How Long Has This Been Going On (31 page)

Those were the days, huh? Twenty-one and crash out of the fucking closet. The whole thing then was where could you find a guy to shack up with and how many of the possible lewd acts would either of you refuse to do? Think of it: It was actually hard to find a guy who was willing to get fucked. Nowadays, you get a guy every night you want it and you do everything, including a couple of maneuvers that haven't been invented yet. So you invent them: It's today. You invent yourself, with the gym and the clothes and the look. Everyone has a type, but, also, everyone
is
a type—preppy, twinkie, actor-model, leather man, street kid, trucker, loose teen, tight end, Alice in Wonderland... The list grows every week.

Now, that is a world for you, Frank thinks, running his eyes over the place—not in case of trouble, because there never is any: just to keep track of things.

Andy's here. Now, there's a sweet guy. Likes to sit at the bar and chat you up about the movies. "Have you seen
Wild in the Streets
?" he goes.Frank says, "Seen it? I
am
it," and Andy laughs and the skin around his eyes crinkles up. Makes him look like a little boy. Must have had a real secure home life to turn out so pleasant.

Henry enters the bar, shrugging off the chill outside, and he and Frank catch eyes and point at each other. (Frank grins and snaps his thumb and middle finger as the index points.) Henry's what Frank's mother would have called "a caution." This means that he's his own man. He doesn't care what you think. If he doesn't like what you're saying, he'll pipe right up about it, and if you give him grief, he'll bounce it back at you, right between the eyes.

Henry gets in there and looks around. He thinks, Is this going to be the same place forever? Same beauties, same drips, same Paul and Jim and Andy and that incredible bartender? Another harangue from Paul about the Historical Possibilities; Jim I know so well I can get his news just by looking at him; Andy is dear, fine, ordinary Andy; and the bartender is death by hunger, so you don't get too close to him if you're smart.

Henry doesn't get too close to anyone in Hero's, actually, because all he turns on to is trash. Street trash, especially the lone, drifting hustlers of Third Avenue, are Henry's fascination. "Wild boys," he calls them. Another type. He likes to think of them as a force of revolution, blithely dismaying the fascist marital system, throwing closeted patriarchs into quandaries and exploding the traditional American hypocrisy about sex. Alas, all he's found thus far is a bunch of kids on the make.

No revolution, Henry thinks. They just are. Paul keeps saying that Gay Liberation means having an agenda. Indeed, Henry and Paul have one. They belong to Sacred Acts, a political group with an agenda so passionate that it is still being hammered out as the mechanics scream at each other. We've got sixteen male and three female members. And if you can find a topic on which any two of these people agree, you're a better man than I am, Errol Flynn.

This is going to be a
very
slow revolution—like when the women wanted a consensus on pornography, which degrades women, and Paul snapped out, "Well, it
exalts
men!" Sacred Acts did two and a half hours on that, and still the genders disagreed.

What's Frank the Bartender's agenda? Henry wonders. What's he after? He seems such contented trash, so amiable with his decision to live without the approval of the Great White Father, of the System, of families, the law, respectability. Is that where our rank and file will come from, or is that our charismatic prince of outlaws? Our president?

"Henry!
You
dashing
tall and cool white boy, which is my second favorite kind—the hesitant, too-young-for-it frightened little white boy being my
most
favorite—well, now, how be you today?"

This was Jezebel, a black queen with the fastest snap and the biggest chest development in the East Village. Jezebel's love-to-shock-you style was a test even in the everything-goes atmosphere of Hero's. "I'll stuff the tightest ass in the house!" he'd scream, working his hips and showing his fist on the chance that someone was about to retort disrespectfully. "I'll ream some pretty honky boy!" he'd shout, just when the jukebox had finished a side and conversation had dropped to murmurs. Jezebel enjoyed being heard, like it or (even better) not. "I'll fuck all the cops and marines!" he'd bellow, doing his walk and giving the finger to those who were so dainty as to be amazed. "I'll make them do the dance of joy! Teach them
snap jive!"
Turning to a stranger, Jezebel would ask, "Will they
do
it, you say? Hey, ain't you dig my
tell
here? You hear me calling at your door, white?"

That was Jezebel's way of deciding whom he could live with. He had his catalogue of types, like anyone else, and they were but two: those who were part of the Liberation and those who were not. "There go some moderate douche bag, I guess," he'd say, as someone, fearing Jezebel's patter, made himself scarce. "Raised him from a puppy, too."

Then he'd flash out with, for instance, "Who gonna blow on my magic stick? Marilyn Monroe? Deal. Tyrone Power? Too beautiful. I in the mood for some street bish. Who gonna get
on
me, now?"

So, that night in Hero's, Jezebel asked Henry, "You gonna eat me or beat me?"

Henry grabbed Jezebel by the arms and said, "I'm going to hear you and fear you."

"Yeah," Jezebel replied, flexing his stuff. "Yeah, you know what it is."

They pulled each other close for a moment, because they were gays who had already been with each other and had had a nice time and didn't need more—what was known as "getting it out of the way." They were equals, colleagues, and friends.

"Remind me," said Jezebel, lowering his voice and following Henry to the bar, where he bought a can of Bud from Frank. "Did I fuck you tough or easy?"

"We just fooled around a little. At the Everard."

"Oh, the baths? Well, I don't do much
there.
I like a intimate format, you know? Bed and some cushions in pastel colors. Do it family-style."

Henry nodded, distracted by the comings and goings of the men, the types, the possibilities.

Jezebel tapped Henry on the shoulder. "Everyone say you a good catch, upward mobility and such. Next time, you give me six or seven minutes' warning and I gonna bust you head to sideways with my ream. I give you the black boy
landslide
flick."

Henry grinned. "Jez, you're a man of many moods."

"I got but the one mood in me, and that be meanness. What I am is a man of many personalities."

Henry gulped at his beer; he was about to get moving.

"Now, for instance," Jezebel went on, slipping his hands into his pockets and leaning against the wall in a collegiate manner, "just the other night someone asked me for a recommendation as to which integral recording of the holy Beethoven Nine he should buy." Jezebel smiled, relishing the game. "I told him von Karajan Two. His first set was expert, but the sonics are outdated and of course mono LPs are rather hard to come by except in the specialty shops. Besides, the Berlin Philharmonic plays so beautifully on the newer set."

"Gotta walk, Jez."

"It has been nice to see you, Henry."

Standing in the huge picture window that fronted the bar, Jezebel watched as Henry headed off for the Stud and the Strap. This was Henry's regular tour, combing the streets of Chelsea and the West Village in a sweep running way south and then northward again, from the chummy Hero's down to the cruisy, anything-can-happen Stud, up again to the severe, leather-and-western Strap. All the way, Henry was hoping that he might run into some really nice, attractive, middle-class guy—but
really
nice, and smart, and funny—so he could be detoured from his socially, culturally, and politically ridiculous (and probably dangerous) quest for the Hottest Man Alive.

Life as Henry sees it? The whole thing is Control, and it's Sweethearts versus Wild Boys. Sweethearts are guys you could have gone to high school with; their idea of a great time in bed is to lie with their head against your chest holding on to you and talking intimately. Wild Boys are from another planet; their idea is to fuck their brains out, and they wouldn't know intimately if it fell on them.

Control is what it is. See, with Sweethearts, Henry is... well, on top. They respect and want to please him. With Wild Boys, who are by nature out of Control, you become the respecter, even the buffoon. Sweethearts root you in social norms. Wild Boys take you out of this world.

It's a problem: because Henry would like to own the Control, but then he'd have to forgo experiencing the magnificent clarity that Wild Boys bring to sex. It's a terror: because you cannot truly go all the way till you've gone too far. It's a choice: between dignity and ecstasy.

Sweethearts are, like, Jim and Andy. They're good guys, but they're so... wide-eyed and fumbly. Henry once spent the night with Jim. It was the right Saturday and the right drugs, and they tried a marathon. Henry made of Jim's body a veritable engine of sin; and Henry came three times and Jim twice; and they did everything; and Jim even got a little abandoned. (Well, what he did was whisper, "Fuck me till I shoot!," which is abandoned for Jim.) But they were both performing, and Henry's looking for something hotter than that, more wired up. Yes, you have your various missions in life. You have friends, leisure, and brunch. But, without the perilous honesty of ground-zero, no-one-gets-out-of-here-alive sex, what is life?

The Stud is oddly dead this Sunday evening, so Henry moves on, watching carefully for the hunters, the teenagers who patrol the empty streets of the dock area, looking for gays to assault. It is nearly midnight when Henry reaches the Strap, the most famous leather bar in the gay world. Everyone's dressed as a biker or cowboy or, like Henry, as an eclectic derivation: brown bomber jacket over jeans, a flannel shirt, and heavy western boots.

Icons, Henry thought as he stepped inside. We worship ourselves.

"Hey, Tex, you live with your folks?" someone breathed in Henry's ear.

"Martin. You missed the meeting."

"Hold this."

Henry took Martin's can of Bud as Martin struggled out of
his
bomber jacket.

"You realize," said Henry, "that the day they declare that the world's supply of used bomber jackets has been exhausted, life as we know it will come to an end."

"To your right, at the corner of the bar, in the blue shirt. Yes? No?"

Henry looked. "Handsome but sexless."

"Look again."

Henry did. "Nice arms," he admitted.

"I love the way the sleeves are
tolled just
halfway up the biceps."

"If you want him..."

"Listen, three teenagers were attacked this evening on Eleventh Avenue."

"What?"

Martin nodded. "With a baseball bat, apparently. The whole bar's buzzing about it. Looks like another bashing."

"You mean they were
gay
teenagers?" Henry cried. A couple of men turned around to look at them. The Strap was very strict on style: and real men speak low when they speak love.

"It's not clear who was what, exactly," said Martin. "I don't even—"

"Excuse me," said a younger man, in sailor's blues, behind them. "I happened to be passing the scene when the police were there."

"Yeah?" said Henry.

"They had identified the victims by their wallets, and they all live in the projects on Eighth Avenue."

Martin said, "Hunters?"

The sailor shrugged. "Looks like."

"Who bashes hunters?" asked Henry.

"Maybe we should," said the sailor.

"You're cute," Martin told him. The sailor smiled.

"Catch you later," Henry said as he began a slow tour through the bar.

Control. You're the giver of blessings. The man of note. Decisive and formidable, Henry's second and third favorite adjectives. His first was
dominating.
That's why he kept trying to find a middle-class boy to work with, someone like himself, a Sweetheart.

And that's why he really preferred a Wild Boy: because only the man who wrested Control from the Controller could teach Henry its value. Henry cannot respect what he has: He respects what he fears.

It was cold and Henry was tiring. Still, he took the E train uptown to Third Avenue to see who was Wild tonight.

You wonder how certain locations are singled out for use by gay people. Who chooses the men's rooms that will become hotbeds of furtive activity? Who claims a bar for our crowd? Who decided that the east side of Third Avenue from Fifty-third to Fifty-fourth streets was where the hustlers would hold their fire sale?

Wild Boys. You know what Henry wants? Some fierce and fearless being who doesn't regard the world but simply inhabits it. Someone intrepid—no:
natural.
Like many intellectuals, Henry reckons that his advanced states of conjecture and analysis have denied him access to the life force.

Not too many kids out tonight. Some of the regulars are huddled in doorways, one very doped-looking and slightly older fellow sways in the window of Clancy's Bar, a couple of
objets trouvés
guarding the subway entrance mutter near each other like escaped zanies. Oh, and here's someone new. Someone very young, underdressed for the cold, tall and stocky, with white blond hair. He has a smile, and a way of standing. Oh, yes. Standing like
Everything's okay
and a nice real heavy solid
I am
sort of smile.

Henry isn't wealthy, but he makes a good living, and he occupies, by illegal sublet, a rent-controlled apartment that costs him pin money. He has the spare twenty, twenty-five, for this.

After the standard "How are you doing?" opening and a bit of blather, the blond rejects Henry's offer. "Forty," he says.

"I don't have forty."

"You could get it fer me if you needed it."

But the blond doesn't turn away with a
Keep it moving
attitude. The blond keeps looking at Henry, smiling.