Adam Lee Klein

Red Room

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

God don’t end in the Tenderloin. Forever don’t skip over the Tenderloin. If you hear me singing, “Increase My Territory,” I ain’t asking for more. I’m asking less. That’s the lessen.

—Marvin K. White

Imagine a room from which tendrils of opium smoke ascend to scalloped windows and are set adrift over a flourishing garden in the city. The room is low lit, with soft floor cushions on which a seven-foot-tall drag queen, an Odalisque, lies in repose, while painters, philosophers, and poets expatiate around her on history, aesthetics, and performance art. Here, heretics purged from the suburbs find their natural collaborators. They arrive like those at the great crossroads, al-Andalus, or the mythical space of Rafael’s The School of Athens, where Heraclitus, Averroess, Aristotle, and Ptolemy discourse in robes and unroll their scrolls. In this room, Freud, psychedelics, and sex work are links in the great chain of knowledge. Adorno and Mike Kelley are fixed in the memory theater. The conversation goes on for years, thoughts developed, disputed, dropped and picked up again by each new emissary to this fragrant emirate. This was the plan for the Red Room, our surprisingly sprawling apartment in the Tenderloin, painted red, as if to welcome an imperial court, a coterie of Hollywood stars, or to announce the grand opening of a dirty bookstore.

When my roommate Scott and I were looking for apartments, there were FOR RENT signs everywhere. Finding the place was kismet. It was such a renters’ market in San Francisco that, waiting on the doorstep of a one-bedroom we had an appointment to see, we were approached by a stranger who offered to show us another available place around the corner. Like a strip-club doorman, he wagged his finger and said, “Come this way,” already shambling down the hill as we doubtfully followed. A ring of jangling keys pulled one side of the stranger’s trousers down. He had a limp in the opposite leg, so that he appeared to be trying to even himself out. “It’s just around the corner, at the Alhambra. Do you know the Alhambra?”

I’d often stopped to glance into its circular lobby, to admire its ornate dome and chandelier. The place, with its cool terra cotta tiles and tall columns was an Orientalist dream, kitschy, over-designed, with a history of having once housed Valentino. I could see myself wandering there, in a smoking jacket and gold embroidered slippers.

The apartment manager walked us briskly through a side door and to the apartment’s private entrance. While he unlocked the door, he gave a quick look over his shoulder and said, “You can have orgies here and no one will bother you.”

“In the garden?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said brightly. “Outside. Inside.” He was noncommittal. “The residents before you were very active.”

I’d never had anyone try to rent me an apartment by promising an expanded sex life, but I admit it factored into our decision. The building manager, maybe a little drunk first thing in the morning, walked us room to room, turning on spigots, glimpsing into closets. Walking behind him, I began to nurse my fantasies of the place, my very own Moroccan hideaway akin to the historical (perhaps mythical) ones visited by Bill Burroughs and Tennessee Williams, where Paul and Jane Bowles wrote and drank and drugged and no doubt squabbled.

My coworkers from the Lumiere Theater swung by, bookstore workers, Club Uranus go-go dancers, Art Institute students, our Tenderloin neighbors. Scott was dating a woman who worked at the Mitchell Brothers theater just a few blocks away. It was renowned for introducing the “lap dance” and Marilyn Chambers into public consciousness, and before long, our apartment was a hangout for strippers before and after their sets. Gatherings felt like a picnic no one took responsibility to organize, a raucous extended family with no money or boundaries.

Yanik and Richard leaned into conversations on Vasari, Caravaggio, and the atomic bomb, while Chris, whose name was variously Kryzstof (after Penderecki), Twistoff, Twisty, and Twistofine Daniels (the surname borrowed from Jane Fonda’s character, Brie Daniels, in Klute) created an ongoing soundtrack, playing multiple records simultaneously and at varying speeds, proto-Vaporwave. At varying points, Twistofine lived on the couch behind a scrim of pot smoke, pot that I sold when it wasn’t flagrantly consumed by friends. A former roommate from Boston showed up in San Francisco and moved in for a time. Hanna Barbaric sprawled out on the couch, held court and a remote control, and shared VHS porn tapes so gross they would only be available on the dark web now.

Rona, my drag sister, would position her short, blonde wig and practice her pugnacious, fight-ready expressions in a mirror, rolling a pair of stockings over thick, hairy legs, and straightening her skirt. The two of us shared a rough drag modelled after the teenage girls we grew up with, whose reputations for street smarts were often taken for cruelty. That brassy, I-know-what-you-think-of-me attitude helped us feel invincible, even walking the Tenderloin at three in the morning. We goaded each other with the mantra: stonewashed, skimpy, secondhand.

Rona despised restraint of any sort and that made it easy to identify with her, but not to advise her. Above all, she didn’t like being talked down to. She would determine who was worthy, who had her best interests at heart. Most people, she believed, didn’t.

We’d spontaneously perform together, usually on a dare, some enactment of our rage. Once we wandered into a straight, south of Market rock club on an open mic night. I screamed over a Bad Company song and made obscure, possibly obscene gestures while she swung around an Egyptian, ornamental ceramic head her mother had purchased. Rona had used it to hide her syringes inside when she lived in New Mexico. Then, she took it with her to San Francisco, an object we both felt smugly contemptuous of, though it did fit the Red Room’s interior design. Onstage, I watched as our captive audience stood back confounded, biting their fingers with worry for a couple of tense minutes before she shattered it on the edge of the stage and the two of us left. We spilled out of there feeling purged and laughing at the expressions of distress we’d provoked, until we were both in tears, remembering how the shards crunched under our heels.

🙗

The miniature painter Jerome Caja came by regularly on his way to the theater where we both worked. When I first met him at a party at our sister cinema, the Castro, I wondered who this ruddy Botticelli was that everyone talked about. He had long, straggly blonde hair and wore a pair of torn jeans, stockings showing through the holes, and a used condom earring.

He was frighteningly thin, but so was I in those days, and, like me, he had bad skin. Mine was acne, his was rosacea, the same skin condition that troubled Warhol. He grew up in a Catholic, working-class environment similar to Warhol, in Cleveland, Ohio, with ten brothers. I’d end up writing an artist monograph on him, but at the time, he was merely an odd, interesting co-worker I’d soon grow close to. Like Rona, he had no tolerance for grandiosity and met any form of “philosophizing” with a contemptuous, “There goes Miss High and Mighty.”

He was contrary but always in the service of pointing out someone else’s unnecessary seriousness. I’d badger theater customers about using butter on their popcorn (I was a fervent, one could even say rabid, animal rights advocate) and Jerome would say, “Those animals are happy to die for us. And you should see the rabbit fur I found for you. From the Goodwill, of course.”

For someone so fundamentally iconoclastic, he was a disciplined worker, always attending to something with squirrel-like industry. He’d recently graduated the Art Institute and used the Lumiere ticket booth as his painting studio, easy to do as a miniaturist who painted in nail polish.

He became my first mentor in San Francisco, though he’d never tolerate the title, not because he was self-deprecating or humble, but because other people’s sentiments were a little too much for him. For many years after his death, I’d remark on how “fully himself” he was. Now I realize he was simply empty of others. By that, I don’t mean he didn’t attach. He could be surprisingly thoughtful, even dutiful in friendships. He’d arrive at my doorstep at least three times a week for a couple of years, always with a gift in hand, usually a toy or stuffed animal he’d found at the charity shops. He was a magnet for the strangest objects, like the rubber kielbasa he wore around his neck. Once he’d brough a bacon and eggs clock which hung above our kitchen table, commentary on a home that never had bacon in it.

Jerome, too, was like a strange object, impossible to imagine who’d deviled up his attributes, his weird humor and self-possession. He appeared to carry no influences, or very few. He didn’t particularly like movies except for Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? He was otherwise too impatient for them. He liked rock ‘n roll in an unspecific way, as well as nudity and dressing up, horsing around, and the lives of the saints. He was a ham, a psychedelic apparition, a pin in the hot air of convention.

He had a few close friends, Miss Tina, Miss Cherry, Miss Kitty, Rex Ray, Michael Blue, and Anna, the photographer who administered his estate and with whom he had a long history. There were many others he socialized with, admired, and complained of. But I’d be surprised if any of them convinced him of anything, or exerted influence over his thinking any more than chanting might affect a lunar tide.

The first incarnation of our drag band, Chastity, had Jerome on tambourine, Twisty on a sequencer that overheated and slowed down and that she never seemed to fully control, and Rona, sitting dejected on the edge of the stage playing nothing. I hollered and provoked in that fake rabbit fur coat drenched in red paint that dripped and spattered like blood whenever I turned in it. At the Drag U.S.O. show, we performed immediately after a young RuPaul, between her Star Booty persona and her first hit, Supermodel, and I remember thinking that her everybody just say love schtick must have saved her life in sticky situations but nobody in Chastity could have said those words and sounded convincing.

And yet, Jerome did charm, in his way. He could amuse and excite some of the most stolid people. At his openings, he’d let his fingers roam up the shirtfronts of stodgy collectors. He would do this “itsy-bitsy spider” thing with friends and strangers. He was slapstick, which is why when people talk of him being crucified at a nightclub, they perhaps miss how funny he made it.

His paintings depicting hamper-toting housewives visited by the holy spirit, urinating putti and ascending Bozos, or a family of heedless eggs gathered around a Thanksgiving turkey could reach anyone, from children to business executives, with their laughable subversions and reversals of fortune. But in those paintings, there were greater depths of devastation having to do with false righteousness, or the belief that power is ever actually held. Sunny Jerome, whose message was that we’re all equal in death.

Everyone could share his offbeat humor, but few knew how willing to laugh he was at the grimmest misfortunes. I had once complained to him about a tarot reading that I’d been given in Iowa City, and how everything terrible came to pass, including getting robbed. So, at one of his openings, dressed as Miss Fortune, he read from a tarot deck he’d created, and shared with everyone who sat down with him the awful futures that awaited them.

“Poor thing, everything you desire will wither away to nothing. La, la, la.”

“You’ll die without accomplishment in a terrible accident. But it will be an exciting, fiery accident that people will remember.”

Or simply, “Jesus will send you back.”

He laughed at his own misfortunes, too, in the face of the disease that would ultimately blind and kill him. Though not at the very end, I was told, when he had to accept the caretaking of friends.

Prior to meeting him, I knew only one register: mordant. I thought it appropriate to our time in history, to AIDS. But Jerome treated the disease like someone stupid he was stuck on a long road trip with, someone it was best to pay only half a mind to.

When Jerome spoke of never desiring a “partner,” or expressed contempt for couples, I understood. Likewise, his distaste for babies, happy families, “nice things.” He was intensely critical of “nice things” as distraction from the humiliating violations that awaited us all. There was, of course, something performative about his distastes. And yet, he intuited ideas that would fit theoretically somewhere between Adrienne Rich’s concepts of “compulsory heterosexuality” and Lee Edelman’s later “reproductive futurism,” though if I had tried to tell him his ideas resembled feminist or queer theories, he would have mocked me no end.

In the Red Room, he would lay out his paintings like cards from a deck and ask me to rank them, ruthlessly, like a pageant judge. Sometimes he’d ask why I’d made the selections I had; at other times, he judged my judgment, holding his hand to his heart as though deeply offended. “Girl, I knew you had terrible taste but now you’ve gone too far.” He’d gather up the paintings and stuff them in an envelope and toss them in a beaten-up canvas bag. Then the both of us would walk up the street to work, Jerome talking to everyone who’d stop him, his fingers wandering up their chests, saying “sexy, sexy,” or faking them out by reaching around and tapping their shoulder, then we’d quickly break away and he’d return to admonishing me, “Try to lift yourself from the couch and do something worthwhile today.”

“Like what? Count popcorn cups?”

🙗

Like the apartment, the drugs were a bridge to another time, another set of conditions, where discovery, experimentation, even recklessness, was valued above everything else. We worried about AIDS, but none of us imagined ourselves addicted. It was too predictable a story, couldn’t happen. Hanna Barbaric, Nurse Eva, and I dressed as candy stripers, and assisted anyone in need of a clean needle and an unshaking hand.

For a time, heroin was an innocent attempt at deepening my relationship to the artists I admired. Our film, Shooting Gallery Girls, was a hokey super 8 movie in which we attempted the chaotic spontaneity of Warhol’s factory films. In it, we tied Twisty to a table and force-administered her drugs. (She didn’t like Heroin, preferring pot and beer, so we had to fake the needlework and used the syringe and drugs ourselves). Or Fan Dance, that in its best moments resembled Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! In it, I crawl around in drag with a table strapped to my back, awaiting a suitor. A close-up reveals my face slathered with Kabuki-white flour as thick as a Julian Schnabel plate painting. My makeup crumbles in slow motion, white flecks lifting up and blowing away, catching like dust in my wig.

In all of the visceral redness of the room, it was hard to register the minor changes, the shift from an opening of the mind to a dependence of the body. I was still a functioning full-time master’s student, writing my first book, participating in a local reading series, showing up to events. Conversations were still engaging, even if people would tell me that I’d gone silent for almost a minute, then picked up exactly where I’d left off. In that minute I’d swum off to some untroubled undersea cave, hearing nothing but the ocean’s pulse in my head.

I wrote my first collection of stories sitting at a bulky typewriter with a bottle of whiteout in one hand, then at a used Mac, with those same gaps of time in my thinking, those stops and starts in which the world was annihilated and some unattributable part of myself drifted through a visionless dark. I’d find myself at my desk with my forehead on the space bar, hundreds of empty pages advanced on a document. I was amused by it, telling my roommates those empty pages were aspirational. My stories hurt to write, and the drugs numbed, so to do one required the other.

Sometimes, by sheer determination, I’d quit using. I’d take a few days when I’d do nothing but sit in movie theaters and eat lavish Indian dinners at the Embarcadero, alone with an Indian travel guide, imagining myself in a teeming, colorful city, in different red rooms, in a Rajasthani miniature painting chattering with birdsong and running streams.

I’d keep my mind off the despair that would inevitably tic up with every hour of withdrawal. If I got through three days clean, I’d charge ahead, determined to change everything. I found myself in aerobics classes at the Civic Center Y, trotting around in a circle and jumping in place. I hopped with such intention, I ended up breaking my tibia and had my leg casted. Jerome spent a couple of hours painting an intricate, frowning sunflower on it. It was a joke between us, because I’d once dressed as a sunflower for the Gay Day Parade, then bitterly complained that children followed, pulling at me, calling me Daisy. “I hate daisies! Common weeds!” So, Jerome made contemptuous sunflowers part of his iconography, always miserable, sometimes taunted by potted daisies and dog shit.

I went to meetings, sometimes three a day, and developed a social life in church basements among other anonymous addicts. Sometimes I went just to hear their stories. Other times, I heard very little, but learned to stay. I started to doubt there was a bad meeting, even when I sometimes felt I hadn’t heard what I needed. Because it struck me, I didn’t know what I needed. But for that day, at least, I knew what I didn’t need.

🙗

Not all strippers are beautiful or even interesting to look at. Arranged in the living room, sometimes sullen and awkward until they got to know the Red Room’s regulars, they often appeared undistinguished, like miserable girls held over in a summer class, with mostly quizzical or bland expressions, chewing their nails, their restless legs going a mile a minute. They accompanied my roommate’s girlfriend who would drop by to work out some kind of drug transfer with him, and then use our bathroom to doll up for her shift. She’d step out to our encouraging applause, well-painted, her platinum blonde hair blown back, and pull her shirt open and shake her tits at us.

She once invited us to see her perform in the “flashlight room,” where she and one of her coworkers exposed themselves to penlight beams. Outside the theater, busloads of Japanese men were checking cameras at the door. We wandered in behind her, momentarily reveling in her power, and sat at a circular, cushioned table, giddily waiting for her entrance. After a few minutes in the dressing room, she parted the curtains, arms in the air, as though celebrating a victory lap, and climbed up naked on the table. Arching herself this way and that, peekaboo-ing from between her legs, she had us appraising her genitals like skeptical jewelers, eventually clicking our flashlights off and on and twirling them around in the air as though we preferred disco.

But there were moments at the apartment I should have noticed, of a stripper’s discomfort when she realized her coworker was using before her shift, that she couldn’t tolerate showing up to work otherwise, and wore gloves to cover her marks. Or the times when one of the strippers would ask us to entertain their child while they claimed to be “touching up” in the bathroom.

We were pretty good with kids, considering most of us didn’t have them or spend much time with them. But there was always the thought of who else they might be left with. I feared the worst. We may have been unsavory, but none of us wanted the responsibility for a child’s troubled memories, considering how beset we were by our own. If we claimed we didn’t like kids, it was because we didn’t want to assume responsibility for them. I pondered what kids would remember about this luridly painted room and these luridly painted queens. Likely they’d recall the queens as clowns, creepy but not mean. We also let them do whatever they wanted. I remember encouraging handstands and backbends and withdrawing from what I called a magic trunk the trove of stuffed animals Jerome had delivered me.

It wasn’t only strippers who dropped by, but those who imagined saving them, or at least bringing them to life in a way that men who merely watched them perform could not. The photographer Ken Miller came by one night with the author William Vollman, and Jerome and I put William in drag which only served to grant him the likeness of a blow-up doll. That image was captured in Miller’s monograph, Open All Night.

For all its comings and goings, the apartment felt cleaved off from life, the way a hooker’s apartment might feel to someone who uses it exclusively for a shameful kink. It was harder to imagine it a lively crossroads of ideas than a crossdresser’s anguished closet.

In truth, the apartment was a dump, a dark basement with water pipes running across the living room ceiling. Its hodgepodge of cheap furnishings included a spinning bottle rack we used for coats. There was a large turquoise couch, but also futons and low coffee tables,as hard to register the minor changes, the shift from an opening of the mind to a dependence of the body. I was still a functioning full-time master’s student, writing my first book, participating in a local reading series, showing up to events. Conversations were still engaging, even if people would tell me that I’d gone silent for almost a minute, then picked up exactly where I’d left off. In that minute I’d swum off to some untroubled undersea cave, hearing nothing but the ocean’s pulse in my head.

🙗

When the drugs became the greatest of my problems, I couldn’t be appeased by them. A part of myself tagged along behind my physical body, annoyed at having to follow it onto buses, wait for dealers outside their residence hotels, cop the drugs, return home. There was an idealized self, resentful at being forced to chase the body’s cravings.

But it wasn’t just the body enacting this circular provisioning. The brain too had grown a tail that it chased. A little dog of a brain, its tail wagging in alarm.

🙗

Circular time. Time that ran emptily onward. My head on the space bar, pages advancing.

🙗

It felt personal when the famous strip club, The Mitchell Brothers, closed. Jim Mitchell killed his younger brother, Artie, who was allegedly at home in a drug psychosis. My roommate’s girlfriend had to embark on other plans, to get clean, and become a stockbroker. Eventually she did, moving to London just before the sub-prime boom.

🙗

I felt some anguish as chance and opportunity opened up for others. First, it came for Rona. At the Lumiere theater, she announced that she’d spent the night, or at least had sex, with a Greek guy she’d met at The Stud the night before. He was heading back to Athens, but promised he’d send a plane ticket, and Rona asked me to advise whether to go or to stay.

“What do you have here? A minimum wage job, roommates, a drug problem?”

“Don’t make it sound like nothing,” she said.

“Do you think he’ll send the ticket?”

“With your ass? I think he will.”

Her voice was pensive. It made me realize that she had this guy on the hook, which must have been flattering for her; I imagined it must have felt like a brush with the cosmos, but she was clearer about the commitment, that the opportunity would sever her from everything she knew. A life of chaotic drug use is, at its center, weirdly stable. One is willing to meet life under a single condition. Nothing else is let in. Now Rona had a chance to stand at the real, the mythical, the classical crossroads of culture that I’d once imagined the Red Room duplicating. She would have access to antiquity, the actual ruins, and not just the ruins of our recent decisions.

“What if it doesn’t work? What if I want to come back?”

I dismissed her reservations. “Come back to what, Ro?”

The ticket came a couple of weeks later. I didn’t go to the airport, probably because I

had no car, and the BART airport extension wasn’t yet built. But I should have found a way to see her off because I’ve only seen her twice in the thirty-something years that have passed since she moved, and she’s still, remarkably in Athens, and with him.

When things seem like they can’t or won’t change, I wait for an intervention like Rona’s, an abduction with consent. But the universe doesn’t work like that with me. It has decided that my role is to remind others they have nothing to lose.

🙗

Twisty had been plotting and planning to get disability benefits. He studied the DSM III with surprising dedication, carefully considering the symptomology that corresponded most closely to his own disposition. Both of us could handily check off many of the anti-social personality traits itemized in the DSM, but Twisty wanted a sure bet, something more dissociative, so that there’d be no question that he could no longer work. For a week before his determination appointment, he drew an elaborate scroll depicting poisonous plants with an Audubon level of specificity and detail. This was the brew he’d threaten to blend up and take his life with if he were denied benefits. Moreover, he would consume this tea on the steps of City Hall.

On the foggy morning of his appointment, I saw him walking down Geary, wearing a curly wig with a scarf tied around his head, a black smear of lipstick, carrying the scroll under one arm and a TV Guide in his other hand. When I later asked how the appointment went, he explained he’d spent much of the interview circling upcoming TV shows. When the interviewer asked, as part of a battery of questions, how he’d respond to the sight of a child drowning, he answered if nothing else was on television, he’d watch from the shore.

The process had taken several months, but eventually he was approved. When a retrospective payment finally arrived, he began planning his travel. He had a mutual friend he could stay with in London. When he told me of his plans to visit the Freud Museum, my envy swelled, my heart sank.

🙗

Then, too, the club promoter Michael Blue decided to take Jerome and Miss Kitty to Thailand on a whim. I suspect he thought Jerome needed to see the sex clubs of Patpong and Soi Cowboy.

“I hope he puts you to work,” I said.

“Honey, that’s not work.”

When he returned, he’d respond to my hang-dog expressions of longing by announcing, “It was fabulous, just fabulous. Too bad for you, la, la, la.” But he didn’t only taunt. A couple of months later he invited me over to see paintings he’d made of the Thai deity Garuda, and I was surprised by the earnest approach he’d taken. They were, dare I say, almost reverential. Like the saints whose lives he’d discussed with sadistic relish, but also with a strange awe, he had a fondness for these holy embodiments.

In a moment of unusual sympathy, I remember Jerome explaining to me how Garuda was the vahana, or vehicle, of Vishnu. He wanted to bring me closer to his journeys by sharing how many Thai deities were in fact Hindu deities, including Ganesh, Brahma, and Shiva. It might have been a bit of accidental seed-planting, like a Hare Krishna change purse my father had once delivered to me, unaware of it being more than something pawned off on him at an airport by a group of chanting, saffron-robed kids. Or Jerome simply understood I needed to get out of the Red Room, to cut my losses and get out while I could. I needed to be freed from the spell of the Red Room, permanently exiled from the romantic and grandiose ideas that had gotten me so stuck. Jerome, unattached to anything but his work, had finally disclosed to me my dharma.

🙗

With those years behind me, I can see how planning an infantilism party, turning the entire apartment into a birth canal, was in fact an attempted departure from one life to another. It was to be a poor man’s party for the ages, an enactment of rebirth, and finally, the long-awaited orgy that our building manager encouraged.

We called the event “Sugar Walls” and for weeks Twisty worked on a soundtrack of children’s songs mixed with Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, Olivia Newton John, and television noise. He checked out violently scratched vinyl records from the public library and for weeks I heard nothing but “Little Goldie Goldfish” and “I’m a Little Teapot,” full of pops and skips, slowed and sped up. Even with my high tolerance for industrial music, the derangement of Little Marcy, a Christian ventriloquist whose albums are now the stuff of cult collectors, could set my teeth on edge.

We draped the walls and doorways with yards of cheap, pink chiffon and tulle. I insisted the hallways should suggest fallopian tubes, and the concept developed from there. When guests arrived, they were disrobed by sexy winged men in jockstraps—adult putti—and escorted into our vast bathroom where they were erotically bathed in either a bubble-filled inflatable pool or the bathtub. They were then lovingly and thoroughly toweled off, powdered, and placed into diapers. The large number of strippers and drag queens meant a willing crowd, unafraid of nudity and familiar with compromising and primitive positions. Provided soft toys and teethers, they were guided out to the other infants in the living room, sitting in cribs or on futons, in chambers divided by the elaborate draping so that they could play in small groups, awash in the din of nursery rhymes, while watching others through pink scrims.

It has to say something about the late eighties that this was a wildly successful event. I knew it was going well when my upstairs neighbor, a straight man with Rock Hudson’s cool reserve, whom I’d had a crush on since we moved in, arrived with his fiancé in a giant bunny suit. He handed me a bunch of real carrots at the door, and I found myself trying to seduce him in my bedroom while his fiancé watched us from the doorway.

By the end of the night, there were bodies entangled on the couches, bottles everywhere, cigarettes ground out in the floor. I was mopping in my wig, feeling suddenly aged by the whole event. I felt a little resentful of the mess, as though I still held some fantasy of the Red Room as a place that would avoid succumbing to the waste it celebrated. Like the Mitchell Brothers theater, I imagined it could retain its reputation in perpetuity. I had the hopes that the Red Room would be recalled warmly, like the old North Beach theater sign of Carol Doda’s flashing tits. But the place was trashed, diapers kicked into the corners. I was surprised no one shat in them. I walked into the garden and threw out the carrots with their long, weedy stems. Let the garden devour them. The sun was almost up, and it was time for bed.

🙢🙗🙠

Adam Lee Klein is the author of the Lambda Book Award-nominee, "The Medicine Burns" (High Risk Books); the novel, "Tiny Ladies" (Serpent's Tail Books); the D.A.P. artist monograph, "Jerome: After the Pageant." He edited "The Gifts of the State: New Writing from Afghanistan" (Dzanc Books). His work has appeared in BOMB; Subtropics; Your Impossible Voice; Evergreen Review; Pank; Hobart; Electric Literature; the NYT At War blog and elsewhere. He is a graduate of The New School MFA writing program and currently teaches creative writing at Ashoka University in Delhi.