I sometimes walk up Hawthorne around 40th to 50th, but usually only during the day. At night that area is pretty much a post-apocalyptic landscape of wandering drunks and horny straight guys in tented cargo pants roving in packs, sniffing the air for discount pheromones. By the time I stroll by the following morning the encrusted vomitus has been scraped off the pavement and the moist gusts of sexual desperation have been replaced for a few hours by a more wholesome and diffuse atmosphere of general life desperation. I've never been the barhopping type, even in my salad days, assuming I had salad days. Maybe these are my salad days. It's hard to be a gay barhopper unless you live in one of the few American cities where being gay is not yet considered too objectionable and therefore the number of gay or gay-friendly bars is greater than one. I have lived in such places, only such places actually, but I still never took advantage of the opportunities for hitting multiple nightspots in a single evening, an activity requiring a spirited retinue I never had and fun-seeking energy I could never muster. Instead I liked to find a stool or corner booth or comfy banquette and stay put until my ass got numb, or until my mood slipped into some gloomy concavity from which escape was impossible, or until I only had enough cash left for cab fare home, or until closing time when the grim biological reality of everyone in the place is suddenly revealed in the pitiless glare of those unflattering overhead lights. In that sudden surgical light you realize how crudely some guys separate their monobrows, and just how big facial pores in the human animal can really get.