Vapors 1965

On a Friday night in New York City, Thomas Gerald Jacuzzo steps off a bus and makes his way into the dim, echoing interior of the St. Marks Baths. He is greeted by a clerk named Sam Larry Joels, who lays out the practicalities of the visit: the weekend rate is $3.50, with a weekday average of $2, and before entering he must surrender his wallet and valuables. A white robe, a towel, and slippers are handed to him, and he’s reminded that food or drinks aren’t allowed inside the baths or any of the rooms. The atmosphere feels clinical and distant, a place where steam fogs the air and voices mingle in the distance.

Thomas locks his belongings away and heads into a dark room to change into his robe, then sits on a bed, watching the rising vapors curl through the air as other men drift past in the hall, talking loudly and moving with a kind of restless energy. The surrounding hum is punctuated by the occasional, almost rehearsed joke or quip from people who seem to glide in and out of this space as if it were a stage. A sense of unease threads its way through the scene, a feeling that the baths are both sanctuary and theatre.

Soon a trio of figures enters the frame. The flamboyantly dressed drag queens, Miss Parrish Hal Sherwood and Mavis Hal Borske, saunter with a confidence that contrasts with the room’s quiet tension, while Thumbelina Richard Goldberger and Taffy Larry Ree move with a practiced ease that hints at underlying stories they’re not ready or willing to tell. The young man senses the social currents shifting around him as the group’s dialogue veers between light banter and sharper, more degrading remarks about the other attendees. The atmosphere remains charged, an uneasy blend of curiosity, performance, and unspoken judgment.

Into this charged space steps Mr. Jaffee Robert Dahdah, a middle‑aged man who introduces himself and makes his intentions clear in a quiet, almost awkward way. He says he’s here not to return home to a wife he’s been with for nineteen years, and Thomas—presenting himself as a newcomer to this world—admits that he’s actually here for a first experience, despite a whispered bravado about visiting the baths three or four times a week. The exchange grows uneasy as Mr. Jaffee’s warmth slips away and a chill settles in the room. He speaks of a dream about women’s feet and insists on staying close to Thomas, turning the conversation toward his own troubled life and the reasons for his visit.

In a chilling aside, Mr. Jaffee recounts the anniversary of his sixteen-year-old son’s death—an event that fractured his marriage and left a lasting scar. The man’s monologue grows cooler and more revealing, and his presence begins to feel less like company and more like a haunting mirror of Thomas’s own fears. He confesses that his appearance reminds him of his son, a thought that makes the young man shrink back, unsettled, as the clock ticks in the background and the room seems to close in around them.

Just as the tension peaks, Miss Parrish, Mavis, Thumbelina, and Taffy burst back into the room, carrying a wrapped package. Thomas tells them to leave, and they comply, though they soon return with the package in hand and a sense that something intimate is about to unfold. Inside the paper wrapper lies a simple paper sunflower—a gift that seems to carry far more weight than its delicate appearance would suggest. The gesture unsettles Thomas, and he whispers for them to go again, retreating to the bed to collect his thoughts. The others depart, but the moment lingers, heavy with unspoken meaning and a sense of abandonment.

Left alone, Thomas sits with the silence that follows the storm of visitors. He lights a cigarette and stares upward at the black ceiling, letting the steam fog his thoughts as graffiti and shadows drift across the walls. Then, a soft knock of a presence—an intruder moving past the door—shifts the mood once more. The intruder Ron Keith lingers at the threshold, a silent, almost predatory figure who watches and waits. The room’s tension fractures again as Thomas, still clearly vulnerable, invites the intruder in with a hesitant nod.

What follows is an unguarded, intimate moment that closes the scene with a raw, unresolved pause. The man steps inside, disrobes, and approaches Thomas with a directness that leaves the room with an amplified quiet. The moment is not framed as romance or spectacle, but as a stark, unspoken invitation that ends the sequence with a choice hanging in the air.

Throughout, the bathhouse setting—the dim lighting, the steady hiss of steam, the muffled conversations, and the rules about decorum—functions like a character itself, shaping the mood and guiding the choices of everyone present. The story unfolds with a restrained, almost documentary-like lens, presenting each person as a fragment of a larger, sometimes conflicted social mosaic. The film does not offer easy answers or tidy conclusions; instead, it presents the bathhouse as a crossroads where loneliness, desire, memory, and fear intersect in small, charged moments that linger long after the screen goes black.

Attendant Myron Williams watches from the periphery at times, a quiet reminder of the institution’s routine amid the personal storms playing out within the rooms. The result is a study in mood and human behavior, a snapshot of a specific night in a place that has its own rules, rhythms, and undercurrents, captured with a careful, observational eye. The characters—each with their own pain, humor, and longing—interact within the bathhouse’s intimate, confessional space, leaving the viewer with a lingering sense of ambiguity and reflection about what such spaces mean to those who inhabit them.