Buddies (11 page)

“Anyone I know?” I asked.

“Shut up and listen and maybe you’ll get a nice tale out of it.”

“That’s the story of my life.”

“Last night I met this guy at the corner of Twenty-first and Eleventh. He was sitting on the curb because he had no place to go. He looked like he’d been on the streets for—”

“Whoa,” I said, getting all set up. Basically we’re best friends, but we have these verbal duels in which we try to pulverize each other. It keeps the relationship fresh. “What do you mean you
met
someone at Twenty-first and Eleventh, as if that were the lobby of the Algonquin or some prankish salon? Twenty-first and Eleventh is the Eagle. You don’t just meet anyone there. You pick him up. You molest him. You pause to count the bugle beads on his art deco shorts and—”

“I knew you’d do this.”

“What would you say if you handed a small child a lollipop and he unwrapped it and put it into his mouth to enjoy? ‘I knew you’d do this’?”

“When calm sets in, I’ll tell the interesting part.”

I went to the piano and played “Getting to Know You,” grinning at Dennis Savage. He let me get all the way through the chorus, then said, “The interesting part is, he’s straight.”

“Oh please, these banal gay daydreams. Mission ridiculous.”

“I swear on your mother’s life.”

“I don’t know,” I temporized. “Didn’t I read in the
Times
that there weren’t any straights anymore, just electricians?”

“If you saw him—be good and you will—you’d change your tune.”

“What does a straight do in bed?” I asked, bemused.

His eyes glowed again. “Everything,” he breathed.

“But what would a straight be doing outside the Eagle?”

“He didn’t know where he was. He was almost raving with hunger and fatigue.”

“How come
you
got him?”

He shrugged happily. “I came out and there he was.”

“Good career move.”

“Oh, he’s so nice,” Dennis Savage told me. “To meet him is to … to—”

“To yearn to drill him, eh?”

“Will you clam up? To meet him is to understand him.”

“Old news. Any gay can understand a straight because we all start out as insiders in straight culture. The headlines are due when a straight understands a gay, which will be never. And, excuse me for asking, but what’s a straight doing in bed with the gayest man in New York?”

“Well…”

“Stop looking rapt and answer!”

“Oh, he was a mite shy at first. But you know how affectionate lost boys can be, when someone proposes to take care of them. Can I tell you what a pleasure it was to spend time with a man who wasn’t scared by his mother when he was three?”

“Are you going to see this waif again?”

“I can’t help but. He’s sleeping upstairs right now.”

“You left him alone in your apartment? Alone with your checkbook, your plastic, and your complete collection—the world’s only, I fear to say—of Alice Faye lobby cards?”

“
You’re
the one who—”

“Did you at least hide your—”

“His name is Ray and he’s as sweet as they make them. Do you want to come up and meet him or not?”

I was reminded of that scene in Tennessee Williams’ play
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,
wherein two beldames remark a splendid youth asleep in a bed, for Dennis Savage took me up to his place and there in the bedroom was his vagabond lover, one of those unruly innocents that delight at twenty-five, confuse at thirty, and irritate thereafter; but Ray was twenty-five. Curled up, clutching the pillow as if it were a teddy bear with a Mastercard, he looked trashily angelic, a little haunted and maybe a little intelligent. Maybe a lot intelligent: that’s unusual in waifs.

Dennis Savage was beaming like Fafner over his hoard. Noting banter bubbling to my lips, he held up a ssh finger.

“Isn’t he cute?” he whispered. “How jealous you must be.”

“Not at all,” I whispered back. “I’m happy for you.”

“What are you, a saint?”

“I want all my friends content.”

He regarded his treasure. “Please be jealous. I want you jealous.”

“Why?”

“It’s half the fun of being gay.”

“I’ll bet he squeaks when he’s screwed.”

“He doesn’t do anything you’d expect. He even talks funny.” He pulled me over to the window. “Last night, when we were dozing off, he farted and said, ‘Guess a bedbug just bit me.’”

A guffaw yelped out of me and Ray was awake, eyes fluttering as he took us in. Interesting eyes. “I was oversleeping, fellas,” he uttered.

“Ray,” Dennis Savage blissed—no other usage quite captures the noise he made that moment.

Ray squirmed, lazily smiled, and kicked off the covers. Dennis Savage soared right on to introduce us, and Ray said, “A happy Saturdays to you.”

“To someone, anyway,” I replied. He pronounced it “Saterdies,” which was charming enow. “Well,” I added, edging out, “I’m off to farandole class.”

“Wonder if I could get up eggs and buttered toast with fruit spread,” Ray was saying, and I chuckled all the way home. Once again, another thrilling chapter in the gay chronicles—
True Love at Long Last,
for instance, or
Bad Hat Reformed by Influence of Nice New Friend,
or, as in this case,
Dennis Savage Makes Sexual Crossover
—boiled down to the usual participants making the usual pickup in the usual places. Not that true love, character reformation, and crossover were all that elusive; but they were secret, invisible, while cruising and tricking were all over the place and hard to miss. And Dennis Savage, in those plague-free days, before he hooked up permanently with Little Kiwi, did enjoy his pickups. I was a little startled to learn that he and Ray ran their morning after into the night of the following day (complete with periodic breathless reports from Dennis Savage on the wonders of bedding a straight). But then I’ve seen a lot of moving in and out on the part of the homeless—Carlo has spent half his life as a leaseless roommate, and a number of Brooklynites of my acquaintance routinely arrange their affairs around the securing of pieds-à-terre in more central locales. What was amusing was Dennis Savage’s enthusiasm for the appeal of straight: the pure hot of A Real Man.

“He’s so elemental!” Dennis Savage raved. “So true to life! At last I see it! All that old friends-of-Dorothy lore about waterfront bars and truck stops and dangerous men. That wasn’t just because they didn’t have preppie bars then. It was because they wanted to experience sexuality at its most masculine.” He looked awed. He prepared his lecture. “Frustrated by their own giddy going-nowhere wit,” he intoned, “by the covering-up, the apologizing, the hunger for peace, they fled their own kind and sought … what?”

“You know, that’s about the most homophobic thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Oh, great. If you can’t be jealous, be political.”

“They weren’t fleeing anything,” I insisted, “except the vicious credo of self-hatred laid upon them by everyone they knew all their lives. Society outlawed them so thoroughly they had to conceive their culture after-hours in secret places with murderous lunatics who have nothing to lose, and then society cried out in horror at ‘the night world of the homosexual’! And when a dangerous man took them to a dark corner, lifted their wallet, and kicked them to death, with their last breath the contemptible faggots would sigh, ‘Thank you, that was just.’”

His enthusiasm somewhat watted out, Dennis Savage regarded me resentfully. “I hardly think that boy upstairs is going to kick me to death.”

“Why does he have to be straight, anyway?” I asked. “Would you enjoy him less if he—”

“He doesn’t have to be. He is. Nothing embarrasses him. His world isn’t a … a stage of drag shows and epigrammatic ripostes and all those delirious, skulking hungers.”

“Oh, good.”

“Shut up. His world is the world, and he’s the center of it. I’m telling you, it’s pure straight. As far as he’s concerned, the universe exists to pleasure him.”

“Sounds like an est instructor.”

“It’s more than the sex. It’s like slipping through to the other side of the mirror. It’s the difference between needing love and fucking love. Gays need love. Straights only need to fuck.”

“According to Freud, then, gays are healthier than straights. Health is defined by the ability to love and work.”

“I’m not looking for healthy just now,” he fumed. “Do you mind?”

“Aren’t we confusing issues, anyway? It’s not a question of who’s dangerous and who’s nice. It’s a question of who’s emotionally available and who isn’t. I would consider a man who is thus available to a gay man as gay. A man who is thus unavailable is straight—no matter whom he lies down with for what reason.”

“Dick Hallbeck,” he said suddenly, supporting my thesis. Dick Hallbeck is one of our favorite people, a man from Dennis Savage’s hometown who turned up in the early days of gay cinema under a
nom de porn
screwing every man who chanced to come within camera range. Some porn actors are slithery hot, some less hot than hired, just there, minding the wrong business. Dick Hallbeck was hot. He outclassed men far more stunning than he and overwhelmed practiced veterans. Dark and forceful, he seemed on screen to offer a
summum bonum
of dead-on, take-no-prisoners promiscuity. He was the very energy of what Stonewall promised besides politics and art, virtually the protagonist of gay sex.

But he was straight. I don’t mean latent. I don’t mean bi. I don’t mean avant-garde. I mean he was a straight who made his living fucking men. He appeared to be managing it lucratively. Ads offering stills, cinema, and even the kiss-and-tell journal of Jim Packer—Dick Hallbeck’s public name—were everywhere one turned in those days, and the utterly humorless eyes that gave that ordinary face its show did not look like those of an exploitable man. There was no doubt that Dick Hallbeck held the major percentage on the marketing of Jim Packer.

Today Jim Packer is long forgotten and porn stars are in any case less prominent than they once were; we look to other heroes now. But in the first days of Stonewall, porn promised to be the most immediate source of gay independence, symbolically the unique defiance. Not every gay would revel in the emergence of a gay literature or monitor the airwaves for signs of “normalization” in the stereotype. But every gay responds to porn. Hell, what man doesn’t, except George Will? Willing or no, there was no
Christopher Street
then, no Edmund White, no Gerry Studds. What there was was Jim Packer. To sit in the ruins of one of old Broadway’s great relics—Henry Miller’s Theatre as was, renamed the Park-Miller for purposes of porn exhibition—surrounded by hordes of hungry men, cruising, gasping, lurking, wandering, watching Jim Packer initiating applicants of many types in more positions than the
Kama Sutra
knows … well, to be there and to comprehend it, yet to hear Dennis Savage whisper that he had gone to high school with this man, and that he was as straight as our fathers are, was to realize that there might indeed be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

Naturally, I didn’t believe this at first, partly because it was unbelievable and partly because I find it good policy not to believe anything Dennis Savage says, especially when he’s in earnest. You have to understand that he was speaking of a man we had seen, over the course of an hour, plowing into a sizable fraction of the male porn population. And while I must admit that this man never cried out, “Hey, some fun!” or even smiled, still no one was holding a gun to his head.

I told Dennis Savage he was crazy, that the man was as gay as George Cukor (if different). Dennis Savage said that after all Dennis Savage’s older brother was Dick’s best friend, so he ought to know. But at the time all I could see—or all I could understand, and therefore all I
would
see—was that straight was one world and gay another, and that the two worlds were irremediably separate. I could believe that many a straight had lain with a man for personal, financial, or professional advancement. But would a straight so thrust himself into the gay scene that he could become its potent symbol?

The question fascinated both Dennis Savage and me, and his old friend’s names became our buzz terms. “Dick Hallbeck” signified a straight of possibly expansive virtues. “Jim Packer” was gay, wildly appetitive, but somehow impersonal. These were fantasy figures, largely—but came the day, then, that we crossed paths with the two men ourselves. It was a spring afternoon; we were on a bench in one of the plazas the Sixth Avenue office towers use in order to frill up their bottoms, and a man left the passing crowd to examine Dennis Savage. His wrinkled shirt was open to the belt, his boots were busted, his scraggly beard looked like something a wrestler would wear to a cockfight, and he said, “How’s Cliff doing?”

“He’s in Seattle,” said Dennis Savage. I think he was stunned.

“Who’s this?” the man asked, about me, sitting next to us.

“Bud,” said Dennis Savage, “this is…” Yes, who, or which, was he? “This is my brother’s best friend from high school.”

“Dick Hallbeck,” he told me, as we shook hands.

That’s one way of looking at it, I thought.

The meeting was short, merely a “What’s new? encounter—Dennis Savage reporting on the family Cliff was raising in Seattle, Dick on the bar he was planning to open in New Jersey as soon as he had assembled his venture backing, along with a few idle aperçus. But we spoke long enough for me to realize that Dennis Savage had been right: Dick Hallbeck—even Jim Packer—was straight. Emotionally unavailable to gays, possibly to anyone. Some gays swear they can tell a fellow from an outsider within two minutes simply by his dress and eye movements and allusions; but these are blandishments. I can tell a comrade by a certain sensitivity, a sometimes determined and sometimes furtive awareness of place, of people, of the vibrations bashing through the ozone. Gays are never strangers, even when they’re uncomfortable. Straights always hold something back. Dick Hallbeck did, too; and better, perhaps, than anyone I’ve met. He was focused entirely on us, never as much as glanced at the people storming by. Yet he gave nothing to us. There was no real transaction: because what he might have wanted, we could not supply. There was a barely perceptible gap between us, a hitch in delivery, as when one of the speakers in a conversation is not altogether fluent in the language. None of us was shy or brooding. We were lively, forthright, and we all spoke English. Yet we could not impress him. He could not touch us.