To my 5 or 6 readers: This series is moving beyond New York, so I've changed the title. Same thrilling story.

In Tokyo, I sometimes drank at a nameless wokingman's pub in Ikejiri-Ohashi, not far from my apartment. The barmainds were friendly and spoke some English, and they'd send out for food if you asked. Best, every third or fourth drink for me was free. They were oddly proud of me and stuck news articles mentioning me onto their walls.

David, an anemic, Texan, self-proclaimed fairy in his late forties with dyed-yellow hair and a Blanche DuBois drawl,  often occupied the opposite end of the bar. Raising a thin, white arm, he admired the electronically depiliated flesh. "I choose do not to be reminded of my kinship with the lower primates," he said.

When David drank too much, which was always, he often almost-claimed to have slept with Yukio Mishima. "A lovely, lovely man, and he spoke perfect English. His home was so modern, so Western... he had perfect taste, except for that awful wife of his."

Alcohol also fuelled David's vigourous loathing of the Chinese, especially those he had never met. "The Japanese had the right idea in Nanjing, they just didn't have the technology, " he once said. "They should have asked the Germans to send them over some gas."

The one Chinese David knew personally was Absalom, his own nineteen-year-old boyfriend, a slight, girlish law student who never spoke above a whisper and could be found every night except Saturday sitting, hands folded and eyes downcast, at David's side. It was well known that, at home, Absalom (the name was David's choice, of course) filled the simultaneous roles of  protégé and dom, bullying David horribly. If the barmaids mentioned David's split lip or bruised cheek, he smiled coyly, saying, "Darling, don't you know love hurts sometimes?"

The one condition David placed on Absalom was that, except to go to class, he couldn't leave his sight, night or day, six days a week. On Saturday he roamed free, as David observed the sabbath and imagined shiksas of both sexes sinking their dirty claws into his beloved. No matter how long he lived in Asia, David said, he'd always be a perfect Jewish mother.

I was at that time often in the company of a German woman named Rosi, who despised David nearly as much as David despised the Chinese. "If any part of that man's body comes within one meter of me," she growled, "He should kiss it goodbye." Rosi was a splendidly tall, buxom, strapping exemplar of Teutonic womanhood, as well as a black belt in aikido. Though the smack-down with David never materialized, imagining it did provide me with plenty of happy moments.