How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (15 page)

Evan and I palled up for some reason, and we could have been called best friends if one didn’t apply the concept too nicely. It wasn’t because I had a case of hungry love, because Evan lost the Debauched Scooter look almost as soon as he had attained it. Besides, I had discovered the appeal of the older male in that same locker room, when I passed Senior Danny Eider-Ainsley telling Junior Garrett Williams that they had the two best bodies in the school. Garrett’s was one of those naturally expansive layouts, and he took Danny’s praise with an uninterested shrug. But Danny himself, one of the few seventeen-year-olds of that era to maintain a home weight-lifting program, was clearly sending out a sincere, not to say passionate, message, and that moment remains my most consequential high-school experience.

So Danny Eider-Ainsley was gay, too: straight boys have no need to share thoughts about who is more beautifully made than who else. But Evan was less readable, because he was going to be one of those homosexuals who aren’t gay. Do you know the type? It’s not simply that they lack the Knowledge or that their idea of a pop singer is Vic Damone. They seem to not get what the rest of us do for fun. All they see in gay is a rococo charade, and they often end up married to a woman and treating everyone to a sermonette on how alienated they once felt.

Dennis Savage has no patience with Evan; for a while, he banned me from mentioning him. Until Pennsylvania. It seems that somehow or other Evan fell in with a group of gays who had all moved out to York County, not all that far from Harrisburg. They were bachelors in an enclave, in a time capsule: for fashion never visits the country. Evan still lived mostly in New York, but he kept talking about leaving, and finally he took a place in Dillsburg, among his new friends. And then he learned something about the enclave he had not known before: they juiced up their sex life by paying local men sums of money to perform sexual acts at parties.

And now Dennis Savage was interested.

“Your friend is bringing back the fifties,” he said. “He’s befriending fear. It’s that pre-Stonewall thing, Athletic Model Guild meets the Phantom of the Opera. Sulky trade, beseeching queen. Is he dangerous? Is it better that way? ‘Slash me, my fool!’”

He, Carlo, and I were kicking it around at my place; this must be twenty years ago by now.

“I believe it’s fair to know about this other kind of gay life,” said Carlo quietly. “Where guys don’t have it all laid out in front of them like rides at Disneyland. The bars and the dancing. Magazines to tell you what everything is, clothes and such. Out in the most part of the world there, they don’t know how gay is supposed to go. They don’t even know what to call it. Meet a guy in a bar, he says his girl friend kicked him out just now, where’s he going to bunk tonight. Like his looks? You say, I got room.”

Carlo showed us how this is done, shrugging off a kind of smile.

He goes, Well, thanks. So you get there. It’s nervous, right? ’Cause if you’re gay hotshots hooking up at the Ramrod, you know what’s going to happen. These other guys, now, they’re not sure what they want, ’cause the way they grew up, nothing’s allowed. ’Course, you get boozed up first. Even then, sometimes, it’s nothing doing. Other times, the whole place starts to get real focused. He says, I sure would like to cockadoodle you. He says, Know what that means?”

“‘Cockadoodle’?” I echoed.

Carlo grinned. “Crazy lingo, yeah. It’s not ’cause they’re dumb. It’s ’cause they’re alone.”

He jumped up, went into the kitchen, and came back with an apple. “There can be some nice stories in it. Big Mike Peterson back on leave from the Navy rows his high-school English teacher across the lake to a deserted shack to share a joint. Let’s strip down, says Mike. Or young exec and the boss on a business weekend travel three states away from their real lives, ordering steaks from room service. Do I get the promotion, Mr. Carstairs? Well, Gridley, I’d say that depends on you. Or truly just Coach and Roddy.”

“Tell that one,” Dennis Savage suggested.

A horsebite of apple. “Well, you know Coach. He’s a big number, with deep intentions. They say he was married once, in prison once, in the Foreign Legion once. You name it, it’s got a Coach story. Roddy’s the captain of the baseball team, and all he wants is to climb inside of Coach and never come out.”

“Photo and phone get prompt reply,” said Dennis Savage. “Visuals, please.”

“What for I need to describe to a pair of experts like you, who’ve had their personal vision of Coach and Roddy on file since Pokey was a pup?”

“Clint Walker,” I offered.

“Wesley Morgan,” said Dennis Savage.

“The story can be anything,” said Carlo between apple bites. “’Cause opening up the opportunity’s easy enough. The real story starts with how these guys deal with what they’re doing. They can hide their feelings—but what
are
their feelings? Nothing’s allowed, right? Sure, if it’s for money, they can pretend that there aren’t any feelings in it. There’s no them in it. The trouble starts when they meet up with Coach and there’s no money to protect them from their feelings.”

“Was there a Coach for you, Carlo?” I asked.

After thinking it over, he said, “I’ll pass on that one. Story’s a little spooky.”

“They’re all spooky,” said Dennis Savage.

“I never wanted to be a part of those corruption parties, or whatever you might call them,” Evan had told me. “They take turns giving … ‘head,’ I believe, is the phrasing. As if lining up for a bus. Each has a limit of one minute, and the one who … fires the cannon, as one might say, wins the betting pot. I was very disquieted to hear about this, but I suppose you’re familiar with such sport. From your roguish experience in the Manhattan gay world.”

“I see Roddy as anxious,” I announced. “Confessional. ‘I always liked you, Coach. Do you like me?’”

“Coach is gruff,” said Dennis Savage, joining in. “His words seem to reject the young athlete even as his hands rove—”

“Coach is silent.”

“Coach is kissing.”

“No,” I said. “He goes, ‘Can I whisper in your ear, young fellow?’ The world turns so utterly still that a rotting fence falls over in Norway and they hear it in a church bingo basement in Boca Raton. Roddy holds on to Coach’s massive shoulders and Coach inclines his head…”

“His tongue moistens the boy’s shell-like ear as he says…”

“He says…”

We were looking at Carlo to conclude our tale.

“You got it too romantic,” he told us, rising to line up a shot of apple core at the kitchen sink and send it home. “Kid swings on Coach’s dick till Coach pulls him up and says, Let’s do this right. And he takes him to the bed and cockadoodles him.”

The three of us contemplated that for a bit. Then I said, “Well, there’ll be no Coach for Evan. He’s romantic. Flowers pressed in a book the day they pledged their love.”

“In the life that we’re talking of,” said Carlo, “they don’t do love. Love is for women, so they can raise children or teach school or be Nurse Laura Barton.”

“I was going to leave this party,” Evan had told me. “It had the taste of the New York homosexual, setting his traps and covering up with his West Side witticisms. But this night the … guest, as they term it, was a fellow called Slim. He had a handlebar mustache and a way of looking right at you after you had finished your sentence, so you would say more, to keep him there. You quite babble your heart away. His name is Henry Muller, but Slim is so much more appropriate. He needed the money to make the mortgage payment on his farm, and I found that so sympathetic. He’s no drifter, none of your gay-bar riffraff. I offered him all the money he needed, and he didn’t have to do anything for it. They had him undressed down to a rustic cache-sex, just a flap of white linen tied at the waist, and he looked so genuine that way. His eyes were misted at the humiliation, and I wanted to save him. The other … yes,
guests,
wouldn’t you know it, were just local ruffians. They lacked every quality except availability. They couldn’t be degraded, try as you might. Ask them to masturbate themselves while riding a tricycle in a lady’s wig, and they’d simply say, ‘That’s twenty bucks extra.’ But Slim seemed so noble even in his shame that he inspired me! I turned to look at the rest of the party—how gleeful they were at breaking down this beautiful being’s pride. They
feast
on man!”

“But, Carlo, isn’t it easier our way?” I asked.

“Surely. But you’ll always know what you’re getting, like opening a box of cornflakes. What happened to discovering?”

“He came away with me without even putting his clothes on,” Evan recalled. “A bold stroke for a fine cowboy, certainly. He was grateful for his rescue, and so he endeavored to share his male warmth with me, despite his shyness.” Evan smiled here. “You’ll think me excessively fond, calling him a cowboy. But York County farmland is virtually in the Midwest.”

“The Midwest starts at Tenth Avenue,” I told him.

“Carlo, which is more fun,” Dennis Savage asked, “that other world or ours?”

“Depends on what you want out of life.”

“I knew I couldn’t compete with the gay cognoscenti of the city,” Evan told me. “Those practitioners of the art of being gay, with their drugs of pleasure and sinful circus.”

“You know, it really isn’t all like that,” I said. “Gays choose their lives just as straights do. There’s nothing about drugs and circuses in the contract.”

“But do you know,” Evan asked me, “in your wonderful city, anyone so genuine that he is wistful in his cache-sex, yet so wide-shouldered from farm labor?”

Was I talking to Stonewall’s Emily Dickinson? I said, “Don’t forget that you’re somewhat substantial yourself. I never told you how amazing you looked in seventh grade.”

“Doing what?”

I gave up with a sigh.

Evan went on, “You were the only one who was kind to me then. You’re not like the others, and we must always be friends.”

*   *   *

A
ND SO WE WERE
, at intervals when he came to New York for some family do, and in his homemade Christmas cards—always views of Slim’s farm—and occasionally a letter. The birth of a calf, the trouble with some machine, intrigues of the local homosexual enclave. Over the years, the tale of Evan and Slim grew into a wonder saga, especially as the Stonewall ideal of braggy promiscuity gave way to the post-AIDS ideal of loving monogamy. No one else in my family had as much as met Evan, yet we all referred to “Evan and Slim,” always as the control in an experiment whose other participants were by comparison fly-by-nights lacking in vision. Together these two stood, windswept in Pendleton shirts and Timberlands, resolute yet playful, a Jeffersonian icon of independence: the yeoman farmers.

So when Evan suddenly invited us out for a weekend, my first thought was How can we possibly stand the scrutiny? And isn’t the ideal best appreciated from afar?

I didn’t tell the others till one evening in my place. It was right after dinnertime; they’re less wary then. Dennis Savage was in the kitchen, preparing freeze-boxes of the leftovers of a Wiener schnitzel with horseradish cabbage he had cooked for us. Carlo and Cosgrove were watching
Survivor,
that show in which Americans are dumped into a jungle and left to fend for themselves. This one was
Survivor: Thailand,
and our two television critics, filling me in on the show’s format, explained that the series had lost much of its dramatic validity now that the cute blond guy had got voted off for letting his tribe’s boat float away.

“Cosgrove,” said Carlo, struck by the brilliance of a new notion, “why don’t you send in a tape to the producers for next season? They surely like a gay character nowadays.”

“I’m waiting for
Survivor: The 104 Bus.
”

“How about
Survivor: Dillsburg, Pennsylvania?
” I asked.

My tone got their attention. Even Dennis Savage came out, dish towel in hand.

“That’s Evan and Slim,” he said. “A trip?”

“All of us?” asked Cosgrove.

“All who want to,” I replied.

“Would Cosgrove be happy there?” Cosgrove went on. “On the farm?”

“Ask Carlo. He was a farmboy once.”

“You, Mr. Smith?”

Carlo, who had been stretched out to full on the couch, slowly pulled himself around and rose to loom over us with his bigness, his implausible realism. The truest man may grow a bit soft with time, but he never loses power: because he has seen what the rest of us only dream of. He has been—as he himself put it—discovering.

“Did you milk a cow?” Cosgrove asked Carlo. “On your farm?”

“I did when they could find me.”

“How farm
is
this place?” Dennis Savage asked. “Is it, like, crops and a one-hoss shay? Do they herd sheep?”

“Do they
hear
sheep,” Cosgrove corrected, quoting from
A Damsel in Distress.
“And what would sheep even say?”

“It is so farm,” I said, “that it has been in Slim’s family for three generations. It’s that land thing, where everyone in the place loses his identity to become one with his dynastic fate. It’s the opposite of gay life, in a way: no one is allowed any choices. Any liberty. You live for one thing only: the land.”

“Did you like the farm, Mr. Smith?”

“Smells bad and it’s filled with people giving you orders.” Carlo moved close to Cosgrove and ran his hand through Cosgrove’s hair so exactly on the center parting that he got a shiver out of him. “And you have to get up early for the rest of your life.”

“How early? Nine-thirty?”

“Five.”

“Oh, I will not be on the farm.”

Everyone sat down for Discussion Group.

“What’s Slim like, again?” Dennis Savage asked.

“I’ve told, a thousand times.”

“Just once more.”

“He’s your destiny, wearing nothing but a piece of white linen tied around the waist, with his patch roughing out at the top and his manhood hanging out below. His eyes are sad, but if you love his land, he will love you.”

Carlo said, “Do what?,” Cosgrove made a low noise by way of sarcastic rebuke, and Dennis Savage waved the nonsense away with “And where does Evan fit into that?”