Buddies (12 page)

Dennis Savage, once he got over his surprise at seeing Jim Packer turn into Dick Hallbeck, became ebullient and began to flow with picturesque recollections of small-town life. Only in New York, I reminded myself—only in this absurd metropolis could you find yourself sitting between a schoolteacher and a porn star as they review a past of socials and canoeing. But once in this old-home convention did Dennis Savage tighten up, when Dick referred to “that time you guys bagged the Winky-Dink out by the sled hills.” One of Dick’s eyebrows jittered, as if he found this a questionable act, though his tone was noncommittal, and I made note to inquire into this matter as soon as was indecently possible.

It was Dick, anyway, who held my attention, for I always enjoy meeting proof that the riddles haven’t all been solved—that some stories, after all, have yet to be told. What fascinated was not what Dick was, but what he
also
was, for Dick fielded the tough form of straight, based on the kind of self-reliance so brash it hardly needs to show itself. In fact, I began to understand—at that very moment, that chance meeting—that the straight-gay disparity was not a sexual but a
cultural
matter. Isn’t it? I stopped listening to Dick and started watching him, and I got a picture of a man who cares only about withstanding assaults on his space, making women, filling his wallet, and satisfying a few secondary appetites. He cares about nothing else: he has no art, no representations, no themes. And that is pure straight. The exceptions are salesmen, unemployed actors, and hustlers, all of whom will go out of their way to engage you emotionally no matter how straight they may be. But then, of course, they want something from you; that gives them a theme.

“Who’s the Winky-Dink?” I asked after Dick went on his way. “And why did you bag him?”

“Do you like me?” Dennis Savage countered.

“Uh…”

“Do you want to stay friends with me?”

“At least through next week.”

“Leave it alone, okay? Just leave it, because it’s a sacred, sad thing that no one should hear of.”

“Okay,” I said. Two beats, then: “Tell me or I’ll make up something horrible and put it in a story.”

“If I tell you, you’re bound to put it in a story.”

“Never.”

“It already is horrible.”

“I sensed that.”

“I’d hoped to take it to my grave.”

“None must know it.”

“Exactly.”

“Any who did would hate you.”

“There you go.”

“So tell me. Or else.” I mimed a headline:
“DENNIS SAVAGE MOLESTS MAYOR’S EIGHT-YEAR-OLD SON. ‘HE BLEW ME APART,’ CHILD REVEALS.”

“Cut it out!”

“‘IT HURT BUT IT’S FUN,’ THE VICTIM WENT ON, AS HIS PARENTS SLAPPED HIM ABOUT—”

“I helped some homophobic straights beat up a helpless gay kid for a Halloween prank. We were so mean to him that whenever he saw us he quietly stood where he was and wept. Now, are you glad? And who made
you
head of the gay secret police,
huh?
”

He was angry and I was silent.

“Comes the revolution,” he went on, “and you report me to the Committee, try to remember that the pressures to conform are tremendous in a small town. Tremendous, okay? And remember that many of us, in that last desperate surge of fake solidarity before we face up to what we are … what we need to be … pull one or two truly vicious stunts that hurt us for the rest of our lives.”

“Imagine how the Winky-Dink feels.”

He took a deep breath and silently counted to ten.

“Go joke,” he said, in what may have been genuine melancholy. “Go ahead.” He gestured feebly, like a dying insect. “Have one on me.”

We were almost home by then; our encounter with Dick Hallbeck had made us long to get indoors, safe from chance meetings.

“What’s bagging, anyway?” I asked. “Each time I hear it, it means something else. Carlo says it’s where you pull off someone’s pants in public. Lionel says that’s
de
bagging; plain bagging is dunking someone in water. The way you use it, it sounds like a mugging.”

He just looked at me.

“You have to tell,” I said. “I told you about Gary Lundquist making me play Strip Candyland in the attic.”

“You never told me that.”

“Didn’t I?” I held the door for him; we had gone to my place. “Well, I will, one day. Right now, it’s confess or else.”

He nodded. “It was Halloween night,” he began, speaking in a slow drag, as if showing me how repentant he was. “We were in tenth grade…”

“Pace! Pace!”

“All right,” he said, and we began to sail. “His family called him Lance and their name was Winkler, but we called him the Winky-Dink, for the imaginable reasons. Total queer. He was eccentric, as you might expect, and he liked to go out trick-or-treating. Well, two jocks and I decided to jump him. You know, teach the faggot a lesson. I mean, here’s a society in which tenth-grade males excel in sports and design racing cars and do ingenious things with cherry bombs. And here’s this narrow-shouldered potzie named Lance who likes to dress up on Halloween and collect candy with the eight-year-olds. You have to admit that’s pretty limp.”

“I think it’s pretty daring.”

He shrugged. “Maybe it was the biggest night of his year—the one on which it was actually legal for him to go out in costume.”

“So,” I said, giving him unsweetened apple juice to steady his nerves. “What exactly happened?”

“We waited for him out by the sled hills, where there’s this big empty space and no houses. And finally he came by, singing happily to himself, and we … well, okay, we bagged him.”

“Such as what?”

“Oh, we harassed him and then we pulled him off the street into the shadows while he said, ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ and ‘I never did anything to you,’ and all those unbelievably
stupid
things that have absolutely nothing to do with your relationship with implacable men. Is that what they say in a prison riot, as they’re held down while someone trims their skull with an acetylene torch? ‘I never did anything to you’?”

“More.”

“More … We threw his candy all over the place and we punched him around a little, and then we stripped off his costume and ran off with it, laughing all the way. I know you love to humble me and rake me around, and here’s your big chance. Let’s get it over with.”

“Did you really do that?”

He was still.

“No,” I said. “I mean,
why
did you do that? How
could
you? I thought I knew you. ‘I don’t like his looks so let’s bag him.’”

“On the contrary, he was very cute. Black hair and very dark skin. All the girls were crazy for him.”

“I thought you hated violence.”

He nodded. “Maybe this is why.”

“And how,” I pursued, “could you agree to go along with those two cretins? Why didn’t you get sick or have to look after the house or something?”

“I didn’t go along with them. I led them. It was my idea.”

We drank our juice and contemplated the strange footnotes of the gay biography.

“The sled hills…” I said. “What’s the derivation of that?”

“Oh, there was a series of interconnected slopes that were hell to walk on but great for sledding in the snow, which we always had a lot of. And there were no grown-ups around to … you know…”

“Bag you.”

“We only went on them for sledding, so they were—”

“That’s a great naturalistic detail. Authenticates the story.”

“You mean I would have been safe if Dick hadn’t mentioned that?” he asked. “You wouldn’t have proposed to expose my shame?”

“No, I would have made something like that up. But it’s more amusing when it’s real.” I noted down the term, and turned back to him, smiling.

“I’ll never tell you anything again.”

“I always thought teenage violence was a strictly straight phenomenon,” I said. “Kind of like the physical interpretation of the state of being emotionally unavailable. You know, when I was a kid there was a Dairy Queen on the town road, and the parking lot was a meeting place for adolescents looking for a fight. I mean, literally. A violence market. The outlet closed at nine, and by ten there’d be kids hulking in the shadows, looking each other over, approaching, psyching up … What does it sound like?”

“A bar.”

“Exactly. Jim used to hang out there and collect scalps. He’d invite me along now and then, but I got all the fighting I needed at home—with him, in fact—and besides, who in his sanity would lurk in a parking lot for the purpose of engaging in battle with another teenager for mere sport? Jim would come back and describe his adventures, and you know what I was thinking? Better he had this release for whatever’s inside him, because if he didn’t give it to, them he’d probably give it to me.”

“What did your parents say about this?”

“Are you kidding? They never knew.”

“Interesting that your father never needed this outlet.”

“Why should he? They had wars then. If you have the chance to serve in the O.S.S. as liaison between Polish partisans and the Russian Army, who needs Dairy Queen parking lots?”

“Anyway, wasn’t Jim the aberrant Mordden?”

“I always thought so. But then Andrew took it up in his time, too. There’s something in straight blood. Something in the mind.”

“Maybe they intake a substance gays don’t know about—Gatorade? Sen-sen? Or effusions from polyester?”

“Incidentally, what costume did the Winkler boy go out in the night you bagged him? I visualize a helter-skelter Liz Taylor, but where would he have gotten the wig?”

“He went as a Mountie.”

That took a moment to sink in. I said, “What?”

“You think every gay kid’s idea of dressing up is drag?”

“You mean a Mountie like Sergeant Preston of the Yukon? Like Dudley Do-Right?”

“I want more juice.”

“Whatever happened to him? Winkler? I could really use a confrontation ten years on. He forgives you. Tearfully. Makes a nice effect.”

“You’re really going to use this, aren’t you?”

I refilled his glass. “If you don’t want to be in a story, don’t know a writer.”

“Anyway, I haven’t heard of him in twenty years. I venture to guess that he’s in Rochester or Buffalo, has timidly joined some gay organization or other, and is alone and unhappy. He was cute, but he was born to be pushed around and neglected.”

“I wonder if that’s a difference between gay and straight—that gays are unhappy when they have no one to be emotionally available to.”

“That sounds more like women.”

“Anyway, what have we decided?” I asked. “Who hurts? Who needs? Who gets? And what if the Lance Winklers come to New York instead of the regional capital? Would that make a difference?”

“Do you know, every time I think of that Halloween I wish I were Catholic so I could describe what I did to someone who doesn’t hate me.”

“The interesting thing about being a Protestant is you get to pay for your sins in this life.”

“In that case, gays are the Protestants of the sexual revolution.”

*   *   *

By all of which, boys and girls, I wish to put Dennis Savage’s boyfriend Ray in context: as a willowy, charming fellow with hard skin and soft talk. He was far from the certifiably brusque remoteness of Dick Hallbeck, yet no Winky-Dink, either. He entered upon our scene in the early 1970s, at the height of our questing communications on the subject of the gay and straight identities, and so may well have seemed more attractive than he might have in some other season, as a kind of conversation piece.

He himself had little to say; and one was relieved, after hearing what little there was. Ask him a question and he’d say, “Huh? Lookit,” before formulating a reply, and to the ponderous statements that we of the great world are prone to make, he’d offer, “Hey, that’s for sure!” Then he’d smile at you as if patting you on the back after making a great save in the ninth inning against the other team’s ace batter. He was the kind of fellow you introduced simply as “Ray”—only important people have last names—but he seemed content however he was treated. The official story told it out that he was staying with Dennis Savage till he could find work and a place of his own; and that was true in theory. But in fact Ray was around because Ray liked to take it easy and Dennis Savage liked company. So okay. And, unlike a lot of young men in his position, Ray did not horn in on the conversations of his betters with idiotic opinions. Nor did he scorn to do the marketing, the laundry, and other minor favors. Best (and rarest) of all, he did not quickly become less accommodating in bed. Ray was ideal for his role: there when you needed him and out of the way when you didn’t. Moreover, he seemed completely honest, unlike most if not all hustlers, who feel they’re missing something if they don’t somehow sneak a little extra out of you one way or another. I still felt that there was something oddly intelligent about him, that he knew more than he let on. He would hear things, and be quiet, uninvolved; but you could tell he had heard. He reacted by not reacting.

When I caught him at this, I would smile wittingly, the cabaret detective; but his smile came back open and unknowing. Then I’d turn to Dennis Savage and he’d do one of his “What’s going on here?” attitudes, like the cop in the movies who wants to be fair but gets a useful edge out of being tough first and fair later. Something
was
going on here, but I couldn’t assimilate it yet.

“You think you’re so smart,” Dennis Savage would tell me.

“I just want to learn about straight from your friend,” I reply. “I’m checking him for emotional unavailability.”

“I can see you on the Ark. There’s Noah and the family beaming at this amazing achievement. They’ve saved the world. And you come in and say, ‘We forgot the unicorns.’”

“I’m looking out for him,” I protested. “I’m afraid you’ll find out he’s gay after all and then you’ll call him a funny name and take his candy and—”

“Of
all
the low tricks,
that’s
—”

“Come to think of it, he already has a funny name.”

“You should talk?”

“He pronounces it funny, too, doesn’t he?”