Buddies (29 page)

He stopped. “Say something,” he told me.

“No, go on. Whatever it is.”

“Why? What’s the point now?”

“So I can understand about the other world.”

“It’s the same world,” he said, slowly. “The same world.” He leaned forward. “Okay,” he said. “Now listen. This one time, I go up there. Huge place. Servant at the door, this way please, and I go in.”

And I’m thinking that if Carlo didn’t have Dennis Savage and Lionel and Big Steve and me and a few other friends to keep him busy and talk him out of things, he might have come to one of those dark rooms.

“They’ve got this kid tied to a chair. Sixteen, seventeen. Really sweet boy, scared as hell.”

Or that it’s not U and non-U but luck. The luck of finding the right apartment before the crunch hit, of not going down the street when the bad guys are waiting, of running into someone you half-know on a day when you feel the way George Will looks and the half-friend says, “Let’s get ice-cream cones,” and the next thing is the two of you are singing the entire score to
Follies
and you’ve made a friend for life. Or the luck, simply, of being one of the ones who doesn’t take ill.

“All these people in suits. Sometimes they’re in costumes and sometimes they’re wearing like a plastic garbage bag, but these people were all dressed up. And the head man says, ‘This boy is no fun at all,’ meaning the kid, ‘so you’re going to liven him up for us.’”

I was thinking that this boy would look like Bill Post, for thematic symmetry, but Clark Ellis—as if reading my map—shook his head and said, “This chicken was pale white, like ivory, and very thin, with brown hair. He was no winner, just a stray kid. You know how many of those there are in this city? People were petting him, and they’d watch me, and pet him some more, and the man says, ‘Let’s see you, ace.’ While I’m stripping they’re getting the camera set up on this tripod. And the people were coaxing the kid toward this bed, and he’s fighting them and he keeps looking at me. Just think of that, because the two of us are naked and everybody else looks like a party at the UN or something. I mean handkerchiefs and flowers and like feathers and lace. Fans and capes. And this kid was scared.”

Like the football player in the car.

“The man gave me a gizmo like a combination carburetor and carrot grater and says, ‘Slide this on your cock and fuck him.’ Over on the bed the suit people were holding the kid down, and what do you think they look like? Grinning, like oh boy, some fun? There was nothing on their faces at all. See, they’re holding this little boy down to watch his ass get all tore up, and nobody’s home. Anyways, I told the man I didn’t like the look of that piece of his, and he says he’s got three big ones to lay on me if, but otherwise nothing, and what’s my service going to say when he tells them I don’t put out.”

“This isn’t the world,” I told him. “This is land’s end.”

“That’s why I’m telling you this story. Because you think that. Because you think everyone’s got a place to live and enough friends and something funny to do on Sunday afternoon, don’t you? You think Lorenzo Fell’s as bad as it gets. Christ, all that fucking money! If only you knew about it, man. You would sure feel different in one of the dark rooms they got.” He shook his head. “That rich friend of yours. King…”

“Kern Loften.”

“He doesn’t give dark-room parties, does he?”

“No, he gives very nice parties. Very official gay parties.” The kind, I almost added, that you attended in your time of glory.

“He doesn’t tie kids up and have them fucked with something you could cut your way through a jungle with, does he? He doesn’t tape it? He doesn’t have this woman in a mantilla or something who’s looking at the kid and saying, ‘Maybe get a towel for the blood, somebody.’ Does he?”

Not exactly. Once Kern cut me off for weeks because I told him William Burroughs, despite a deplorable world view, was one of the greatest writers of the day. “How can you praise that kind of thing?” Kern asked while forgiving me. “Are you a New Yorker or aren’t you?” And I replied, “What’s a New Yorker?”

“He doesn’t lay three bills on you because to him that’s pennies and he wants to see what happens when you torture a boy who doesn’t know how to make the exit? That’s a neat sight to see, isn’t it? Brings a lump to your throat.”

There was silence then. Finally he said, “And so.” He nodded. Gestured mildly. “And so. Good story, huh?”

I’ll see what I can do.

“So they got this rope from somewhere and I said I don’t need it. Look, I outweighed the kid by a hundred-ten pounds. He’s just lying there, not even struggling anymore. I pulled a guy out of the crowd and gave him the camera and told him to be creative. And I scattered the people at the bed and pulled the kid up and stood behind him, like I was demonstrating him, you know. Showing him off. I felt him up but he was so scared he wasn’t getting on. The camera was right on him and he kept trying to turn away from it. So I took him around through the guests so each one could touch him and kiss him, and they all got into that, stroking him with the camera on him. And soon he was hot. And they were getting pretty wild so I had to control them. That woman who asked for the towel? She was dancing in and out like the native princess in a jungle film. I looked over at the head man, and he was pleased. It was good for them, so I could make the bread without hurting the kid. I turned the scene around on them, see? I sat the kid on the bed, and I waved the camera guy in close, and I made the kid look right in there, at whatever it is. Then I asked the kid, ‘Who are you afraid of?’ He swiveled around to look at the head man, but I caught him back and I asked him again, with my hands on his neck, thumbs right on his throat. He was so damn sweet, he didn’t understand what I was trying to do for him. But he saw my eyes, and I pressed his throat a little, and he got it. So then I said, ‘Who are you afraid of?’ a second time, and he said, ‘You.’ And then he was begging me not to hurt him, and crying, and that was it. That was all they wanted. Some of the others ran up and held him down again and now they were laughing and cheering us on and I could fuck him so gently and it didn’t matter because I’d given them what they wanted. The man gave me five hundred dollars and I got dressed and I left the dark room and now, you tell me, Is that the world or is this the world?”

“What?”

“That dark room there—or sitting at this table now?”

“What happened to that boy at the party?”

“Drinking coffee like this, talking about it. Maybe they’re showing that film somewhere this minute. Some guy’s showing his wife so they can hot up enough to fuck. Maybe that’s the world. That’s what works. Money making adjustments for mcgoons. Ask a mcgoon how he’s doing. He’s doing great.”

“It’s not too late, you know,” I said. “You’re still a beautiful man—”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure,” holding his head, lowering it to shake and be sad and bewildered. And he said, “The beautiful are most troubled, for they trust no one.”

“Where,” I asked him, as quiet as a nail in a coffin, “did you learn that?”

He was still, didn’t look up. “You told me. Didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“At a party. In The Pines. It was—”

“Help me.” He raised his head, stiffened, and looked sharp, as if apologizing for the outburst, for needing anything. “Please. Something.”

“Kern Loften,” I began, “always thought you were the hottest man alive. He’d probably send you to a doctor first and so on, but—”

“He gave that party.”

I smiled. “It all comes back. Who was that man you were with? He was almost as—”

“He’s dead. A lot of hot men are dead because they were hot. You should know that.”

“Well, Kern might take you on. I could call him.” A thought hit me. “What about Bill Post?”

He shook his head slowly. Dead also? Gone? Sometimes they simply vanish.

“I could call Kern tomorrow.”

He nodded, and so we left it, but he seemed in no way relieved, and when he got outside he told me not to call anyone for him. Not Kern and not anyone. The wind had puffed up, the kind that burns your ears. We clearly could not chat it out. I said, “Do you want to come home with me?”

“Yes. And I’ll smash you up and wreck your apartment and take everything you have.”

There was a moment, just a flash of a bit of time, when I could see him trying to believe he meant it. I kept it light: “Better not, the doorman’ll fuss at you. I think it’s Ramon tonight, and he’s—”

“You played the piano. With the opera lady.”

“Yes.”

“What do you do now?”

Well, for starters, I’m going to write this story. “Do you want me to call Kern for you?”

“No.”

“You said, ‘Help me.’”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because nothing works and everybody dies. Because it hurts.”

He was about to turn, and I grabbed his arm and said, “Smile for me.”

“No,” he said.
“Why?”

“To show me you’re all right.”

He looked at me for quite some time, then, and finally shook his head. I watched him walk off. After fifty yards he turned and stopped. We got into a kind of standing contest, then he came back and said, “What does it take?”

“Will,” I said.

“No. To make you get lost?” But he grabbed for my hand and squeezed it, against the words, and patted my shoulder. “Go home,” he said. “Okay?”

I grasped his left arm to see that caption of his again, No. 1, and I looked up at him, thinking maybe I would see the rest of him as he was, there among us once, really the hero, but his smile had busted into a thousand million pieces because nothing works. Because what you hope for isn’t necessarily what to expect. And I am not a demonstrative fellow with people I don’t know and Clark Ellis is very reserved, as many great beauties are expected to be, and the weather said move!, and I was so crowded with recollections of how matters have proceeded in those Stonewall days—which exactly coincide with my years in New York—that I scarcely knew how we ended up holding each other; but I would not make much of it, boys and girls, because I expect we were simply celebrating a pungent nostalgia, or marking our shared belief in certain things many others do not believe—or perhaps because it seemed correct punctuation, and easier than smiling. It was cold, and Clark Ellis went away.

When I reached my building and Ramon unlocked the door, I told him, “The beautiful are most troubled, for they trust no one.”

And Ramon, who never smiles, said, “Good evening, sir.”

Sliding into Home

In which unities of time, place, and action are observed—but not that of character, for even The Pines, Stonewall’s most compact ghetto, may contain an intruder here and there. And herewith the author takes his leave.

I heard a strange voice ask, “What flavor of ice cream would you like, Virgil?” as I came up the walk. I opened the door to the patio, and stood facing a handsome, fortyish man in an outfit one rarely sees at The Pines, slacks and the kind of striped shirt you wear with a tie.

“Who’s Virgil?” I asked him, though I knew very well.

“Don’t listen to him!” Little Kiwi shouted, rushing up.

The man, completely at a loss, looked from him to me.

“If you’re the garbageman, we don’t want any today,” cried Little Kiwi, trying to push me out.

“Don’t call him Virgil,” I told the man, using my valise to drive Little Kiwi back onto the porch.

“It’s my name!”

“Yes, but it throws everything off.”

“Then you’re so mean,” he said, “that I won’t introduce you.”

We introduced ourselves. The man in the outfit was Dave Bast, who had just moved to New York from Cleveland.

“How on earth,” I asked, “does one move to New York in 1985? There’s no place to move into.”

“Unless you buy,” he said.

“Ah. A professional.”

Like me, he had come out for a stay at Dennis Savage’s house in midweek, when the other renters were job-bound in town. Dave Bast had been about to secure the lunch matter at the Pantry when I walked in.

“Little Kiwi’s flavor, by the way, is Frusen Glädjé vanilla almond.”

“Whose … what?”

Little Kiwi sulked.

“You’ll have to go slower on this for me,” said Dave. “I’ve only just got here and everyone is … well, kind of a stranger.”

“Whose friend are you, anyway?”

“No one’s really. See, I was Seth Brown’s paddle brother in college, and—”

“Paddle brother?”

“Our fraternity. St. A’s. It’s just a … term. Read ‘big brother.’ Or ‘sponsor.’ Or something such.”

I was impressed. For those of who you don’t follow collegiate Greek culture, St. Anthony’s is invariably the top house on campus, sporting not only the wealthiest and nicest guys but also the best looking. (Another interior contradiction in straight: if they’re so stuck on women, why would they fill a frat house with gorgeous men?) When I left for Penn, my dad advised me to avoid St. A’s—“it’s kind of la-di-da,” he warned me. I’ll say. His idea of a sound frat was ATO, his old house, which turned out, not surprisingly, to be the third-toughest jock house on a campus noted for tough jock houses. In my first year at Penn, the first- and second-toughest jock houses were dissolved by university decree for hazing enormities. ATO was thrilled: number one at last! An ATO friend of mine, Bob Morgan, urged me to pledge the house, but I figured I’d already had everything ATO could offer just growing up with Jim. I went to St. Elmo’s, a sort of vapidly sweet frat that had lost its building in a fire a bit before and had rebuilt in red brick and glass. It stood on Locust Walk, the main drag of the frat system, right in the heart of the campus, but it looked too neat and mod next to the Gothic mansions that characterized Penn’s Greek community. (Funny how that word keeps slipping in.) Once, I left a group of friends in front of the house; it was the pledges’ weekly night for dinner with the brothers. As I left, one of them said, “That’s his fraternity? I thought that was the science building.”

“St. Anthony Hall, huh?” I said, taking in Dave Bast. “No wonder you’re so well dressed.”

“It’s supposed to be my junking-around duds.”