{Cough, clears throat}. Chapter one. It’s 1991 in Manhattan. Cue a Gershwin piano trill, followed by sirens; open on an old lady getting her purse snatched. An ambulance whizzes by. Gray skies and rain; a little group of shivering hookers. Oh yeah, the roaring ’90s. But this isn’t Midtown. No, no, we’re in the crosshairs of 88th Street and Second Avenue. One building has a line outside. We zoom in on the awning — it’s Elaine’s, the glamorous literary canteen. The camera takes us inside, tracking.

When it’s time for lunch, the old men strut naked to the cold showers for a rinse. Their hot, bony feet, arches flattened by the tonnage of fat knees, are somehow immune to athlete’s foot or whatever virus crawls in the bathy fray. Disease lives on the wood slabs of the sauna, in the cracks of broken shower floors, between the toes of barrel-chested men who somehow can’t contract Giardia. Aging bodies roast silently in gold jewelry they refuse to take off, chest hair singeing under six-pointed stars and Chais, little pinkies burning too. Inside these perspiring men are cold operators, and to be shamelessly naked is the Yiddish art of war.