Buddies (4 page)

So why do they keep at it? Has one of them ever—in the entire history of architecture from Stonehenge to the present—made a single woman on the street? There are the occasional groupies, true: a few days ago I saw a young woman with an intense air of the bimbo about her waiting outside the site next to my apartment building just before quitting time with a camera in her hands. But this is the kind of woman these men have access to anyway, not least in the neighborhood bars where they cruise for a “hit.” The ladies of fashion who freeze out these lunch-break inquiries are a race of person these men will never contact. After all, women like being met, not picked up, especially not on the street.

One of the workers next door eats his lunch sitting on the sidewalk in front of my building. Men he discounts or glares at; women he violates in a grin. The pretty ones get a hello. I was heading home from the grocery when I saw a smashing Bloomingdale’s type treat his greeting to a look of such dread scorn that, flashed in Ty’s, it would have sent the entire bar into the hospital with rejection breakdowns. But the ironworker keeps grinning as she storms on; “Have a nice day!” he urges. Emotionally invulnerable, I tell you. Yet are they really trying to pick these women up—sitting on the ground in a kind of visual metaphor of the plebeian, chomping on a sandwich while ladling out ten or twelve obscenities per sentence? This ironworker at my building is young, handsome, and clean-cut; still, he’s riffraff. Sex is class.

When I started working on my dad’s sites, I saw these men not as a social entity but as ethnicities and professions. There were Italians, Poles, Portuguese, and the Irish, each with a signature accent. There were carpenters, electricians, cement people, and the ironworkers themselves, the center of the business, either setters (who guide the girders into their moorings) or bolters (who fasten them). They were quiet around my brothers and me, not respectful but not unpleasant, either. We were, as they term beginners, “punks.” Still, we were the boss’ punks.

My older brother Jim fit in easily with them and my younger brother Andrew somewhat admired them; I found them unnervingly unpredictable. They were forever dropping their pants or socking each other. They’d ignore you all day from a distance of two feet, then suddenly come over and bellow a chorus of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” about two inches from your nose. Surpassingly uncultured, they were nimble conversationalists, each with his unique idioms, jokes, passwords. One might almost call them sociable but for their ferocious sense of kind, of belonging to something that by its very nature had to—but also by its simple willfulness wanted to—exclude everyone who wasn’t of the brotherhood. Their sense of loyalty was astonishing—loyalty to their work, their friends, their people. Offend that loyalty and you confronted Major War.

Most of them were huge, the mesomorph physiques expanding with the labor over the years so that even fat wrecks sported gigantic muscles under the flab. Strangely, ironworkers don’t throw their weight around, don’t try to characterize themselves the way gay Attitude Hunks so often do. Ironworkers don’t care whether you’re impressed with them or not: they are what they are.
They’re
impressed. And just when you think you’ve figured them out, they’ll pull a twist on you. My dad built the Louisiana pavilion at the 1962 World’s Fair, an evocation of “Bourbon Street,” and one of the setting crew, a tall, silent Irish guy who drank literally from start to finish of every day, impressed me as being the meanest bastard on the site. “Hey, you,” he said to me, on my first hour on the job, “what the
fuck
are you
doing?
” I had been sorting material so bizarre I don’t think it has a name, and I said as much. He stared at my mouth for a moment, then said, “Fuck
you
and fuck your
college.
” I avoided him as much as was possible. And it happened that one day, some weeks later, the wind blew a speck of dirt into my eye while I was on the roof, and before I could do anything about it, he had come over, pulled out the bandanna they all carry, and was cleaning out my eye with the most amazing tenderness. “Okay?” he asked. It was, now. “Thanks,” I said. He nodded, went back to what he was doing, and never spoke to me again.

The younger ironworkers had a certain flash and drove dashing cars, but my dad warned us not to take them as role models; they spent their evenings getting drunk and came home to beat their wives when they came home at all.

“Is that what you want to be?” he asked us grimly.

“Yeah,” said Andrew.

The superintendents on these various jobs were supposed to keep an eye on us lest we get into trouble, but they seemed to delight in posing us atrocious tasks, such as climbing rickety, forty-foot ladders on wild-goose chases. Sometimes they’d give us a lift home, whereupon we’d be treated to an analysis of the social contours of the business: “Doze Italians, now, all dey wanna do is make fires. De niggers are lazy good-for-nothings.” And so on. Once, on lunch break, Andrew told my dad about this. “That idiot,” was my dad’s comment. “Look,” said Andrew, pointing to a group of Italians who had just made a pointless little fire so they could watch it go out.

*   *   *

Unlike the rest of us, Jim stayed with it. After a year of Rutgers he abandoned college forever and joined the ironworkers’ union, an unthinkable act for a building contractor’s son, virtually a patricidal betrayal of class. Yet I doubt he could have gotten his union book without my dad’s assistance; the building trade is harder to get into than a child-proof aspirin bottle. By the time I reached New York he was living in Manhattan. We ended up a few blocks from each other in the east fifties, and tentatively reconvened the relationship. My dad’s “Is that what you want to be?” ran through my head when I first visited Jim’s apartment, nothing you’d expect from a birthright member of the middle class. It was somehow blank and gaudy at once, rather like a pussy wagon with walls. Mae West, reincarnated as a blind lesbian, might have lived there. No, I’m giving it too much texture. It was the house of a man whose image of sensuality was a nude photograph of himself, his torso turned to the side to display a tattoo of two crossed swords. The photograph hung on his wall, and when I saw it I said, “If that thing on your arm is real, you’d better not let Mother see it.” He pulled off his shirt, smiling. It was real.

“Girls like a breezy man, sport,” he told me. No one else in my family talks like him.

I don’t understand this craze for tattoos among working-class men. Permanently disfiguring oneself falls in with that hopeless flirting with inaccessible women and other self-delusory acts of the reckless straight. At least Jim’s tattoo was high up on the arm, easily hidden even in a T-shirt; his pal Gene Caputo had a tattoo on each biceps, forearm, and thigh. Colored ones, no less—snakes and eagles and murder and paranoia. Socially, Gene had one topic, “layfuck.” For the first three beers and two joints, he would expound on the attracting of “my woman.” Four beers and another joint along, he would outline the various methods of layfucking them. By the eighteenth beer, he’d get into how to dispose of them. Then he’d pass out wherever he happened to be.

Plenty of ironworkers are happily familied, jovial, and intelligent. I even knew one who was—on the quiet—a Dickens buff. But it is not a settled life: the work wanders, the schedule is erratic, the weather can freeze you, boil you. It’s not for anyone who has the chance to do something better. So ironworkers tend to be roughnecks—and in this Gene was the essential ironworker. He was a fabulously uninhibited slob. He was also one of the largest men I’ve known. The flow of beer bloated him a bit, but he had something like six shoulders and a chest that could cross the street. A good man to have on your side, if you’ve got to be in the war.

He was hard company, the sort who expresses his
joie de vivre
by putting headlocks on you. He also laced his endearments with threats of sexual attack, a typical ironworker anarchism. When I asked him to stop mauling me, or do it more gently, he said, “I could screw your butt. Would that be gentle enough for you?” Of course, one doesn’t take any of this literally. They like to shake up the taboos. Jim would say, “I don’t know why I’m so exhausted,” and Gene would reply, “Because I was fucking you all night and now your fucking asshole’s all sore.” Imperturbable Jim would observe, “Yeah, that might be it,” and they’d proceed to other matters. After a number of these outbursts, I began to wonder if something genuine might be pouring out of Gene.

He was often at Jim’s when I was, elaborating his theory of layfucking, and, out of loyalty to Jim, would attempt to draw me into his philosophy. Or perhaps it was just because I was there; perhaps he would have polled Eleanor Roosevelt for the dos and don’ts of layfuck had she had been in the room. He would be deep in depiction of a pickup, acting out the parts, even filling in for passersby who, he once said, were “huffy and out of date.” Then, he told us, tensing, showing us how it felt, “My woman spots this briefcase dude and she is traveling. She is traveling away.” Now he showed us Rodin’s
The Thinker.
“But what she don’t know is, see, those guys in suits don’t spend money on my woman like an ironworker does! Am I wrong or what?”

“You’re right, my man Gene,” says Jim; and I’m trying to figure out where all this lingo comes from.

“What about you?” says Gene, to me.

“What about
what
me?” I respond, trying to look about six foot eight.

“What do you think of my woman dodging me like so?”

I took up my beer can, swirled the liquor thoughtfully, and offered, “I read that as an uncanny act on the part of my woman.” Had I made it, passed? Jim was nodding, but Gene was just looking at me. I looked back.

His face a puzzle, Gene asked me, “So like tell us why you didn’t join the union like Jimbo here.”

“Jim already knows,” I said, backpedaling.

“So me.”

“The punk’s a writer,” Jim put in.

“What kind?” asked Gene, his brow clouding. “Novels, fiction, stories?”

“All of the above,” I answered, for they already
were
all of the above.

Gene looked dire.

“Fuck me and fuck my college,” I said. “Right?”

“How come you could have joined the union and instead you’re being a writer?”

“Well,” I said, “every family has its black sheep.”

Gene looked over at Jim, digesting this comic flattery, and I believed I had scored the point. But there was one more test.

“So tell us,” said Gene, “some of your unique procedures in the enticing of my woman.”

Jim smiled. I hadn’t told him I was gay, but brothers always know. Sometimes they care; not Jim. Gay neither irritated nor interested him. It was like water polo or raising sheep: someone else’s fucking problem.

As it happens, I am bent toward the analytic. I love codes, theories, lists. So, despite our differences, I easily fell in with Gene’s taxonomy, following—and sometimes leading—him into theoretical situations calling for the most finely honed expertise in layfucking. And I laid one concept in particular on him that struck vastly home: the wearing of shirts with a college insigne, I had noticed, encourages people to talk to you. “It’s a mark of class,” I concluded. “Especially if it’s a snappy college.”

Gene thought it over. “Girls like college, don’t they?”

“They admire a college man.”

“Yeah,” said Gene, slowly. “I could be the fucking football hero.”

Well, rougher men than Gene have attended school on jock scholarships. Jim remembered a Rutgers sweatshirt in some closet at my folks’, and I retrieved it the next weekend. It was early spring, a nice wind up—excellent sweatshirt weather, and apparently Gene did score a social coup in his new accessory, though he had had to cut it up to fit into it. He didn’t win any women over to a date, but a few actually replied to his addresses; according to Jim the most popular remark was, “Did you
really
go to Rutgers?”

From then on, I was Gene’s main man, after Jim, and he took to dropping in on me for confidence and advice. He called me “little brother.” I put up with him, at first because I was trying to straighten out my standing in the family at that time and I thought it politic to tolerate Gene as a favor to Jim. After a while, however, I began to like Gene himself, for under the perversely insensitive behavior he had a rather touching sweetness, a Dostoyefskyan idiocy, maybe. Too, there was that amazing ironworker loyalty, something I’ve never encountered in members of the leadership classes, gay or straight. There was this as well: though his days were filled up with labor and his evenings with pub talk, he was a very lonely man. Jim and I were his only friends; the women he took to bed, I gathered, were whores of small quality. He disposed of them not because he was heartless but because there was nothing between him and them but a hit. One summer night he turned up at my place in his Rutgers shirt, drunk and sorrowful and inarticulate, but clearly heading toward something. The subject was love.

“When you got a buddy, man,” he said. “Then you can show him how you feel about him, right? It’s
radical.
Because when you really like a guy, and he trusts you, you
know
him … you know him right down to his cock, know him like a man. You get a buddy like that, you can do anything with him.
Anything.
You could ask him to lie down on his stomach because you’re going to lock him up and ream his cherry out for him, and he’ll do it. That’s what love is. Loving your buddy.” He gazed at me as if measuring my ability to understand what he was saying. “You hear me, little brother?”

I nodded.

“Now, your brother is really solid. That is a fucking solid guy, and there aren’t many. You better know that. Right?”

“Right.”

“Sure. Because if you don’t know it I’ll kick your butt in. Shit, he’s solid. But he doesn’t like to let a guy show him how he fucking feels. Know what I mean?”

“You’re hurting my arm.”

“I’ll be good, little brother,” he said, releasing me. “Because listen. This fucking city is filled with buddies. And they trust each other. Sure they do. But there comes a moment when you got to show your fucking buddy how you feel about him. You got to. There’s no words. A guy just looks at his buddy, and he loves him. He
loves
him. Not just as a friend but as a man. He’s got to show him, don’t he? Put his arms around him, show his buddy. Am I wrong or what?”