Drunk on Clark Street, we heard a burst of laughter like a rope ladder dropped from the third floor open window above. Nyiah said, Let's go. I said I was pretty tired.

But I followed her through the unlatched chain-link gate, past the coiled garden hose and the pots of bare soil and up the back stairs, a dozen layers of gray paint cracked and coating the hand rails, the steps, the ceiling. We'd traveled those steps before, the ubiquitous intestinal passages of Chicago apartment buildings, but there was no one above expecting the likes of us to walk through the door.

With nervous smiles we made our way through the scouts, clean-cut boys and girls smoking cigarettes and talking in that familiar metropolitan twang about their sex lives, about their habits, about themselves. Too self-absorbed to mind the strange, straight couple six pints to the wind inserting themselves where they didn't belong.

Everyone's in front, suggested a quartet of girls playing cards in the kitchen, a bright Home Depot display of bland conformity, its granite countertops littered with Miller Lite bottles. We grabbed a pair of props and ventured down the hardwood hallway toward the noise, where a roomful of sirens were immersed in an incomprehensible game of plastic cups and beer.

I'd been there before, in high school, in college, in every swollen, bacchanalian ritual of banal self-congratulation that people have forced on me throughout my life. It didn't matter that I was the only male in the room. I was raised polite, and at midnight this tame gathering was coasting on cheap beer, a boozy breath all the admittance necessary.

What was disappointing? That nobody cared? That they were all nice? That three dozen white dykes didn't root out our ruse? Send us tumbling down the stairs and Leave me battered and bloodied in the alley?

Or was it that three dozen white dykes hadn't invited the likes of us in the first place?