Poor Thomas Barker; he's been looking for something for a long time. Friends and lovers? No, he has many (some would say many, many) of those and they are categories often mixed with each other. Influence? No, he has lots of that with his connections, column, and publicity business (Thomas wields influence; I wield power.) No, he's been looking for his ass. As he laments, "I'm a white boy with no ass."(although those of us privy, know this is more than made up in other attributes).

So for Christmas, Thomas got from one of his many admirers (none of this is to suggest that he is a whore or anything like that, just popular) a pair of jeans cut to accentuate the back regions. "How does it look?" he asked, all aglow. "Just lovely," I replied. "Like a bra, it lifts and separates." And, in a town like this with a boy like that, well, that's dynamite.