Excerpts from Flights Of Angels: My Life With The Angels Of Light. Adrian Brooks. Arsenal Pulp Press 2008.

15. . . . I could see props and huge masks: a carriage with prancing horses, plague monsters, a brilliant red starfish, giant rats, and icebergs.

18. Ours was no mere avant-garde; avant-garde implies social connectedness or possible future integration, like Andy Warhol's scene in New York. We were Underground, in a wholly different and distinct secret society that had not been tied to, absorbed, or even glimpsed by the mainstream.

18. My ball gown was pale blue lace and pink satin spangled with silver stars and violet velvet bows. Birdcage-like contraptions thrust my skirt to a horizontal width of six feet. My neck was sheathed in rhinestones, a virtual pillar of "diamonds." Amethyst drops dangled from my bodice and, as the Countess Flushette, I sported a toilet on my head.

21. "You know how to separate the men from the boys in San Francisco?" he'd crow: "With a crowbar!"

22. John was a tall, radiant black ecologist with flashing eyes who'd given up talking and who wrote on a pad of paper to communicate, if words were necessary. As a personal ecological statement, he'd also given up riding in a car and, for years, walked everywhere he went, no matter how far.

24. "New York is red."

29. At eight, I blithely informed classmates at Friends Central School that, when I grow up, I wanted to be a peacock.

39. "What kind of socks do you wear . . . ? Oh . . . White? That's nice. Always white? Oh. Cotton or wool too? Oh fabulous. Sweat socks . . . uh-huh . . . What about short ones? Oh, well, how tall? The kind you fold over? Do any have a stripe at the top? Thick stripes? What color? Oh . . . blue . . . oh, that's great. Are those the sweat socks or the other kind? Do they all match? Oh. Do you ever wear one sock with a stripe and one without . . . ?"

57. Chicken-breasted Irving Rosenthal was a bearded and diminutive Byzantine padding about the periphery of the scene. A figure in his own right, as editor of the Big Table Review at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, he'd publish a seminal issue that featured excerpts of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, which he edited, and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." Later, after appearing in Jack Smith's film Flaming Creatures, Irving penned a stylish novel, Sheeper, in which he famously attacked women, ordering them to cease reading epicene prose that be summed up as a boiled testicle impaled on a Faberge hatpin.