How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (5 page)

“Gradually,”
said Peter. “You know? He had me to dinner two nights ago, and I thought it would be we two and a meat loaf. Well, ha!: seared tuna, spinach almondine, silver on the table, and six of his friends. I felt very, very auditioned, my pals.
Inspected.
At least they were mainly gym bunnies. The most incredible stomach crust but very little between the ears.”

“How did you know they have crust?” Cosgrove asked.

“Well, they’re always pulling each other’s shirts up and holding mini-contests, aren’t they? If I weren’t so hefty myself, they … well, they’d turn quite against a fellow. Now, imagine plopping Lars Erich among you intellectual cut-’em-ups all at once. What would occur?”

Cosgrove said, “I dread to think”; and Dennis Savage snapped back, “Everyone knows you dread to think.”

Without shifting his seat on the couch in the slightest, Peter held them apart while continuing, “So I thought, let’s not have a general scrutiny of my … Yes, Lars Erich wants to expand his CD collection. Weak in his classics, it seems, though like all Europeans he’s horribly brisk on the rudiments. Knowing how many symphonies Brahms wrote and even the D Major or e minor part. Does the key matter, one wonders?”

Taking advantage of the altercation between Cosgrove and Dennis Savage, Fleabiscuit had slithered out from under the couch to reopen Peter’s right shoelace.

“A symphony in D Major,” I observed, “really is a different type of music from one in any minor key.
Boys,
” I then warned Cosgrove and Dennis Savage, who were winding down anyway. “Each type creates a different drama.”

“Yes, but so
I
thought if you
alone
went with Lars Erich and me to Tower Records for an expert’s buy, it would smooth my friend’s way into the … well, coterie. I was thinking this Sunday, with lunch after.”

“This guy with the gym-bunny friends and the Lederhosen,” I said. “What does he do for a living?”

“He trains seeing-eye dogs.”

That so startled us that even Cosgrove and Dennis Savage shared a
wow!
look. Fleabiscuit sought to celebrate the moment by opening Peter’s left shoelace.

“You found some hero?” I said. “A good guy?”

“Would I fall for a ribbon clerk?” Peter countered.

“But what is his type?” Cosgrove insisted, holding up one of the Lars Erich photos.

“His type is love,” said Peter, retying his shoelace.

“You’ve hooked up with a man in a charity service industry,” said Dennis Savage, incredulously. “Why did I foresee a liaison with a soap-opera stud? A circus strongman?”

“Because you think all gay men are materialists.”

“No, just you.”

“I want to come to Tower, too,” said Cosgrove. “This guy could model for a character in my series of porn stories. Only there is no desk for Cosgrove in this apartment. Some may ask, Does he have a theme? Yes. Yet there are those who will fear the dire mythology I unveil.”

“I would need a decoder ring to even begin replying to all that,” said Peter. “Except this first time it really should be just Bud. The rest of us are so … unpredictable?”

Followed then a bit of scurrying around. Dennis Savage went upstairs, Cosgrove set out on household errands, and Peter took a refill on coffee.

“It’s okay about Tower, right?” Peter asked me, relaxing a little, as, I’ve noticed, he always does when a group boils down to a twosome. He doesn’t like having to Hold the Stage. “I can’t wait to see how you … But that’s gay life, isn’t it? Presenting your new boy friend, and your buddies hold this pep rally thing, and deep bonds are forged. Why do my shoelaces keep coming undone whenever I sit on this couch?”

“Would you please finally take that ridiculous thing off your head?”

He did, and that was even worse: he was bald.

“Christ and Judas!” I said. “
What
are you
doing?
”

“Well, it’s a look. The hair’ll grow back. Haven’t you ever wondered how you’d seem without … Some men find it attractive.”

“I’ve never wondered how I’d seem being eaten by wolves. I’ve never wondered how I’d seem going down on the
Andrea Doria.
And I’ve never wondered how I’d seem bald.”

“Lars Erich digs it.”

The next few seconds hosted a gently rapturous moment, as Peter contemplated his great good fortune.

“Just to … to talk to him,” Peter finally fluted out. “His smile as he dives into little German phrases. The fierce way he pushes me onto my back, his hair falling across his forehead and his mouth frowning like a little boy’s. Can I whisper to you?”

Not waiting for a reply, he leaned over and quoted, in a synthetic German accent, “‘Now it is my Peter who is being fucked, you will see that!’”

Retying my right shoelace, I set up the logistics for the Tower trip in a tone designed to conclude the visit, but Peter appeared to have one more thing on his mind.

“Yes?” I said, stopped while working my way to the door.

He rose; he didn’t follow. “I need to say this, but I’m afraid you’ll think I’m crazy.”

“I already think you’re crazy.”

“It’s a sort of … yes, a … a dream, you see, that I, you might say, entertain. You’ll find it strange. I don’t know where it came from, but it’s in me somehow. I can’t get away from it, shocking though that … But I have to tell you, or someone. It’s funny how concerned one can be about appearances, then … suddenly … you aren’t at all.”

“Sure you are—you’ve just changed the appearances.”

“It’s about a sacrifice ceremony. Drums and feathers in a sacred grove, the Maria Montez thing. And
he’s
the sacrifice, struggling in the grip of burly guards … or why use that silly vague straight term, ‘burly’? No, they’re lavish dynamite, as hungry to fuck him as to … You see how
frontal
it gets? As if a boy this beautiful cannot simply be loved. He must be done to on the highest level, an ultimate worship, with a sort of … death love … like Tristan and Isolde?”

“Snuff fuck.”

“Bound and crying out and looking around for help that will not come and he has never been more beautiful. He’s too splendid to live, almost. It’s like that exposé on talk radio, did you see that? Where the black voice said, ‘I want to kill a pretty white boy.’ It’s all so … Oh, wait till Sunday.”

As we walked to the door, Fleabiscuit came running out from under the couch, began to frolic, suddenly realized that he was About to Be Left Alone in Bud’s Sadistic Grip, wurfed, and raced into the bedroom to hide.

“Thank you for listening to me,” Peter said. Then, impulsively, he gave me our first hug.

“Now, that’s gay life,” I told him as I opened the door. “Someone is willing to hear what you need to say.”

*   *   *

I
T IS WORTH REMARKING
on Lars Erich’s unique sophistication of looks, because we have been graduated from a time when everyone in gay was either a type or invisible. Nowadays, most guys are not types; and the whole typing system has grown so complex it’s meaningless.

It was so simple before, in the early days of Stonewall. Fantasy cartoonists proclaimed the styles: on the one hand Tom of Finland’s dangerous giants, and on the other Toby’s plunderable goslings. I kept wondering whether these artists were tapping into something universal or were outlining a vision dear only to themselves. But the porn stars were not kids: hairy-chested Richard Locke, one of the first gays to take a tattoo (a butterfly on the right thigh); an eerily handsome galoot named Paul something who Colted under the billing of Ledermeister; and an angel-faced hoodlum named Jimmy Hughes who won
The Advocate
’s Groovy Guy contest and was almost immediately after convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault upon women he supposedly abducted from supermarket parking lots.

So you could not be a kid, it seemed. You could not even be you. You had to be big, rough-hewn, surprising. Bright and funny—the essence of urban gay—was unhot. But what was hot? Abducting women from supermarket parking lots?

“I hate this,” Dennis Savage would wail, coming back from the gym in his early days there. “It is so sheerly punishment.” Still, his mesomorph structure took on the extra flash easily, and he so enjoyed the results that he upped his program. Then, too, the gym—Profile for Men, just down Second Avenue from our building—was notoriously cruisy. Orgies were known to break out in the steam room.

One day, as a shirtless Dennis Savage flexed and paraded around in his apartment with a sinful grin, I asked, “Are gays having so much sex simply because it’s pleasurable? Or is it part of a psychological transaction?”

“You have to teach a guy to like himself,” said Carlo, coming out of the kitchen munching an apple.

“How do you do that?”

Carlo thought it over while examining Dennis Savage’s waist-to-shouders ratio. “You will show him solutions to his problems,” Carlo began. “Always side with him against the world.… Now you want to work the delts extra-heavy, my friend. Give yourself the wing look. Extra wide at the top is best. And not so much arms now.”

“But they notice those first,” Dennis Savage protested, moving to the mirror to see for himself what Stonewall had made of Jane Austen’s Eligible Young Man: the hunk.

“Main thing they see is the shape of the torso,” said Carlo, coming up behind Dennis Savage to demonstrate like an academic at a chart, pointing, underlining, savoring. “You want this long V above all. Big chest for those fine buttons to ride on. They will not just be there—they will stand out.”

From across the room, I said, “To just be there is not permitted in gay life.”

“You will keep on heavy in the legs,” Carlo went on. “Big thighs are a lovely sight to see.”

“They only show in summer,” Dennis Savage complained, but gently now, going under Carlo’s spell as he touched and murmured.

“Summer’s when most tricking occurs, I do believe,” Carlo told him. “I want to fill my summertime with lively strangers.”

“What about the haircut?”

“Short’s best on you, so that’s just right.”

“What does all this have to do with teaching some guy to like himself?” I asked, coming over to them as Carlo ditched the apple core in an ashtray and started working from behind on Dennis Savage’s shoulders, enjoying the feel of them while Dennis Savage relaxed and went with it. “Imagine that guy heading for the Eagle tonight, dreaming of … of being loved like that. He’s planning on something other than a hot date, isn’t he?”

“How would you truly plan on something other?” asked Carlo, clearly amused at the way Dennis Savage responded to the massage. He even sighed.

“He wants a personality he can … something to respond to that responds to him.”

“Oh please, do I have to be judged on my personality, too?” said Dennis Savage. “Isn’t the looks competition hard enough? I’ve got to be fabulous company? When does it end?”

“Hush, now,” Carlo told him, rubbing Dennis Savage’s tummy and growling sex telegrams into his ear. Dennis Savage’s eyes were closed, and he mooed a bit as Carlo opened his pants. As I’ve said, fashion decreed in that time that no one hot wear underclothes, and Dennis Savage’s cock came surging out. It was call of the wild in your living room, going naked in the city. Dennis Savage’s is an exploratory and importunate cock, also a very long and fat one ringed with veins. Or, as Carlo said, reaching around to feel and admire, “A piece like so will truly taste, and that’s what I call a man.”

*   *   *

I
CALL A MAN
anything in pants, but you see whither this view was tending: to weight, to power. Gays wanted to co-opt the authority claimed by heteros as the natural order.
They
said, The Fathers shall rule;
we
said, The sons shall be their own Fathers. Thus, we remade ourselves in our own God’s image.

Then created we the
Clone,
unassailably hot. Dark-haired, preferably tall, well-built though not necessarily double-pumped, and bearing the masculine warranty of thirty-five or so, the Clone was early Stonewall’s essential erotic figure, concocted (for few took his form naturally) to incorporate the manly arts. That is: few words, slow motion, big hot. What a paragon to live up to! Moreover, there remained the irony that gay culture reveled in what I call “the Knowledge”—basically, all that Broadway, old Hollywood, and opera, with glitzy trivia thrown in—yet wanted the Clone innocent of it.

This was a bequest of pre-Stonewall, the world of johns and hustlers. Sex occurred between a piece of trade and a piece of fruit; there were no “gay men.” By the understanding of the age, the very idea was an oxymoron. Thus, when we decided to cease being fruit, we tried to turn into trade.

Of course, trade screwed women, whereas Clones didn’t even know any. Clone was a look: the build, the clothes, the hair. If a mustache was de rigueur, beards were the bonne bouche. Hair was virile. Ironically, today smooth skin is phallic.

The smooth
Blond Boy
was in physical style the Clone’s opposite, partly because blonds are expected to be young, not to mention dumb. It’s a compliment, in a way: it expresses the wish that blonds
were
stupid, because if intelligence is complicated, then stupid is vacant and therefore directly connected to its appetites. Calling blonds dumb is no more than the verbalization of the desire for someone whose sexual expression is limitlessly efficient.

While I’m at it, the third of the classic Stonewall types is
Trash,
the stupid thing combined with a class thing. Trash not only lacked the Knowledge but didn’t know how to behave—not just at a dinner party: at a urinal. The trashy man laughed at things that weren’t funny, or made disturbing confessions. Gordon Fay, a fixture at the Eagle’s half-price-beer-for-shirtless-guys nights, looked like many another raggedly pretty, awesomely chiseled boy. But Gordon, after hours, would share with you his fantasy of visiting Central Park some midnight to seek out the sleeping homeless and “lop off a few heads.”

Trash made porn, spent nights in jail, and held down dimwit jobs. And
their
opposite was the
Natural.
This type was totally middle-class, but at any rate he was cute. The least “created” of Stonewall’s personalities, the Natural wore clothes, not an identity kit. For some reason, the Natural was always younger than you were, though he had to make certain adjustments when he faced his first aging crisis, usually at twenty-four. I remember running into Tadhe O’Connor for the first time after several months to find him swollen with build, a graduate from sweetheart to red-hot muscleboy. “I was turning twenty-seven,” Tadhe explained, “and I figured I needed an angle.”