How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (25 page)

“We stand for unity and brotherhood,” Carboy intoned, as his cohort hummed quietly behind him. “We believe in honor, duty, and the taste of kissful lips. How often have we risen against the foe, our ideals our only armor.”

The humming reached a lovely crescendo, then died back down in noticeable harmony. “Yes, yes,” Carboy went on. He was so inspired. “We love the mission, the truth…” But wait. Seeing that Pajammy seemed to be coming close and holding something behind his back, Carboy asked what it could be.

“Oh … nothing,” said Pajammy.

Carboy’s gang started humming again, as Carboy made some more speech.

“Yes,” he said, gesturing like opera. “As we close ranks around our dream of fraternity, it is ‘Down with grown-ups!’ that we cry.”

Again, Carboy paused, noticing that Pajammy was putting something around Carboy’s loins. It looked like buckskin shorts.

“Is that the Acme Patented Cockalizer?” asked Carboy, with a shudder.

“Set it to Piano Concerto Jizzboree,” Corndogger advised.

So Carboy, too, learned not to test the patience of Pajammy and Corndogger. Then one of the schoolboys rushed in to say that Sheriff Slade and his deputies had captured the Smooth Boy gang!

“Those villains may be rugged,” cried Carboy, who had been cockalized only a short time, as a formality. “But our hearts are true!”

“Hooray!” cried the schoolboys.

And soon all was ready for an assault on Psycho City.

Carlo came in just then, and I stopped for a breather.

“Reading that porn tale, huh?” he said, joining me on the couch. “I helped some.”

“How’s business?” I asked.

“Got that one date for New Year’s is all so far.” He shared a knowing look with Cosgrove, and J. noted this silently. “You know how some people just go along with you and some other people fight you on everything? This New Year’s guy’s a fighter. ‘Why do you have to get half in advance? Why is it so expensive if
I
have to do the wine? Can I see a photograph of the waiters?’”

“He’s joshing or something, right?”

“The hell no! And the more money they have, I’ve learned, the more they try to stiff you. Remember that construction job I had off and on, light interior modifications with Bill Duryea? Typical gig is this family’s brownstone. They
own
it, right? Count more servants than
Meet Joe Black,
and while we’re working we can hear the boss lady on the phone selling buildings. I’m telling you,
rich.
So she owes nine hundred dollars for three days’ work—nagging and checking on us the whole time, of course, like we’re going to cheat her the second her back is turned. Right, sneak in beaverboard instead of bricks. But when it’s time to pay, she’s got bullshit to lay on us why she can’t that day. She’s buying and selling New York buildings and she can’t write a nine-hundred-dollar check?”

“I know that type,” said Cosgrove. “They’re living on the Planet Me.”

“Yeah. Well … I just think maybe we have another of those in the New Year’s guy.” To Cosgrove, he added, “You know? It’s important to you, the first job. But this guy’s giving off cheater signals.”

“Has he paid the advance?” Cosgrove asked.

“Not yet, and he’s late and full of bullshit.”

The four of us contemplated this state of affairs for a bit.

“You can always tell a cheat right off,” Carlo continued, in an oddly subdued voice. “Bossy, and suspicious, and arguing with everything. I told Bill Duryea that woman would try to cheat, and he sure had to keep at her before we got that check. Took two months. And she subtracted from it because we messed up her bathroom or something.” He nodded. “Cheats. And you can’t explain to these little freaks about playing fair any more than you can describe green to the blind. Because a cheat thinks everyone’s like them.”

As Cosgrove handed him a glass of the house beverage, Carlo asked, “Where’re we up to in the story?”

“‘Return To Psycho City,’” I said.

“Yeah, read that. I like the ladies’ umbrella wars.”

It was a dark and stormy night, but in the Psycho City Shithouse, it was hot and light, and everyone was raring to go. The Smooth Boys had been trussed up and raised in harnesses fastened to crossbeams high above, and some of the deputies were loosening those cowpokes up for the Grand Shoot by eating out their plumbing as they swung in the ropes.

The Psycho City ladies were well turned out for the doings. Of course, they had left their clothing in neat piles and were sashaying around with only their parasols, to uphold social decency.

“I have Parasol Nescafé,” said one.

“I have Parasol Carmen,” said another.

“But I have Parasol Résumé,” said a third. “And mine is best.”

So the first two whacked her with their parasols.

“Ladies, ladies,” cautioned Lady Clairetta Boothroy in her soothing tones. “This is a gala event in our town’s history, and it deserves the utmost in etiquette and do-si-do.”

So the first three whacked Lady Clairetta with their parasols.

One deputy was oiling up Johnny Mambo so the boy would dazzle under the lights. The sheriff was staring at Johnny Mambo as the ladies came near. One became obsessed with Johnny Mambo’s triceps. As she felt them, left and right, she was heard to murmur, “This one will cream me oh so high.”

So Lady Clairetta whacked her with her parasol.

The sheriff kept gaping at all the boys swinging in their harnesses. Pierce Mayplow warned him that too much looking at boys would lead to the dread condition of droolemia.

Flex Dumhed thought he should give a show. He mooched around in the piles of the ladies’ clothes and put on bra and panties. So the ladies whacked him with their parasols all around the Psycho City Shithouse.

Sheriff Slade had not moved. He was standing in front of a Smooth Boy in the harness. The boy had the cutest elbows the sheriff ever saw.

“What’s your name?” the sheriff asked. “You look like a Manfred, or perhaps Charles Shortzaroff.”

“You can torture me,” said the Smooth Boy. “You can oil me up like a muscle freak. You can vandalize my local
HX
giveaway box. But you can’t make me come so you can get high.”

“We’ll see about that!” cried the sheriff.

Then our heroes burst in, and the onslaught began. In the confusion, Flex Dumhed grabbed a seltzer bottle and squirted Lady Clairetta Boothroy. The Psycho City Shithouse was awash in crazy seltzer. But soon the Smooth Boys were freed and the sheriff was the one dangling in a harness.

“Cockalize him!” cried one and all.

“Form a single line,” Flex Dumhed announced. “No Confederate bills accepted after the bell.”

“No!” the sheriff shouted. “No!”

“It must be yes!” the good folk replied.

But then Flex Dumhed stepped forward, to ask all assembled if they could give love a chance. “It is only lack of love that caused the sheriff to turn out so mean,” Flex explained. “See how he longs for love.”

And everyone who was not already engaged in ferocious rimming championships looked upon the poor sheriff. Their hearts were moved at the sight of the big hairy galoot swinging helplessly. Some of the ladies had to quieten a sigh of delight. All knew that Lady Clairetta Boothroy had first rights to him, for she was the town belle. She softly approached. With grease and condoms there displayed, the others broke into couples to fall in love that night and to bring peace to Psycho City. Lady Clairetta, meanwhile, was putting on her private set of Turandot fingernails, to point out the fine points of Sheriff Slade’s body sculpture.

“The heavy upper torso,” she noted, running one nail along the pec line. “Yet the tiny waist, as in a cartoon. The famous Sheriff Slade genitals, bursting with guilt. The thighs, big and gloomy as a forest. The poetic haircut.”

“Let me down, okay, lady?”

“We cannot do so, Sheriff,” said Lady Clairetta Boothroy. “Oh, not ever. We are saving you for the first human cloning experiments, for you are too magnificent a specimen to be surrendered to the cycle of life and death. You must live forever, my dear Sheriff, for you are fuck itself.”

That’s where the text stopped. A surprise ending, one might say. And, perfect timing, the buzzer went off just then. Cosgrove got it, saying, “Send him up.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

Carlo was grinning at J. and Cosgrove. “It’s not your daddy’s porn, is it?” he said. “But it’s somebody’s.”

The visitor was Davey-Boy. That was odd, because he and I had little to do with each other, and he seldom ventured north of Better Bodies or whatever they call that gym now.

Both Cosgrove and J. opened the door for Davey-Boy, crowding him with copies of their story, and gala reports of its impending publication, and the usual esoteric ad-libs. This was even odder, because they and Davey-Boy had never met.

On the other hand, Carlo and Davey-Boy had definitely touched base somewhere, because they nodded at each other in a surprised but acquainted way. When Davey-Boy doffed his coat, he was in a skimpy top that made him look like an anatomy chart.

“You must know Bud’s cousin, right?” said Carlo, getting up to shake hands. “In that gang of his, I guess.” Carlo couldn’t resist running his fingers very lightly through Davey-Boy’s hair; he alone would dare challenge the latter’s highly inflected sense of masculine decorum.

Davey-Boy looked at Carlo as if he’d like to take it to the next level, but was distracted by urgent business. “If I’m interrupting, I apologize,” said Davey-Boy, his eyes still on Carlo but his attention turning to me.

“You didn’t interrupt,” said Cosgrove, “but you missed our prestigious trilogy.”

“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had his day,” J. put in. “Now the library files will tell of J. and Cosgrove.”

True son of Chelsea that he is, Davey-Boy couldn’t quite bring himself to turn from the hunk that is Carlo. He reached out and held Carlo’s upper arms as if making a physical effort to pull away, so I went over and stood behind Carlo, thus getting into Davey-Boy’s line of sight.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Finally looking at me past Carlo’s right shoulder, Davey-Boy said, “Ethan, I need your help.”

8

T
HE
E
MERGENCY
D
OLLAR

N
OW, WHAT DID HE
mean by that?

Most immediately, Davey-Boy wanted me to help him with a birthday gift for his only close friend who was not one of the Kens. No, this man was a show-biz buff, with the usual specialty in musicals; and Davey-Boy found it urgent to delight him; and this friend was facing a crossroads of life. He was within days of being twenty-five years old.

“I want something special for him,” Davey-Boy told me. “Something no one else can have.”

That was easy. My friend Matt has a computer scanner and a … something, and … I don’t know, a duodenum, which all together produce homemade CDs in jewel boxes with full-color covers. He creates all sorts of anthologies—imagine having the Streisand 45 singles that were never reissued in any form. But Matt’s gems are his CD transcriptions of old LP cast albums—not the ones you love. The ones that don’t exist, like
Let It Ride!
and
Donnybrook!.

This is truly something no one else can have, and once I explained it to Davey-Boy he was eager to make arrangements. Matt obliged with
Seventeen, New Faces of ’56,
and
Say, Darling,
all looking exactly as if Victor had CDed them. Davey-Boy was as grateful as he was ignorant of what these three little boxes of music represented. And of course this was the help he had asked for, but not the help he needed. Because what really was going on was not a birthday, though one’s twenty-fifth is a very serious matter in a place like Chelsea. No, Davey-Boy’s problem was that Jim Streeter had finally broken up with his boy friend.

We had left Matt’s apartment with the three CDs and were on our way to E.J.’s Luncheonette on Sixth Avenue, my haunt in that neighborhood; Davey-Boy owed me a din. Matt lives just around the corner from it, and as we passed one of (this is my mother’s term) God’s unfortunates, I pulled out the dollar bill I always keep in my right back pocket and handed it to the one-legged guy in the wheelchair with his little cup.

“Ken does that, too,” said Davey-Boy.

That’s because Ken and I are products of a family that impresses upon its tender offspring the importance of service. Eventually, this would comprise a stay in the Peace Corps or so, but as kids we were expected only to carry an Emergency Dollar at all times. We could use it ourselves, of course, in dire need; back then, a dollar was worth seven or eight bucks in today’s currency. But the Emergency Dollar was really there to hand out to anyone in dismay. Arguing that I myself was perpetually in need, especially of the next cast album, was useless. God had chosen unfortunates, and the rest of us had to serve.

At E.J.’s, Davey-Boy told me he really needed my help without actually saying so. “Why Ken never tried to score that flashy lunk,” he said, as if announcing a topic. “Right, why. And passed him to Tom-Tom.”

“You mean Red?”

“Red,” Davey-Boy repeats, without inflection. “Oh, yes. Red”: now a schoolmarm detecting mischief in the cloakroom. “Red”: an ex-lover referring to his successor. “Red,” Davey-Boy insists: Cézanne planning a barn. “Ken never cared about Red, because he was waiting for the availability of Jim Streeter. Which who didn’t know was on the verge in any case.”

“Who’s Jim Streeter? Is he The One?”

“He’ll make sure he is.”

“I hear a ‘but.’”

Davey-Boy gave me an okay-let’s-settle-this look. “Who do you think runs our group?” he asked me. “Ken? This is how you think, and you’re wrong. Ken is window dressing. He’s the looks captain. Yeah, so who calls the plays, if you’re way the wise one?”

“You do. But where you’re wrong is you think Ken resents that. He prefers it, my very excellent Davey-Boy, who is always sparring in a challenge match, such as now.”

He didn’t deny it.

“Ken doesn’t want to be in charge,” I continued. “It takes too much out of him. Besides, command looks good on you.”