Mr. McAndrew offered Mark a glass of beer, which was notable. Only time his father ever poured out any Rheingold was when he wanted him to do some ballbreaking thing. "No? I suppose you get enough of this on the sly, when I'm away."

Mark said nothing, just waited, his feet turned inward on the polished oak floorboards. They were sitting in the living room of a house tucked away on a side street in Smithtown, Long Island. He looked at his shoes with their pinch tassels that seemed to be faintly twirling. Or anyway moving, perhaps from the draft of air that also moved the fringes of the hooked carpet... tousling them helter-skelter so that they looked like colored fingers beckoning and waving...

"Listen, Mark, I was talking to a friend at work today-nice guy-Charles Carpenter. And um, he was telling me about this little business his wife and her friend have, right here in town."

"Really?" his son replied. "What kind of business is it?"

"Catering concern," said Mr. McAndrew, in an expansive mood. Ruthlessly he brought his beer to his face and chugged it down. Then he rose from his armchair with his empty glass, as though he didn't know what to do with it. If we were in England, Mark thought, he'd dash it into the fireplace. "Nice for the wife-keeps her out of trouble. I've met the wife and she's a piece of ass. How'd you like to work for her?"

Mark hated it when his father tried to talk man-to-man with him. You are probably great at banking or whatever you do at Chase, he thought, but you are no pal of mine. He squinted down at his shoes and yes, the tassels were moving across their faces.

"She needs a few boys to help her out this Saturday, so I figured you and Kevin Killian could give her a hand. It's for some shindig at the Club. Nice pay," he said reflectively, his hand on the doorjamb. "And she is some piece," he said.

At twilight the grounds of the Smithtown Country Club looked blue, and the evening was warm, springlike. A white man in blue jeans stirred a giant net on a stick through the placid waters of the swimming pool. Mustangs rolled up the wide pebbled drive, pulling up to the front porch and depositing weathered barmen, maitre d's, coat check girls. Mark and I walked around the low-slung Colonial-style buildings to the tennis court, where a huge statue of a tooth had been erected, spotlit by green and yellow headlamps. I gathered that this catered affair was some kind of benefit to help our town fight tooth decay. Beneath the statue a little ledge had been erected, around which a fence was strung with near-invisible ropes of dental floss; a tuxedoed man stood on the ledge gingerly, fiddling with an outdoor microphone, and casting his eyes around an imaginary crowd. Behind him the golf courses began, and beyond those shadowed dales a line of poplars separated the club grounds from the strip of beach on Long Island Sound, its shallow choppy tide.

"I suck at this menial shit," Mark said to me. "What I hate most about my Dad is the emphasis he puts on meniality. Like I'm supposed to learn how to be a man by first being a waiter."

"It won't be so bad," I said, determined to put a bright face on the matter, and to lend my friend some cheer. "Aren't you looking forward to seeing this famous piece of ass friend of your Dad's?"

"Hmm," grunted Mark. "Well, there's the door, Pollyanna, give it a knock."

This was the beginning of March, 1967. A week or so before, in the UK, police had arrested Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, and Robert Fraser after raiding Richard's rented country mansion "Redlands," on a tip from a reporter from News of the World. The two great rock gods were in jail, charged with possession of heroin tablets and four amphetamine pills, later thought to be the property of Jagger's girlfriend, the pop singer Marianne Faithfull. Mark and I had read the story of the midnight raid and thrilled to the police testimony that Faithfull had been surprised in her bath and had come into the sitting room wearing nothing but a white fur rug. We didn't want to work, we just wanted to rehash the Redlands affair. Something in the air-some spirit of rebellion-whispered to us that we were too young, too special, and too good-looking to have to work, even if Mark's father had put his foot down, actually driving our asses to the Country Club himself in his big black Fleetwood sedan that looked like a pimp drove it. "You have to read between the lines in these news reports," Mark confided. "She was naked, brother Kevin. Nude as the day you were born."

I didn't want to admit that Marianne Faithfull had ever been naked. Not her! For she was a creature from a Fragonard, dressed always in exquisite laces, her blonde hair in these natural waves from the 1840s, shaded by a pink parasol. She had had a hit song the year before called "As Tears Go By," which I thought the most beautiful thing ever written. I didn't like Mark taunting me about her reported dishabille, it seemed sacrilegious, and if he wasn't my best friend I would have-well, I wouldn't have socked him one but I wouldn't, sure as shit, be here tonight on the grounds of the country club getting ready to be a busboy on his father's whim. The issue of Faithfull's nudity was a bone of contention between us that, rather, had spoiled for weeks the amity we felt towards each other-and the guilty crush I had on him-a feeling I didn't know what to do with, a bleak blast of suburban anomie. When I thought about her, and her blonde air of moneyed tristesse, I thought about him-Mark McAndrew-these two worlds of sensuality colliding and crashing together like dental plates: clack. Hurt my head.

One afternoon as we met after school he told me what "friends in England" had told him had been omitted from the newspaper accounts. The police had raided Redlands for drugs, and had surprised Mick and Marianne having oral sex on a white fur rug on the living room floor, and Mick had been eating chocolate out of Marianne's-out of her- I couldn't even comprehend what my friend was telling me it sounded too vicious.

Backstage, in the big kitchen, Mrs. Carpenter was directing her staff, standing in the middle of the wet tile floor, examining a list of hors d'oeuvres, when her partner tapped her on the shoulder and said, "Kiki, can I disturb you for a minute?" He stood six and a half feet tall, handsome, about twenty-eight years old, and he wore a frilly apron about his waist. Tiny scraps of dough still clung to his fingertips, and his fingers were arrayed with jewels-rings of many descriptions, some plain and masculine, but others studded with elaborate jewels.

"No, go ahead, William," she said absently. He lifted a hand and pinched her upper arm.

"Where are my boys? I asked you specifically for two young helpers. Are they here or are they somewhere else?"

"They're coming, William," Kiki Carpenter replied with ease. She moved to the pastry chef and sampled his rich, crusty pound cake. "Very good, Sam. Yes, William, I arranged with a friend to get you two young helpers."

"What size?" he said.

"Darling," she said. "I do hope –"

William looked furious. He towered above Mrs. Carpenter and his fists were knotted with red lines-veins, I guess.

Kiki gave him a cool look over her clipboard. "Back to work, dream boy," she said dryly.

Right outside the kitchen door, in the busy sunset, Mark and I stood downing a can of beer apiece. "What are heroin tablets, anyhow?" I said, suppressing a belch. Remember those old-fashioned cans of beer that you opened with a silver opener? Pop tops had just recently made their appearance and purists like ourselves disdained them. "Heroin 'tablets,' like St. Joseph Aspirin for Children? Do they come like pills, all buffered and shit?"

"Heroin is legal in England," Mark said.

"Oh, yeah, right, and that's why Mick and Keith are in prison."

"Heroin's legal there," he said, with utter certainty, for Mark was even more convinced than I that England was a magical land, one far more worthy of our attention than our benighted USA.

"Maybe it's just illegal to put it in tablets," I said brightly.

"What they're in fucking prison for," Mark said, tipping the empty can to the flagstone pavement, "is eating Hershey chocolate out of Marianne's snatch. It's not because of heroin tablets or anything else, just pussy eating."

"You knock," I said coldly, to defray further slurs against Marianne Faithfull's chastity.

"No, you knock," said Mark. "Pretend you're the inspector from Scotland Yard investigating snatch abuse at Redlands."

"It's your party," I told him, so he knocked, saying, "Here comes meniality."

Just then the door opened, hot air blowing out against us and the evening. A man stood in the steamy threshold and his eyes lit up with surprise and quiet appraisal. "Hello my little fledglings," he said, trim and tall and very mod even in his frilly apron. He pointed a ringed finger at us. "You're late, but don't fret. My name is William, and you must be –?"

"Kevin Killian," I said, extending my hand.

The kitchens, which I saw over and around him, were steamy with white clouds and the insinuating smells of prime rib au jus, roasting in industrial size ovens. A wheeled rack held tray upon tray of what looked like-devilled eggs? A thousand eyes.

The tall man stooped over to kiss my hand. His mouth felt like someone had just cooked a pancake on my wrist.

"Mark McAndrew," my friend said, but did not offer his hand. William looked at him reproachfully, told him not to be coy.

"Is Mrs. Carpenter here?" he said hesitantly. "My father told us to ask for her."

"She's busy right now, but I am William, William Lemoire, and you are here to help me! I am the one who needs your help and I have uniforms for you to put on."

He shoved us towards an alcove hung with coats, hats, greasy-looking smocks. Above the coat rack a small diamond-shaped window let in the light of the fading sun.

"You shall be busboys tonight," he said, handing us each a thatched bundle of clothing, red and brown and black. He perched himself on a little wooden stool with an expectant manner, his eyes gleaming as bright as the jewels on his hands.

Slowly I reached up and pulled my shirt over my head.

"Yes, ah, splendid," said William finally, when I stood before him in my underwear, and he handed me a starched white shirt, that had both buttons and studs to do up the front. First I stepped into the long, absurdly baggy pair of dress trousers he held out. Then I felt William's deft hands, his fingers clutching pins, running up and down my legs, pinning up the inseam, and when I raised my eyes to the diamond of sunset, it almost felt like he was trying to arouse me, ticking the inside of my legs from the ankles, then, lightly-like a silken spider-touching my inner thighs and pressing the fabric against the tip of my prick. "That's good," he said. "Now let's move these over here and really give them a show."

"Say mister," Mark said, "did you hear about Marianne Faithfull?"

William flashed him a glance, his mouth full of pins.

"Did you hear about the cops in England came into the big house and Mick Jagger was eating her out on a white fur rug?"

With some effort, and now a sudden hard-on, I finished buttoning the difficult shirt, with its silver studs. I turned away to the corner and slipped on the very baggy red jacket.

"In fact he was eating a Hershey bar out of her cunt," Mark said, stepping out of his jeans.

"I heard that, yes," William said. "But it was Cadbury, not Hershey."

I was feeling more out of the loop from minute to minute. Did everyone believe this baseless calumny about Marianne? Did everyone have "friends in England" with nothing better to do but get on the transatlantic phone and lie about a great beauty and a great virgin?

"Some people will believe anything," I said. I lifted my hair from under the blazer's collar and said, "Thank you, William."

"All I can say is," said he, moving on to my friend, "you can put chocolate on something doesn't make it taste any better."

"Say, William," Mark said. "Can I ask you a question, about all the rings you wear on your fingers?"

"Everyone says I remind them of Ringo," William replied, his hands stitching and sewing right under Mark's balls.

"No, that wasn't the question," Mark said. "My question is, do you get another ring for every cock you put in your mouth?"

"Oh, I wouldn't ask that question if I were you," William said. I looked around at the kitchens, laden with heavy, hot plates, steaming. There were little white clams with pink insides, they looked sexual to me, they made me think, is a pussy like that? There was molasses, dripping on hot slices of chicken, all golden and brown. A huge crystal bowl, filled with cold lemon punch, and a man wearing a tooth costume pouring a bottle of bourbon in it. He winked at me. I felt stupid having a hard-on tight in my tight black pants. Another chef was carving up a dressed turkey, chestnut stuffing spilling from its throat or whatever. Big plates of bonbons. Oysters soaked in port wine.

The winking tooth man capped the empty bottle and tossed it in a metal trash can, where it rang and clanged hollowly. He touched the lapel of my baggy red blazer. "The redcoats are coming," he said, his accent thick with some Caribbean patois. "But don't you go far without your hat, they make the boys wear hats like Jackie Kennedy." Mark and William emerged from the alcove presently, and on Mark's head was perched a little black pillbox style cap, tilted jauntily to one side. His face was red. William held out another hat for me. It came with an elastic band to fit under my chin: God, did I look dumb, all I had to do was look at Mark McAndrew to see how dumb I must have looked. He after all was the cute one, and I was the homely serious sidekick, like Horace in the Judy Bolton books for girls. And if he looked bad I must look like such an asshole.

Apparently the chocolate bar story was only a rumor. Marianne Faithfull's memoir recounts it as the kind of tale only dirty-minded people would invent or believe. "I laughed it off," she writes (in Faithfull, Marianne Faithfull and David Dalton [Little Brown, 1994], p. 113), "but my amusement began to wane when the damn story established itself as a set piece of British folklore." I don't know how these two, Mark McAndrew and William Lemoire, knew about it already: they were neither of them British. "By some mysterious means," writes the pop historian Philip Norman, in Sympathy for the Devil [Penguin 1993], p. 199), "a rumour was travelling the length and breadth of England that, when the police entered Keith Richard's sitting room, they had interrupted an orgy of cunnilingus in which Jagger had been licking a Mars bar pushed into Marianne's vagina. The Mars bar was a detail of such sheer madness as to make the story believed, then and for ever after. No one needed any explanation of the line that appeared gnomically on Private Eye magazine's next front cover: 'A Mars Bar fills that gap.'"

Until I read Philip Norman's book I never heard that a Mars Bar anchored the rumor. Nor had I ever heard that 'A Mars Bar fills that gap' was a current UK advertising slogan and thus must have been hysterically, cynically funny to the in-the-know readers of Private Eye. I guess a certain level of salaciousness is to be expected from a pair of young boys. We were suburban sophisticates after all. Am I wrong? My memory's bad: perhaps I knew it was a Mars bar but, disliking Mars bars personally-their bulky gloss, their chewy mass-unconsciously substituted my favorite, the slim, pure, milk chocolate Hershey bar. In the years to come Mark and I quarreled about this too, as he reminded me over and over that it was a Cadbury bar, per William's correction. He ridiculed my attempts to place an American Hershey bar inside the English country house, indeed inside Marianne Faithfull's most secret place. "Cadbury is English chocolate," he said. "Obviously you think monkeys grow on trees."

William waved us up towards the head of the food line, his fingers twitchy and febrile in a way I found extraordinarily expressive, rings flashing like evening fireflies, as I made my way through the steam with Mark McAndrew, the two of us dressed more like bellhops in a Fred Astaire picture than busboys, each of us fourteen or fifteen and almost drunk. The cooks and chefs and food suppliers didn't so much as blink twice. As we stumbled by, they continued applying whipped cream to gingerbread, pineapple slices to ham cutlets. "Say, Kevin," Mark said.

"Yeah, did William give you a blowjob?"

"Brother Kev..."

"What," I growled.

"Did you hear about Marianne Faithfull and her pussy?" Mark asked. Under his jaunty pillbox hat. "Pussy smeared with chocolate, mmm, good, and Mick Jagger eating her out on that white fur rug?"

"Fuck you," I said, disgusted. I kept thinking of those little clams and how, maybe, a vagina might be very like one of those little cherrystone clams; experimentally I tried to imagine licking one, trying to decide well, it won't be so bad; and indeed I found myself getting aroused, thinking, well, then, it is only a little thing, a tiny, winking dime-size slot rather like the asshole of a boy which –

when smeared with chocolate –

which-and then suddenly a tall woman in a blue denim coverall and a severely bleached hairdo came up to us in the steam. An apparition. "Hello," she said in a cracked voice. She carried a clipboard.

"Ye Gods," said Mark under his breath. The woman's face was lined, she must have been forty at least, and her dim blue eyes were lined with swatches of melted mascara. She looked hard and cold.

"Hello," I said nervously. "Can you tell us where we can find Mrs. Carpenter?"

"You must be Mark," she said, her manner imperious. "I am Kiki Carpenter. I know your dad."

"Oh, this is Mark," I said, with great amusement. I clapped my buddy on the back. "I'm just his friend along for the ride."

Today, whenever I see either Mick Jagger or Marianne Faithfull, both of whom have managed remarkably to stay on in the public consciousness, I always think of them having sex at Redlands, at the moment of the police break-in. The white bearskin rug upon which Marianne lay, her long skirt hiked over her hips. To describe the warmth and sensuality of that rug correctly I'd have to be Carole Maso, I suppose. Jagger's wide slash of a mouth, and that tongue, which even I knew was long, the tongue the Stones later used as the logo for their short-lived label-as though determined to keep the Mars Bar rumor floating in my head. They were tripping on acid and the heat of the fire excited their senses.

It excited mine, for it was an English fire I created for them, exquisitely detailed, all the requisite implements standing in a rack by the side of the hearth, and the mantel laid with cunning knickknacks of the Colonial era and Staffordshire china. And for thirty years I've followed the dictates of this dream, ruled by it, even asking my lovers to include chocolate bars-or chocolate syrup, ice cream, mole, Hershey's kisses-into our sex lives. At no time has it worked out well, though I wouldn't have believed it when I was a teen, constricted, a prisoner of my own thoughts and imagination, and I lived on Long Island with my mom and dad in a suburban house of bores, fleeing always to the basement with my records, drugs, etc., and importing various pop magazines to find out about the outside world... Thus it was that one day I opened the paper to find out about the arrest on LSD charges, in far-off England, of the pop stars Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull... Wild chocolate...

"Piece of ass," Mark muttered rebelliously. This was after the banquet when, worn off our feet, we were along with our feet propped up on a chrome counter in the kitchen. The dishwashers had gone home, Kiki Carpenter had gone home, all the helpers and guests gone home. Piles of tooth costumes were folded into cardboard boxes for morning pickup. At the dinner we'd recognized many of our neighbors and people we'd seen in the paper. Local politicos, their wives, doctors, lawyers, a writer or two, a host of spinsters, Smithtown dignitaries and shopowners, the Chinese Nobel-Prize winner from the local university at Stony Brook. Bankers, dentists, suburban housewives and their harried husbands. We took their plates as soon as they were done eating and some local Italian singer with big black hair mounted the stage. Then they ate more and we had to run around and do it again. Six hundred people, Mrs. Carpenter said, her springy hair escaping from its Aquanet. Her glasses fogged up. "Go, go, go!"

"She was not my idea of a dream girl," I said to Mark. We had found part of a bottle of Johnny Walker Black on the table and he and I were switching it back and forth, our chairs drawn close together, our hands touching. I loved him so much, but I was tongue-tied and he was the suave one.

"That's my old man for you." Mark belched. We were covered with grease and sweat. "He's fucking her," Mark added.

I was shocked.

"But what about your mother?"

Glug, glug, glug. "What about her, brother Kev? Y'know, I didn't really put two and two together until just now but I bet anything he's fucking her. She is just his type and that's what he considers a piece of ass." "You mean your father cheats on your mom?"

"Yeah," Mark said. "With pigs especially. Soon as I saw her I had one of those epiphanies like in James Joyce's Dubliners. He's putting it to her but good."

We each had a twenty dollar bill in our wallets now. Fabulous pay for 1967. I looked down the clear neck of the bottle, saw this delicious brown whiskey, at least another inch of it. I was too upset to look at Mark in the face. I felt so bad for him. I wasn't very mature, I guess. Had lots to learn. When he passed us the twenties, I had given William my phone number, scrawled on the back of a matchbook from the Country Club, and I'd told him to call me "if more work comes up." He took out a pen and asked Mark for his number; Mark said, "No thanks, brother William." So brother William kind of crumpled up the matchbook and thrust in his breast pocket, his rings winking like fury. On and on Mark and I sat sharing the bottle and smoking these leftover Kent cigarettes that looked stained as everything else with chicken guts. They kind of tasted like chicken noodle soup.

About a month later, Mark mentioned that he'd heard from William and gone to see a boat show with him. What?!?

"He's okay, in my opinion," Mark said. "We've got a lot in common even if he is a fag of the worst description."

"Yeah, and he gives a great blow job," I said, coldly.

"Um, he gave me some heroin tablets," Mark said. Again I believed him, though as I think back on it now, perhaps he was lying to impress or deflate me, though he didn't need to. I wonder if he and William actually ever met, but who's to say? And one evening, shortly afterward, when we were walking down by the river, Mark produced a plastic bag with three heroin tablets in it from the pocket of his jeans. "Want to split one?"

"Okay," I said. He opened his palm and showed me this blue pill, under the shadow of the blue alders. Sunlight flickering through the leaves. It looked more like a diet pill than anything I would call a tablet. A capsule, like the ones that decorated the cover of Valley of the Dolls. Carefully he pried it apart and I licked the heroin off his palm, while he swallowed the other half, including the gelatin casing or whatever it was. I don't remember how it made me feel-romantic I guess. Now, thirty years later, I'm reading Philip Norman's book and I find Mick Jagger knew very well what Hershey chocolate is like. "They had been back on tour only a day or two when Phil Spector, in New York, picked up his office telephone to hear Mick Jagger's voice, speaking from a hotel room in Hershey, Pennsylvania. 'Everything here,' Jagger moaned, 'is fuckin' brown!' The Stones that night were performing in a town named, and largely decorated, in honour of its principal product, the Hershey chocolate bar. 'The phones are brown,' Jagger wailed, 'the rooms are brown, even the fuckin' streets are brown.'"

And a week or so later I called again on Mark McAndrew. His mother let me into the house, a modern split-level house on a street that made a complete circle-which, Mark boasted, was the way streets were laid out in the UK. "You can go right to his room," his Mom said, gesturing with a Kent. I studied her with the same worried, doleful smile I wear today when I go to the hospital visiting pals with AIDS, how stupid of me. I felt deeply for Mrs. McAndrew; her Chase Manhattan husband was cheating on her with a blonde caterer. And she didn't seem to know it, as she sat there at her kitchen table working a crossword puzzle. Or maybe she knew and she didn't care. Or she had worked out an accommodation in some "adult" way that repelled me. In any case I ran up the steps, three at a time, to Mark's room, barging in as best friends do. "Aftermath" was spinning on the turntable. His hair was wet, he had just come out of the shower. He wore a ribbed sleeveless cotton T shirt and a towel round his waist. He sat down on the bed and the towel fell off. Just for a minute. Slightly erect, then his cock shrunk. I don't know, when that happens with a man I always feel a sympathetic reaction, a mutual loss. Blushing, Mark put the towel back on and repaired to his closet. When he next appeared he had thrown on a pair of khaki green shorts, wrinkled like seersucker. His blonde fair hair, when it was long, looked like Lord Byron's: wet, pressed to his skin. He looked cuter than I could understand. He threw me a beer and a can opener and winked at me.

We bullshitted about this and that and presently I jumped across on the bed with him. He was wearing a pair of khaki green shorts and his legs were shorter than mine. "I value your friendship," I said haltingly.

"Yeah, well..."

"Let's always be friends," I said-pleaded.

He turned his head away, then turned to me. His hazel eyes, almost green, his ash blond hair. "Okay," he said, then smiled. "Yeah, me too." He leaped up, rolled on his side, stuck his head under the boxspring. "Here's a treat for you, Kev." I was watching the waistband of his shorts peel down across his hips until he straightened up, pink in the face, and showed me a Hershey bar. Part of it was eaten, the "E" and the "Y" at the end of the word "Hershey," and his teeth had made bite marks which somehow had oxidized the chocolate, turned it a lighter color the way chocolate does. Mark unwrapped its brown face, its silver wrapper, all the way, and he stuck the eaten part into his mouth. His thin red lips. His eyes widened as if to show me what to do, drawing me in. I put my mouth to the other end-the "H," the "E," at the beginning of the engraved word-and we started biting in unison, giggling. When our lips met we broke away, giggling louder.

I was perfectly happy and my heart was pounding away in my chest like a thousand guitars.