Further Tales of the City (19 page)

A
FIVE-FOOT MIRROR BOOT, COMPLETE WITH SPURS,
spun slowly over the dance floor at the Nevada State Fairgrounds, casting its glittery benediction on the assembled multitudes. The event was called “Stand By Your Man” and most of the dancers were doing just that.

Michael looked up at the shimmering icon and sighed. “Isn’t that inspired?” he asked Bill.

The cop regarded the boot for a split second, then frowned. “Goddamnit!”

“What’s the matter?” asked Michael.

“I forgot to get poppers.”

Michael smiled. “This is country music, remember? Not disco.”

“No,” said Bill. “I mean … for later.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe they sell them at The Chute.”

“It doesn’t really …”

“Somebody there will know how to get them.”

“I don’t need them,” said Michael. “If you’d like some, then …”

“I don’t
need
them,” barked Bill. “I’d like some, that’s all.”

Michael didn’t want an argument. “Fine,” he said evenly. “What shall we do?”

“I’ll drive into town,” answered Bill, sounding less hostile now. “You can hold down the fort here. I shouldn’t be long, O.K.?”

Michael nodded, soothed by his friend’s inadvertent rusti-cism.
Drive into town. Hold down the fort.
They might have been hitching up the buckboard for a trip into Dodge City. “O.K.,” he smiled. “I’ll be here.”

Bill nuzzled him for a moment, whispering “Hot man” in his ear, then disappeared into the crowd.

It was an escape of sorts, Michael realized. Bill detested this music. He had managed to endure the rodeo with the aid of his Walkman and an Air Supply cassette. He was clearly not prepared to commit himself to an entire evening of country songs by Ed Bruce and Stella Parton and Sharon McNight.

Michael was relieved. He felt fragile and sentimental tonight—achingly romantic—and he knew that those sensations could not long coexist with Bill’s horrifying literalness. It wasn’t poppers
per se
that had put Michael off—he got off on them himself—it was the soul-deadening way they sometimes reduced sex to a track event, requiring timing, agility and far too much advance planning.

How many man-hours had been wasted, he wondered, searching for that stupid brown bottle amid the bedclothes?

It wasn’t Bill’s fault, really. He
enjoyed
sex with Michael. He enjoyed it the way he enjoyed movies with Michael or bull sessions with Michael or late-night pizza pig-outs with Michael. He had never, apparently, felt the need to embellish it with romance. That wasn’t Bill’s problem; it was Michael’s.

Michael moved to the edge of the dance floor and watched couples shuffling along shoulder to shoulder as they did the Cotton-Eyed Joe. There was genuine joy in this room, he realized—an exhilaration born of the unexpected. Queers doing cowboy dancing. Who would’ve thunk it? Kids who grew up in Galveston and Tucson and Modesto, performing
the folk dances of their homeland finally,
finally
with the partner of their choice.

It didn’t matter, somehow, that teenagers out on the highway were screaming “faggot” at the new arrivals. Here inside, there was easily enough brotherhood to ward off the devil.

Ed Bruce shambled onto the stage. He was a big, fortyish Marlboro Man type who spoke of golf and the Little Woman as if he were singing to a VFW convention in Oklahoma City. His big hit, “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” took on a delectable irony in this unlikely setting.

Twenty years ago, thought Michael, gay men were content to shriek for Judy at Carnegie Hall. Now they could dance in each other’s arms, while a Nashville cowboy serenaded them. He couldn’t help smiling at the thought.

Like magic, across the crowded dance hall, someone smiled back. He was big and bear-like with a grin that seemed disarmingly shy for a man his size. He raised his beer can in a genial salute to Michael.

Michael returned the gesture, heart in throat.

The man moved towards him.

“Pretty nice, huh?” He meant the music.

“Wonderful,” said Michael.

“Do you slow dance?” asked the man.

“Sure,” lied Michael.

A
T FIVE-NINE, MICHAEL WAS DWARFED BY THE MAN
who had asked him to dance.

To complicate matters further, this lumbering hunk clearly expected him to
follow
—a concept that hadn’t crossed Michael’s mind since the 1968 Senior Prom at Orlando High. And then, of course, Betsy Ann Phifer had done the following.

There was a secret to this, he remembered. Ned had learned it at Trinity Place’s Thursday evening hoedowns:
Extend your right arm slightly and straddle his right leg—tastefully, of course—so that you can pick up on the motion of his body.

Check. So far, so good.

It felt a little funny doing things backwards like this, but it felt sort of wonderful, too. Michael laid his head on the great brown doormat of his partner’s chest and fell into the music.

Ed Bruce was still on stage. The song was “Everything’s a Waltz.”

The man stepped on Michael’s foot. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“That’s O.K.,” said Michael.

“I’m kind of new at this.”

“Who isn’t?” grinned Michael.

Not so long ago, he realized, men
had
slow danced in San Francisco. He recalled the tail-end of that era, circa 1973. The very sight of it had revolted him: grown men cheek to cheek, sweaty palm to sweaty palm, while Streisand agonized over “People” at The Rendezvous.

Then came disco, a decade of simulated humping, faceless bodies writhing in a mystic tribal rite that had simultaneously delighted and intimidated Michael. What that epoch had lacked some people were now finding in country music. The word was romance.

“Where are you from?” asked Michael.

“Arizona,” replied the man.

“Any place I know?”

“I doubt it. A place called Salome. Five hundred people.”

So he
was
a real cowboy. That explained the hands. They felt like elephant hide. Bill could just go fuck himself. “Salome,” repeated Michael, copying the man’s pronunciation (Sa-loam). “As in Oscar Wilde?”

“Who?”

Michael’s heart beat faster.
He’s never heard of Oscar Wilde.
Dear God, was this the real thing? “Nobody important,” he explained. “It doesn’t really matter.”

It really didn’t. He felt so profoundly
comfortable
in this man’s arms. Even his gracelessness was endearing. It wasn’t the man, he reminded himself, but the circumstances. Two prevailing cultures—one very straight, one very gay—had successively denied him this simple pleasure. He felt like crying for joy.

“Did you … uh … ride in the rodeo?” he asked.

“ ‘Fraid not. I’m just a construction worker.”

Just a construction worker!
Jesus God, had he died and gone to heaven? Why hadn’t someone told him there was a place he could go to slow dance with a construction worker?

“What do you do for … this … in Salome?” Michael asked.

The man pulled away from him just enough for his smile to show. “I go to Phoenix.” He leaned down and kissed Michael clumsily on the edge of his mouth. “You’re a nice guy,” he said.

“You too,” said Michael.

They danced for another minute in silence. Then the man
spoke huskily into Michael’s ear. “Look … would you like to make love tonight?”

Make love. Not have sex. Not get it on. Michael’s voice caught in his throat. “I’m actually … here with a friend. He’s just … off right now.”

“Oh.” The disappointment in his voice warmed Michael to the marrow.

“I could give you my phone number. Maybe, if you’re ever in San Francisco …”

“That’s O.K.”

“Never go there, huh?”

“Not yet,” said the man.

“I think you’d like it. I could show you around.”

“I don’t travel much,” said the man.

Michael decided against suggesting a trip to Salome. “Look,” he said, “would you believe me if I told you that this is better than all the sex I’ve had this year?”

The man grinned. “Yeah?”

“Infinitely,” said Michael.

“I’m stepping all over your …”

“I don’t care. I love it.”

The man’s chest rumbled as he laughed.

“You’re doin’ just great,” said Michael. “Just keep holding me, O.K.?”

“Sure.”

So Michael settled in again, lost in a sweet stranger’s arms until Bill came back with the poppers.

W
HEN THE
SAGAFJORD
REACHED JUNEAU, PRUE
and Luke went ashore with the other passengers and explored the tiny frontier town—a place heralded by the local chamber of commerce as “America’s largest capital city.”

“It must be a joke,” said Prue, puzzling over the brochure in her hands.

Luke shook his head. “They mean land mass.”

“But how …?”

“It covers more square miles than any other capital city. Everything’s out of whack up here. It’s further from here to the Aleutians, at the other end of the state, than it is from San Francisco to New York.”

Prue thought for a moment. “That’s a little scary, somehow.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It makes you seem so much smaller, I guess. Like the landscape could … swallow you up. You could just disappear without a trace.”

Luke smiled at her. “People do. That’s the point.”

Prue shivered. “Not to me, it isn’t.”

“Wait till you see the glacier.”

“What glacier?”

Luke slipped his arm around her waist. “I thought we’d rent a float plane and fly over the ice fields. They say it’s as close to God as you’ll ever get.”

Prue looked troubled. “Can’t He just come to us?”

Luke touched the tip of her nose. “What’s the matter, my love?”

“Nothing … I just … well, those tiny planes and my tummy don’t always get along.”

“It’s just forty-five minutes.”

He pulled her closer until Prue relented. In many ways, she realized, he had already become her talisman against harm.

The float plane skimmed the surface of the water like a low-flying dragonfly, then lifted them into the slate-gray sky above Juneau. Besides Prue and Luke, there were four other passengers: a youngish couple from Buenos Aires and two lady librarians, traveling together.

Luke sat directly behind the pilot and conversed with him inaudibly, while Prue watched the alien world beneath her turn from dark blue to dark green to white. No,
gray.
A pale gray plateau as far as the eye could see—a living entity, sinuous as lava at the edges, brutal and beautiful and unexplainably terrifying.

It relieved her somewhat to see that the glacier had boundaries. Splintering and hissing, it tumbled into a dark sea where the water crackled like electricity. As the float plane dipped lower, Prue peered into fissures so brilliantly blue that they seemed unnatural, blue as the lethal heart of a nuclear power plant.

“Look, Luke … that color!”

But her lover was deep in conversation with the pilot, their voices drowned out by the engine sounds.

Prue leaned closer. “Luke …”

He didn’t hear her. He continued to interrogate the pilot, a rapt expression on his face. Prue could make out only two
words. Oddly enough, the pilot repeated them.

She fell back into her seat, frowning. This moment should have been theirs: hers and Luke’s. This buddy-buddy business with the cockpit was inexcusably selfish, thoughtless. When Luke finally sat back and squeezed her hand, she let him know she was pouting.

“You O.K.?” he asked.

She waited a beat. “Well, what was all
that
about?”

“All what?”

“My God! You haven’t stopped talking.”

He pumped her hand again. “Sorry. Just … plane talk. I guess I got carried away.”

“What was that about dire needs?”

Luke blinked at her. “Huh?”

“You said something about dire needs.”

“No, I didn’t.” His face was resolute.

“Luke, I heard you. You said something, something … dire needs. And the pilot said it back. Just a minute ago.”

He studied her for a moment, then smiled and shook his head. “You misunderstood me, darling. We were talking about geography.” He held up his hand like a Boy Scout. “Honest injun. You didn’t miss a thing.”

Prue let it drop. For one thing, the other passengers had begun to take an interest in her vexation. For another, she wanted this moment to be special, free from earthbound anxieties. Luke did, too, it seemed. He gave her his undivided attention for the rest of the tour, turning away only long enough to make a brief notation on the inside of a matchbook.

“What was that?” she smiled. “A reminder?”

Luke looked up, distracted.

“I do that myself,” she added, not wanting to appear nosey. “My mind’s like a sieve.”

He smiled faintly and returned the matchbook to his breast pocket.

“Let’s go dancing tonight,” he said.

B
ACK AT WORK AT GOD’S GREEN EARTH, MICHAEL UNLOADED
his rodeo experiences on an ever-indulgent Ned. The saga suffered in the retelling. Michael’s brief interlude with the slow-dancing construction worker emerged somehow as a hackneyed masturbatory fantasy, no longer the rare and wonderful thing it had seemed at the time.

That night, he tried invoking the spirit of the weekend by listening to country music on KSAN, but Willie Nelson took on an oddly hollow note in a room full of bamboo furniture and deco kitsch. Cowboys didn’t collect Fiesta Ware.

So he wandered downstairs and smoked a roach on the bench in the courtyard. The dope and the silence and the tiny sliver of a moon hanging in the trees all conspired to make him more contemplative than usual.

Contemplative, hell—he was simply depressed.

Nothing grand, of course. This was a garden-variety depression, born of boredom and loneliness and a pervasive sense of the immense triviality of life. It would pass, he knew. He would make it pass.

But what would he put in its place?

The clock said 3:47 when the phone woke him.

He stumbled out of bed and lunged for the receiver. “This better be good,” he told the caller.

“It is,” came the reply. Mary Ann’s giggle was unmistakable. Michael settled himself in a chair. “What’s up, Babycakes?”

“Brian and I are getting married!”

“Now?”

Another giggle. “Next month. You aren’t pissed, are you?”

“Pissed?”

“About waking you up. We wanted to make it official. Calling you was the only thing we could think of.”

Michael was so touched he wanted to cry. What followed, though, was total silence.

“Mouse? Are you there? You
are
pissed, aren’t you? Look, we’ll talk to you in the …”

“Are you kidding? This is
fabulous,
Babycakes!”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“It’s about time,” said Michael. “Are you pregnant?”

Mary Ann roared. “No! Can you believe it?”

“Is Brian?”

He heard her speak to Brian. They were obviously in bed. “He wants to know if you’re pregnant.”

Brian came on the line. “The bitch knocked me up.”

Michael laughed. “Somebody had to do it.”

“Are you alone?” asked Brian.

“Hell, no,” answered Michael. “Say hello to Raoul.”

“Hey, that’s O.K….”

“Calm down,” laughed Michael. “I made that up.”

“You shithead.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“I was picturing some French Canadian with five o’clock shadow.”

“That’s funny,” said Michael. “So was I. God, Brian … this is so damn wonderful.”

“Yeah … well, we just wanted you to be the first to know.”

“Goddamn right,” said Michael.

“We love you, man. Here’s Mary Ann again. She’s got some more news for you.”

“Mouse?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you got a TV set at work?”

Michael thought for a moment. “Ned’s got a portable that he brings from home sometimes.”

“Good. Get him to bring it on Tuesday. I want you to watch the show.”

“Bargain Matinee?”

“Is there any other? You don’t need to watch the movie … just my little halftime bit. I think you’ll be mildly amused.”

“Don’t tell me. You’ve found a new use for empty Clorox bottles.”

“Just watch the show, smartass.”

“Roger.”

“And get some sleep. We love you.”

“I know that,” said Michael.

But he slept much better knowing it.