Faggots (4 page)

And suddenly he found himself falling to the floor, Fred did, being careful to hold his water in, and getting underneath Dinky, and looking up at him, at that thirty-year-old beauty, towering above him, handsome like the devil, with black hair rakishly widow’s-peaked in the center of his forehead, darting black eyes that sometimes looked at you, a round cherubic face protected by a full, short, neat, black beard, biceps the wonderful size of smooth, firm, elongated honeydews, under which resided Fred’s favorite spot, those beautiful armpits, soft, wispily fluffy, nice-smelling of Dial soap, and that rest of his body, a personal triumph over childhood skinniness and a touch of bad feet, now perfected into faggot desirability: muscular, tough, smooth skin, not an inch of fat, to which he dashingly added a small gold earring to his pierced left lobe. Oh, it was gorgeous, this view from neath Mount Rushmore. It was so gorgeous that Fred’s own cock became gigantic. Could it be that for all these years he was unknowingly harboring a very big cock and not only not knowing it, but not using it as well? Oh, gorgeous Dinky, up there, you who like me and have come after me, wooed me these weeks of my trying to play hard to get, not be anxious, not be hungry, not fuck this one up; you who read books and design gardens and plan interiors and love to travel and dance and cook so well; you who swung me in a hammock in your sweet little Southampton house beside a canal, our Venice, as I read to you about our shared love for England; you who smiled at me as we awoke in each other’s arms after a wonderful night of love; you who have said: “I really like your profile,” “You have such nice feet,” “You’re very important to me,” “On paper we make so much sense—we have mutual interests and the sex is good,” “I believe in old-fashioned marriage, where people make commitments and out of respect the love just grew and grew,” our first month of truly filling simple things, being alone together, you are giving me this hugeness!

Then, just as suddenly, still on his knees, he crawled around in front of Dinky’s perfect ass. He took both cheeks in his hands and he buried his face in it like an elegant pillow in a perfect Italian palazzo overlooking the blue Mediterranean where they could be when they were living happily ever after. If they hadn’t moved to England. Then he moved his face down and under, and inspected, like a mechanic beneath a Porsche on the overhead rack. The cock was perfect, the balls were perfect, the conjunction of all parts was perfect. Fred was glorying in the knowledge of true ownership: this Perfection is Mine! I love it!

And in he stuck his tongue into Dinky’s asshole.

He just did it. It tasted good. It tasted very good. It was smooth and clean, rather like a good quality moist satin. Dinky’s asshole was lined with a lovely ribbon!

And Dinky was obviously enjoying it, because he was growing an even larger hard-on than any Fred had seen him grow during their times together, which had not always been the case, Dinky’s hard-ons, which was something Fred didn’t like to think about or look at, as he now was looking at Dinky’s own present giganticism.

Then they went into Fred’s bedroom, which was a perfect room of plants and indirect lighting and soft music and a wide mattress upon a gray platform with a hanging black-and-brown curtain of duck canvas to wrap around it all as they had their secret picnic with each other. After a slight detour to the john, Fred then allowed himself once again to be fucked.

It hadn’t always been such. Before Dinky, Fred had not liked to get fucked, even though he had noted over the years that those he was fucking always seemed to be enjoying it more than he was in doing it to them. No, it took Dinky to show him the way, in a manner that no number of years of advice and pamphlets and manuals on “Painless Rectal Intercourse”—replete with their diagrams of all canals and passageways and orifices and advice to “relax,” so that these could bend and sway—had been able to do.

No, Dinky had showed him how. With tenderness. Dinky was the most tender lover Fred had ever known. He was soft and, while not actually giving—Dinky was not a kisser or a toucher, unless stoned, when he did both beautifully—he managed to convey in lying there, with Fred sitting on his cock above him, that the gentle movements back and forth—making them one, oh happiest moment of moments! Making Them One! Dinky and Fred! get the embroidered towels ready! order them now! find that spot in the country! sign the lease! Dinky will remodel! happily ever after is beginning right this very Now—were the most pleasing Fred could ever recollect receiving. From anyone. Did not such tenderness mean his heart beat for Fred!

Indeed, to be fucked pleasurably is a gift.

And then Fred said it: “I love you, Dinky.”

Richard “Boo Boo” Bronstein stood at the dark end of an abandoned pier by the mighty Hudson and, while he was having his cock sucked by a balding, bobbing head belonging to an older gentleman, further fantasized that with which his life was now obsessed. His own self-inflicted kidnapping.

The papers would be full of it. Richard Bronstein, the twenty-four-year-old son of the multimillionaire cake-mix manufacturer turned movie producer who had divorced the sporting-goods heiress after the bar mitzvah of their second son, Richard, in order to marry the former teen-aged cover girl from New Zealand, who was then replaced by Miss Australian Butter, and then Miss South African Gold, had disappeared. Through her tears, Mrs. Ephra Lopp Bronstein, the first, rich, and American one, would announce on Walter Cronkite that it was all her husband’s fault.

Boo Boo knew he would cry when he saw his mother on the news. But the experience will be very good for her, he thought. She is entirely too selfish. Besides, she should hate Pop as much as I do.

And, just thinking about it, he came in the older gentleman’s mouth.

The father, Abraham Bronstein, he who was the son of immigrant German peasants, escaped from the pogroms of their native Dienstag to peddle rolls and nuts and eventually parlay cakes and cookies, pies and pizzas, into a fortune in the New World (reported in last Sunday’s Financial Section of
The New York Times
as producing a record fiscal profit from all divisions, 29% over last year, $2.03 dividend per share, $146,000,000, Abraham Bronstein, Chairman of the Board), would undoubtedly suspect foul play of the most heinous sort.

“God is finally getting his revenge,” Richie would hear Abe sadly confide to Walter. “For my success. For my hubris. For my not loving my Richie.”

Even at this moment of climactic triumph, Boo Boo wouldn’t cry. “Unh, thanks,” he said to his kneeling benefactor, who had actually swallowed the stuff, a feat which always amazed Boo Boo, who wouldn’t stoop so low.

“What’s your name,” the balded one asked, creaking to an upright position and liking even more what he saw. “You have a phone number so we can do it again? Indoors.”

“My name is Tex. No phone.”

And Boo Boo walked away.

Patty, Maxine, and Laverne were the best of friends and had been ever since they met dancing years ago at the old Tenth Floor. Each danced in a similar style, two legs implanted solidly on the ground, movement only from the knees and hips, the former back and forth, the latter side to side, hands discreetly undulating in and out and only within a modest circumference from the upper torso, eyes always straight ahead or closed. It was either a lazy man’s dance or a wise one’s, since its lack of caloric intensity allowed, with the aid of a few chemicals, for non-stop participation midnight till dawn and was, for all its rootedness to earth, still quite graceful.

Jack Humpstone was called Laverne because he was, with Manny and Moe, partners in the flourishing discotheque, Balalaika, and because there were three thirty-year-old friends and partners named Manny, Moe and Jack, they were christened, faggot-style, Patty, Maxine, and Laverne.

Patty, who was tall, thin, balding, hyperactive, and completely unable to delegate authority (“Listen! it’s easier to do it myself than to trust just any slag”), was definitely in charge, to the relief of the other two, who still pursued independent careers. Maxine, who was Patty’s lover, and who was addicted, in moments of stress, to dressing up as Elizabeth Taylor, was hefty, bouncy, and sharp (“Closets, schmosets, everyone’s out of the closet. Now where the fuck are the
men
!”), and currently sold women’s shoes at Lord and Taylor, where the ladies always asked for “that young man who knows my feet so well.” He and Patty had been together for seven years, and Maxine was not aware that an itch had now descended on his lover and it wasn’t coming from crabs.

Laverne, who looked like John-Boy Walton with his neat and trim body, his youthful face and demeanor, and his slightly off-kilter hillbilly smile perking under his close-cropped steel-blond hair, was a schoolteacher in White Plains (“They are as retarded in Westchester as they are everywhere else”), where he tried to instill a love of English literature in heathen, suburban minds. He was a Southern Baptist boy from Birmingham, Alabama, and he was as together as anyone could be with an itinerant preacher for a father and a mother who was Betty Crocker All-State Finalist twelve years running, and who had discovered his own sexuality while a scholarship student at Washington and Lee, not with one of his classmates or instructors but with his Uncle Jeeter back on the farm—and who had just extricated himself forcefully from a six-year affair with Dinky Adams, to whom he had given himself in innocence and expectation, and by whom he’d been intimidated out of both

But Jack was now going to a dyke shrink who had offered the hopeful, positive suggestion: “Mr. Humpstone, I think you may be a heterosexual
manqué,
” and so perhaps not distant would be the day when his current inferiority (an impotency brought on by the fact that his cock had a head like a mushroom, which Dinky, claiming it hurt him when Jack fucked him, had utilized as an excuse to have sex elsewhere, which destroyed poor Laverne and his fantasy of love and sex melding into one by a hearthside yet unbuilt) would vanish, freeing himself up for sparking, roaring fires with the wooing Robbie Swindon, so patiently waiting in the wings.

It was Patty who had decided, when the old Tenth Floor was forcibly closed by the Fire Department—that most homophobic of all city agencies—to open his own place. He’d started saving and he’d looked and looked, with Maxine as a willing, if astringently mouthed companion, for possible premises. After work (Patty had been an accountant in the cookie division of Bronstein Bakeries), Saturdays, Sundays, uptown, downtown, Brooklyn Heights (“Patty, no tripping queen is going to take a subway to Brooklyn to go dancing”) until, on a very cold Election Day Tuesday four years ago, they were shown a parcel of properties on West Street, near Little Eleventh, across from the Hudson, by Alvin Sorokin (whose Immigrant Savings represented them), who told them: “A lease on this piece of shit is yours for any price.” It was a piece of shit, an assortment of ill-matching adjoining sags and warps that would have done Dickens justice; the second floor of one did not greet the second floor of its brother, but Robbie, a Mormon architect who had been expelled from Brigham Young for being caught jerking off in the middle of the night and refusing to name names of any fellow Unnatural Behavers (not that he then knew any), forcing him to receive his degree in the East, showed them in sketches (Dinky had wanted the job but Patty had told him he wasn’t qualified) how neat it would all be when a little money was spread around and how, after knocking out a few of the ground-floor walls, the street level would be dynamite. It would be, as it now was, a huge dancing womb of a place, suitable for thousands, with angled bleachers up to the d.j.’s nest, and, since one whole side had outlets to the street, there would be no Tenth-Floor-exit problem to disturb the awful Fire Department, still carrying on their tradition of unleashed homophobia. Alvin helped arrange a tight lease for ninety-nine years with the owners of the property, the Dippsy Doodle Cake Company, Limited, as Beneficial Nominee for the Lopp Trust. Patty paid $10,000 down, which was all the money he had saved from his cookies, plus $10,000 he’d begged from his aging parents in Brooklyn, plus $2,500 from Maxine and $1,000 from Laverne. It was theirs.

Robbie, always the nice smile, the black turtleneck, the handsome silver bracelet, the muscled gymnast’s body, drew up plans as best he could under the grief of some difficulties pertaining to his current lover’s penchant for fucking around elsewhere. To effect the extensive renovations and purchase the best of sound equipment, additional monies were secured by renting out part of the excess basement space to what Patty at first thought was Tiny Tots, Inc., a job lotter of kiddies’ clothes, preschool to preteen, but which, after opening, turned out to be The Pits, a rather special gay bar. The upstairs partners were naturally upset to find competition quite so close at foot, but after Patty, unknown to Maxine, had paid a few visits to the place—as an exploratory observer, of course—and obtained true satisfaction from one blow job given and two anal intercourses, one given and one received, on his recommendation they decided not to press charges. “Listen!” he’d said, “a little competition can only help.”

The strange bedfellows were to get along just fine, even after The Pits became a wee bit too notorious for the quality for the stage show, all those outré extensions of the anatomy’s natural abilities, all played in various forms of repertoire, thus causing overflow crowds of uptown slummers, visiting firemen, and other assorted pleasure seekers, including New York’s leading fag hag, Adriana la Chaise, disguised as a man, who, while a faggot to the extent that she evades the responsibilities that her brains, her abilities, and her energies, in a more enlightened age, would have channeled, via adult commitments, via more positive injections, into a needful society, was, nevertheless, by clitoral choice, straight, though it was her habit to enjoy slouching in dark corners, wearing military attire, sailor’s suits or soldier’s, and watch the boys do things to each other, and enjoy fainting when the beauties on the stage wilted to the floor, only to be watered by huge blacks wearing hip-length Goodyear waders and furry guardsman’s toppers and tipping wax from large Rigaud candles that sizzled neath their stream, her distinguished presence, albeit in mufti, being naturally noteworthy enough to enter the Divine Bella’s twice-weekly column in
Women’s Wear,
so that Billy Boner, who owned The Pits, then imposed strict membership and attire and inspection requirements, which only made business even better, both downstairs and up.