I was with Sally Keil, who has been my girlfriend for the past two years. There were six of us in all: Gay was there with a girl named Janet whom he had met at George Plimpton’s Paris Review party four days earlier. We squeezed into an elevator and rode it down to the basement, where we filed down a long Freudian corridor. As we walked toward the nudist health spa, my knees, which had been cramped during the ride, felt weak. When we reached The Fifth Season at 315 West 57th Street, we all staggered out of the car. I was not at all sure that I would know the right steps. Three of us squatted side by side on the car floor, like the monkeys who were blind, deaf, and dumb to evil. Love in this car would have been torture-just riding in back was bad enough. He now knew fancier places to undress in. Gay had long since outgrown back-seat grappling as well as many other small-town sexual practices. But this car was different in one crucial respect. The car bounced and rattled like the one in which Gay had first discovered sex long ago in high school. Gay Talese and his party crowded into an old Ford and headed across town.
