Read How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle Online

Authors: Ethan Mordden

Tags: #Gay & Lesbian, #Literature & Fiction, #Fiction, #Gay, #Romance, #United States, #Gay Romance, #Genre Fiction, #Lgbt, #Gay Fiction

How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (7 page)

“I have a puppy,” said Cosgrove, still in the paper-bag head, “and his trick is to untie shoelaces.”

“Yes, it is so funny, how a little dog will understand all his rules but still can make mischief in a moment. As when everyone is asking, ‘Where is puppy Hanno?,’ and then he pops up with all the family’s missing socks in his mouth. Or when my brother and sister are running through the neighborhood to find puppy Asterix, and we all come back tearful as if he must be lost forever. But he is in the kitchen, wagging his tail. And two weeks later, they take him away, and he cries so that Harry cries, too, and we all three break apart with crying, because he thinks we let him go without caring.… I will stop here.”

His eyes were wet.

The waiter was hovering, and Lars Erich brisked us out of the sad moment with “Now we must order our American platters, where the food comes like the Grand Gardens of Babylon.”

We ordered, did a little number on this and that, and then, at my guidance, returned to Lars Erich’s profession.

“Well,” he admitted, “it is so strange that examples of each breed will look alike, but each subject has a different personality. We call it ‘the subject,’ the dog we are training. You may think it is always a male, but both genders will be found useful. And you know what is so odd, that these heroic dogs are given to people who so often do not appreciate them or will even mistreat them. This is a great secret, of course. One of those many things that one is forbidden to say in America.”

His arms bent and swelled as he said this, and Peter helplessly grabbed one to feel. It’s a little annoying: don’t they get enough at home?

“Do the dogs have any idea of their heroic role?” I asked. “Do they ever wish, do you think, that they were the merest household pets, without responsibility?”

“A dog does not know choices. In Alaska, the sled dog does not wonder, Why am I not pampered Lassie of the movies? A dog knows only who feeds him and what the rules are to be still more fed then. It is mankind only that conceives of possibilities, of changing one’s position. It is why the gym, so popular now even in Europe.”

“When you spoke before of the resentment of the extraordinary,” I said, “that really caught me. Because I think homophobia is based on that—or maybe more a fear of the unconventional. That is, not counting the Religion Nazis, who turn Christianity into a hating machine. But the average homophobe simply doesn’t like
anything
he isn’t used to.”

“They are afraid of too much everything in the world,” said Lars Erich, with a shrug. “Just a few things they can understand—house, food, jobs, vacations. But ideas”—here he held up a warning finger very close to me, leaning in, flirting and teaching—“are mysterious. Mystery is troubling. They want to kill what troubles them, ja?”

Peter interrupted by asking Cosgrove, “How are you going to eat with that paper bag on?”

“By magic,” Cosgrove darkly replied, though in the event he simply removed it.

“So a folk,” Lars Erich went on, “that lives entirely in its own way is very troubling, very to be killed. Being gay is not just different language, religion, king. It is different in every way.”

“Please,” said Peter, “enough Citizenship 101.”

“Instead, let’s name our favorite actors,” said Cosgrove. “Mine is Andrea Thompson, Jill on
NYPD Blue.

Lars Erich smiled. “Mine is Aiden Shaw,” he said. “Handsome like a wonderful schoolteacher who is also leading the hiking club on forest trips. Then he is stripped in a movie and it is a very mysterious idea.”

*   *   *

M
UCH LATER, BACK UPTOWN
, Cosgrove asked me, “So what type is the German guy?”

That was hard to say now, for despite the gay emphasis on looks, personality overwhelms all calculations, and Lars Erich’s personality—his restless intelligence in particular—seemed bigger even than his looks. I’ve known smart hunks, humorous hunks, surpassingly talented hunks, brilliant hunks, and even a hunk with such finely nuanced democratic principles that he’d give a mercy fuck to anyone who asked. But not till Lars Erich had I met a hunk so stimulating in his worldview that he made me reconsider my beliefs.

“How can I write porn,” Cosgrove grumped, “if I don’t know what anyone is?”

“Well,
you
describe him.”

“He’s a big young guy. He’s a cute authority figure. He’s like your minister but then he takes you to the prom for your first secret kiss. What kind is that?”

“It’s
type,
not kind. And what type he is: I don’t know.”

“Last week, when you were being extra reproachful of Cosgrove who forgot to pick up the laundry, you said you know everything.”

God, am I turning into a parent?

“Anyway,” Cosgrove went on as he tended another batch of pretzels, “get ready for more types. Because now J. said he would bring his roommate to dinner this Thursday.”

“Vince Choclo? You’ve got to be kidding!”

“And Cosgrove is not unhappy to meet him after all these tales we’ve heard. I may be seen taking notes.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Is he ready for us?”

“J. thinks their relationship will soon reach critical mass. They’re up to the massage stage.”

I was hunting for the big orange household scissors, which are
supposed
to be in the flatware drawer but finally turned up inside the carriage of the pasta machine.

“How would you feel if I canceled this dinner?” I asked.

“You
can’t!
I have to meet Vince Choclo for myself!”

“Why?” I said, going to my desk to wrap Dennis Savage’s birthday present, a cashmere sweater he had fallen in love with in Bloomingdale’s and had alluded to perhaps 387 times in the last four days. Cosgrove, having coated his pretzels with honey and salt and laid them in the oven, followed me, wiping his hands on a dish towel.

“I need to see,” he told me quietly, “what J. wanted instead of Dennis Savage.”

I was wrestling with the gift wrap, an insufferably thin and easily crinkled paper in a baby motif.
*
“You mean,” I said, “you need to see what J. wanted instead of us.”

And
that
brings us to a final type, marginal yet timelessly essential to the gay world: what I call the
60–40.
You won’t find this genre of man hanging around Splash, but he might have turned up in a bathhouse in the old days, on a night when his wife had taken the kids for an overnight to visit her mother.

The 60–40 is apparently straight, actually. (For an even truer statement, switch the adverbs.) Sixty percent of him is attracted to women, enough to make a marriage on and, if he is a willing stooge of homophobes, stick with it. However, 40 percent of him seeks carnal knowledge of men, and that is a hefty fraction of oneself to control. The healthier 60–40s find outlets on the sly and may even leave the marriage; the more damaged 60–40s go through life insane with frustration at all the Hot Guys downloaded into the American consciousness by advertising, movies, and real life, hating what they were born to be and, sometimes, heading “family preservation” groups for the Religion Nazi community.

Generally, 60–40s never enter gay life in any true sense. You may meet a few describing themselves as “bisexuals.” But most 60–40s don’t describe themselves at all. Like the freedom-fearing people whom Lars Erich cited, they feel perilously submerged in choices. The true 60–40 is a shadow figure, one piece of him maintaining a profile existence as a round-the-clock hetero and the other piece frantically darting in and out of a fantastic existence: ours. A single honest moment and he is destroyed.

But now I’m going to have to give Vince credit—he was honest to a fault at our dinner. True, if he was a 60–40, he concentrated on his 60 side, rapping endlessly about women, whom he treated as a genre divided into three categories.
Gash,
his favorite, loved sex and asked for no more than a good lay.
Princesses,
whom he resented, would put out only after “dinner and a show.”
Brides,
who mystified him, did not have sex at all, at least not with Vince.

“I’m just some mutt to them,” Vince told us, sitting on our couch, congratulating us for having Beck’s Dark beer and thanking Cosgrove for giving it to him in a glass, looking around at the stuff on the walls as if he’d never seen
Wizard of Oz
frame enlargements or a
Billion Dollar Baby
poster before.

He was very tall, with long, shaggy brown hair and the heavy, loose construction of a thirtysomething who doesn’t consciously take care of himself but spends his days delivering those great bulbs of water-cooler water and picking up the empties. I’d call him ordinary but for a saving grace: his eyes grew extra warm and wrinkly when he smiled.

J. walked in a bit later, and I stopped him at the door with a whisper: “Just give me the ground rules here—are we supposed to be gay?”

“Make your choice,” he said, brushing past me.

Vince looked up gladly as J. approached. “Your friends are treating me real nice.”

“They can show a cruel side,” said J., joining Vince on the couch. “Yet I love them as brothers.”

“Friends, sure,” said Vince. “Can’t fuck with them, can’t fuck without them. Like my buddy Red Backhaus. Him and me, we’re special-close, all the way back to second grade. Screwed our first gash together, side by side. Put him up when some bitch threw him out after hours. He’d do anything for me, Red. But there’s always this, like, contest, when he disagrees with what I say and betting me a fast ten I’m wrong. Then he tries to forget to pay. But I love his soul.”

“Does he have red hair?” Cosgrove asked.

Thinking it over, Vince said, “’S’more brown. He doesn’t take to the color, keeps it short. And his body is all freckles, which also he don’t take to. But chicks’ll notice colors, and that can be useful.”

J.’s failure to explain the reason for this visit worried me. Were Cosgrove and I supposed to represent the normality of gay life, thus to correct Vince’s preconceptions and advance his seduction by J.? Yet J. had, I learned, told Vince nothing of us save that we’re all longtime friends. Vince even asked Cosgrove where he lived.

“Right here” was the answer.

Vince nodded. “So you’re like me and J. here.”

“You aren’t yet,” said Cosgrove.

“Yeah, now, with my real good buddy Red Backhaus, we both know the same things, so there’s no surprises. Huh—’less Red shows up with some slick new babe and I steal her away.” Chuckling here. “He’ll bet on it, the girlfriend tango we have. He’ll lose. But he could steal gash from me anytime he wanted to. He’s a five-alarm guy, Red. A beautiful, beautiful guy to know about.”

Fleabiscuit’s snout came ever so slowly out from under the couch, just to the right of Vince’s shoe.

“I told Red he should establish some Polaroids of himself, show his charms. Not to no princess, you know, who would just pretend to be horrified, like she’s been taught to show. But gash love to know what’s in store. Now, what are
you
up to, short stuff?” he suddenly asked, swooping down to pick up Fleabiscuit. “Where’d this little flyboy come from?”

Fleabiscuit, content in Vince’s grasp, closed his eyes and went limp.

“That’s right, now,” said Vince, setting the puppy to rest on his lap. “Anyhowsle, though, I took a few shots of ol’ Red to show him how it goes. Had him pose in just a pair of dress pants I lent him, which gives it class. We opened them up so to show off his racy boner and he looked real good. But I don’t expect that Red takes those pictures out at the right moment. Red’ll get confused or drunk. He prefers to do a triple, where two ol’ friends share the gash and everybody’s happy.”

Fleabiscuit awoke, shook himself, and jumped back down under the couch.

“Now, with J. here,” Vince went on, his eyes winningly wrinkling, “it’s always a surprise. He made me get a VCR and he’s teaching me all about the movies. ’S’funny, with friends, ’cause you don’t want a buddy like Red too smart or he’ll go all boss on you. But I like J. being smart, you know. He showed me this one attraction I would never have known was okay didn’t J. explain it to me. It looked stupid, but J. says it’s
supposed
to, so then you can enjoy it. Two old bags going at each other, greasy fat guy and all.” He thought for a moment.
“See What Happened to Lady June.”

“Lady Jane,”
said J.

“Baby Jane,”
said Cosgrove.

“Yeah. Movie’s older’n I am, could almost be a silent. You know, where all the actors was posing while passing fifi remarks and it don’t seem real. Like, we sure could use Harrison Ford here. But J. says it’s this whole world of entertainment I could get into, with strange music and jokes, and it gives you a new life.”

“‘You will be assimilated,’” said Cosgrove, quoting
Star Trek
in hollow tones. “‘Resistance is futile.’”

“You haven’t said much, mister,” Vince told me.

“Cosgrove went to special trouble over this dinner,” I replied as the little chef returned to the kitchen. “He’s trying out some first-time recipes of great complexity.”

“Yeah? I don’t cook myself, except for you heat a can of tuna and stir it into spaghetti. Some butter, grated cheese. Company coming, you can sprinkle those French’s fried onions over the top, it’s fancy. Right, J.?”

“Vince and I are pals,” said J., “so what he says, goes.”

“Here’s the appetizer,” Cosgrove announced, bringing in a platter. “I call it”—he had to concentrate to get the sounds out smoothly—
“biscuit assaisoné.”

“Say, little pretzels!” said Vince. “Fresh and hot, too, like you can’t get on the street.”

I was watching J., wondering if he’d make a disparaging comment. He seemed about to, but then he simply took his pretzel and ate it.

He’d seen me watching him, too. He didn’t care. He’s busy re-tailoring Vince as a suitor, stooge, and meal ticket. Why should J. worry what judgments I draw?

Was all that Little Kiwi—Dennis Savage love affair a fraud? No, of course not. But J. deeply resented having to work—especially after Cosgrove moved in with me with only the family chores to do. Straights want laws, constrictions, social pressures. Gays want freedom. J. may well be the gayest of all. He yearns for irresponsibility. (That’s a joke, my brothers.)

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