THE HUNTER’S MOON, THE BLOOD MOON AS SOME CALL IT, the full moon of the month of my birth, passed.

It was the most distant, the farthest full moon of the year, and therefore seemed to shun the lower heavens and the eyes of those who gazed.

I spent my birthday alone, as I wanted to spend it, in the quiet heart of autumn. I had not had a drink in quite a while, and I did not want to drink on this day. But I was looking forward to a glass or two of good—I mean really good—single-vineyard champagne to go with the Muscovy drake I was going to roast, pancetta-larded, garlic-larded, with quartered spuds, which never tasted better than when set to cook in duck fat. So I had blown about a grand on a bottle of Krug Clos du Mesnil 1995. It would be something of a waste, as I would not drink the whole bottle, and the rest could not be kept in the refrigerator, no matter how well-stoppered, for any length of time. But it was what I wanted to taste with my fine, greasy duck.

This was not a surreptitious alcoholic craving. Alcoholics who like the taste of the booze and beer they drink are rare. Almost all of them hate it, no matter what they say to the contrary. They endure the taste for the sake of the effect. They will endure anything, down to the ruination and forsaking of their very lives, out of their enslavement to that effect. I wanted nothing to do with the once dear oblivion that drink had brought me. The idea of the taste of it repulsed me. I wanted only the taste of a bit of fine champagne.

I felt the same about blood. The very idea of the taste of it repulsed me.

Could the effect of the baclofen be psychosomatic? I did not know. In the past, I had been administered all sorts of drugs that I was told would work on my brain chemistry and banish darkness and depression. Never had I felt any effect whatsoever. So I figured I was not much susceptible to the so-called power of suggestion. I had not been in touch with Olivier in a long time, so had not discussed any of this with him.

Maybe the change I seemed to be undergoing had nothing to do with pills. Maybe the baclofen had simply become a part of my routine, like the Valium I took with the milk, the Valium that made me feel nothing but which I continued to take, always with cold milk, more as a ritual than anything else. There were those who told me that a mere five milligrams of Valium all but knocked them out. The ten milligrams I took at least three times a day did nothing but subtly enhance the milk breaks I took. Milk and cookies. Milk and Valium. But I continued to take the baclofen. If it was not really helping, it surely was not hurting.

There was no baclofen, no nothing, for bloodlust. Maybe because there was no bloodlust, but just an insane desire to steal back what had been lost: the florescence and wonders of youth and strength and life and love. If ever I had fallen for the power of suggestion, I had done so then: acting, seeing, feeling a madness beyond that of Ponce de León’s, and maybe even Alexander the Great’s, belief in and search for the Fountain of Youth. I had actually seen, or believed I had seen, the marasmus of my flesh relenting, reversing. I had tasted and experienced anew, as if relishing all about me for the first time. It was like the guy said: “what fools these mortals be!”

Ponce de León was about sixty when he kicked. Alexander was thirty-two. At least I had beaten those fools out.

I still have six of the volumes of the American Artists edition of The Complete Works of Mark Twain. They must be all but a hundred years old by now. They were, as inscribed in one of them, the “Property of Ernest Tosches,” a great-uncle of mine who did not read. These were the books with which my mother introduced me to the idea of literature, reading to me from them before I myself could read. All I remember is asking her to begin over and over again with the sixth chapter of Huckleberry Finn, “Pap Struggles with the Death Angel,” because it had the word “damn” in it and I liked to hear this curse word, and there was something even better about hearing her read it to me. I’ve kept these books out of the childhood associations they hold for me: my great-uncle (the oldest member of my family to have been born here rather than in Italy), the vaguely remembered voice of my mother, and the books themselves, and her reading them to me, having been my introduction to what I later learned was called literature.

I stopped right there. Yes, these beat-up old books held a certain sentimental value. But my later love of words was, as much as in them, rooted elsewhere. I could just as easily trace my scurrilous and dirty mouth to my mother’s repeated reading to me of that chapter I so liked solely for its cussing. Wordsworth was full of shit: the child was not the father to the man. The child was just a child, a stupid fucking kid.

As it turned out, I never came to care much for Mark Twain. But I did like a few of the things he said. In his autobiography, he said something about there being more satisfaction to be had from a single wicked deed, if it was truly heartfelt, than in all the kind deeds in the world. And as pertains to this business of my particular madness and the sought-after Fountain of Youth, he is supposed to have said that life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach the age of eighteen or so.

The champagne was good, and so was the duck, and the blood that trickled out when I tore the limbs from its body.

But I didn’t want more champagne than the two flutes I’d had. And I sure didn’t want any blood.