How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (4 page)

Silence.

“So?” I asked.

“So we’re now in front of some, I don’t know, school or church. It’s a goddamn wall of nothing there, so I grabbed her by the hair and swung her as hard as I could into that wall, three times.”

Taking my hand, he wrapped it around the glass to hold it for him so he could show me how he did it.

“Now that
cunt
is
down,
and that’s
all
she
wrote!
”

He was almost panting with anger, his face flushed, his eyes fireworks.

“That’s
all she wrote,
” he insisted, retrieving his drink. “And let’s hear from you now.”

“I’m happy you’re here,” I told him. “I’m happy you raid my fridge when you’re hungry. I’m happy you trust me.”

Taken aback, he slowly wound up to “Say something about what I told you.”

“It’s good that you weren’t hurt.”

Thinking that over, he pressed the glass into my hands. “You drink,” he said.

“It’s too early.”

“Just a sip, real personal, as a favor to me.”

So I did.

“Right,” he said, reaching over to take the glass and put it down.

“Can I get away with this?” I asked, putting my hands on him. I wanted to know what something that big and free felt like. His heart was still pumping heavily, but otherwise he was still and almost welcoming.

When we broke, he said, “I have to be somewhere.”

I smiled. “Quincy?”

“Business.” And off he goes.

I went right up to Dennis Savage, who had finally invested in a photo album and was sorting through an epoch of loose photographs.

“Should it run chronologically?” he asked. “By categories? Relatives, trips, tableaux vivants, tricks? Does one organize it by type, do you think?”

“The big guys, first of all,” I suggested. “Especially the ones with big personalities.”

He gives me his satiric look as he starts arranging his pictures in piles. “Someone’s been on another coffee date with Ivanhoe and got all amazed again. Here’s one of you in drag.”

Horrified, I grabbed it—no, it was just the Grand Canyon and some Boy Scouts, young Dennis Savage among them. Recounting what I’d just heard in my place, I began helping him sort.

“He was testing you, of course,” said Dennis Savage.

“That story, you mean?”

Setting down a series of family shots, he said, “Midwestern farmboy from a very narrow society where everyone has the same value system arrives in the total city where society is a mix. Where some people treat values they don’t share with savage attacks. He has an evil run-in with a street crazy, and when he tells of his adventure, some react unsympathetically. With accusations, even. How dare he not show compassion, tolerance, or the leftist’s favorite posture, passivity? Why, his … his
violence,
isn’t it? His moral primitivism! His outrageous act of self-defense! It is forbidden in the total city.”

I said, “Why is
he
so special? It’s Stonewall, and we’re overrun with tall and handsome and built and hung. Some nights in the Eagle, it’s like—”

“Hair. Nipples. Forearms.”

That stopped me.

“Your friend so special why is he?” he went on. “One, he’s got crazy hair that’s smooth and soft yet seems to edge up into the air so that it more or less shimmers over him. It’s wonderful. It’s implausible.”

He shuffled through the visual record of his family life for a moment. Aimlessly, just doing it. Punctuation, maybe.

“Two, his nipples are big red circles with heavy white spiking. Is it sexy or freakish? He’s
too
something. As if he’d sprouted out of the earth, like a carrot. And three, where did he get those gigantic forearms? He’s Popeye. He’s a cartoon.
In fact
 … he’s a fantasy. Quick, what’s his name?”

“You say Rip,” I replied. “But he told me to call him Carlo.”

“See? Ripley Smith is his name. Carlo’s his hustling name. That’s what you want to connect with—a fantasy.”

“Or is fantasy the gay equivalent of what straights call ‘sin’? Isn’t it simply that he has a lot of sexual content?”

“He has a lot of emotional content, which he is using sex to explore, as blindly as possible. He is, I repeat, a fantasy.”

“He’s not a fantasy. He only looks like one.”

“What else
is
a fantasy but he looks like one? I really need to introduce you to some nice gay attorney, some … stockbroker or something. Someone you could have gone to high school with.”

“Introductions are inconclusive.”

Suddenly gathering up all the Kodak to drop it back in the box that had held it lo these many years, Dennis Savage proposed to tackle the photo album project another time. “What we mainly should do is consider my outfit for the Black and White Party. Do you think I can get away with this?”

“This” turned out to be a stoker’s mesh top over the kind of black leather britches favored by men whose workplace is a torture chamber.

“You really ought to stop attending Gilles de Rais’ garage sales,” I observed.

“But what footgear goes with it?”

“Boots, surely?”

“I can’t dance in boots.” Moving to the mirror, he held the outfit against himself. “I know it isn’t me. Just tell me I’ll look good.”

“You’ll look terrific.”

“Kenny Reeves is going in white ducks and a striped T. So sensible, he says. But won’t everyone come that way? How do you make an entrance dressed off the rack?”

“Carlo would.”

“Oh, her,” he said, moving into the bedroom.

Following him, I said, “You know, the key thing about us runaways is that we can all come to Stonewall not because of our education but because of our hunger for freedom. Gay life isn’t about class. It’s about feelings. We enter it to be obliged not to people we resent but to people we adore.”

He was rooting around in a drawer of his bureau, and he may not have heard me.

1

T
ELL
T
HEM
A
BOUT THE
F
LIP

T
WICE A YEAR, EACH
of my publishers mails a financial statement, indicating how many copies of each title have been sold and including a royalty check—that is, my percentage of the gross.

These checks can be pathetically small, yet they arouse Cosgrove’s interest. As he cannot absorb the concept of royalties, he believes that somehow, somewhere, somebody is accidentally paying me for work that was compensated for years ago. And as this is clearly found money, Cosgrove feels that we should bank it in a special “rainy-day fund.”

“Meaning,” I said, as he handed me the mail, containing two pieces of what he has come to recognize as publishers’ accounting department communication, “you want to use it to buy CDs.”

He said nothing but sweetly whistled “We’re in the Money” as I opened the envelopes and examined the statements.

“One of these checks is for twenty-eight dollars,” I told him. “You want it? It’s yours.”

He clasped his hands at his throat like an opera diva going for high C as I endorsed it over to him.

“What’s the big deal?” I said. “You don’t even have a checking account.”

“I know someone who will cash this for me,” he explained, tucking it into his wallet.

“If you really want extra money,” I said, filing the bills and dumping the junkmail, “why don’t you write porn stories like J. and sell them to the slicks?”

“Would they publish my stories?”

“Here’s a secret that was confided to me some years ago by the porn king himself, John Preston. One day a month, an editor assumes control of the pile of submitted manuscripts and makes the following deductions: everything handwritten, out; everything on both sides of each page, out; everything with no margins, out; everything entirely in capital letters, out; and so on, till three stories are left. The editor accepts those three stories.”

“But how do you write porn?” Cosgrove asked, following me into the bedroom.

“By idealizing. Bring together two hot men of a very disparate type who in real life would never meet, much less have sex.” Changing my clothes for some imminent socializing, I went on, “Banker’s car breaks down near farm, farmer invites banker to spend the night, both go
whee!
Or: high-school teacher meets former student, the two repair to teacher’s apartment, student reveals titanic gym development and longtime wish to ball teacher, both go
whee!
”

Cosgrove looked doubtful. “It isn’t hot to say
whee!,
though, is it?”

One pats his head or rubs the back of his neck at such moments. “Figure of speech, pal.”

Buzzer: Doorman: Peter Keene coming up.

“Look, I’ll help you,” I said. “Give it some thought, then I’ll show you how to outline it. Remember, though: you don’t start with a situation. You start with
characters.
”

“Could I start with Vince Choclo? Except what type is he?”

“Why Vince Choclo?”

“Because it’s such a good name. It’s so dumb and dippy, he’ll have to be hot. He will be pleading in the big scene, where everything’s at stake and the crowd are fearful as the Zombie Contessa goes into her monkey dance.” After a moment he added, “I may be writing postmodernesque porn.”

Peter came in wearing running shorts, a sleeveless muscle-T, and a do-rag; I think he would have failed the dress code at a dog fight.

“Hey, pirate, where’s your doubloons?” Cosgrove asked him.

“You go make coffee,” Peter told him. “For I have news, friends. I have fallen very, very heavily for a fellow man, and if I could only—no, you mustn’t congratulate me, for this is a wondrous yet terrible thing. You feel so enlarged, so re-created … but you, yes,
mope
with joy, you worry…”

He sat on the couch, excited and flustered, wanting to spill thirty secrets at once.

“Could this be just the slightest bit premature?” I asked. “I mean, you picked up some guy in the street for the three hundredth time and—”

“No, no, my—and I don’t blame you—cynical friend. I’ve been a glad slut. But I never mentioned the ‘L’ word before, did I? For the last three weeks, I’ve been trying to … well, yes, to shape this lecture I knew I’d be giving you, yet I still don’t know where to—”

“Let me call Dennis Savage down,” I put in, going to the phone. “If it’s that serious.”

Peter went right on talking, ignoring the fact that I was briefly speaking to Dennis Savage and completely missing the appearance of the head of Fleabiscuit from under the couch, deftly to teethe on one of Peter’s shoelaces and pull the knot open. It’s his latest trick. Through all of this, I caught snatches of the time-honored phrases. You know: “… when I realized I couldn’t wait the required three days…” and “He wasn’t going to get out of my apartment alive” and “We just held each other and…”

Absently retying his shoelace, Peter mused, “If I told you his name, would it … or if I tried to describe the taste of his…”

“Week-old underpants?” said Cosgrove from the kitchen doorway.

Peter was quietly beside himself, running down like a fake Rolex. “Where do I even start?” he bleated. “It all comes out at once. One … raves.”

“‘That is the usual method, but not mine—
My
way is to begin with the beginning,’” said Cosgrove.

Peter paused, then asked, “Isn’t that Byron somehow?”

I nodded. “Cosgrove’s studying
Don Juan
in preparation for a writing career. He’s starting with porn, but who knows? Maybe one day you’ll publish his first novel, perhaps a high-society whodunit.”

Cosgrove agreed, and even offered a working title:
The Secret Diary of the Zombie Contessa.

“The beginning … His name is Lars Erich Blücher. His family came here when he was six, so he speaks fluent English with the sexiest little accent and blunders that bewitch one fatally. I met him in Sheep Meadow three Sundays ago, and we haven’t been apart for a day since, because he’s life itself. Around him, everyone else becomes … meaningless. But then, you two must know what I…”

Regarding Cosgrove and me, Peter stopped, decided not to go there, and as he dived into a rhapsody on Lars Erich’s looks, he again failed to notice that Fleabiscuit had poked his way out from under the couch and untied his other shoelace.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I’ll be the last to discount the importance of a healthy physical appearance in gay courtship etiquette. But what’s this guy’s personality like?”

“If you saw the way that tiny waist draws up to those en garde shoulders,” said Peter, retying his shoelace, “you wouldn’t ask.”

Then Dennis Savage came in, and Cosgrove served the coffee as Peter tried to bring Dennis Savage up to speed. But the Master simply held out his hand, saying, “Let’s view the evidence.”

“What evidence?” Peter asked.

“You must have a selection of photographs for us to consider. George Bush wouldn’t. Rudy Giuliani wouldn’t. You do.”

Peter hesitated, blushing, then dug a few snapshots out and passed them around. An opulent silence filled the room as we examined and shared.

Cosgrove asked, “What type is this?”

“Big blond boy,” I said. “With intelligent eyes. It’s a seventies build with nineties details. Or no—”

“You cannot type him,” said Peter. “He is beyond type.”

And yet. Lars Erich Blücher belonged to
some
category; every beauty does. He was in his early thirties, with a Teutonic face at once buoyant and hard. His hair was a blend of yellow and light brown, cut short around the ears but thick on top, he sported one of those lean torsos, all the muscle packed into the arms and thighs, and, in these snaps, he was clad only in dark green Lederhosen and kitschy suspenders. The silly clothes on the astonishing person created a paradox: the grinning man, the authoritative boy. He respected the taxonomy while outwitting it, which made him impossible to categorize.

“If you knew what it is to love as I suddenly know it,” said Peter as we studied the pictures, “you would flee from love.”

“Why is it,” asked Dennis Savage, “that everyone who finally falls in love thinks he’s discovered radium or something?” A sip of coffee, then: “And when do we meet the prodigy?”