After AIDS was identified and had claimed hundreds of lives in New York and San Francisco, Bruce went through a period of severe anxiety, in which the slightest symptom seemed a harbinger of death. He was scrupulous about practicing safe sex with hustlers, not so much to protect himself from them as vice versa. He applied a ritualistic standard of cleanliness to his sexual encounters. In all moral dilemmas or debates he explicitly invoked the standards of “the ethical Jew,” here above all. As the years passed, he showed no signs of illness and remains healthy today. But I will never forget a daffy exchange in 1984 as I drove him from Manhattan to Syracuse for our twentieth high-school reunion, the first time we had seen our WASP sirens and tyrants since graduation. Somewhere between Albany and Utica on the Thruway, I tried to distract him from his obsessive examination of his dry skin patches and minutely swollen armpit glands. Listening to the radio, I vaguely asked him, apropos of nothing, “Did Pat Benatar have a nose job?” He peevishly shot back, “Does she have a face? They don’t operate on mice.”