Faggots (7 page)

“Who is telling you these things about horses!? Never, never in a thousand years would I want to see horses, any kind of horses! Abe, I don’t know anymore the man I once was married to. All your Misses Non-Kosher have made you into a tinkler! Abe, Jewish people do not tinkle on horses! Abe…Abe…where are you going?”

“I have an appointment.”

“Always the appointments! Do not forget that tomorrow you and Fred are taking me to the grand opening. I have read about it in
Women’s Wear Daily
by the Divine Bella. I want to see it with my own two eyes…”

And he was gone.

After his departure, feeling sorry for herself, then and now, for her abandonment, then and now, and trying to drown her sorrows in her favorite banana yogurt from Dannon’s, she finally wailed out to nobody in particular and the walls (hung with two Picassos and fifteen of that nice Jewish painter, Chagall, all of which she had received in the settlement, settling what, she wanted to know) in general: “Men! I am hating you all. And my mother, who was not a woman with a smile, had good reason to warn me from all of you. You think of no one, Abe, and you never have, not me or not even your own two sons and heirs, Richard and Stephen, to whom I have given so much love and sacrifice and pain and anguish and hope and tenderness and who, both of them, are not even calling to say thank you.”

The thankless younger son and heir was now back in his Soho loft and deep into bodily communication. Boo Boo Bronstein was performing, along with most of our other leading faggots, that necessary ritual preparatory to every weekend’s outings known as the “pump-up,” as he did his daily two hundred push-ups and five hundred sit-ups and four sets of twenty-five each of his bench presses, tricep presses, chin-ups, seated curls, and shrugs on the extensive set of home weights he’d purchased at Herman’s against that fast-approaching day when he just knew he’d put his plan in operation. He was going to kidnap himself, but he certainly wasn’t going to break his routine. It would be bad enough not being able to go out and parade around the Village streets for hours and hours, showing off his nicely proportioned body, six feet, narrow waist, bulging biceps, well-defined pecs, lats like wings, all calculated, or so he hoped, to take the eye of the beholder off his dark, swarthy, unhappy-looking, and rather Jewish face.

I’m going to be a faggot! I’m going to be a faggot! Boo Boo had first realized with terror two years ago during his junior year at Yale when the distinguished gray-haired portly, gentile professor of his History of Art: Greek Sarcophagi class suggested they have a tête-à-tête in his book-walled house on Chapel Street “to discuss the argument put forth in your paper on the marble frieze of Noxos.” After six-and-one-half glasses of some fancy vintage wine, Boo from an early age not being a cheap date, he was laid back, as he somehow knew he would be, and, shivering with the apprehensions and expectations of the guilty, cursed, and damned, which he also knew he would be, he allowed his already erected cock, for the first time, to be sucked.

How did it do that? How did it turn into such a straight and hard flagpole without my even knowing it?, Boo queried his inner self, trying his best not to enjoy it, nor to enjoy the professor’s hands and palms and fingers, rubbing and massaging, much as they must have done to countless other priceless treasures, his nicely developing upper torso, which Boo had acquired courtesy of 1) covertly perusing, like something dirty, in a side aisle of the Yale Co-op, a picture of Arnold Schwartzenegger in a book called
Pumping Iron;
2) commencing the loss of fifty pounds of rather recalcitrant baby fat; and 3) two hours a day of working out at the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Yes, up and down and over and across went the professor’s mitts, and up and down and over and across went the professor’s tongue and mouth, and out of that flagpole flew the nice-flowing, good-feeling release.

To be followed by the guilt.

“It’s not very large,” the professor later said, which also didn’t help.

This was the first verbalized confirmation of Richie’s suspicions. Not only was he a faggot, but his flagpole was not quite the standard-bearer a Bronstein boy was meant to hoist in battle.

“But,” the professor continued, bending down to lead the troops to action once again, “it certainly tastes splendid and your pectorals are perfect. You have the body of an ancient Greek. I believe you’re what’s called a Number.”

I want to be a Number! I want to be a Number!, Boo Boo realized over the succeeding weeks as he moped still lost on campus, his eyes to sidewalk or well-trod grasses, acknowledging no one, or as he sat alone in his Silliman single (who would want to room with him?, a feeling no doubt emanating from those earlier formative years when he shared a john with his older brother, Stephen, who had nicknamed him Boo Boo for his petulance and his whining insecurity: “It’s either ‘Boo Boo’ or ‘Lemon,’ take your choice, I suggest the former, at least it’s euphonious”), staring at the pea-green soupy shade with which Yale walls are nourished, and thinking of his teacher’s mouth and trying very, very hard not to seek it out again. I mustn’t do it, I mustn’t do it, it is Wrong! Even though for those three seconds prior to ejaculation and two seconds post, on each of the many succeeding encounters during the semester (he received a final A), Boo had dim thoughts of what he’d been missing all his years.

The guilt, however, ah yes, The Guilt!, was such as to eventually extrude into a courageous confession to his Pop that he was suffering mightily, “Pop, I got these female problems,” so that Abe, himself in guilt that, like father: like son, financed what amounted to two years of intensive psychoanalysis at Yale’s famed Child Study Center (Richard was never to know that his case had entered the international journals as “A Famous Son: The Transmission of Psychoneurotic Mishegas from Old World to New”) with a Dr. Rivtov. For four hours a week, through his junior and senior years, Richie, as the dour doctor waved his club foot by the reclining patient’s right eye, was shrunk, wherein they both discovered how terrified were his kishkas of: a) his poppa; b) his momma; c) himself.

Armed with this useful knowledge, he graduated. And disarmed by the additional enlightenment that his cock still saluted his fellow men only, a reflexive action not dissimilar to the knee that jumps when struck by the hammer, of which both he and Dr. Rivtov naturally disapproved, though neither carpenter had come up with anything remotely resembling a new set of drawers, he tried to make the best of it. And not to be terrified that his Pop would find out. And not to be terrified that his Pop would find out. And not to be…

This had amounted, up till now, to allowing his flagpole to be saluted and nothing more.

But he knew there was more. He saw it with his eyes and he dreamed it in his dreams and he fantasized it in his daytimes and he knew he was in trouble.

For he knew there was a pit of sexuality out there and that he longed to throw himself into it.

I have to! I have to! he would torture himself before several hours napping in his lofted bed. Because it’s part of the faggot life style—to find abandonment and freedom through ecstasy—fucking and being fucked and light s & m and shitting and pissing and Oh I want to be abandoned! and where’s my copy of the
Avocado
…, which he would then reach for and wonder when he could courageously answer those ads placed by seekers of “willing victims” and “hot humpy young dudes to do things to.”

Then his torture thoughts stretched out to Fire Island. This weekend I promise I’m going to try! He’d never been there before, not because of its physical inaccessibility but because of his physical fear. How to parade around, half-naked, along those fabled boardwalks and strands, in front of all those staring eyes, eyes belonging to humpies far humpier than he? Could he do it? And into that fabled Meat Rack! The sexual pits incarnate! Could he do that, too? Throw himself down there? And could he do it with class, so that they’d look at him and point him out enviously, and say: “There goes that rangy cowboy, Rich Bronstein! You know who he is!”

Yes, how to throw himself into those pits? How?!

One million smackolas. Wouldn’t they help?

And then my Pop could find out. And then my Pop could find out.

But by then I’d be free!

And Rich!

Yes, one million smackolas. They would surely help.

And if I don’t do something quickly, they’ll make me marry that spaghetti heiress, Marci Tisch!

While Fred walked across town to the Y, now thinking of his mother, and Abe left Ephra for an early dinner with Randy Dildough, Anthony Montano left his Beekman Place penthouse and headed south. Fred’s best friend—tall, dark-haired, dapper, Omar Sharif as an Italian diplomat—was heading, oh wondrous joyful shining late afternoon in May, for the Village streets.

There he would get his cock sucked, his cock that had not come in twenty-three days, his wonderful uncut wop cock that deserved better things, as did its owner, slaving for Irving Slough was not an easy life, the Winston Man was not an easy account to square with one’s conscience, Winnie might be cute but people are dying, as am I, as is my cock, both of us feeling overwhelmingly the need for relief and release, I am working too hard, it’s not working hard enough, it’s sometimes, too often, soft and wavy, and that’s for hair sprays not for cocks, and what is happening now that I am getting older and there’s no kisser in my life?

Fred thought of Algonqua. One year ago he had told her!

Algonqua Lemish!

She who was the middle daughter of five achieving siblings of Russian peasants also making the long schlepp to the New World, from there to here, from rags, if not to riches, at least to groceries, they always ate, her poppa, Herschel the Unsmiling, and her momma, Lena the Undaunted, ran a grocery store in Hartford, where Algonqua grew up, graduated from Normal School, taught first grade in the morning, sold shoes in the afternoon, and coached foreigners in English at night. Then she met Lester Lemish, potentially so fine, and they settled down, outside of Washington, D. C., he to not realizing that potential, and she to serving humanity, the American Red Cross, twenty-four hours a day of looking after The World—Home Servicing, Bloodmobiles, floods, fevers, epidemics, fires, Water Safety, tardy alimonies, bandaged wounded, wheel-chaired to ball games, garden partied prisoners, indigent Army wives, paraplegic veterans, missing children, wayward husbands, AWOLs, yes, Handicappeds Anonymous—thus becoming a determined breadwinner, a courageous lifesaver, a tenacious turner of losers into winners,
the
Director of Disasters, yes, a wonderful humanitarian and
A Gigantic Ma
!

ALGONQUA LEMISH!

Algonqua had had her left tit lopped off a year ago. She held court from her eighth-floor bed in the Georgetown University Hospital as if deprived of her best and most useful feature, rather a startling reaction from a widow of seventy and one for whom Fred and Ben automatically assumed sex came not easily if at all. While it is generally construed by all children that their parents never fucked, Fred was reasonably certain that his rarely had, or why else would he have always had such problems with kiss and cuddle and body and closeness and semen and cock and rectum and that interco-mingling of the physical, bodily, and sexual attributes with which all man is blessed?

In that hospital room, there and then, one year ago, the commencement of the New Era, Fred Lemish had, finally, at just thirty-nine years of age, informed his mommy he was a faggot. He had not planned to do so. Had not all friends advised: Why tell? They cannot understand. It will make them unhappy. Why upset apple carts? But Fred would respond with: Why must I go on leading a secret life in the back streets? This only means I am ashamed of myself and this life and I would like to stop being ashamed of this life and me and who and what I am.

He had spent the afternoon on a visit to the shrine. He had gone, after twenty years of various journeyings in the Outside World, to the homesite of his pubescent days. He had knocked on the Hyattsville garden-apartment door with his best successful movie-writer smile, clutching an old clipping from the Washington
Post
with his picture (taken upon the occasion of
Lest We Sleep Alone
opening to the only grotesquely bad reviews it received anywhere in the world; you can’t hit a homer in your own hometown), thrusting it to the shabby young housewife and present tenant: “My name is Fred Lemish, I grew up in this apartment, this is my movie for which I was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adaptation of a Work from Another Medium, which I first thought meant something from the supernatural, would you mind if I came in and looked around?” The helpless woman, rendered speechless by such fame, allowed Fred in, in, in and back to the teeniest of rooms (they had seemed so big growing up!), look Fred, look at the corner where you first jerked off, sure still looks dirty enough, some of that schmutz is
me,
look, there’s where your bed was, next to Ben’s, that bed in which you had your first wet dream after reading Havelock Ellis under the covers and on which you played, though obviously not nearly enough, “doctor” with the little girl from downstairs, and look, there’s the closet you hid in to watch older brother Ben, the jock, take off same, and you later bent to smell, no one was looking, you can smell, take a heady sniff of brother Ben, and there’s the corner where, under the rug, you hid a forbidden treasure, a picture of an erect penis, bartered for three packs of Luckies and ten pink diet pills, yes, a diet even then, and there’s the same Venetian blind you pulled down and closed tightly so you could have your first experiences with another boy’s body, his name was Fred, too, your fellow eighth-grader, once a month or so, allowing sufficient time for guilt to subside and hunger to return, always during the day, when no one was at home, ah, memories are made of this.