of the men who would sleep over. Nancy and I would giggle about “the friendly skies” of that bed down the hall.

So it was that guy I picked up in the park, Nancy’s friend, whose name I have long since forgotten, who answered a question I put to him nervously one night.

“What does it mean when your pee turns the color of bourbon?”

It meant I had hepatitis, of course. My liver had been kicked to shit, and I had been dragging around listlessly for days, and every time I came home the damned mynah bird would yell HOW ARE YA? HOW ARE YA? HOW ARE YA? and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if I covered his cage with a towel, since he would only turn into a screaming tea kettle in retaliation. The doctor who treated me told me I needed bed rest. That meant, in the end, giving up my apartment and returning the mynah bird to the pet shop and flying back to North Carolina for a mother’s care. It meant that my golden California Dream had come to a screeching stop.

Back in Raleigh, I would lie in bed all day, staring up at the stained-glass window I had designed as a teenager starved for a little color. My mother was very sweet, thrilled to be taking care of me, as I knew she would be. Only once or twice did she approach the subject of how I had acquired the hepatitis. “There are lots of ways to get it apparently.” She was laying a breakfast tray on my bed, French toast with eggy crenellated edges, the way I like it. Her tone was both breezy and forced. “I hear you can even get it from a toilet seat,” she added. She could talk herself into anything.

A case in point: in those days she and my father were riding to the hounds with a fox hunting club out in the country. They wore the traditional scarlet jackets (though I had learned to call them pink, in the British manner), and I loved how they looked when they came home on Sunday afternoon, mud flecked and pink-cheeked, exhilarated by the chase, a couple straight out of Auntie Mame. They had not been chasing a fox, however. My mother, as founder of the Wake Country SPCA, would never have agreed to that. This was a “drag hunt,” so called because they were chasing the bedding of a fox, a rag that was dragged through the woods prior to the hunt. That gave the hounds the scent trail they needed, but no fox was killed in the process.

Only, one day one was. My mother rode into a clearing and found the hounds in a huddle going wild with bloodlust. Bits of red fur were flying everywhere like dandelion pods on the wind. The hounds, it seemed, had flushed out a real fox, so they were delirious. My mother fled the scene on horseback, sobbing. She was inconsolable when the master of the hounds approached and told her that these things happened sometimes in spite of their best intentions. That was not enough for her. She would never hunt again, she said, not if sweet little animals were going to be killed. The master of the hounds hesitated for a moment, then offered to share a secret with her if she promised not to tell the other members of the hunt.

That fox had already been dead, he told her, when the dogs got to him. The hunt organizers had found its corpse on the side of the highway that morning and placed it at the end of the drag to satisfy the appetites of the dogs—and, presumably, some of the humans who longed for a taste of the real thing. This explanation struck me as pure malarkey, but my mother had chosen to buy it. If she felt, as I did, that faked savagery was every bit as life-demeaning as actual savagery, she did not say so. She needed this explanation to endure the unendurable. In that way, it was not unlike the case of hepatitis her son had picked up off a toilet seat in San Francisco.

Three years later, when my mother’s breast was removed, I sent her a stuffed animal that I’d bought in New York City at F.A.O. Schwartz. It was a little red fox, soft and squeezable, and she took it with her to the hospital every time she went back.

MY TWO-MONTH RECOVERY seemed to take forever. At night, down in the Chimney Room, with its used brick fireplace and Confederate flag and oiled chintz café curtains, my childhood lurched back like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, threatening to drag me under. In my early youth I had wanted to live in this house forever (or maybe next door, in Miss Lillian’s little house, after she died) but that dream was gone now that I’d become one of Tennyson’s lotos-eaters. My brother and sister were already married and living away, so I would sit with my parents in the blue light of television, annotating scenes from The Streets of San Francisco.

“That’s the cable car I take to work!”

“That’s Russian Hill, where I want to live next!”

“Look! Angel Island! I went there last summer!”

And thus I held tight to the paradise that had almost been lost.