Faggots (6 page)

“All of these reasons are good ones. Leave me with your thoughts. I am having a dinner appointment with Mr. Randy Dildough from Marathon. He has wooed me before.”

“Abe! Why didn’t you tell me? That’s very exciting! I knew I could count on you. He’s the most important man in movies. But maybe it’s not such a good idea. I hear he’s a faggot.”

“This then must help us. He will help his own kind. Go, and I will meet you tomorrow as per our explorer’s itinerary. Now I am tired and must go to Bloomingdale’s.”

“Abe, use your own toilet.”

“It’s just around the corner.”

“Abe…”

“Ephra keeps a clean house. I don’t mind. It is part of our rules. I can use the walk.”

“Abe, you never even noticed that the Bloomingdale’s john is full of humpy faggots, in denim and boots, carrying their shopping bags filled with doilies and candles and towels from the White Sale. Does Ephra know that you pee in such company?”

“Take your feet from the furniture. Ephra cherishes her chairs and her sofa.”

Fred, so good at instant proclamation, removed his feet from their position of comfort, stood up, walked straight to Abe, and launched: “You think I joke, Abe, but today it’s no longer necessary to go out of your own home to pee! Abe, today it’s even considered healthy to wank off. Yes, Abe, healthy! Did you know that your thing will no longer fall off, even if you do it every day, even if you shoot your gism into a sanitized toilet? I know you don’t believe me, but soon the Magazine Section of
The New York Times
will write about it, and these things will be sanctioned once and for all as healthy indoor sports, practiced by Hank Aaron and Dave DeBusschere.”

“My little grandson loves Dave DeBusschere,” Abe said, thinking of Wyatt (where did they find these names?), Stephen’s boy. “This news would destroy him.”

“Abe, I love you very much, but what makes you think he isn’t wanking off right this minute? Along with his classmates. In unison. A cappella.”

“Fred, bite your tongue!”

“No, Abe. I want somebody else to bite it. Somebody gorgeous, successful, brilliant, and male. And that’s what our movie must be all about. The Quest for Love. A thirty-eight-year-old faggot decides he must find a lover before he’s thirty-nine. He’s lonely—and isn’t this the human condition, so timely, so touching?, we must remember that all great stories reflect the human condition—and he wants a mate. This is the story of his Quest. The inborn, natural, lusting Quest of Man for His Mate.”

“But why must they both be fegalim?”

“I could hardly make one of them a dyke. Abe, it’s time to write with the pen of truth. I am a thirty-nine-year-old faggot who must find true love by forty. Abe, beloved, this is my life! I’ve got to go.”

“Don’t use the toilet! Ephra has blue poison in the bowl.”

“I know Ephra has blue poison in the bowl! What have we been talking about all afternoon? I meant out. Abe, don’t you hear the call of freedom?”

“No. In all of this, where? I have certainly been looking!”

“You can’t even piss in your own toilet! What are you going to do?”

“I told you. Go to Bloomingdale’s.”

“Abe…Abe…”

“Don’t say my name like that! Abe is a happy name. It is Hebrew for ‘exalted father.’ My namesake was the father of many nations and the founder of my people and the friend of God.”

“All the more reason to be a modern trailblazer.”

“He was also the model of perfect submission to God’s will, even in the severest trials, including to the sacrifice of his own son.”

“That one I could never understand. I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll commence our tour.”

“The alphabet begins with Abe. And Abe Bronstein is a maker of happy cakes and cookies—though personally I would not touch them, such an aftertaste, my brother now uses cheap quality lard—and of happy motion pictures. Go. Go. I shall meet you per our plans. Seventy-two places you told me you can go to have sex?”

“Abe, New York is becoming Boys’ Town. You don’t know how many faggots parade up and down the streets, inhabit the clubs and bars and baths and discos and shop the stores and cruise the men’s rooms of hotels and universities and bookstores and subways and how many tens of thousands go to Fire Island and the Hamptons and Jones Beach and Riis Park and, yes, there exist approximately seventy-two places where I can go on any evening, or afternoon for that matter, where I can engage in physical activity leading to orgasm, to actually touch and be touched. Yes, seventy-two places I personally know about, which means there are many more that others know about but I yet don’t. And I also know that I am not seeing the same faces over and over again, that I am seeing strangers, and that they are increasing into armylike proportions. And this information, which put to proper use could probably elect a President, means only two things: one, that for the life of me I can’t understand why it’s taken me so long to find the right one among this horde for me; and two, we’ve got to make the movie! Abe, until domani.”

Abe Bronstein, bored with his business, bored with the fights with his brother, Maury, who preferred breads and biscuits when Abe, quite accurately, had predicted the surge in America’s sweet teeth, bored with his bimbies, and bored with his two sons who never called to chat or visit, had turned to movies as a means for other, more creative, outlets for his energies.

At first it was just a chance to get out of the loft on Saturdays, when Peetra was apt to require more money for shopping. Then he would go up to Third Avenue and take in a movie, see perhaps something intelligent from England or a nice color film from California with such pretty photography, though maybe that tootsie is a better looker than she is an actress. Then he noticed in his
Wall Street Journal
that certain movies made a great deal of money, many millions if they hit just right, and he began to take a closer look. Soon he was reading his
Variety
each week, and then he was going to Brentano’s to buy screenplays published in paperback form. From there, he started attending the Museum of Modern Art in the afternoon, to sitting with the old ladies and gentlemen with nothing better to do than cluck over young Conrad Veidt or miss the point of Griffith and Pudovkin and Eisenstein, and if they didn’t like the movie, they would kibbitz in the darkness, driving Abe crazy. He decided the Museum of Modern Art was the noisiest movie theater in town and he took to attending the Carnegie Hall and the Bleecker Street and the tiny old house on St. Mark’s Place where the audiences were all more serious and the seats were all falling apart.

And then one day, feeling excited, courageous, Abe decided he would make his own first film. A lesser man would have sought affiliation within the established industry; a man of Abe’s standing in the financial community did not lack for contacts. But he’d been in business long enough to know that every business was more or less alike, filled with hanky-panky, mumbo jumbo, and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers, all dished up by the residents to hand to the immigrants. So he went about it quietly, in his own way. First he found a book he not only thought would make a good movie but also reflected something he felt worth saying. It was a novel about connections among big business, organized crime, and the United States government, and how they all helped each other. He purchased the rights to film it and, having enjoyed an English import called
Lest We Sleep Alone
(written by one Fred Lemish), which he also understood from Richie had become a cult favorite at college campuses everywhere, he looked for and hired Fred to write him a script.
U.S. Mobsters, Inc.,
made unpretentiously and out of the country for a budget of nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars of Abe’s own money, went on to earn him a profit of four and one half million, which represented an awful lot of cookies. So he was encouraged to proceed apace.

He was now searching for his second property, as he had learned to call ideas for movies (yes, all businesses were alike), and it was for this project that Fred was trying to convince Abe to go gay.

Abe was also searching for something else. Like Fred, he was troubled with certain metaphysical problems in his life. I am searching for something, I have taken so much, what can I give back, were thoughts that daily crossed his brow. I have made so many people fat and they have made me fatter. Do Mr. Bronfman and Mr. Schenley worry in their nighttimes about how many drunks they have sent into the world? Or Mr. Winston and Mr. Marlboro about how many cancers? Mr. Bronfman has built a great building. What am I building? Perhaps Fred is right. Perhaps it is important for me to be his conduit of enlightenment in order to receive my own expiation. But is he not dealing in such schmutz! Fegalim! Please God to tell me if my sainthood comes from cock suckers! Perhaps it is better to wait. The Jew has always waited. For the homeland, for the Messiah, for the acceptance. We are still waiting. Perhaps it is time to stop waiting for the Leader and the Savior and to lead and save ourselves. But are these boys my Mission?

Abe, the philosopher. He stood peeing in Bloomingdale’s, oblivious to Fred’s shoppers, and pondered the unending powerlessness in Jewish history and realized the commonality with Fred’s fegalim. And then he thought, profoundly, how there was something grand about living in hope, but also something terribly unreal and incomplete about it, because when you were hoping, you were not doing or living or experiencing the Now, but deferring and not fulfilling, and that those concepts of Judaism, on which he had been weaned, compelled a life lived in deferment, nothing could be irrevocably accomplished, it was like an orgasm with never an ejaculation, and if it was great to be a Waiter, wasn’t it also weak? Was it now and at last and forever time to stop waiting? But for what?!

Feeling more like Spinoza or Maimonides than Abe, he too zipped up and flushed, and headed back to Ephra’s command post. He does not know it, but the horrors he is to confront in this latest chapter of his search for Meaning, Enlightenment, Where Is the Rational?, on which the emancipated Jew so prides himself, will be such as to make him…what? A Job? A Hitler? An Abe?

There is talk on the Village streets of a fifteen-year-old high-school student from suburban New Jersey who stands at the corner of Christopher and Hudson, outside of a particularly unsavory male boutique, and waits for assignations to suck his cock in the dark.

His cock is ten inches long. Flaccid.

He doesn’t have to wait very long.

He now charges money for his endowment.

Have you any idea how long a ten-inch cock is? Measure it out on a ruler or tape. You will be amazed. Although there is some medical evidence that the male musculature is not able to constantly erect so much, this drawback perhaps does not occur in one so young. At least not for a while.

The lad is very much in demand. He loves it.

His name is Wyatt Bronstein.

Enter Ephra, Abe’s first wife.

“Abe, you flushed my toilet.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You want to flush, you go home to what your bimby’s left you.”

“Ephra, something happened. I had to go again. Bloomingdale’s is closed.”

“After all these years, you couldn’t keep your tinkle in?”

“No! And what’s so terrible about that? Do you know what Fred told me?”

“I don’t want to hear.” Ephra covered her ears.

“Some fegalim tinkle on each other!”

“I worry for him. He’s all alone. What will he do when he’s old like us? If there are so many fine fegalim in this city like he says, what’s his trouble?”

“His horoscope predicts great things for this year. Previously, I gather, his planets would not allow him to fall in love before he was thirty-five.”

“Is he not now thirty-nine?”

“It will now be easier for him.”

“Do they get married like people? What shall I get them for their house? Abe, it’s such a sordid life. I must confess something to you.”

“Confess.”

“I must confess to you that I’ve read they go and do it in the bushes and on islands and, would you believe, inside of trucks.”

“Where do you read this?”

“In the illustrated guidebook Fred gave to you and which you hide from me in your bottom drawer.”

“Ephra, please. Don’t burden your big heart.”

“Why would anyone want to make love in a truck?”

“Love is many things to many people. Love is very complicated. Love is a many-splendored thing.”

“Stop with the movies. Abe, I can’t believe what you’re telling me.”

“What am I telling you?”

“Somebody even, I can’t bring myself to say the word, tinkles on his beloved? Then…then what?”

“Then what
what
?”

“After they…tinkle?”

“How should I know?”

“Do they wash off?”

“I’m some sort of expert in this matter?”

“You’re his producer.”

“Ephra, you are too much concerned with the cleanliness. I do not know the aftermath.”

“Abe, please…this is not easy for me.”

“So, who’s forcing you to talk?”

“Fred wouldn’t do such things.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Ephra, don’t you, in your wildest imagination, have strange thoughts?”

“Never!”

“Of course you do.”

“I swear,
nimmer
.”

“I tell you, you do. Ephra, it’s healthy that you do. Even the Magazine Section of
The New York Times
says so. Think of the last time we made love. I know it was a long time ago, but try to remember what you were thinking…”

“Roosevelt was President…”

“…what you maybe wanted me to do to you or somebody else to do to you…”

“Somebody
else
!”

“It’s all right, Ephra. I’m told that women in particular have very strong sexual fantasies, maybe like a tall man on a white horse should come along and carry you away, after maybe the horse is seen doing exciting things to another horse.”