Laura says Labor Day is the most bittersweet of holidays. As a kid growing up in Canarsie, I dreaded the end of summer, but I also felt the blank sheets in my loose-leaf binders were all potential A's or 100's.

By October's first chill, my papers bloodied with corrections and bad grades—how did I ever become a writer anyway?—I longed for those endless days of July and August. Classes were boring, the days were shorter and grayer, and life generally sucked moose.

Eventually I dreaded Labor Day. Even today it makes me uneasy.

In tenth grade at Canarsie High School, I was the founder and only member of SPONGE, the Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything. To avoid fights, I kept that pretty much to myself.

The first semester of eleventh grade English, I never bothered to read Huckleberry Finn because Miss Shapin introduced it by reverentially reading aloud from the book's opening and humming "NNnnn" when she came to the racial slur.

When she assigned us a book report on an autobiography, I wrote about My Shadow Ran Fast, by a white ex-convict I'd seen interviewed on the Mike Douglas show. She gave me an F and said, "You should have selected a more admirable person."

As a writer, I have always lucked out.

Laura, the baby, and I are back in Brooklyn after our annual three-week rental on Fire Island, where I got barely any work done. Whatever writing I did manage to produce was dead on the page anyway.

Nick, my sixteen-year-old son, is also back from spending the summer in San Jose with his mom.

It's the Sunday afternoon of that antsy holiday weekend—cloudy and cool and lazy—when Nick comes into my office with his boyfriend Kevin.

Nick's been out since he was thirteen.

I did much better my second semester of eleventh grade, when English was speech and drama. I was good at debate and liked the plays we read: the robots in "R.U.R." and the Jewish veteran suffering psychosomatic paralysis in "Home of the Brave." I had a crush on blonde Miss Squicciarini, who gave me an A on the essay I wrote on the latter play, explaining why the film version changed the hero into a black man.

My final grade for the term was good enough to get me into Advanced Drama the next year. I'd be the only twelfth-grader in the class who hadn't taken Drama with Mr. Haring all junior year.

"Hey, Dad, how'd you like a chance to relive your past?" Nick asks me.

I wait for the next sandal to drop.

I didn't know anyone that first day in Advanced Drama, so I sat alone at a two-person desk, feeling like a creepy loser. Mr. Haring had Stephen come down from the back row to sit next to me.

"He hates me."

"No thanks" is my instinctive reply to Nick's question, but instead I just sigh and lift my eyebrows, a cliched gesture my characters also favor.

"I'm talking about your CBGB-and-Club-82-going, Ramones-and-Blondie-listening, hanging-with-Legs-McNeil days," Nick says.

I wonder if the baby will talk like her half-brother when she's older.

Mr. Haring made us do four scenes with a partner that semester. For the first one, Stephen and I did Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with me as Nick and him as George. At our first rehearsal at Stephen's apartment, I suggested he imitate Richard Burton's accent in the movie.

I nodded. "It's something I'm very proud of." I told him about SPONGE and everything.

As Nick begins what promises to be a long spiel, Kevin stares at the ceiling.

Half-Puerto Rican and half-Chinese, Kevin is a year and a half older than Nick. He's been a college student—at NYU—for at least a week now. Still in high school, Nick will be a senior at Stuyvesant, where they met in the Gay-Straight Alliance.

Kevin's the more sensible of the two, and I say that only because I've known Nick a lot longer and better. The son of two professors at Brooklyn Law School, Kevin takes over the case and lays out the facts: He turned eighteen last May and can get into tonight's 10 p.m. show in the basement of Northsix, one of those clubs that have made Williamsburg the hipster capital of the known universe.

But Nick won't be legal till December 2006, so seeing the quadruple bill of punk bands tonight will be impossible unless he's accompanied by a parent or guardian. I am Nick's parent. Therefore, only if I accompany them to Northsix to hear Seein Red, Kriegstanz, Bury the Living, and Kill Your Idols—will Nick be able to get in.

After his many caustic comments on our acting after Stephen and I did the scene from Virginia Woolf, Mr. Haring asked us a question:

"Why did you make the choice to play them as pansies?"

A boy of sixteen should be far more embarrassed to be seen at night in Williamsburg with his father than he would be upset about missing what sounds like a middling show. Even I know the basement venue has to be inferior to what's going on upstairs. I've become Paul Lynde in Bye, Bye Birdie: I don't know what's wrong with these kids today.

I didn't get it. Everyone knew Mr. Haring was homosexual, so I couldn't understand why he'd use a word like "pansies."

"It's the same reason he hates me," Stephen told me while we walked up Rockaway Parkway after school.

"Do they really check ID?" I ask. Nick already has a decent black goatee. This morning, noticing his caduceus of chest hair, Laura felt she had to remind him to wear a T-shirt when he comes to the breakfast table for his Cocoa Puffs. With commendable logic, my son told his stepmother that he'd give her request more weight if she hadn't made it while baring her own left breast to feed Lucy.

Nick actually seems older than the angelically smooth-faced Kevin, whose dyed red bangs make him look twelve to my presbyobic eyes.

But even if he's too young to remember the last Democratic mayor, Kevin is a legal adult who doesn't need his dad—who, by the way, who wouldn't score half as high as moi on the hipster-o-meter—to accompany him to Northsix tonight.

I did my other scenes with girls, playing the brutally seductive Jean to Karen Kramer's Miss Julie, wearing my tightest T-shirt to be Stanley Kowalski opposite Nina Camerlengo's Blanche du Bois, getting into bed (four desks moved together) with my wife Rosemary Benevenuto in The Fourposter.

Still, Stephen and I remained tight and took the B-6 bus together our first day at Brooklyn College.

"Yeah, they're very strict," Nick says. "You know, alcohol and all, they're afraid of trouble."

"Okay," I say. "I don't have to change, do I?"

"Nah, with those cargo shorts you'll fit right in."

"Fongool," I tell my son.

In my freshman year I became political, grew my hair long, had a girlfriend who thought she was the next Joan Baez. Stephen majored in Speech and Theatre, started pronouncing his name "Steff-in," got campier every time I'd have coffee with him every couple of weeks at Sugar Bowl.

"You don't know what it's like to hear all that shit all night and see your mother with two black eyes in the morning," he told me.

"Sweet," says Nick in response to my atavistic Brooklyn curse.

Then, to Kevin: "Let's go to Grand Street and get him a pair of earplugs."

"Hey, I don't need them," I tell him. "You think I'm not man enough to hear loud punk music? I was listening to that shit long before you were born."

"Um, Mr. G, we've got earplugs for us already," Kevin says, smiling beatifically. "We don't want to go deaf like you baby boomers after years of going to arena concerts and listening to your old, what do you call them, records."

"Think of them as ear condoms, Dad," Nick says. He and Kevin make eye contact. "You know the two of us always play it safe like the public service announcements tell us to." Now the smiles are devilish.

Beatific, devilish: I always fall back on the easiest choices.

I tell Nick and Kevin to get out of my office, that I can still save part of the day and continue to churn out tortured prose.

As I got more involved with politics and started going out with Yolanda, I didn't see Stephen that much. By the start of my senior year, fighting with Yolanda took up bigger and bigger chunks of my time.

Stephen even told Yolanda about SPONGE.

I try to write all afternoon but nothing comes out right.

After we walked past the block where Stephen lived with his mother and little brother—I barely managed to get out a curt "G'night"—I said to Yolanda, "You know, I got kind of nauseous when Stephen kissed John on the train like that. And I feel so weird about it."

She sighed. It was too late and I was too tired to break up again tonight. Yolanda didn't want to come back to my parents' basement with me, so I just let her go down the block to her apartment in the projects.

As we cross underneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the early evening, my son is uncharacteristically ebullient. Or maybe this is how he always is and I just don't pay attention.

"Don't worry, Dad," he says. "If you don't survive the show, I'll tell Laura you loved her. I'll even lie and tell Mom the same thing. And until Laura finds a young studly new husband closer to her own age, I'll help her raise Lucy like she were my own child."

"Sometimes I think Homer Simpson has the right idea when he says, 'Why, you little...' and starts choking Bart," I say.

"Mr. G!" Kevin says. "Surely you're joking about the choking." Kevin's mom teaches the Domestic Violence Workshop at Brooklyn Law School, but he's a good enough straight man to set up my next line.

"Don't call me Shirley," I tell my son's boyfriend.

I kept wondering why I was so freaked out by that kiss. After all, I'd known Stephen was gay from the first day I'd met him. I figured I probably should watch them do it again so I'd get used to it, but I had other things to deal with, like the end of my relationship with Yolanda.

My stories usually got good comments, but they weren't entertaining and graceful like Veronica's. Somehow the class took her little humorous tales more seriously than my earnest productions.

"That must have funny back in the day, Dad," Nick says about my "Don't call me Shirley" line as we pass a combination Malaysian-Peruvian restaurant where they have video screens in the restrooms.

Two weeks after our Advanced Fiction Writing class workshopped a barely disguised version of my breakup with Yolanda called "Misplaced Trust," Veronica handed in a whimsical story called "The Misplaced Trout." She claimed that the first time she looked at my story, she'd misread the title. "The Misplaced Trout" was so good that even I couldn't help admiring it.

It struck me then that Stephen was actually the friend I'd had the longest.

As we pass the Galapagos Art Space a few doors up from Northsix, I say, "There still must be time for you guys to get to an all-ages show someplace."

Nick just snorts. Kevin says, "Oh come on, Mr. G, it'll be the bomb."

"I'll take your word for it, Mr. C-R," I tell Kevin. His last name is Chin-Ramos, which the young black guy checking ID's in front of Northsix's entryway can see when he looks at Kevin's driver's license.

Nick shows his photo ID and I show mine. "I'm his father," I tell the ID-check guy. Nodding, he can see that I'm Richard Arnold Grayson and he's Nicolas Stephen Grayson.

When he was three, Nick made me read Oh, All The Places You'll Go! over and over again.

As I pay for the three of us to get into the basement and a girl with heavy black eyeliner stamps our hands, I find myself thinking: "Congratulations, today is your day! You're off to great places, you're off and away!"

After graduation, Stephen and I saw each other less frequently, but when he was hospitalized with severe back problems—they couldn't diagnose the cause but I suspected it was all the weight-lifting he'd been doing—I went to see him every day.

"He didn't help you much anyway," I said.

I'm surprised the basement venue is so small. There are only about a dozen people in the audience, most standing, a few on the single of row of seats that look like they came out of an old movie theater. Most everyone puts in their earplugs right away. When the first band—four guys from Holland—starts playing, I feel actual pain.

I stay as far away as possible from Nick and Kevin as well as the band. Punks don't need their papas close by. There are a few older people around—nobody remotely near my age, of course—and probably most of those guys only look older because they take don't care of themselves.

Even with distance and the earplugs, the music's way too loud for me. Besides, I've got ants in my pants once the second band up gets past their first song, an angry rant about Bush. So I make my way upstairs, decide not to get anything at the bar, and head outside.

The air is almost-autumn brisk as I lean up against the building's brick wall. I watch the strolling hipsters and tourists when suddenly I see a familiar face: Nick's friend Quinn.

"Hey," she says. Or maybe it's he says—Quinn is a trannyboy who's been to the house a few times.

Quinn takes my hand and pumps it in a hard handshake. She's got a cigarette in her mouth and I remind myself that I'm not every young person's parent.

"How's it going?" I ask.

"Okay," she says. "Working hard."

"Sounds good," I say.

"I'm taking testosterone now," Quinn says.

"How's it going?"

"Good, real good. I mean, I don't like putting something artificial in my body, but it's not really artificial for me, you know?"

I nod. "Not like that," I say, pointing to the cigarette. I can't help myself.

"Yeah, I keep saying I'll quit when I'm twenty-five," Quinn says. "But you're right, I should do it now. It would help me save for the surgery."

I remember at the house she said she's having only the top done: "I'm sick of Ace bandages." And: "What do I need a cock for? My masculinity is in my head."

I look at Quinn and nod one more time. "Well, nice to see you again. You're looking good."

He smiles. "Later, man," he says. "Say hi to Nick for me."

As Quinn walks down the street, I don't bother to notice if his gait is masculine or feminine. Who can tell nowadays anyway? I live in a neighborhood where neighbors notice my lack of body art. Two years ago a gay bar opened around the corner from us on Lorimer Street. The subway station has fresh ads telling riders that meth is death.

From out here, Seein Red's music probably sounds better than it does in the thick of it downstairs.

I think about Quinn and then I think about little Lucy, asleep in her crib: oh, the places they'll go.

When my first book came out, Stephen was the one to call me late at night from the hotel newsstand to tell me good news—"Richard, you made Liz Smith's column!"—and not-so-good news—"There's a review in The Village Voice. I wouldn't quite call it a rave." That was a nice way to characterize a line like "Grayson is an awkward stylist and his work suffers from sentimentality and easy laughs."

I once brought it up with Laura, and she just said, "Well, you're a writer, aren't you?" I thought of saying, "That's debatable," but I figure it would be just another one of my failures of the imagination.

For me, the show at Northsix seemed to last an eternity after I went back into the club. For the boys, who knows? Wending our way through the crowds of the terminally hip that clog Bedford Avenue after midnight, Kevin lets out a huge sigh.

"I can't believe it's four years since my first week in high school," he tells us.

"Ah, yes," I say. "Those wonderful carefree days of youth are now behind you, Kevin. I feel your pain."

"Um, my first week in school was 9/11, Mr. G. And Stuyvesant was practically next door to the twin towers. We were there like fifteen minutes when the building got evacuated."

He's right. Nick was still in middle school in Brooklyn that day.

"Sorry," I say. "I forgot. Senior moment."

Kevin needs to get back to his dorm at NYU, so I'm surprised when he doesn't get the subway at Bedford and North Seventh. "I'll walk further with you guys," he tells Nick. Mostly we do it in silence, but at one point Kevin asks me if I'm going to use anything I've seen tonight in my next work of fiction.

"Sure," I say, "but I'll just plagiarize what you write when you go home tonight and update your blog."

"You read his blog, Dad?" Nick says with real alarm.

"No," I say truthfully. "I was just joking. I didn't know he had a blog."

Kevin and Nick look at each other.

I don't know anything. I have no idea why I've been a published author since I was twenty-seven while Veronica Reilly, who had so much more talent and energy, practices ophthalmology with her partner in Westchester. The one piece of hers that ever got printed, and only because I intervened, was "The Misplaced Trout."

I hadn't seen a play in years when Stephen dragged me to a performance of Tom Eyen's Women Behind Bars at some East Village theater around 1976. Holly Woodlawn played a locked-up hooker and Divine the prison matron. Before that, I'd only seen them in Andy Warhol and John Waters movies.

But we both knew that wasn't what he meant.

The Lorimer Street entrance to the L train is closed on weekends, so we've got to say good night to Kevin at the entrance on Union and Metropolitan. There's a cop on the corner, and people walking up and down the street. A few stores down there's an all-night Korean grocery and across the street is a brightly-lit 24-hour laundromat.

So am I going to look or not when they kiss? If I look, I'm not giving them their privacy. But if I don't look, they might think worse of me. I hate for people to think worse of me.

"No, not at all," Stephen protested. "She didn't see anything. She wasn't pretending not to see anything. She really didn't see what was going on. Richard, people see what they want to see and no more than that."

What I see: My son and his boyfriend kiss.

Perhaps out of deference to me, perhaps because it's what they're doing naturally, the kiss is neither incredibly deep nor incredibly long. But it's a real kiss nonetheless, with some tongue involved.

Still, it's no epiphany, just two tired teenage lovers saying goodnight.

I imagine I kiss Laura like that all the time.