How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (3 page)

“You don’t think I’m good for it?”

The sidekick stood there and steamed, his face set and his body rigid.

“You don’t trust me, is that what?”

“Christ, how do I maybe
should
trust you if you borrow and don’t—”

“This is about Lauren, right? That night she stood you up?”

“What’s
Lauren
got to do with twenty real dollars you owe me?”

The looker sunshined out a grin real slow, turned his body slightly away from his friend, and nodded sardonically, knowingly. Playacting.

“She broke her date with you to be with me,” the looker explained. “Didn’t she tell you?”

The sidekick took it straight on, full horror but no flinching. His mouth starts to work: “You got to bring
that
in?”

“So give me the twenty and we’ll say no more.”

“I’m not giving you no twenty after that, am I? First twenty, then Lauren?”

“So what are you good for?” Two beats, then: “I’m asking you
what
are you
for?
Chicks don’t dig you, guys don’t respect you, your own buddy you don’t trust—full of resentment, I would guess, because Lauren prefers a handsome guy
and so where the hell are you going?
”

The sidekick had taken off and was now crossing the street; in the comic-book version, they would print a big black square before his eyes.

The looker watched him go for a bit, then turned to me with a half-mocking smile; of course, he had figured out my game. “What do you say, chief?” he asked. Disconcerted, I stared at the idol and finally got out, “I expect he’ll be back for more in due course.”

“Think so?” he replied with a grin. And off he went.

Now, that sort of relationship is much less common in gay life, which is an essentially civilizing force, like prep school or Peggy Lee albums. I want to show you an example of this in someone who might easily have ended up quite badly had he not stumbled into the Scene, been befriended by it, and become one of its poster boys.

I first saw him quite some years ago, when I was fresh out of college and attending—is that the word? but it did seem like theatre—my first gay bar, the Eagle. It stood at the Hudson River edge of a then ungentrified Chelsea, and it maintained a “leather and western” theme, meaning no admittance except to “cowboy,” “biker,” or fifties “straight” in jeans and white T.

The Eagle gave a rake-off on your beer if you went shirtless, and Dennis Savage partook of this discount during his trashier-than-thou gym era. He even entered the Eagle’s Navel Contest one year, unbuttoning the top of his jeans like our straight friend in Columbus Circle and lowering his beltline obscenely. One had to: because they weren’t judging navels per se but rather that body area centering on the midsection, where the waist starts to V up to the shoulders even as it makes that jump downward over the Venus girdle to start the legs. Remember, too, that in this vanished age no gay guy could be taken seriously (or home) if he wore underpants.

Dennis Savage might have won the contest, for he supplemented weight lifting with swimming laps, and his waist was so tight it squeaked when he walked. Still, he placed second. The winner was the man I wish to tell you of, a devastato beyond even the exacting standards of this Temple of Mars: about six foot two and molto heavy in the style of the day, when bulk was everything and no one had abs. He was also alarmingly handsome. Or no: rudely, roughly handsome. Prince Charming as a hangman. His smile had edge. When he won, he warily allowed the bartender-judge to pull down his pants to reveal one of those sensory-overload dicks that already is huge rather than gets huge.

“Who is that guy?” I asked Dennis Savage after the contest, in the routine question of the day.

Regarding the winner, Dennis Savage said, “He’s kind of a thug, actually.”

“Do you know him?”

“As slightly as possible.”

Nevertheless, the guy came over to shake hands with Dennis Savage. We were introduced—his name, which I had missed during the judging, was Rip—and after a bit of this and that he clumped off into the bar’s other room.

“You know that guy?” I said, not trying to hide my awe. “Do I get the story?”

Thinking it over, he said, “You do remember that I was graduated summa cum laude from Hamilton College on a full scholarship. You know I’m made of better stuff than this.”

“I’d rather respect you for this.”

“They’re all the same story, though, aren’t they? The tale of the Law of Beauty, superseding all those other laws. The ones your parents follow, and your pastor follows, and the president follows.”

He gestured at the rest of the bar, at the cowpokes and leathermen and James Deans.

“Are we still trapped in a system that someone else invented?” he asked.

Eric ran up to pound Dennis Savage’s left arm and cry, “I’m speechless! You won the Navel Contest!”

“I came in second.”

“You’re shameless,” Eric went on, genuinely impressed.

“Tough is hot,” said Dennis Savage, to me. “But sweet is hotter.”

Eric balled a fist and thrust it into his mouth while uttering a thrilled noise, then raced off.

Rip came back into the room, looking about himself.

“Be careful,” Dennis Savage warned me as he joined some brand-new fan for a little talk. Very little: it was considered unmanly to converse at length before going home with someone. Sex was looks, not character.

I watched the big guy for a while, thinking that Rip was a great name for him, then left the bar.

Now. A few days later, I was coming out of a movie in our strip of theatres along Third Avenue in the Sixties when I found myself walking next to Rip. We both did a take at the same time, and we both laughed. I asked him if he’d noticed a hitch in the movie’s dialogue, something alluded to in reel 10 that was apparently cut out of reel 4 or so. He jumped at that.

“I surely knew there was something disconnected there,” he said. He sounded glad. It seemed that his second favorite nonsexual activity was moviegoing, but his first was discovering a film’s storytelling errors, accidental changes of outfit within a scene, or any other fraud in the realism, because then he didn’t have to take movies seriously, and for some reason he didn’t want to.

We were discussing the something disconnected outside the theatre in that awkward situation in which the two of you might formalize the socializing but at least one of you is afraid to suggest it.

“You live around here?” Rip suddenly asked me.

So we went to my place for coffee. Shockingly, while I ground the beans and set the water up for heating, Rip pulled open the refrigerator and snacked without permission.

Clearly, he’d come out of a different culture; or maybe this was another case of beauty taking over the world. He never scheduled a movie date in advance; he just showed up, telephoning from the corner. He had no steady job, hustling or working short-haul moving when he needed money. He only sort of had an apartment, even. Subletting it was another source of income, so he was forever moving in with some trick. He had no property, no groceries, no ambition. The everyday of his life was generic; the romance of his life was uniquely pumped to the max. I would see him stalking through the Eagle, raw and magnificent, fast, impatient. Once I got so engrossed that he was startled and came over to me and said, “What?”

I just replied, “Are your eyes really black?”

“I’m dark on my father’s side,” he replied, turning to note the passing of some dazzler, and to follow.

*   *   *

D
ENNIS
S
AVAGE FOUND IT
bizarre to learn that Rip was visiting our building.

“What incongruity!” he cried one evening, ladling out dinner. “Here we are, collegiate, cultured, debonair … and here’s this … what? this
specimen
in our midst. In looks, he’s absolute clarity. But what is he in content? Remote and troubled. He’s mining something dangerous. He’s deep. Not as in intelligent—as in
hidden.
You know what he’ll do to the guy who tries to discover him? And all
you
see is the black hair against the red lips.”

“He takes movies apart like Darrow questioning Bryan at the Scopes trial. You’d like him if you knew him.”

“I know him.”

“Do you know yourself? Who
also
entered the Navel Contest? Who fucked Helmut Schmidt in some porn theatre, onstage, right in front of the screen only four days ago
as we speak?
”

Stunned with his serving tray, he paused. Then: “I’m going to
kill
Eric!”

“No,” I told him, “because that’s what’s great about us. We’re not entirely middle-class any more.” Runaways. “Last weekend, when you came out to my folks’ and we found you a bathing suit in the pool house … You were on the diving board, showing off, and I caught my mother looking at you wearing that undersize
pour-la-plage
or whatever it was that was maybe last worn by Booth Tarkington, and you were more or less coming out of it altogether. And you didn’t care, and you looked so hot like that. I caught her eye, looking at you, and she quickly looked away. And I thought, Lady, you don’t know anything about it. Gays are the men who have fun being men. We’re inventing the wheel.”

We were inventing a sex manual, and professions so we wouldn’t have straights bossing us around, and styles for leisure, and even a politics. But most of all we were inventing a method by which men could relate to and support and enlighten and perhaps love each other. Maybe it’s my mistake, this late in the first piece, not to set all the book’s narrative throughlines into motion. Many of you will doubtless feel relief when Vince Choclo shows up with his bizarre buddy Red Backhaus, two straights ready to tumble into gay, though I still don’t believe there is such a thing as a bisexual. And our old comrade Peter Keene, that stalwart disciple of excess, will fall for the most poisonously appealing of Beefalo Boys. We’ll go to a farm to meet my old high-schoolmate Evan McNeary, learn new gay styles from Chelsea twentysome-things Davey-Boy and Tom-Tom. A certain Nesto will befriend Cosgrove, who must grow free of J.’s influence, though I am going to put into rotation a porn story they co-wrote. All this will busy us for many pages, whereupon I will finally bring this saga to its resolution, this time (as Bullwinkle used to say) for sure.

But please bear with me while I scrutinize what I believe has been the identifying feature of Stonewall gay life. I’m going to look in on a significant moment that many relationships undergo, when the two of you realize that you have moved from airy to dense.

It was after another movie. Rip ate his way through my fridge—cold spaghetti, two apples, and a frozen Milky Way—then said, “I’m going to tell you a little something.”

“Okay,” I said, fussing around at the sink.

“Leave that and come here, now. You come along nice to me.”

“I’m always nice to you,” I said, drying my hands.

“This’ll may need some extra nice. But I got to tell you all the same.”

“Shoot,” I said, joining him on the couch.

“You recall my speaking of Quincy, this big old guy I have been known to boff on occasion? We sometimes play basketball at that court on Second Avenue, in the park. It’s pretty much come-one-all, so there’s always new guys around, and I enjoy to see my buddy Quincy taking a shine to one of them and going all team spirit if somebody scores so he can grab the guy and dance with him.

“We have this deal that if he doesn’t pick up anyone, I go to his place, where we shower up and then figure out if there’s some new position for me to fuck him in. We got fourteen so far.”

“Does he ever actually pick up anyone?”

Rip laughed. “That’d be hard to do, with everyone all around on the court there. But he can dream.”

“Do any of those other guys know he’s gay?”

“I don’t believe
Quincy
knows he’s gay.”

“But he lets you fuck him?”

“He can’t help it, ’cause he loves me so.” He smiled. “He’s a big boy, kind of gruff on the surface. But he’s got a secret soft side that he shows only to me. You know I’m right fond of that style of boy, I guess.”

True enough. Though he occasionally traveled the official circuit, Rip tended to cruise outside the parish. No doubt he had a special clause in his recruitment contract.

“Well, this one time Quincy and I go at it for a nice long session, and it’s near midnight when I leave. Some of the streets are kind of empty, and there’s all those dead buildings. The burnouts and such.”

He got up then, looking around the room as if wondering where he was.

“Could I have a cocktail?” he said.

I want you to see this: he’s in dark green cords and a white T-shirt so thin you can read his parts right through the cloth, and he’s got all the power in the world to redeem or reject you. Yet he looks, for once, a little unsure.

“A cocktail?” I echo, wondering where this farmboy heard the term.

“Whatever you’d drink. Quick, my friend.”

I splashed some vodka over ice and gave it to him. He drank, wiped his mouth, and said, “This one place, halfway down the block, one of those crazy street ladies comes out of nowhere, shouting, ‘Tramp, you stole my life! You called the agency on me!’ and all that stuff they say. She’s got this stick and she comes at me with it. So I grab it from her and toss it.”

He took another swig of the drink, wiped his mouth again, and said, “Taking ahold of wood while someone’s firing it at you, you’re going to cut yourself, so I was pretty mad. So when she came at me kicking, I just punched her a sweet one right in the face. Down she goes.”

He stopped, looking at me, the two of us standing in the middle of my living room.

“Think it’s over yet? I get maybe four steps down the street, she’s on me again. I didn’t hit her hard enough? Okay.
This
time.”

More vodka, and now he wipes his mouth not on his hand but roughly all the way up his arm, showing me that he’s getting mad all over again.

“Because why do I have to come to hurt if
she
wants to start something? ‘Tramp, you have struck me!’ and all. Oh,
I
have struck
you?
Miss, you are truly going to discover what struck
is!
”