How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (26 page)

The food arrived, and there was a Luftpause as we got set up. We ate for a bit in silence, Davey-Boy doubtless going over what I’d just said, because it was news. He thinks that he and Ken are locked in a dispute over who stands at the top of their order.

“‘Davey-Boy always struggles,’” Ken had told me. I said that aloud to Davey-Boy now, just those words. While he thought about it, I added on, “What’s new with your porn project?”

“It fell apart. Nobody was serious about it but me.”

“Were you really serious?”

He looked right into my eyes and calmly said, “Yes.” Then: “Your cousin’s wrong to date Jim Streeter. That guy’s a catch, it’s true. But so’s Ken in the first place. He doesn’t need the spike in his stats. And Jim’s a handful. High-maintenance, they all say. It’s like marriage, life with him.”

“I think Ken wants an adventure.”

“Why not with me? I could turn into whatever the gentleman needs. Did he ever … Is there some kink he’s trying out that you could heads me up on? Or I suppose it’s confidential—but you could pass along a clue. Because sometimes Ken has a purely physical conception, right? He’s going for type. But what if this time it’s a conception of fantasy? I could do that. Like a waiter when you order. Yes, I’ll bring that to the table for you, sir, if such is your delight. Though, if I may take the liberty, if you weren’t so fucking handsome with that wave in your hair along the part, you wouldn’t get away with driving me crazy, sir.”

He put down his fork, drank deeply of his water, and stared at me.

“A physical conception
is
a fantasy, anyhow,” he went on. “I went out for wrestling in high school. Thought I was pretty neat, huh? We all did. We’d go round Robin Hood’s barn to express our contempt for pro wrestling, because it was so freak. Of course, the others never guessed what a secret fan I was. My folks didn’t allow a television in the house, nor any of my relations. It was hard to keep up with the shows. Yeah, I had to get the other guys on the team to tune in when I was at their homes. Have to be slick with a pretext, or they’ll see right through you. They’re very good at spotting a queer, did you know that? You go slow. Say it’s just for a laugh. See what they’re up to. Come on, what a joke. Sure enough, they turn it on.

“Pro wrestling today, now, it’s so full of melodramas that it’s talk and gawk. Boring. But in those days it was all action. Half the guys were the stars, and the other half were sparring partners. They never got interview time or turned up on bubble-gum cards. They’d show up or vanish without warning. And one of them sort of fascinated me.”

He started eating again, calming down. He can prevail. “This one guy,” he finally said. “Big Viking type, with that white blond hair. Not a day over twenty-two, and very, very big. Young and big. Six foot six, easily, and not so much gymmed up as …
grown
up. They called him Mike Justice. He didn’t appear a lot, and maybe he wasn’t so handsome. Clumsy, too. In the ring. But something about him spoke right to me, even as a teenager. Now we are the kids of Chelsea, and we know style. This guy Mike didn’t know style.”

“Isn’t that what Ken’s looking for?” I said. “A guy with no style?”

“Ken doesn’t know what he wants. He makes it up from week to week. Like compulsive shopping, right? He’s trying the whole store on, something’ll fit. See, what I wanted to say about it … Ken’s like me and this wrestler. I knew I wanted body contact—except what kind? Can I stroke his soft white hair and say … What? And how do we decide what happens on the date? Where does my mouth go and what do I touch? I could beat off to the thought of the guy, but what if he’s in the room with me? So Ken’s ahead of where I was then, because he knows what happens on a date. But he doesn’t know who his partner is. Which is funny, wouldn’t you say? Because usually you know who you want to do it with long before you know what you’ll do. Didn’t you have a guy on your mind when you were in high school? Someone total?”

“Yes,” I answered, thinking of Evan. “He turned out to be an idiot.”

Davey-Boy nodded. “It’s never who you thought it would be. I mean, not in real life.” Looking more serious, he said, “Tom-Tom reports far and wide that you figure everything out. Can you figure this out for me? How much does Ken like me?”

“I believe you are his best friend, Davey-Boy.”

“I know I am. But how much does he like me?”

*   *   *

W
HEN
I
GOT HOME
, Tom-Tom and Red were in the listening room; the selection was Cosgrove’s rarest cast album, the 1989 Australian
Anything Goes
with Geraldine Turner and Simon Burke. Matt has offered to run up some of his mom-and-pop reissues for Cosgrove, but Cosgrove knows that Demento would have a fit if one of his devotees was, as Cosgrove puts it, “collecting homemade.”

Our record buff was in his element socially, I have to say, supplying Tom-Tom and Red with story continuity between the numbers and blandly rising above the fact that his two guests were, as always, staring at each other so intensely that the paint was fading on the walls. I dropped down on the shoelace couch for a bit, in time to catch the great moment during “Easy To Love,” when the hero tells the heroine, “You love me, Hope. You’re going to marry me.”

“Yeah, listen,” Red commented. “That singing boy friend’s taking the trolley to Prisontown. Why do guys want to get married?”

“Or why do gays want to get married?” said Tom-Tom. “Since they never had to before. At least, straights always had to.”

“I won’t” was Red’s pledge.

“I won’t, either, Red,” said Tom-Tom.

As they jumped up to shake on it, I wondered if Red had registered Tom-Tom’s reference to a gay issue and how he reacted to it. But Red does miss a lot. In any case, the union of the two, taking their oath in the center of the living room, created so much extramusical content that Cosgrove buttoned off the CD.

“Did your New Year’s client ante up with the advance yet?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Mr. Smith is my new business manager. He’s going to call about it.”

And then, suddenly and casually, as if they were always this impulsive in exactly this way, Tom-Tom put his arms around Red and Red went along with it. It made quite a change from the last time they occupied the center of my living room, because not only was it not erotic: it was peaceful. It was a real-life gloss on
Anything Goes’
musical comedy. You like me, Red. You’re going to be my friend.

Then Red got a beep on his pager and had to head for his gym to cover in some emergency, and Cosgrove went off on the Saturday errands. Tom-Tom was going to leave as well, but I delayed him with questions about Jim Streeter.

“Why him?” Tom-Tom asked, clearly surprised to hear the name.

“Aren’t he and Ken about to hook up?”

“It’s news to me. Of course, everyone in Chelsea wants Jim Streeter. But he’s going with some rich Broadway guy.”

“Apparently not for much longer.”

“Somebody better tell Davey-Boy.”

“He knows.”

Tom-Tom’s eyes widened. “Oh, he must be on the warpath for sure. Davey-Boy holds next–boy friend rights to Ken, and everybody knows it. You should see them when we have a threesome; I could be just some cameraman on the set. They draw high card–low card to see who’s top, then they caress each other while they promise to go way rough. ‘I’m going to snuff-porn you,’ Davey-Boy says, in such a loving tone. Yes, c’est le choc! It’s like those legends of the gay blades of early Stonewall. You know, where they invented sex with a crazed determination. Didn’t I think that was all over by now?”

“It’s still going on, Tom-Tom. My Harvard friend Erick just had sauna sex with a Mormon.”

“Yes, but how did he know it was a Mormon?”

“The other fellow kept saying, ‘It’s just two guys getting off.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’ Then Erick happened to mention God during the patter, and the guy flipped out. ‘Don’t do the G-word,’ he said.”

“Yes, that’s a Mormon,” said Tom-Tom, with the authority of one who has bagged many a Latter-Day Saint.

“Now tell me about Jim Streeter,” I said.

“Do you like franks and beans?”

Two beats passed as I figured it out, then: “I love franks and beans.”

“Come to my place and we’ll dinner it.”

*   *   *

T
OM
-T
OM’S APARTMENT IS VERY
small, and he makes no attempt to refine or enliven it. He treats it as a dorm room: knowing that he’ll be graduated out of it sooner or later, he sees no reason to tart it up. A can of beans, half a package of franks, and the biscuits that come in a tube went into one of those infomercially available cooko things that render everything ready for the table all at once. It’s what I call “school food.”

As Tom-Tom got out the plates and flatware, I filled glasses with tap water and asked him how he liked his new job.

“Oh, it’s fine enough,” he replied. “The main thing was to get away from that stress. And you know?” He stopped what he was doing to emphasize the wonder and weirdness of what he was about to tell me. “One of the boys from the old office invited me to a little souper. Aux chandelles, très galant. I asked him—in just these words—if
she’d
be there. And he said, ‘Who’s “she”?’ Can you believe? After all that trouble, he just forgot?”

“He didn’t forget, Tom-Tom. He’s denying his knowledge so he doesn’t have to deal with it.”

My host absently folded a paper napkin into a triangle and slipped it half under a plate. “Why would he do that?”

“Most people don’t side with the victim, Tom-Tom. They side with the aggressor. Otherwise, the aggressor comes after them, too.”

Once dinner was served and Tom-Tom had set out an assortment of marmalades, relishes, and chutneys—“for the biscuits,” he explained, “so each bite is a new treat”—we got down to the matter of Jim Streeter.

“Is this why Ken keeps failing to date anyone new?” I asked. “Because he was waiting for this Jim Streeter?”

“Ken tricks rather easily, you know,” said Tom-Tom. “But he
dates
with a real sense of purpose.”

I watched him cut off a bite of hot dog, carefully give it a topping of beans, and guide it into his mouth with a little kid’s concentration. “How come Ken never mentioned this guy to me?” I asked.

“Don’t miss the black-cherry marmalade. It’s from St. Dalfour Frères. In the Aquitaine.”

As he bladed some onto a biscuit, I said, “Do Jim Streeter for me.”

“Okay.” The biscuit. Then: “You know how sometimes you just wake up in the middle of the night for no reason and can’t get back to sleep?”

“I always know the reason—Cosgrove and Fleabiscuit are building one of their dominoes steeplechases.”

Tom-Tom reflected on that while ingesting more biscuit. “Isn’t one of them a puppy dog?”

“Go on, Tom-Tom.”

“It was when I had that problem at work. I went TV-surfing, and there was this adventure show about, like, Victorian English people in a jungle. But the jungle had dinosaurs and even sci-fi aliens. The good guys were broken up into different qualities, so an old guy was smart, and a classy brunette wised off to everybody, and then there was a young cute guy and a jiggle blonde. But most of all there was a kind of thirties hunk with an odd accent like it’s not from England but it’s not Crocodile Dundee, either. But he was from somewhere like that, because he wasn’t gymmed up the way our hunks are. He was … Well, what do you call it when they’re masculine and strong but they don’t have muscles?”

“‘Straight.’”

He smiled as he readied another bit of biscuit and jam. “Anyway, he doesn’t have to pump, just stay trim and good-humored but very warrior at the same time. See, he doesn’t have to
look
strong. He just
is
strong. He’s got a secret method. And that’s what Jim Streeter is like. See, it’s not a kind of famous movie hero. What they have is canned strength. Jim Streeter is like those strangely interesting guys that would turn up in a B movie and never get famous. Someone with real power.”

I kept my face politely blank, but he knew that I was wondering where he’d heard such an intriguing aperçu.

“Davey-Boy,” he said.

I nodded.

“Although
some
of us would like to know why Ken’s going after other guys when he and Davey-Boy are
so
destiny. But, anyway, that’s your Jim Streeter. He’s someone no one can have, like that guy in the gym last year. Remember? When we were all fighting? I don’t believe we’ll ever fight again, at least. We’ll do good works. That’s Ken’s term, I guess you know.”

“Yes.”

“What good works have you done?”

“I used to read to the blind at the Lighthouse.”

“That’s too radical. Tell about a little good work.”

“When I was a teenager going into New York for Saturday matinées, I used to lunch at the Automat on Broadway and Forty-sixth. Oh! How odd—because my standard meal was an oval crock of a frank with beans, just as we’re having tonight. Way back then, it cost only thirty-five cents.”

Charmed by the coincidence, Tom-Tom nodded happily as he devised a miniature hot dog dressed with Major Grey’s chutney.

“The Automat was huge but crowded, and it was customary to share one’s table. On this particular Saturday afternoon, right next to me, was an old woman. She had put sugar into what she thought was an iced tea, but it must have been something else, because it foamed up and overran the top of her glass. And she said she had spent all her money, and started to weep.”

Tom-Tom stopped eating.

“Now, it happens that in those days I was on a fixed budget, with just enough for the train, lunch, and the cheapest theatre ticket, which was two dollars and thirty cents. And one piece of sheet music—a beat-up old operetta score, a song from the latest show, whatever. So I had in effect spent all my money by then, too. But there was always my Emergency Dollar.”

“Just like Ken,” said Tom-Tom, in mild wonder.

“Just like Ken, and so I broke it into change and bought the woman a new iced tea.”

“But what if you had had an emergency after this?”