I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (6 page)

“Is it Nick?” I asked Dennis Savage. “All this mourning because a love affair ended?”

“Where do you get off reducing it to ‘all this mourning’? Who are you to point a finger—you who set it all up, as I recall?”

“I hate you for that.”

“And you aren’t joking.”

“I was helping! How was I to know that Mac could stay intrigued by a Nick?”

“Who made you the social arbiter of gay romance?”

“It was supposed to be one glorious night.
One.
It does
not
follow that a … a player of Monopoly would want to coexist with someone who can’t tell a house from a hotel!”

He looked pensive. “Who knows less about love than you? The Wicked Witch of the West?”

“All right, what happens now? Is Mac’s life ruined because that slimy hustler busted his heart? No doubt you know much of one, true, life-long love—no one I know has been in and out of it more variously than you.”

“Jeers from a left-out.”

“So tell me: can it destroy as surely as it exhilarates?”

“We must watch developments,” he replied. “We must see and know.”

Developments proved invisible, for Mac gave up his apartment and resettled in Wisconsin. Odd letters trickled back, drab ones now. Mac’s mail used to soar. He never mentioned Nick, though there were what I took as oblique references, in phrases like “the fantasies of Manhattan” or “the grip of wishes.” I would respond with carefree dish and, perhaps two months later, back would come another feeble laudamus of rustic places. “More and more,” he wrote, “I have come to appreciate the plain heart of the midwest.” I felt as if he had spit on me.

I continued to write, as breezily as I could manage. There was pleasant news: Lionel was teaching at the New School, Carlo lucked into a job at a ritzy boutique and became solvent for the first time since grade school, Eric sold his first novel to a major house, Dennis Savage had met a dazzling young man in, of all places, the Forty-Sixth Street Theatre, and the boy was so pure it took our Circuit paragon four dates to bed him. Are Manhattan’s fantasies so blameful, then? We were all pushing thirty, and great dreams were slipping within our reach. And so I said to Mac, straight out: “Some fantasies must be shared.”

Mac never answered; his wife did, enclosing photographs of the wedding. Her name was Patricia; she had known Mac all their lives, and had married Mac’s high-school buddy, one of the last American casualties in Vietnam. Shortly after his death, Patricia had given birth to their son, Ty. A very mid-western story. I saw them all in the pictures: Pat quite pretty, Ty a handsome and sombre little boy, and the Mac I had known in New York, glad and lively. And still believing in fantasy. A thousand McNallys surrounded them, held them, admired them. There was even a tiny Ty with the model couple atop the festive cake. “And Mac,” Patricia ended, “is a natural-born father. We put on a record of ‘The Parade of the Tin Soldiers’ and Mac and Ty march around the room. You should see little Ty, how seriously he takes it. There is so much love in the world, I cannot know why I have been so lucky.” And she closed with, “Your friend, Patricia McNally.”

I never heard from Mac again.

*   *   *

I did see Nick, though, some years later, in some other spread in some other magazine. What,
Cockstorm? Bullstick?
And the spread—“Fantasy Boys”? It might as well have been. Nick was fondling a younger man, who gazed up at him in tender terror. No doubt Nick was making him dance. I was in a room full of men at party, and they passed the magazine from hand to hand to see.

“My God, that one’s hot!” someone exclaimed.

“How … hot … is he?” said another, in the cue-up style of Ed McMahon.

“He’s so hot,” said the jester, “he could make a straight turn gay.”

I let it pass.

The Homogay

These stories, reader, are meant as mine in particular, not as gay stories in general—not depictions per se. Each life bears its own tales. Still, I am concerned at how often people cry in these pages. Life is not that sad. I’ve made up my mind that there will be no crying in this one.

*   *   *

I come from a town so small that every mother’s son is born at home in mother’s bed. So small the school bus made but three stops. So small the bully had to double as the sissy.

His name was Harvey Jonas. He had a high-pitched voice, his frame carried a pudding of blubber, and he was a fiasco at sports: the classic adolescent queer. Yet he was intently aggressive, even sadistic, especially with those smaller than he: a classic adolescent tormentor. I frankly admit I was afraid of him. With a little warning, anyone could outrun him, but sometimes he would lie in wait, then come hurtling out to nab you, braying like a monstrous donkey. Once he caught me while I was pumping my bicycle tires and, without uttering a word, snatched the air pump and marched off with it.

Our meanest encounter happened up by the swings one summer evening. Harvey came upon me and my two little brothers while we were in the air and couldn’t run off. Anyway, you can’t run in front of little brothers. I stood my ground and had the first extrafamilial fight of my life, outclassed by Harvey’s superior weight and a warrior’s will I had yet to develop. My brothers came to my aid—Andrew socked his head and Tony bit his foot—but I was losing badly until my older brother Jim happened by.

Jim was one of those cooly murderous youths who, if not strangled at birth, grow up to comprise a sizable fraction of the straight male population as cooly murderous adults. I must admit, though, that it was rather grand knowing him on this occasion. Always decisive if sloppy on the amenities, Jim grabbed Harvey by the hair and swung him with a grunt into one of the metal posts that supported the swings. Harvey lay where he landed, and I feared he might be dead, but suddenly he reared up and ran off. At a safe distance, he turned around and brayed at us.

“That,” Jim observed with disgust, “is one champion queer.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“He sure is,” agreed Andrew.

“I bit his foot,” said Tony.

“And you know what you are?” Jim asked me, getting around to one of his favorite subjects. “A stupid
jerk.
” He shoved me. “Because you can’t even defend yourself from a
fag
with an
army
to help you!”

“I bit his foot,” said Tony.

Jim shoved me again. “Because you were
born
a jerk and you’ll
die
a jerk!” He stared at me as if he could see another Harvey Jonas on the rise. I was there; I know it; I can feel how it looks to this day. And Jim stalked off.

It’s tricky being the middle child: half the known world looks up to you and the other half looks down. Andrew and Tony waited for the next move, but I was too crushed to initiate anything.

“Do you want us to grunch his room for you?” asked Andrew, to cheer me up. “Grunch” is to ruin, to trash.

“The Revolt of the Moon Mice!” cried Tony, planning the marquee. “Let’s chew Jujubes and dribble them in his sneakers!”

*   *   *

Childhood is hard. I’ll skip ahead now to my grownup years in New York—you’ll see why directly—to a fey and raucous party of gays and their friends in the West Nineties. I knew no one; the other guests all seemed to be old comrades. There was a lot of liquor and smoke and by midnight the place was roaring. A few couples were openly smooching, a Puerto Rican teenager was wandering around wearing nothing but a Melitta coffee filter paper around his middle (it was large and he was small), and, in the main room, two queens were doing show-biz impersonations.

It appeared to be a set routine. After a handsome actor type smoothly intoned into an imaginary microphone, “And now, it’s time for
Dish Maven,
with the first legend of stage and screen, Miss Katharine Hepburn,” seven or eight people hummed “Fine and Dandy”—
Dish Maven
’s theme song, I guessed. And “Hepburn,” on a couch, ran through the rituals of the talk show, with preposterous commercials, rampant plugola, and unwitting egotism.

“And now, Miss Hepburn,” the actory announcer cut in, “it’s time to bring on your special guest.”

“Damn. I was just going to do
Coco
medley,” said Kate.

“Too late now, for here comes your dearest friend and competitor, the scintillant Miss Bette Davis!”

To a reprise of “Fine and Dandy,” a second queen joined Kate on the couch, eyeing her as Hamlet might eye King Lear.

“Deah, deah Kate!” rasped Bette.

“Miss Davis’ clothes,” Kate told the crowd, “designed exclusively by K-Mart fashions!”

“Who is older, Kate?” Bette asked. “You or the Gobi Desert?”

“Quick!” Kate cried to an imaginary orchestra. “
Coco
medley!”

“Coco?”
asked Bette. “I pronounce it with cedillas:
Soso!
”

“Well, you never won an Oscar!”

“You slept with Howard Hughes!”

“You made
Beyond the Forest!
”

“Ladies, ladies!” urged the announcer. “Surely you great survivors can stop feuding and tell us of Hollywood’s golden age.”

The two stars fell into each other’s arms. “We’ll reminisce!” Kate swore; and Bette was overwhelmed. “Yes,” Kate went on, “yes, we knew them all: Gable, Hank Fonda, dear little Deanna Durbin, sweet as halvah. And, of course, Bette, I had my marvelous Spencer and you had no one, but they were great, great times!”

“I had William Wellman.”

“I want to ask you a very important question, Bette. Now, it may seem academic—and I know our guests are waiting for golden-age dish—but, seriously, Bette … you knew them all. The directors, the writers—”

“Such as F. Scott Fitzpatrick, my favorite, who wrote
Tender Are the Damned!
”

“… the actors … and you knew what greatness was, as I did, and you knew the beauty of the art. You knew it! You
knew
it!” It was like Hepburn in
The Lion in Winter,
running, mounting, soaring. “Griffith and Gish!
Gone With the Wind!
The comebacks and the glory! And what I want to ask you is…”

“Yes?”

“Who had the biggest boner in Hollywood?”

And of course everyone laughed and clapped, and someone cried in a Tallulah voice, “
I
did, dahling!,” and people refilled their glasses, and I was bowled over. I had come to New York for fast-moving hip, freedom from straights, and a touch of dada; here they all were at once. While musing on this, I suppose, I was unconsciously staring at the man who had played Hepburn. He was tall, not good-looking, and strikingly weightlifted; another year or two of iron and he could have entered a contest. The contrast between his physique and his performance was like a standoff between homosexuality as a feeling and gay as a style, the clipped hunk look warring with the camp. Half of him was more homo than gay, the other half more gay than homo. He was
homogay;
and he was, I suddenly noticed, aware that I was looking at him. He came over, posed, and said in a sultry voice through Jane Russell lips, “They call me Lorinda.”

“That was expert satire,” I told him. “You got television, Hollywood, and show-biz megalomania all at once.”

He was looking at me oddly; was I too stiff for this party?

“Go on,” he said, in his own voice. “Say something else.”

“Why?”

“Because I know you.”

“No, you don’t,” I told him, strangely fearful.

“It’s Bud Mordden, isn’t it?”

“Who are you?”

“So!” he screamed, Lorinda again. People were looking. “Have you forgotten that night in romantic Mahony City when you pledged to be true?”

It was Harvey Jonas. Most gays conquer an atrocious childhood by going either completely virile or completely fag. Harvey had done both. No wonder I hadn’t recognized him: he was twice disguised. Nearly speechless, I said the first thing that hit me: “You stole my bicycle pump.”

“But not your heart, I see.” He squeezed my thigh and “whispered,” “What are you doing after the game, fullback? Let me teach you some new positions.” More people were looking, and I backed away from him.

“Slow down,” I said.

“A hometown girl like me needs her sweetheart by her side!” He was screaming again; now half the party was watching, including, inches away, the Puerto Rican in the Melitta filter. Briskly switching over to Eve Arden, Harvey told the boy, “You have an emergency call—coffee for three in Room 308,” turned him around and pushed him away. “They’ll want plenty of hot cream from your spigot, too,” he added, and turned back to me.

“Now, my old friend,” he said, in quiet, even, masculine tones, grasping my shoulders. “Let’s understand each other vividly. If you tell a single soul … and I mean
anyone:
a judge, a ribbon clerk, a bag lady … if you tell anyone about my past, I swear I’ll rip you apart, limb from limb.” Grasping harder, he flexed his right biceps. “Feel that.”

“No, I’ll take your word for it.” Twenty years after, the same bully was still harassing me.

“If you’re nice to me,” he added, softening, “I’ll be nice to you. Silence?”

“All right.”

“Will you shake hands on it, in our simple country way?”

“No. But I’ll give you my word.”

He regarded me for a bit, then nodded. “I’ll trust you.”

Suddenly a voice rang out: “Auditions for the chorus line! Auditions for the
Hello, Dolly!
number!” Harvey swept back into the throng; now he was Carol Channing. “And
I’m
Dolly!” he announced. “Hello, everybody!”

“Hello, Carol!” they replied. And that day at the swings, which I had almost succeeded in burying, came flooding back into me like poison.

*   *   *

I would have been glad to give Harvey a wide berth, but for some reason he adopted me. He was utterly uninterested in me physically and we were not compatible as friends; however, he often included me in a crowd. I went along because I liked his crowd; after all, I had come to New York to join it. And never once did he revert to the threat he had voiced that night we reconvened. He had learned to project his toughness at genuine enemies, from impedient bureaucrats to sullen doormen, casually and fiercely. He was shameless. A scene in a bank or restaurant energized him. One minute he would be regaling the dinner table with his Tallulah and Carol; the next, he’d have a flippant waiter by the hair threatening to wash his face in soup if he didn’t snap to. And he meant it; and he was over two hundred pounds of total beef.