“Realize what?” Dennis Savage asked.
“Oh.” He smiled. “Jesus. Remember when we were the new boys in town? Trying everything for the first time? Wasn’t there one encounter in there somewhere when you felt you weren’t just sharing something with someone but … well, opening yourself dangerously to him? Totally, sort of? I mean, like feeling him pressing against you through your emotions? And imagine now … imagine if you saw that coming and tried to close yourself away from it, because you don’t want someone knowing you so well. But the other guy won’t let go. He presses. He presses, gentlemen. Closer and closer. He invades you. A stranger. And, like if you pleaded with him to let you be he’d hold you and he’d soothe you. You know. But he’d keep coming and you’d never be safe. Never. Never. Never.” He took up a sponge to polish off the counter, but just stood there. “You guys tell me, what kid could stand up to that?”
“What’s going to happen to Bobby?” I asked. “Is he going to get hurt?”
“Dick Tangent doesn’t hurt them. The way he does it, there are no visible scars.”
“What exactly does he do?” asked Dennis Savage. “Is it like with your father?”
Carlo shrugged and sponged off the counter.
“What did your brother say to you?” Dennis Savage asked me.
“Not another word,” I announced, “shall pass my lips.”
“Those talks aren’t meant to be shared,” murmured Carlo.
“Just tell me one thing. Are you comparing this family discipline routine to S&M?”
“Not sexually,” Carlo replied. “Family discipline isn’t sexual. But S&M is more than sex.”
* * *
The dogs pranced about me when I returned. The house was still, and Bobby sat despairing on the deck as the sun went down.
“What am I going to do?” he asked me.
I didn’t know.
“I can’t stay here anymore.”
I nodded, looked sage.
“Wherever I go, he’ll find me. They always do.”
If this boy lives to be thirty, I thought, he’s going to have an
amazing
backstory.
“Tell me something,” I said, sitting next to him. “Do you love Dick—I mean,
really
do you? Or is he just an available sweetheart?”
“Oh, what difference does that make?”
“To a lot of Pines beauties like yourself, no difference. My point is: are you in this house because this is the summer of love or die, or are you truly hooked on him? If the former, you can get away from him. He’s not the KGB, you know. If the latter, maybe you should work something out with him, with less S and more M. Or maybe he actually has a deep and abiding crush on you and together you can—”
“You fucking asshole,” he said sorrowfully.
I rose. “Go to hell.”
“I’m sorry.” He grabbed my arm. “Please don’t leave me alone. It’s just … you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t work anything out with pirates. They come in where you are and they say they’re going to be nice to you but they aren’t, whatever you do. It just eggs them on. I’ve tried joking with them, and getting tough, and running like hell, and screaming for help, and crying. You name it. They just keep coming in.”
“Coming in where?”
“They’re pirates, don’t you see what they are? They’re
pirates!
All they care about is … is…”
“Plunder.”
“What’s that?”
“You.”
“So what do I do now?”
The dogs came up, leashes clamped in their jaws: time for my walk. “Come on. We’ll spin along the beach and talk about it.” The dogs romped frantically ahead down the walk while Bobby paced what looked like a last mile somewhat behind us. Every so often the dogs would look back and bark at him. Cute doesn’t score any points with them; they think he’s boring. Mortimer growled.
“Even his dogs are pirates,” Bobby muttered.
“Well,” I said, as we reached the water. “The way I see it, you have only to decide whether to go on with Dick and take what he dishes out or drop him for someone who isn’t a pirate.”
He splashed around in the water to his ankles, head down, shivering in the gathering wind. He sighed.
“What does he do to you?” I asked, trying to connect Carlo’s lesson with Bobby’s theory of the pirate.
“You know what he does. He cockfucks me to death.”
“Besides that.”
“He tells me things.”
“What things?”
“Adventures we could have, like.”
“Such as?”
He looked at me a long while. “No,” he said finally. “You’ll get mad.”
“Not at you.”
He made a face, designed to look wacko but very winning, a face to energize a pirate. “Fantastic adventures, that’s all.”
I waited.
“Like … there’s a war somewhere. And the soldiers wreck this town and take hostages. And they’re in this barn and all the soldiers get drunk and they decide to snuff the hostages. So each soldier picks out a prisoner he likes … you know. It goes on from there.”
“I’ll just bet it does.”
He shrugged. “I don’t mind those stories. Dick’s not the first man who told me them, anyway. It’s just that sometimes he makes me tell them, too.”
“What?”
“It’s funny what you’ll say once you get going. Horrible things. Horrible, terrible sexy things. All made up. Things that could never happen. It’s like I’m drugged, like he’s pulling something out of me that shouldn’t be there. The more we do it, the more comes out.” He shivered again. “It doesn’t sound so bad, I guess, talking about it like this. But after it happens, I feel so rotten and crazy. I feel like he’s going to turn me into someone else, almost. Into…”
A pirate, I thought.
“Did this ever happen to you?”
“No.” Yes. “Not really.”
“And then he gets so tense with me sometimes. They always do, pirates. They get sore so easily. Oh, please don’t be sore at me!”
He sent this over my shoulder: Dick had come down to the water, taking all four of us by surprise.
“Please,” said Bobby, approaching him. “Please, Dick,” stroking his arm. “I’ll be a good boy and I’ll do what you say,” putting his arms around him and resting his head against Dick’s shoulder as Dick moodily rubbed his back.
“We’re going all the way tonight, Bobby boy,” said Dick.
Bobby shifted position and held Dick more tightly, his feet almost on Dick’s as if he were trying to climb into him. “Dick,” he whispered.
“All the way to rope,” said Dick.
Bobby was quiet.
Dick looked at me without changing expression. “I’ll cook steak and mickies on the grill. You can make the salad. There’s peppers and scallions and carrots. Use olive oil this time, and drop the chives
over
the bowl at the last minute. Don’t mix them in with the dressing.”
“Dick,” said Bobby, looking up at him. “Listen. Not the rope yet. Okay? Dick?”
Dick took Bobby by the hand and led him up the sand to the dunes. The dogs and I watched.
“Dick is about to start losing his hair, I think,” I told Mortimer, who was pulling on a leg of my jeans, trying to get me to follow his master. “And Bobby is about to be patterned,” I told Gridley, pulling the other leg toward the ocean. “Dick will touch his eyes, I bet.”
At the base of the stairs, Dick and Bobby paused and spoke a bit, and Dick ruffled Bobby’s hair. They kissed, a good long one. As they mounted the steps, Bobby turned to us and waved happily. Gridley barked.
“I think someone just got a reprieve,” I said.
Mortimer grumped.
“Of course, we should consider the possibility that Bobby is made of stone in the first place.”
Mortimer sat.
“In the middle of this riot, you notice, I get gourmet reproaches about the chives in the dressing.”
Gridley sat. Mortimer dug a little hole.
“All of which teaches us that, sooner or later, every gay gets roped. Sooner or later.”
Gridley snapped at a beetle.
“Boys, I ask you; which is better: to take your roping early and grow up sophisticated, or come out innocent and work up to it?”
They hadn’t a clue. I would have raced them to the stairs, but it occurred to me that at that distance Dick and Bobby looked like father and son, or perhaps two brothers, and I didn’t want to shake up the picture.
Ranging wildly through the years of Stonewall, and perhaps more a discussion than a story, although the most drastic narrative event in all this book darkens the final pages.
I was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in the class of 1969 with a degree in Medieval Studies, for all the good that did me: none. Mother greeted my return with, “Help, the monster-child is back!” My dad, more whimsically, told me how much my education had cost him—“door to door,” as he put it, meaning
tout compris,
from the tuition bills to my train fares to and fro and even the dinners at Bookbinder’s when they jaunted down for a visit.
All told, he quoted a whopping sum. I felt guilty. I decided to devote the summer to Good Works, such as tending bar at weekend cocktail hours. (With recreational amenities and a convenient suburban location, my parents did a lot of entertaining.) My specialty was Tequila Sunrises poured into huge goblets over cracked ice and topped with lemon juice, the fruit so overpowering the taste of the liquor that the uninitiated took them for a kind of art deco orangeade. In fact, it’s potent stuff. One Sunday morning we came outside to find Aunt Agnes, Uncle Mike, cousins Jeffrey and Rita, their children, three locals, and an unfamiliar dog all passed out on the patio, and I was in trouble again. Worse yet, I intercepted the invitations to my graduation exercises and hid them so I wouldn’t have to go back to Philadelphia. By day I tooled around the north shore of Long Island with my high-school chums; at night I worked on a novel of dubious virtue. By the summer’s end, Mother had had it. Coming into my room one night, she said, “Monster-child, we all love you very much … but why are you still here?”
She had a point. First I negotiated a settlement—years later, when I told my agent Dorothy the terms of the deal, she was impressed by their generosity. “It’s like a contract with Knopf!” she said, deep praise. Thus endowed, I phoned an older friend who had once offered the hospitality of East End Avenue, packed a valise, sat in with two grad students of old acquaintance on their drive into town for the start of the semester, and, in September of 1969, at the dawn of Stonewall, I moved into New York.
Like everyone else of my ilk, I was unlearned in metropolitan style. But one meets people. There’s a name or two to call. One event leads to another—the opera, say, to cocktails on a terrace. You’d be surprised what doors the right tie will open. Hugh Whitkin’s, of course, was one of them, but at the time I had no inkling of what I would become, and value, and despise. I had skipped two grades of grammar school and ended up somehow always younger than my attainments warranted. I was unformed, the raw recruit. But I did notice that my old society of mixed couples going steady and gearing up for careers was ceding to a more complex fellowship, all-male, of brunching, cruising, and tricking. When my old friends got themselves placed, aligned, married, they would ask of a stranger, “What do you do?” When my new friends asked that question, it came out, “What do you like to do?” and it meant: in bed.
There was, in fact, a veritable old-boy network still in operation then—possibly because counseling the new boy in town on the nature of life was not unlike learning from youth about the nature of love. So, anyway, I took the transaction to be. At length someone brought me to a spacious co-op in the east eighties for advising by a wise old queen.
“First of all,” that worthy warned me, “you must have a best friend. First of all. So?”
What was I supposed to say? I tried to look concise and untouchable, yet warm. Enigmatic. Big-city.
“Second of all, so? You must have a dream of success, a work ambition. Do not be a waiter, a bar pianist, a masseur. Be avant-garde, but be respected.”
“So,” I murmured.
“Quite,” he rejoined. “Friendship, ambition … yes: then comes love, thirdly. Do not expect it. Do not look for it. Do not believe in it. Are you willing?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Will you renounce love?”
“Of course not.”
“So.” He smiled. “I just wanted to see. Of course you believe in love. Of course. I believe in love, in my many years. Yet I’ve never known love. Do you think that strange?”
“Not in the least.”
“Sweet chicken.”
“I’m not a chicken,” I flared up.
He considered me.
“Nor am I. Do you suppose that’s interesting?”
* * *
Would I ever be doing this myself? I wondered. Do all gays become queens in due course? So I looked around and marked what I saw, noted whither the culture tended. The wise old queen put forth his three rules and I had mine. First of all, queens and clones stay the same, but kids become men, or nothing. Second, all gays have, somewhere, a touch of queen in them—or let’s say an instinct for rebellion. Last, once a gringo crosses over into gay he can never get back. To attempt to retreat would be like giving up all your friends, your sense of brotherhood, of affirmed self. Or so I guessed.
It was, in any case, the age of the clone. The wise old queens were passing on, or keeping to themselves in their gala co-ops, and I thought how different a wise old clone’s advice to some newcomer might be, how very potent the urge to friendship, how disinterested the line on ambition … and what does a clone think of love?
To Big Steve Bosco, a king clone, I said, “Some are born clones and some attain it. Does anyone have it thrust upon him?”
“You’re a funny guy,” he said. That means that Big Steve missed a few words in the sentence. But then, I had noticed, large, humorous, loving men were attractive even without great savvy. Ah, what would you talk about, you ask? But the odd thing is that clones never run out of things to say to each other. Nor do queens—though they prefer to speak to clones, as a rule. It’s kids who lack tongue, who really don’t know what is being said from one sentence to the next, or who, lacking attention, develop irritating allergies: to cats, soap, porcelain, whatever will disrupt a lover’s life.