Buddies (20 page)
Once we loosened up, it
was
a party. Carlo spent much of it in Big Steve’s lap opening presents, Rick Conradi did a drag act in the discarded wrappings, and Kenny Reeves taught Little Kiwi the samba.
“You were waiting for something,” I reminded Carlo. “Did it … occur?”
He grinned and patted his cheek. “You saw it occur, my friend.”
“So was Hugh the stranger you wanted, after all? Did you electrify him?”
“Hugh is a stranger, I guess. But not my stranger.” He looked around the room, at something like twenty men he had known for about four hundred years in the aggregate, nearly half a millennium of buddies. “Maybe there are no more strangers in gay life,” he said. “Maybe you can only electrify yourself. Listen, that’s what Stonewall gave us, right?”
“Do me a favor? Go home with Big Steve.”
He laughed. Dennis Savage signaled me over to the salad bowl to pick out the last few cherry tomatoes.
“Thank God that wretched soap opera is over,” he said.
“If it’s over, it wasn’t soap opera. Soaps never end, you know.”
“I don’t recall how this got started, but I’d swear it was your fault.”
“I know why Little Kiwi calls you Snug.”
“If you
dare
say so much as—”
“It’s because you electrify him when you cuddle, you cockdude, you.”
He said, “You would have made a good early Christian, you know that?” But I could tell he was pleased.
Notes on S&M, set forth by outsiders as well as by experts.
Strenuous, black-hearted Dick Tangent asks me where Bobby is.
I say I’m not aware.
He knows I’m lying, and takes the double-crostic away from me. I still won’t look at him; fine, he’ll wait.
I give in and turn to him. “Look—”
“Hey,” he cuts in, mock-amiable, patting my knee. “Hey, now. Because the longer he stays away, the worse it’ll be for him when he gets back. Tell him.”
“He knows.”
“I want that little chicken here, and I mean today. By the time I get back from tea. That gives him three hours.” He leans against the deck railing, facing the ocean and me. “What does he think he’s doing, anyway? He knows he’ll come home. He’s got a case on me, whether you like it or not.”
“It has nothing to do with me.”
He nods once, slowly. “Now you’re talking.” He looks at the puzzle, cut from the
Times
and set on a clipboard. “You do these in pen?”
“Pencil makes too light an impression.”
“Belts make a good impression. You ought to try them sometime. Tell Bobby what I said.” He hands me the clipboard and saunters off.
I have always had back luck in my Pines houses. My first year, I roomed with a temper-monster and an alcoholic realtor who, before my eyes, jacked off his poodle, Amahl the Night Visitor, with his foot. The dog cried out like a plucked mandrake when it climaxed. The second year I jumped from a house as structured as summer camp to one so open no one got around to making dinner. I lived on Lorna Doones; and by September I looked like one. I tried going freelance the next year, but I hated being a guest, so I bought out the share of a friend who was suddenly transferred to Los Angeles, and ended in a small rectangle surrounded by deckwork and perched high over the eastern end of the oceanside Pines: with one S, Dick Tangent; the S’s two wonderful Labradors, Mortimer and Gridley; the S’s M, Bobby Hackney; and a coil of rope with which Dick terrorized Bobby.
No gizmos for Dick—none of that
Drummer
kit of clamps, enemas, whoopie cushions, Cuisinarts, seltzer bottles, and other jazz. Dick was subtle, tactile, confidential. Tying up his partners was not the start of his scene, but its ultimate threat. What he would do to you then was, I suppose, your worst fantasy, Room 101; anyway, he had Bobby paralyzed. I had seen them in bed lying so skillfully intertwined they might have been a pretzel; and chasing each other along the beach splashing and shouting like little kids; and staring at each other on the deck as the sun was coming up, not daring to touch except at the eyes, and then Bobby would turn at my footsteps and I’d see tears running down his cheeks.
It was a good house logistically. Dick ran it, and ran it well. He and I got along because his dogs and I did. He let them walk me, which was not unlike driving a chariot without the chariot. He did all the cooking, saw to the landlord details, and even enjoyed cleaning up. All I had to do was play secret agent with Bobby, who was forever running off in fear of and returning in lamentation to Dick and the rope waiting in the bedroom.
Now, Bobby, I should tell you, was a very disadvantaged kid. Poor family, chance education, no ambition training. God gave him something: cuteness to die—but this too turned out to be a disadvantage, because as long as he could remember, men had been seducing and raping him. His cousins, his uncles, the minister, delivery boys. He called them “pirates.” Too slight to defend himself from their advances, he took up karate training; but the instructor kidnapped him. Then Bobby joined a gym, but in the shower room everyone could view his gigantic cock—another disadvantage, the poor kid—and pirates would drag him home and commit disorderly conduct upon him. I suppose he concluded that as long as he was born to be possessed, he might as well select a permanent dreamboat.
That Dick Tangent was. He knew the Three Secrets, more valuable than the Three Cards of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, to wit: (1) have a lot of jaw, (2) smile seldom but dazzlingly, and (3) walk from the ass down. For my money, his dogs were more fun. Mornings, I’d come out on the deck and they’d frolic about, then I’d lie down and they’d take turns leaping over me. Yet everyone I knew was suing for dinner invitations, and not to meet the dogs. Dick ruled these out. “Take your guests to the Monster,” he’d say. “Read your lease. I cook for the house.”
Besides, he was busy with Bobby. There were other folk on the premises, but we were all in our late twenties and early thirties, and things were beginning to break for us professionally. They were often away: filming on location, setting up a Denver office, whatever. So basically it was a three-character play, a
No Exit;
or no, a duet with an audience, so Dick and Bobby could shock me, worry me, delight me when they lived happily ever after for a day or two, then challenge me when their contentious bond snagged taut and threatened to snap.
* * *
“How’s World War III going?” Dennis Savage asked, when I repaired to his house for relief.
“You know this is the skid row of The Pines?” I replied. He was far west, deep in the woods on the bay side, where the mosquitoes are so big they wear cock rings. “If Elmer Fudd came out, this is where he’d stay.”
“We had shrimp scampi for lunch,” said Carlo, tidying up in the kitchen.
“Watch out, Carlo,” said Dennis Savage. “Dick Tangent’s been giving him macho lessons. He got an A in Tying Castanets to Your Balls So People Can Hear Them Clacking, and now they’re working on—”
“Congratulations,” I told Dennis Savage, “on getting over your accident.”
“What accident?” asked Carlo, a dependable straight man.
“The night of the Green Party. He was putting toilet water behind his ears and the seat fell on his head.”
“Does Dick still have that rope?” Carlo asked.
Sensing dish, Dennis Savage grew rigid. “Carlo! Did you—”
“No. I was out of S&M by the time I came back east. Does he?”
“Yes,” I said.
Carlo smiled, nodded, shrugged; what a life.
“He never uses it,” I added.
“Till it’s time to,” said Carlo. “He’s quite a character. You remember what happened to Bert Wisner after Dick put the rope on him.”
“He vanished,” said Dennis Savage.
“He moved to Brooklyn,” I corrected.
“Same thing.”
“No,” said Carlo, putting the dishes away. “No,” closing the cabinet. “He left the scene, and he got into porn and hustling, and then you’d see him panhandling around St. Marks Place, and he looked so pathetic men took him home just to cash in on that sense of … of little lost boy. He wasn’t attractive anymore. He was helpless. Some men go for that, you know? Like they collect pictures of amputees? And Bert had been a very, very cute man. He could’ve gone anywhere. He blew it all.”
“Because of Dick Tangent?”
Carlo shook his head. “Because heavy sex is fire, and some people are made of stone and some of paper. The stone people are good for S&M, but the paper people go up like tinder. They fuck their brains away. They trade life in for fantasies. They become obsessed by stone idols.” He packed away the flatware. “No, not because of Dick Tangent. But because some people shouldn’t do anything more than cruise and screw and do an affair now and then. Haven’t I always told you that certain kinds of love are dangerous before the age of thirty?”
Dennis Savage and I carefully attend. Carlo is not a great reader of Proudhon or Dickens or Nietzsche. But when it comes to romance, thus spake Zarathustra.
“Dick is a very deep guy, very loving,” Carlo went on. “A strong man can survive him, learn from him, even. But a kid…” He shook his head. “It’s like locking an altar boy in with twenty Popes.”
“That’s Bobby, all right,” I said.
“Have you ever been tied up?” Dennis Savage asked me.
“Not for sex.”
“Maybe,” Carlo began, “someone should—”
“Whoa!” says Dennis Savage. “Not for
sex?
Then for what, an international incident?”
“My brother used to—”
“I knew it!” he exulted. “Another chapter of
Pennsylvania Gothic.
” He turned to Carlo. “You know how parents send clan photographs at Christmas? The Morddens send their portrait by Charles Addams.”
“Your brother?” asked Carlo, amused.
“Well, you know. Brothers will fight. And ours were pretty severe. So, finally, rather than chance killing me, he took to tying me up. Formalizing the punishment, so to say. I’m not defending it, but it was rather sensible, wasn’t it? After a while, I didn’t even bother to struggle.”
“Listen to him,” Dennis Savage whispered. “Listen to corruption.”
“No, wait,” said Carlo. “I happen to know about this. He tied you to your bed, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Wrists and ankles?”
“No. Hands to the bedposts.”
He smiled. “You had an old-fashioned house. And then what? He’d talk to you, right? Sit on a chair next to the bed?”
“On the bed.”
He shook his head. “It’s a tiny little thing of a world, gentlemen. So many men—so few stories.”
“Did someone do that to you, Carlo?”
“My father.”
“My God,” said Dennis Savage, “I’m surrounded by perverts.”
“No,” said Carlo. “It’s just punishment. An act of the middle class, like cruising shopping malls and turning on a television. It’s discipline. But it’s also a kind of flattery, I think.”
“What do you say to a man you’ve just tied up?” asked Dennis Savage.
“You don’t tie up a man,” said Carlo. “You tie up a boy. Your kid brother. Your son. Men do the tying.”
Dennis Savage said, “The two of you. Sometimes.”
“It can be a very honest moment,” Carlo told him. “I never felt so close to my father. Other days, you know, he was like steel. So sharp, so full of himself. But when he tied me up, he was gentle. So open. Intimate. Even soft. I was never so conscious of him—of the hair behind the top buttons of his shirt. Or the veins in his hands. We had this game we called, ‘I’m Going to Touch Your Eyes.’ When I was a kid. It was just another name for tag, really. But later, it turned into this like … this touching game. Where he’d sneak up on me and pin my arms and touch my eyes while I struggled. And I did it to him. It probably sounds strange, but, you know, it’s like kissing him. It is. And so that’s what my father said when he was satisfied that I had learned to be good and he was going to untie me: ‘I’m going to touch your eyes.’”
“And would he?” asked Dennis Savage.
“Oh, yes. My God, how I miss that!”
“I can do without the rave review.”
“Men have grievances one to another,” Carlo told him, “and they are bound to express these.”
“What is this,” Dennis Savage cried, “Bible study group?” He raised an index finger. “And they made to divide the people, that those who knew reason would not know love, and that those who knew love, yea, would not know reason.”
We laughed, and Carlo said, “That’s what S&M needs, a sense of humor. The trouble is so many men got into it too early—tied up like that … consoled by it, too…”
“Patterned,” I suggested.
“Yes, that’s right. That kind of upbringing can make you very solemn about it. It’s funny you never got into the scene, Bud.”
“I loathe it.”
“Oh, it was so wonderful a few years ago. What we called ‘San Francisco Style.’ It was like getting tied up by your father. Nothing to fear. No weapons or anything. Some quiet talk, then the buddy stuff. It was lovely.
Fun.
It wasn’t touchy, the way it is now. Philosophic and so on.” He grew informally nostalgic. “Oh, one night … you know … Big Steve decided he wanted to fist me, and I said no, and he got nosy about it, so I ran out of the house and he chased me up and down the boardwalk. It was one of those sweater nights, everyone all bundled up inside, and here were these two naked men chasing through the place. Finally I just ducked into a house and there were four queens sitting on a couch doing cocktails, and I flattened myself against a wall and winked at them. Wouldn’t you think they’d be glad to have me around, a surprise happening to them? But they looked at me as if I had thrown up on their … antimacassar or something. So when Big Steve poked his head in and said, ‘Hey, you guys see my victim around here?’ one of them stood up and pointed to me and said,
‘And there he is!’
So Big Steve looked at them and looked at me, and he broke into this … this great laughing roar, and he took me out of there with his arm around my shoulder, laughing all the way home. And I just liked him so much for that. I mean, he was no S. He was just doing what everyone else was doing then. You know? But of course he had never been tied up or anything … patterned … so he didn’t realize…” His reverie dwindling, he blinked at us.