Faggots (33 page)

The Pines once supported a large population of same, but most of them withered and died when a larger harbor was dredged to provide more room for the visiting flotillas, always in residence, known variously as the “Bagel Brigade,” “Jewish Navy,” or “Mama’s Little Tugboats.” Why rich Hadassah ladies with big hairdos and bigger husbands should wish to come and park their yachts alongside twenty-four-hour faggot discos (The Botel for Tea Dance and The Sandpiper for nights when that magical Ice Palace seems simply too far away) is an interesting sociological question not in the scope of our survey.

Before 1954, The Pines land was barren. Fat Truman Toss and his birdlike wife, Tessa, had bought up a great deal of it, via Tessa’s father’s New Jersey All-Inclusive (later to become part of Myron Musselman’s P-P group of families), and Aorta Crawfish, a single lady, had squatted on much of the rest. There were few buyers in those pioneer days. But in 1963 all hell broke loose, when electricity was installed in The Pines before The Grove, and fellows from the latter attempted to move those scant two miles Eastward. Alas, they ran smack into a very stern “Families Only!” and “Single Gentlemen Need Not Apply!” policy rigidly enforced by the Tosses. Yet, since nothing could deter a group of fellows desirous of decorating upward, away from kerosene beaters, ice boxes, and candles, to refrigerators, dishwashers, and candles, buy in they managed to do, via female friends, mothers, and other helpful types.

A great deal of the land is still owned by Aorta, usually away living it up in Menton, on the French Riviera, close to the Italian border town of San Remo, where she has located the world’s most perfect piece of chocolate cake, and the Tosses, still unfortunately ever present, but now “so in love with all our nice young men!,” plus a chiropractor’s wife from the mainland, and the gas man, Bath, all owners speaking the local dialect which, as in all summer resorts, precedes each vowel with a dollar sign.

Thus, while 73% of The Pines is straight-owned, 99% of it is faggot-occupied.

There is between The Pines and The Grove an area of one and one half miles, that place of myth and story, called The Meat Rack. Suffice it for now to say that it is located where indicated, that it is a lot of trees and bushes and hills and dunes, and that in it—day or night, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, we never close—a lot of fellows are playing with each other.

Fred had first come to Fire Island Pines when he was thirty. He wasn’t ready for such beauty, such potential, such unlimited choice. The place scared him half to death. It was a warm and sunny weekend and there were one thousand bathing-suited handsomenesses on The Botel deck at Tea Dance. They all seemed to know each other and to touch and greet and smile at each other. And there he was, alone. Though he had acquired his 150-pound body for the first time (of his so-far three: the first for himself, the second for Feffer, number three, with muscles, for Dinky), he still felt like Mrs. Shelley’s monster, pale, and with a touch of leprosy thrown in. Not only had he no one to talk to, not only did the overwhelmingness of being confronted by so much Grade A male flesh, most of which seemed superior to his, which would make it difficult to talk to, even if he could utter, which he could not, floor him, but everyone else seemed so secure, not only with their bodies (all thin and no doubt well-defined since birth), tans, personalities, their smiles and chat, but also with that ability to use their eyes, much like early prospectors must have looked for gold, darting them hither and yon, seeking out the sparkling flecks, separating the valued from the less so, meaning, he automatically assumed, him. Their glances his way seemed like disposable bottles, no deposit, no return. He felt like Mr. Not Wanted On The Voyage, even though it was, so be it, his birthday.

Many years would pass before he would discover that everybody else felt exactly the same, but came out every weekend so to feel, thus over the years developing more flexible feelings in so feeling.

After that initial dose of the sun’s rays, he had spent continued years of climbing executive ladders in filmdom, learning he could write screenplays, in New York, in London, in California, looking for love, adapting
Lest We Sleep Alone,
looking for love, running after Feffer, looking for love, looking for himself, joining up with Abe, how to unload fear and anxiety, looking for, what else is around?, and why are the ways of the world so complicated, the roads so long and unmarked, and all answers so elusive?

Two years ago he had tried again. He returned to share a house with Anthony and Sprinkle, plus an acquaintance Fred had not spent time with since Kamp Kogunt kounselor days in Maine, plus his lover, who was always stoned, and a friend of theirs who spent most of his time balding his head with Nair. Anthony and Sprinkle, newly united in togetherness, were always off on romantic journeys to The Sunken Forest beyond The Grove. Fred was left to contend with what he decided, nobody’s fault, was a bad mix. And as anyone at The Pines can tell you, a good mix is what’s important.

So he threw himself into the daily routine of beach, nap, dance, nap, dinner (Sprinkle that year was very Into health foods and salad dressing made with honey), nap, dance, sleep, all interspersed with as many tricks as could be turned (that was his year for 170, pounds, not tricks, but probably tricks as well), and as many strolls along the strand as spirit, weather, crowd, and energies commended.

He learned to say Hello!, to walk down beach and boardwalk with his head held high and his eyes front and center and learned how to nod and smile to faces fucked with, danced with or next to or near, or just encountered though not properly introduced. He thus became known as a friendly sort, though he felt his friendliness, like Algonqua’s, was only a tool to make everyone like him and keep him from sinking into the sands of complete ostracism. He really felt like the fat girl in the sorority house who knew everybody’s name and secrets but had precious few of his own.

It was only last year, in welcoming Grey Gardens, that he realized how many friends he had in this, his world. Though of course how long still the road. And naturally how elusive those answers. And where else was there to go? New York was home. The Faggot Capital of the World.

Then, as now, he preferred not to consider his artistic laziness. He knew he was now expert at fashioning screenplays from other people’s inspirations. Yes, adaptations he could do. But to be more original? Try something more ambitious? When asked about this inactivity, he would mumble about the ridiculousness of the medium, the lack of creative satisfaction it provided the writer, as well as being “full of idiots,” “only good for action,” “difficult to work with meaning, irony, intellectual arguments, layers of subtlely, like the great works of literature.” No, he yearned for the whole hog. In art as in his life. Well, Abe now was giving him his chance.

Then, as now, the Fire Island image was the same. Always before him. Thousands and thousands of handsome men. All over the place. Wherever eye could see. All touching, holding, hands or arms upon each other, all touching, the Brotherhood! No wonder all kept coming back, again and again, in memory and in truth. Such Beauty. Such narcotic Beauty!

And here it was again another Memorial Day Weekend. How time flew. Here it was, all beginning again. Here it was, tomorrow, so be it again, ipso facto again, another birthday.

So, filled again with renewed Anticipation, Enthusiasm, Possibilities, Potential, HOPE, now that I’m over Dinky!, he shouldered his mini-duffel of summertime’s wardrobe, took off his Weejuns, rolled up his painter’s pants’ legs, climbed down and out of the machine that brought him here, and waded from the seaplane to the shore. Then down the strip of sand, then up onto the dock, which passed some Mama Tugboats that led into a boardwalk that passed the Marketeria, and to The Botel’s steps.

Oh and My God, Yet and Once Again!

For there they were, up there, yes also yet again, had they never left?, those bathing-suited hordes! But more than ever! They spilled over the railings and off the deck and down the steps like some rich soufflé gone crazy. Tea Dance. Six O’Clock Madness! There were more here than he’d ever seen before!

Years of training suddenly went for nought. Fred wanted to run. But he couldn’t move. Gorgeous bodies blocked his path. He couldn’t even get a toe hold on the stairs. He stood there pinioned. A dangling perfect calf from up above behind him. A flawless rounded tush and waist in front. Get a hold on yourself, Lemish! Reglaze that smile of bonhomie upon your puss. Dinky, do I want you now!

For as certain as the second cookie always comes on the heel of the first, the rushing need returns. The memories of those first four weeks with Dinky. When he didn’t have to cruise and look and seek. When he didn’t have to confront all of this! When he had someone to look forward to each evening.

Lemish, you
are
in trouble.

Ladies’ Home Journal,
here we go again.

Tarsh, the red of his beard matching the red of his Polynesian-Prince sarong and dyed-to-match Keds, yelled at him: “Fred! Hurry! You’ll be late! Where’s your costume? Hans’s Hot Party at Utopia! It’s in honor of Timmy Purvis. Get dressed immediately. What are you going to wear? I told you to bring a costume. Did you bring a costume?”

A profusion of confusions, in the midst of Annie Hall, né Grey Gardens, Bay at Beach Hill, a very large, cozy, Cape Cod, built on the mainland in 1884 and floated over fifteen years ago, full of bedrooms, tacked on round the ancient hull like some jaunty Holiday Inn, full, too, of mismatched pillows and a yellow-based spackled mock-Pollock floor, of a hundred colors, prone to squeaks and everything leaning the wrong way, including a kitchen where nothing worked, a house beloved by all, particularly when someone was fucking, when the total foundation swayed.

Josie .and Dom Dom were debating over artificial daisies or lilies, Gatsby was Jimmy Connors, Fallow was still naked, Frigger would only go so far as to add a Beverly Hills Health Club T-shirt to his jeans and peekaboo Jockeys, Bilbo wore a parachuter’s jumpsuit full of pockets for his pills, and Bo Peep tonight was truly an angel.

Mikie rushed in, wearing his simple basic twinkydom: gym shorts and hooded sweat shirt and sneakers, these would have to do, Mikie had no money for wardrobe and was forgiven for this lack, and tambourined his welcome to them all: “Good evening! I am so happy we are all now here! We are now in permanent residence at last! I know good things will come our way this summer! I shall personally build flower boxes for us all and I shall polish my moldy brass bed so that it gleams and smiles and I shall continue my experimentation into the tambourine and I shall fuck fuck fuck like a bunny!” And he looked around at all his friends, his family, with love.

Frigger, only a visitor for the weekend, and fresh from his triumphs in the city, said: “It’s good to be back. Los Angeles, you know, isn’t into having their cocks sucked. Just into doing it. Out there I’m just another cock sucker. A Californicator. Here I’m in demand. That’s really the major difference between the two coasts.”

Making the final decision for them both, Dom Dom parceled out the lilies equally for him and Josie. “Here you’re an ingénue,” he said to Frigger, “and there you’re an ingénold.”

Josie, his Bronson head freshly rebalded, accepted the lilies with queenly pride and proceeded to commence stitching them on to their matching white leather shorts. “Yes,” he said, “having had five mothers and fathers, Frigger appreciates the need for change.”

Bo Peep sidled over to Fred and said, his halo already in place on a gilded coat hanger: “It’s the oldest story in the world. You want him back, don’t you?”

“Want him back? Me? I can’t imagine to whom you are referring.” And he kissed Bo Peep and rushed off to his annex off the back rear deck to change.

Everyone else stood around the red Parsons table to witness the ritual. Carefully, with a sharp razor blade, his small, muscled body tensed and hunched over as in the best safe-cracking movies, his fingers most delicately poised and ready to commence, his mind now completely given over to this important concentration, Tarsh was preparing to cut the dust.

With a precision that would give pride to any surgeon’s mother, Tarsh lowered the boom on the small cake of rock, gently hacking off minute crystals, which he then further minced and pulverized as only the best salad chefs can do. The hands and eyes of only a leader were required, because if sure hand and perfect judgment were in any way second-rate, if the crystals were not reduced to near-nothingness, not only would the damn stuff blow away, but dust could be dangerous.

While Winnie’s death was still remembered, no one talked about it. Nor was last month’s demise talked about, of Nubie Knisel, a waiter, who mistook his thirty-ninth story Columbus Towers living room for a ground-floor flat and also walked out of his window to say hello to the world, causing one of his guests to inquire of his roommate: “Who will replace him? My unemployment’s running out,” and the roommate to reply: “Mine runs till fall.”

Tarsh then amalgamated his handiwork with dill weed and rolled the mixture into joints. His expertise was then passed around to all. And all of them, plus an arriving Anthony, in jeans and blazer, and a nervous Wyatt, dressed all in white, both happily welcomed for the weekend’s final days, puffed up their lungs hugely on the precious dust. For dust was a hundred and fifty dollars a gram by the rock, if The Gnome liked you, and if he didn’t, he didn’t have any.

Fred rushed back in, now dressed and ready, get these parties started, get this weekend started, get this lifetime started, keep busy, keep active, involved, the mind devoted to diversions calculated to keep the heart at bay! He had thrown on his hunter-green satin Champion boxing shorts and blue sweat socks and battered old Jack Purcell tennis shoes with the extra-long laces and had inspirationally polished it all off with a topping of his maroon hooded Harvard sweat shirt.