Faggots (31 page)

Frigger dashes in, pulls a decorative bunting from a column, and quickly wraps the beauty in crepe. He wonders does a body hex or help an opening night. He wishes everybody would go home. His mouth is hungry.

Milling bodies think passing thoughts. That one’s had too much. I must watch out. How much have I had tonight? I always told you smoking kills.

Hans Zoroaster rushes up to view the body of his late great model.

“What is your name, boy?” Hans cannot take his eyes from young Purvis.

“Winnie Purvis,” Timmy answers in memoriam.

“I shall make you a star!”

But Timmy hasn’t heard. Or he’s heard it all before. So what? He’s suddenly very lonely. He needs some arms to hold and warm him. He’s suddenly frightened that his bite of the Big Apple is more than he can chew. Here comes that Dildough. He really wasn’t so bad.

But Dildough has returned with fire, ice, and the suitor who is the handsome gymnast-architect with the silver bracelet, Robbie Swindon. His face had been vaguely familiar to Randy from somewhere. Had he ever done a scene with him? Yes, Dildough is back to his former self. A scene we’ll certainly do tonight! So good to get back into known roles. He looks down at young Timothy. “So long, Timothy.” And off he and Robbie start toward an elevator down.

“I am so happy to be seeing you again so soon!” Dordogna del Dongo, her flaming-red hair swaying and her gold bangles clanking and her deep dark eyes muskying, has finally found her man.

“Next week!…Save me an evening!…save me two evenings!…” What am I saying? And Randy grabs that Swindon and makes it through the elevator door before it closes.

“I’ll bet he’ll come to Fire Island,” says her friend, the ever-helpful Marine, our Adriana.

“Such a coincidence that you have invited me, too,” Dordogna says.

Hans says again to Timmy: “I shall make you a star!” Even his gold tit now radiates anticipation.

The Divine Bella, fresh from golden-showered triumphs in Jackie O and smelling a column item, hears these words from their most important model-maker. He immediately bends to kiss this newest beauty of our moment in time. “My precious, I am enraptured, such a world and life is now in store for you!”

“Phew,” someone says. “What do you use to get rid of the smell of piss?”

“You buy it at a pet shop and it’s called Fresh Pussy,” someone answers.

Lork and Carlty and Yo-Yo and Tom-Tom and Dawsie and Pusher all now rush up to reluctantly get a closer look at Timmy. Now he’s really competition. Hans beams that his children like each other so.

Dinky, without Dennis, whose passion for a scene had evaporated when he’d seen his Master decked, nods hello at that elevator door to Frigger.

“I wasn’t late,” Dinky says.

“You were four fucking hours late,” says Frigger, referring to that night seven years ago when Frigger had refused to wait any longer and had left Dinky, as he now again does.

Here comes Laverne, alone. He’d been unable to respond on the spot to Robbie’s proposal of marriage. He’d promised a decisive answer at the Island tomorrow, which of course now is today.

“Can I give you a lift?” Dinky asks his late lover.

Laverne sighs. He hates himself as he hears his answer: “OK.”

Fred’s gone home.

Such a night of nights.

Josie and Dom Dom, wearing matching hues of tired sagging grays, leave The Toilet Bowl holding tightly.

“Oh, Dom Dom, what’s happened to kiss and cuddle?”

“They’re coming back in the eighties.”

Yes, such a Night of Nights!

And Rory Neutra, a film director’s son and in charge of cleaning up with his staff of twelve, made the following census of trashy items after all had gone: one coffin, two sets of portable gallows, seven hoods, two executioner’s masks, one artificial arm, ten high heels, four net stockings, twenty gross of used poppers, eighty-three empty bottles of liquid same, fourteen rubbers, seven diaphragms, one damaged dildo, ten pairs of ladies’ underpants, ten sets of Chafeze, forty-seven jockstraps, twelve basketball player’s shorts, fourteen numbered jerseys, seven cock sacks, twenty-one falsies, five cock-and-balls harnesses, six ankle shackles, seven bras, two corsets, eighteen whips, one pair of Gloves of Silence, two force-feeders, one mace, forty clothespins, one cattle prod, three boweling balls, one surgical ass-spreader, several odd lengths of rope, several unmatched links of chain, one Ping Pong paddle, five empty containers of Joy Jell (one each of raspberry, orange, grape, licorice, and Persian Rose), two depleted tubes of Sta-Hard, seven dual inhalers, one universal harness, three Crisco-ed pool cues, one pair of thumb cuffs, one pulsating vagina, four vibrators with worn-out batteries, one copy of
The Complete Enema Guide,
a couple of dog collars, one meat tenderizer, five blindfolds, three unmatched spiked gauntlets, one pair of slave hobbles, 1,453 roach ends, 17,543 cigarette butts, seventy asshorted cans of Crisco, two hundred Vaseline empties, one hundred and twelve depleted Intensive Cares, ten knives, forty-two cock rings in various sizes, seven tit rings, one black leather jerkin, one empty pill case, twenty-seven kilos of dried semen scraped from simply everywhere, seventeen pounds of shit, one hand-lettered sign:
DANNY’S PISS CLUB MEETS EVERY SUNDAY E
&
L—B.Y.O.P
., one lavender letter: “I love you so fucking much I can hardly shit,” twenty pale faces popping out from the interior for air and light and wanting to go back for more, and an exhausted Blaze, fast asleep in Jackie O and dreaming of models, models, models.

Two other discos opened tonight. Mission Accomplished, owned by fellows in Las Vegas, kept five thousand overexcited and eager customers waiting on the streets till three, but once inside, free strawberries, top-drawer sound, and the legendary Tino D. J., plus a balcony (the place had been a former opera house, which stretched up to heaven, from which one could look down on all the dancing fleas) made it a Possible, only time would tell, the efficient Alfestra bei Icker, press agent to the bisexually affluent, was being summoned and Alfestra had worked wonders in the past. Fury’s Place, named after a former body builder turned drag queen out of Atlantic City who thought he had a lot of friends but didn’t, closed on opening night.

Fred went home to void and purge his system. A douche, an enema, to love that wasn’t love. So long, Feffer, so long, Dinky, hello…what?

He wrote to Dinky on a sweet note card with a bowl of cherries on a background the color of sand:

He considered the prose. Did it scan? Was it sufficiently metaphoric? Was it light, fluffy, but with an undercurrent of heartrending hurt and meaning? Ah, how little experience he’d had in dealing with problems of the heart! But then, who had?

So, trying to perform like a Great Person who has just discovered the cure for a heretofore incurable disease—Greer Garson as Madame Curie, Joan Fontaine in
Letter from An Unknown Woman,
Roddy McDowell in
Lassie, Come Home…
Fred Lemish as Mother Courage—he marched up to West 29th Street, taking with him a roll of Scotch tape, another note card, and a pen, in case he wished to revise or rewrite along the way.

At the shrine, he waited until an early worker left the building so he could gain entrance. Then he took off his shoes and walked up the six flights stealthily and he taped his note, as was, to Dinky’s door—at last Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses on the church in Wittenberg, not a Jewish town—trying not to imagine what Dinky was doing to Dennis on the other side of it. Ah, was there any pain as agonizing as that caused by the knowledge that your beloved, correction!, ex-beloved, was doing it with someone else? He has rejected your body, he has said he prefers to do it with another body, come on Lemish!, cut the crap!, how much shit are you willing to take just for the memory of a little intimacy, how crazy and hungry can you be? With this Bowl of Cherries, your
Ladies’ Home Journal
days must now be over.

So up went the note and down went its author, still stealthily, Butch Jenkins departing
Scene of the Crime,
back down six flights, reentering his Weejuns at the bottom, walking tall out of the building, his hair now dry but his brow making up for it, giving the finger to Dinky’s seagreen Dodge pick-up, and heading home. Ever so much stronger. Out of my hair. Yes sir, yes sir. And back to behind his picnic curtains on Washington Square. Alone. To try and sleep alone.

Dinky was of course behind that lettered door with Laverne. Yes, Laverne was back in his old stamping grounds, his very own apartment, which he had vacated six months ago, causing Frigger, always ready with a one-liner, to quip to Dinky: “Darling, you’ve done what every queen dreams of doing! You’ve wound up with the real estate.”

Yes, Jack and Dinky, the two lean, handsome, youthful beauties of thirty, they’d been an admirable pair, the going-to-be-an-architect who quit school to live with the teacher of English when they thought they were in love and bought the house by the canal in Southampton and opened a store where they sold beautiful things, and failed, were side by side once more, naked upon that pedestal bed Dinky’d made with his own hands.

Both found the conjunction strange. Dinky was trying to embrace Laverne. Laverne did not wish to be embraced.

So Dinky pulled out a bedside volume and thumbed to a page. “I found this quote in Trollope. I’ve been reading this new Trollope. Remember, you introduced me to Trollope?”

Laverne remembered.

Dinky then read aloud, smiling, and as poetically as he could. “‘Did Lily feel the want of something heroic in a man before she could teach herself to look upon him as more worthy of her regard than other men? There had been moments when John had almost risen to the necessary point—had almost made good his footing on the top of some moderate hill, but still sufficient mountain. But there had still been a succession of little tumbles, and he had never quite stood upright on his pinnacle, visible to Lily’s eyes as being really excelsior.’ Story of you and me.”

“Who’s the Lily and who’s the John?” Laverne asked, wondering if he understood Dinky even now, wondering if he’d ever understood Dinky, wondering, come to think of it, if Laverne understood Jack either. All he felt was cynical. Trollope indeed. He’d go and live with Robbie Swindon and he’d try. “What makes you think we can start all over again?”

“What makes you think we can’t?”

“What would you do with Irving and Ike Bulb and Lemish and Tony and Olive and Dennis and Mr. Savannah?”

“I don’t fuck with Ike Bulb, I can’t find Paulie, Irving’s a joke, Olive is boring and only into dildoes, Tony won’t see me anymore, Piero ran off with some of my money, Chipper has another lover and they moved to California, Floyd I only used to make you jealous, I don’t fuck with Frigger anymore, Dennis I only see when I feel the need to be a Master, and Fred Lemish is in love with me. He’s a mess. Love will do it every time. You see, at least I’m honest with you. I always tell you the whole story.” He then paused before adding: “Everyone is so silly. Everyone wants too much. Being gay isn’t fun anymore.”

“You need too much amusement.” Then Laverne paused, too, to think: My, it certainly was a full six years, before adding: “Love isn’t silly.”

“You were the only one who wasn’t silly. You were the only one who ever understood me.”

“I was the only one who let you get away with you! You’re too fucking handsome and too fucking clever and you always have to have your own way and I always let you and I never could believe a thing you said! Fred Lemish was right to slam you in the face. All I ever did was throw at you those mixing bowls from Crete. And miss. You ought to stay with him. He’s rich and famous and you’d always eat. And he wouldn’t let you get away with you. Yes, he sounds the right person for you.”

“You were the right person for me.”

“I was the right person for you once. No more. I’m going to go and live with Robbie Swindon.”

Dinky lay back for another moment of pause. Then he rolled over and leaned down and rummaged in a drawer in the base of the bed and pulled out a long, gray two-headed dildo from days of long ago. Then he placed it, wriggling like a snake, into that space between them, where it rested ominously.