How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (14 page)

“But you can’t just walk up to a stranger in the gym and … can you?”

“I’m telling you, I already did. He couldn’t speak because of a medical thing. He mimed for me. Something in his mouth. But they were all watching.”

“The whole gym?”

“My so-called friends.” He hefted the football a bit, rose, and drew it back as if for a pass at the diamond as big as the Ritz. “I am not prepared to accept their limits,” he said, sitting again as he petted the football’s lacings. “Linton got huffy with me in the showers about not following the sign-up order. I told him, ‘Every man for himself.’”

These were fighting words, given Ken’s gang’s Morlocks-Eloi worldview, and Ken meant them.

“He can’t speak because of a medical thing?” Ken went on. “As
if.
I followed him out of the gym, and after a subway ride and so on, I watched him meet some people for drinks. It was one of those high-tech places with all glass around, so—”

“What people?” I asked. “Like him?”

“Various people.”

“No, I mean did those people give you some idea about whether the guy is gay?”

That stopped him, briefly. “It’s different nowadays,” he told me. “Everybody’s completely mixed together.”

“You aren’t. Everyone you know lives and dates alike. You’re a closed system, an all-boy flesh-and-cream.”

“Oh, yes?” he replies in a cool and even wondering tone: but his eyes are blazing at me. “We live alike but they spied on me? Followed me, like hunters? Yes, you didn’t know this”—because I looked puzzled—“but Davey-Boy and Tom-Tom and that dimwit Devon with the blond streak across the hairline that is so not in style yet shamelessly watched me across the street from the new guy’s drink place. Well, I went right up to them, and Tom-Tom asked for the football back in that stupid French of his. ‘Rendez-nous le football.’ I had to fight him for it. Aren’t you listening to me?”

“Of course, I’m—”

“Right there on the street, you understand? So people could see my best pals and me brawling! And who won, I ask you? As if I couldn’t take Tom-Tom on any street in this world! I threw it at him to bounce off that big little-boy build he’s so proud of. Like, I need his fucking football? And I’ll date that new guy. They can
eat
that sign-up sheet, which you notice I wasn’t even here when they started it. And that was no accident, was it? They believe I need a takedown, that all-boy system you think is so neat! And no, I am not crying, so just get back with your sympathy while I am hard as stone.”

I froze.

A pause.

“And so,” he finally said. “I still have the football. I have Bar Credibility. I have a wonderful power. I have a better job than most of them put together, even if I’m bored with it. You can be hot and educated at the same time. Tom-Tom? He gets his reading in with the Undergear catalog. He couldn’t place a comma correctly if it meant sex with Matt LeBlanc.”

Another pause.

“My best pals. But who kept the football? Who beat Tom-Tom right there? That’s a good system, isn’t it?”

He broke this pause almost immediately.

“Would you please stop looking at me as if I were crying?” he said. “I’m going to show them what a good system is. I don’t have to cry when my feelings are hurt, or ever.”

So he shrugged again and seemed quite calm about it; but life in Chelsea erupted in total war. All birthday sex and movie nights were canceled without notice, and everyone was miserable but determined.

“What a posse of misfits,” said Dennis Savage. At first, he had been amused by my Tales of the Chelsea Boys. But now their boundless religion of hot had become as tiresome as Madonna’s cone bra. “They’re so picturesque and unified,” he noted. “Like when when explorers went too deep into Africa and stumbled upon isolated tribes with unfathomable customs.”

Assuming the voice of a sycophantic guide out of some old movie, he said, “‘We must tread carefully, oh bwana, for it is the Valley of the Rock People. If by some evil mischance they should surprise us here, be certain to copy their every mannerism, no matter how quaint or unseemly, or they will surely annihilate our entire party. But come, oh bwana, let us pass swiftly on our way.’”

Meanwhile, Ken’s gang was doing no better with the new guy at the gym than Ken had done. The cynosure never shot anyone down exactly, but then he never did
anything
exactly. He remained unavailable and inscrutable.

Or not inscrutable: Russian. That’s what Ken told me, on the phone, urgently inviting me to his gym on a guest pass to Speak for Him.

“It’s so weird how he’s been wiggling out of reach, always,” Ken was telling me. “I watch them taking their turn with him, with the others all glaring at me. What a war in the gym! But I’m over it now.”

“Over it?”

“Caring … about how they treat me.” A silence follows, in which we both try to decide if that could be true. “Anyway, I saw it all come down at the bench press. Dickinson approached him, but he started dealing in an alien tongue, and he has this friend there, who pipes up that he only speaks Russian. And you do, too, right? At last I’ll show those jokers who is in fashion.”

My college Russian is about as vital as Stalin, but I was curious to see this show. It’s so reminiscent of early Stonewall culture—of its appetites and styles—yet so smoothly coordinated and homogenized that it recalls Lincoln Steffens’ remark that he had been “over into the future, and it works.” Yet Soviet Russia didn’t work, did it? It didn’t even deserve to.

“Sure, I’ll come,” I told him. “Maybe I’ll luck into a spin class.”

“That’s what?”

“Aerobics on bicycles.”

It sounds extremely questionable to him. “Like bumper cars?”

“The bikes are stationary.”

“We don’t have that California stuff. This is a serious gym. Your free weights, your machines.”

“You are a serious people,” I said; but as usual he didn’t get it.

That night, Davey-Boy telephoned me. He said he wanted peace among his kind, and he wondered what my role might be in this, the next day at the gym.

Watch me be careful. I like him, but I have a loyalty issue.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“We are the kids in the code,” he said, “and we understand each other so well.”

“You have too much code, and you hurt my cousin’s feelings. I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

“Let us harmonize, cousin.”

“Yes, you’re smooth—but Ken ranked you out about the football, didn’t he?” A little exasperated with the whole thing, I told him, “You’re like pubescent orphanage kids eating extra candy at a late-night spanking party.”

“Your cousin is the superior being among us. I have gotten high on his truth many the time. No drugs, just Ken raw. My mouth all on him so, and the way—”

“I forbid you to share this with me.”

“Just tell us your terms.”

“I don’t negotiate with terrorists,” I said, ringing off.

*   *   *

B
Y THE TIME
I met Ken in front of his gym, I was keyed up with curiosity even as I dreaded being part of it. What, approach a stranger in a place as judgmental as a body house? Ken was so anxious that he could have been an ancient Greek box-office treasurer waiting for Aeschylus to introduce the second actor.

We both calmed down somewhat after observing the solemnities at the front desk, suiting up, and hitting the main weight room, a vast contract in the boilerplate of vanity. Men pulled, thrust, mirrored themselves, chatted, admired one another, ballooned and tightened. A few women were irrelevantly scattered about, as if fronting for a conspiracy of some kind. I caught sight of a few of Ken’s former comrades as he pointed out the new guy patiently racking up a heavy score on the quad machine. The Kens clustered and broke apart and reclustered at the edge of my vision while Ken concentrated on what really mattered: revolt. Reaching some sort of climax, the new guy grew still, heaved up out of the metal, and examined himself in the glass.

“See?” Ken whispered.

The new guy: iconographically apt, a physique as crowded as opening day of the Olympics topped off by a glacially benign handsomeness. The Norwegian water polo team’s version of a naughty French postcard, I thought; with Brazilian ears, or something. Your basic devastato, yet raised to the highest possible level. Far out of the ordinary, even for Ken’s demanding taste. Theatrical, conservative, fantastic. A midsummer night’s dream. Still: how good-looking does one have to be now? I don’t mean Is it fair—I mean Is it possible?

“No one should have that,” I muttered.
No,
I meant No one
can
have that. And of course even that’s incorrect.

Then we saw Davey-Boy fraudulently idling past the new guy, whistling and flexing and showing off his veins.

“Go!” Ken told me. “Stop that showboater!”

I hesitated, but it was one of those moments when You’re going to do it right now or You’re never going to do it. So I went up to the new guy and said, “Ya slishal shto vy govoritye pa-russki.” I hear you speak Russian.

Turning from the eternal mirror, he looked at me and said, “What’s that, Somali?”

“Russian.”

He shrugged, started toward yet another hotness machine, stopped short, and looked back at me with a grin.

“
You’re
one of them?” he asked.

“I’m … ambassador.”

“Yeah, huh. For which one?”

“My cousin Ken.”

“But who is he, is what. I get so many in each different place. Turn them
all
down, sure. You have to. Or the whole world would spin off crazy.”

He looked closely at me, then went into some lazily exhibitionistic gym thing, pulling up his tank top while pushing down the waistband of his shorts. When Davey-Boy does it, it’s cute. When this man does it, it’s an outrage, something essential that you’re not permitted to know about.

“See, I feel them all around,” he went on. “Trying to control me. ‘S’why I always say no. No is control. No is me. Are they looking?”

I just kept watching him.

“Sure they are. Now you look inside.”

He indicated the mirror, wherein I saw the reflection of Ken’s entire gang, assembled in disapproval.

“How I see it,” he said, “they could be cruising themselves like so.”

I turned around to seek out the real Ken, to signal to him that I was as close as I would get and that he must step forward. But I couldn’t find him.

“They should look deeper than the mirror,” the new guy went on, shuddering at the cool of the place and to emphasize the lovable bounce of his hair. “I turn from the mirror.”

He abruptly did, and so did I. Before us stood the Kens—Ken now among them—all gazing upon the new guy with resentment. Ken even handed the football to Tom-Tom. Solemnly!

“They make a
great
set,” the new guy observed. “How do they tell each other apart?”

“Harlan has nine toes.”

“So which is your cousin, now?”

“Fifth from the left.”

The new guy took note. “Impressive, you
have
to say so. Yet who isn’t, today? Look how the others never stop watching him.” He waved at them, but they just stood there passing the football around. “They seem so impatient. A habit of youth. A failing, perhaps an energy. I was impatient once.”

“You’re no older than they are,” I pointed out.

“No, I’ve been here forever,” and he stepped forward to say to them, “I’m the one you can never have.”

All together, Ken’s play group glanced inquiringly at me. I shrugged. They looked back at the new guy, and he now took a step toward Ken, modulating his voice so the two of them might have been in the confessional. “They’ll always struggle,” he said, as if making the most obvious of remarks. “Suck it up and deal, guy.”

And off he went.

“You’re free now,” I told Ken, and his pals dispersed to various machines. On the way, some of them gave him love pats or neck rubs, and Crispin drew his gun and let Ken shoot him dead to fall with spectacular and I have to say even joyful abandon into Ken’s forgiving arms.

“I may be free,” Ken told me when we were alone, “but I’m very cross with you. Did he at least tell his name?”

“Odysseus.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, weighting up the bench press.

“He is called ‘No Man.’” Seized by a thought, I added, “The Rock People came out of their valley and caught sight of the world.”

Ken sighed, slamming on a forty-five-pound plate with the familiar metal slap. “Do you know what you would be so much more present-day trendy without?” he asked me. “Those fucking gay riddles.”

4

W
E’VE
B
EEN
W
AITING FOR
Y
OU FOR A
L
ONG
T
IME

W
HO WAS YOUR HIGH-SCHOOL
crush?

Mine was Evan McNeary, whose realtor father was the wealthiest parent among my classmates’ families. The McNearys owned twenty-five acres on Long Island Sound, with not only the customary pool and tennis court but an equestrian stable as well. Evan tended the horses, and all those hours with the brush gave him a heavy upper torso unheard of in a twelve-year-old. With his darkish skin tone and black hair he seemed absurdly masculine for seventh grade, especially because of a classic grand endowment, fat as can be, with a heavy-lidded mushroom cap.

On the first day of soccer practice, as I was dressing at my locker, Evan came back from the showers, startling not only me but Russell Livermore, who had the next locker over. The next day, Russell came sidling up to me in the lunchroom to murmur, “Did you see that Evan McNeary? He must beat off every night!”

No, I was thinking.
You
beat off every night. Evan beats off three times a night—that is, if the quaint notion that size and appetite are linked has validity. Had he been a defenseless kid of the uprooted class, perhaps a graduate of foster homes, Evan might have attracted the attention of many an opportunist and become as erotically educated as Joe Dallesandro was when he stepped off that Greyhound in Los Angeles. But the moneyed middle class raises its offspring delicately. Anyway, Evan was one of the least outgoing guys in all of Friends Academy. The voluptuous physique and the primly pompous persona made an odd blend, as if a Classics professor specializing in Dubious Sources in Herodotus spent secret weekends emceeing vaudevilles at Scheherazade’s.