“THE TEXT IS WE GOTTA COME TO A CONCLUSION ABOUT THE FIST AND THE ‘WE’RE QUEER’ SHIT! IT’S ONLY TWO HOURS TO DEADLINE!” Greg’s voice had become shrill.

“Why is ‘We’re Queer’ shit?” said Randy.

Greg sighed, rolled his eyes, looked away, and tamped the side of his head with the heel of his hand. Softly, his gaze panning from Randy to Camille to Adam, he said, “We—haven’t—got—time—for—semantics. We haven’t got time for deconstructing texts, we haven’t got time for four-month-old blow jobs, we haven’t got time for horny professors. We only have time for—”

Adam tuned out. He knew exactly what poor Greg would do, as did everybody in the room who stopped and thought about it. Not only would Greg be afraid to touch THE GOVERNOR, THE BLOW JOB AND THE BRAWL, he would run a completely straight-faced account of today’s WE’RE QUEER fiasco, even though the whole thing was comical, and he would write one of his nevertheless editorials, assuming he had the nerve to run any editorial at all. In his nevertheless editorials, Greg always said something like, “While the administration is probably not being evasive in referring to the erasure as an honest mistake, nevertheless the Gay and Lesbian Fist has every right to hold the administration to the strictest standards of yackety yackety yak…” And Greg would see to it that he never had time for THE BLOW JOB. The very mention of it had scared poor Greg to death.

Greg was arguing with Camille and Randy and looking at his watch, as if the sheer logic of the deadline would make them willing to acquiesce. Greg didn’t have the balls to just assert his authority and say—as he, Adam, would have—“Look, it’s getting late, and here’s what we’re going to do…”

Adam looked at his own watch and realized, resentfully, that he wouldn’t have the luxury of hanging around long enough to see his prediction come to pass. He had fifteen minutes to get over to his night job. Destiny’s Adam Gellin would spend the next four hours in a little Bitsosushi hatchback delivering slices of anchovy-and-olive, pastrami-mozzarella-and-tomato, prosciutto-Parmesan-red-pepper-and-egg, sausage-artichoke-and-mushroom, smoked-salmon-stracchino-and-

dill, and eggplant-bresaola-arugula-pesto-pignoli-

fontina-Gorgonzola-bollito-misto-capers-basil-crème-

fraîche-and-garlic cheese pizza to every indolent belly-stuffing time-squandering oaf on or off the Dupont campus who picked up the phone and called PowerPizza.

Adam couldn’t stand pizza, but tonight, as he stood at the stainless-steel take-out counter inside the alley entrance to PowerPizza, the sound of the Mexicans dicing all the onions and red peppers and the smell of sausages cooking in their cheese lava cut right into his stomach and made him painfully hungry. He hadn’t eaten since noon and wouldn’t be able to eat for four more hours, and here he was staring into a hot maw, the PowerPizza kitchen, where a motley hive of people were furiously shoveling food in gross quantities. The counter girls up front were yelling at the cooks, the cooks were yelling at the Mexicans, the Mexicans were yelling at each other, in Spanish, and Denny, the owner, was yelling at the whole lot of them in what passed for English.

“ ’Eyyyyy, whattayou do standin’eh?” He had spotted Adam. He threw both hands up in the gesture that said “Useless!”

“I’ve only got seven orders!” said Adam, indicating the stack of pizza flats beside him on the counter. “I’m supposed to have eight!”

“Okay. You get a you eight, you get a you ess moving.”

Denny, whose actual first name was Demetrio, was like a caricature of a pizza parlor proprietor, an immigrant from Naples, too fat, bald, hotheaded, and harried, and he couldn’t even yell at you without using his hands. In the evenings his entire business depended on speed—speed at the front counter, in the kitchen, and above all in the take-out deliveries, which were supposed to go out fast and arrive hot. To ensure that, Denny had devised a shrewd form of bottom-dog capitalist motivation. Delivery boys like Adam got no wages, only tips. Adam’s take each night depended solely on how fast he could get the orders to their destination. Volume was what counted, because students were not the greatest tippers in the world. He wished he could arrive at every door with a sign around his neck that said I DON’T GET PAID TO DO THIS, I ONLY GET YOUR TIPS.

One of the Mexicans slid another pizza box down the counter, and Adam had barely touched it before the all-seeing Neapolitan yelled, “You got a you eight! You get a you ess on da road! You stan’ aroun’ when you t’ru!”

Adam staggered away from the counter holding a stack of pizza flats that rose up higher than his head. Delivery boys used a battered, underpowered eight-year-old Bitsosushi hatchback. PowerPizza was part of a gaudy strip of student-oriented shops, and Adam’s first stop would be six or eight blocks behind it in an apartment building he was only vaguely aware of, since he had never heard of any student living there. On the other hand, he couldn’t imagine anybody other than students with rude animal appetites craving five full-size flats of pizza. The order came to more than fifty dollars, in any event. It would take somebody mean or clueless to tip him less than five dollars. Off the job, he was cautious at the wheel of a car. On this job you had to be a stock-car driver if you wanted to make any money. He sped through the seedy, feebly lit old residential area behind PowerPizza, barely even one-pumping the stop signs.

The apartment building was a dingy brick affair, four or five stories high, with a small entry vestibule containing a deck of about twenty mailboxes, a panel of apartment buzzers, and a glass interior door through which Adam could see a lobby that wasn’t much but had an elevator, thank God. The five flats of pizza were so unwieldy, Adam had to put them down in order to study the buzzer panel. Jones 3A…Jones 3A…Found it, pushed the button, waited for the clicking sound, pushed the door open, and did the usual acrobatics, holding the door open with the heel of his sneaker while he bent over and lifted the five flats up off the floor. Christ! Did something to his back, which put him in an even worse mood. What was Destiny’s child doing in a situation like this? How could it be that he, Adam Gellin, was a delivery boy backing his way into a third-rate apartment building in a shady part of a dreary little city in Pennsylvania, carrying five boxed slabs of idiot food while a lock-mad security-hinged plate-glass door pressed against his butt, trying to deny him entry? And his back hurt like hell.

When he reached the third floor, he found himself in a hallway with seven or eight identical flush doors, but he didn’t have to guess which one was waiting for five orders of pizza. Belly laughs, whoops, the rumble of a lot of people talking at once, and the languid synthesizer sounds of a piece of so-called Sample Rap called “Elliptical Rider” by C. C. Good Jookin’ were audible behind the door of what was undoubtedly Jones 3A. They sound black, Adam said to himself. Consciously, that made no difference. Inside his rib cage his heart had other ideas, however, and sped up. He took a deep breath and pressed the button. Nothing but the sound of people partying inside. He had to push it four times before the door opened. Adam found himself looking up at a towering young black man with a shaved head, clad in cargo pants and a T-shirt that showed off his muscles. His shoulders, biceps, and forearms were so thick and highly defined they made Adam blink. Behind the brute, a hazy, smoky dimness was punctuated by flares of electric color, apparently from a television set. Black faces were chundering conversation, through which pulsed the slow, eccentric beat of “Elliptical Rider.” An oddly sweet odor hung in the air.

In the next instant Adam realized who Jones 3A was: Curtis Jones, the basketball team’s shooting guard. On the court he looked small, since he was only—only, by Division I standards—six-five. Standing there in an ordinary apartment doorway, he looked gigantic. Adam felt relieved. The man might be a brute in a foul mood, but at least Adam knew who he was. Like the other players, Jones lived in Crowninshield, and Adam had been around him from time to time while tending Jojo. He started to say, Hi, Curtis, but thought better of it and settled for, “Hi—PowerPizza.”