Buddies (5 page)
“You’re right.”
“Say my name, too.”
“Gene.”
“Okay. I like to hear it. So, like all this time there’s buddies together, and there’s this one fucking moment, and they both feel it. They know it’s true. It’s fucking true. So one guy just takes his buddy and shows him how he fucking feels, whatever it fucking takes. That’s how they know they’re buddies.” Finally he slowed down, took a deep breath, and shook his head. “I can’t do that with Jimbo, little brother. Do you know what he’s like?”
“I grew up with him.”
“A rubber band. You can stretch it
just so far,
and then…” He pantomimed an explosion that almost blew me off the couch. “I just wish there was a place you could go and find a buddy. You know?”
A thought hit me.
“There is one, Gene.”
“A buddy club, like.”
“Listen, there is one!”
I had been going to the Eagle, and it occurred to me that what Gene needed and couldn’t quite name was a man to take home. Or was I making the mistake of taking him literally?
“What is it?” he asked. “A gin mill?” Their term for a pub.
“Sort of. Potential buddies stand around and try to meet.”
“Then what happens?”
“They go somewhere and show how they feel about each other.” That didn’t sound right. “No, they … they try to like each other.”
“How?”
“That’s hard to say.” Then I added, “It doesn’t always work.” The greatest understatement in Stonewall.
He took a last swig of his drink. “I don’t fucking care anymore. Let’s go.”
Thirty seconds after we entered the bar, I decided I had made a mistake. The Eagle, then in its heyday, was the showcase for tough men, and I knew Gene would never have taken it for a gay bar. It looked, in fact, like what he had asked for: a buddy club. Still, Gene may have been too authentic a buddy for this gang. There was always a lot of leather and muscle, and bar discounts for shirtless men encouraged a trashy savor. But that impenetrable invulnerability set Gene off from the others, and the tattoos, when he pulled off the sweatshirt, were a shock. After all, this was the place where I once saw two incredibly ruthless-looking hombres intently conversing in low tones, and innocently sidled over to eavesdrop. One of them might say, “So we stripped the kid and secured him and then…” The other might say, “Belts are kid stuff, just makes them giggle. You have to whip those butts.” Lo, this is not what I overheard, boys and girls. One was saying, “Barbara Cook could play Sally and Angela could play Phyllis,” and the other replied, “What about Liza?”
In fact, I couldn’t have blundered worse if I had set up Ozma of Oz on a blind date with Leo Tolstoy. This was a place of sculpted hunks; Gene was lewd. They were practiced; Gene was improvisational. And they had polish; Gene was basic. He’d find no buddy here. A partner for the night, maybe: but he would have been repelled by the idea. A man has one-night stands with women, not men. Anyway, Gene didn’t want a sex partner. He wanted a buddy he could like so badly he would be bound, almost incidentally, to fuck him. That particular stylistic riddle he could only solve among his own people, where tattoos are not exotica but a convention, and where loyalties fiercely combine. Sex is class.
Dimly, through the liquor, Gene realized this. He said he liked the place, and energetically approached a few men, yet nothing panned out. “Let’s blow,” he said; once we got outside, he didn’t want to go: “Let’s just talk.” We leaned against a car on the corner and watched the others saunter back and forth between the Eagle and the Spike. We didn’t say much, and, after a long silence, Gene put his arm around me. I looked up to cheer him with a joke and saw that he was crying.
We stood frozen like that for a long while, till he put his arm down and said, “I don’t think those guys liked me.”
“Maybe I should have—”
“I couldn’t fucking understand half the things they were saying. And one of them called me a fucking
Bulgarian!
I never even been there! I never been out of this country!”
Hell, I thought, if Gene is a vulgarian, whoever called him that,
you’re
a Firbankian!
“I want to deck somebody. Anyone here you don’t like? Point him out.”
“Let me call Jim.”
“Huh?”
“He’s your best buddy, right?”
“Yeah, but … look, does he ever come here?”
“No. But let’s see what we can arrange.”
Jim, roused from sleep, was annoyed till I explained the delicacy of the case.
“Shit, the fucker’s on a crying drunk, that’s all,” said Jim. “Everyone does that now and again. He can stay with me tonight.”
“Jim’s coming to get you,” I told Gene.
He mauled me in relief.
The Eagle–Spike parade had picked up notably—but for all the lingering stares, no one actually dared to cruise Gene. Is it possible that there’s a man too authentic to be hot?
Gene was still crying when Jim’s cab pulled up—it is, as they say, a jag. I thought, Everyone likes my brother except his family, as Gene threw himself at the door. Suddenly he turned back.
“Gotta thank little brother,” he said, and, staggering back to me, he planted a huge wet kiss right on my mouth.
“The fucking meter’s running, man,” said Jim.
After they left I noticed that Gene had left his Rutgers shirt on the car with me.
* * *
Later, when I told friends of this incident, they invariably turned against me, one of their favorite activities. How did I dare bring one of those violent homophobes to a gay bar? What if he had wrecked the place? Or me?
Rubbish. I was protected by ironworker loyalty: your buddy’s brother is
your
brother. As for ironworker homophobia, Gene would never have taken the Eagle for a gay bar, because ironworkers don’t believe in gay. Males are men or faggots; men are solid and faggots are weak. A husky leather dude who beds his own sex is even so a man. A little
New Republic
nerd who proudly bangs his wife and sneers at gays is still a faggot. This is why ironworkers casually throw around what we regard as gay references, and why they can climb into the sack with a buddy without regarding it as a sexual assertion.
No doubt all Gene got out of Jim was the chance to sprawl in his arms all night. There are buddies you fuck and there are buddies you only love; and I think Gene loved Jim. And I also think there are ironworkers and there is everyone else, because in looks, world view, and behavior they are unique. I have been wrong about one thing: they are not invulnerable. When I pass a file of them, I look for Gene, but he is probably working some other part of the country now; they move around a lot.
However, they never change, whether in their habits, dress, loyalties, or patriotism, though their fix on love of country is at times comprehensively ignorant. Just a few days ago, as I walked by our local gang lounging out the lunch break, I heard one of them casually call out, “Hey, traita!” Accustomed as I am to New Yorkers’ public speaking, I paid no notice. About a block later, I began to wonder what the heckler had seen to inspire the epithet. Jane Fonda? La Pasionaria? There were only a few shoppers and businesswomen walking with me.
Then I realized that he had been speaking to me. I was wearing my Yale sweatshirt, and ironworkers regard the big eastern schools as hotbeds of Stalin-loving treachery. Inadvertently, I had challenged an ironworker’s loyalty to his kind, and probably baited his sense of class as well.
Anyway, it proves my contention that college-logo sportswear encourages people to talk to you.
Or: how to be precocious, single-minded, and “pseudo” whether the world likes it or not.
A housewife in Sheboygan writes, “Why is it that gay men always seem so much more interesting than straight men? Many of them are cute as the dickens, I have noticed, and they are always fun to be around. When my husband Ivan comes home from work he just drinks beer and grouches till he falls asleep halfway through
Cagney and Lacey.
Whereas my gay nephew Lester comes home from the K-Mart and just locks himself right in his bedroom to primp with the stereo going. And though I must say he goes out in some pixilated getups, as far as he is concerned the night is young and he is ready to party.”
I don’t agree that all gays are fun to be around, but our culture does surely bring out one’s vivacity just as straight culture tends to dim it—as witness the fact that gays tend to look up to people like Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, and Madame while straights claim Theodore Dreiser, Midge Decter, and George Will. Ask yourself which set of people you’d rather brunch with.
Where does the gay spirit come from? I think, possibly, from the theatre; and the spirit runs toward theatre, too: toward its romanticizing fantasy as well as its cathartic grotesquerie. The gay mind, too, raised on impersonation (of the straight style), comes out by rebelling against that fascism with impersonations of antistraight in the drag queen’s camp, the hoofer’s bizarrely debonair tap, the juvenile’s passionate love song. Rebellion. Defiance. Offensive alchemical caricature mixed of too much knowledge of them and too much spoof of us—and it works the other way as well. Notice that it was drag queens who launched Stonewall, in true war. I expect the queen as archetype will last as long as homophobia, for he/she is our reply. Straights think the queen mocks them: no, they disgust her. She
loathes
them. All of show biz is useful in this rebellion, but the musical is especially, for it is most subversive: apparently straight to straights but, as young gays learn, secretly and profoundly gay.
The musical was my key to the culture, for Mother was messianic in the Finer Things. She got us to Europe at an age when the availability of Special K was a crucial issue, favored series titles in books in hopes that we’d plow through a library of them, made everyone play an instrument (respectively violin, trumpet, piano, drums, and utility reed—it sounds like the Brandenburgs in the Busch version), and hit us with recordings of Classics for Kiddies. I remember a Decca 78 of the
Nutcracker
with Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians singing descriptive fantasy travelogue—I could echo it verbatim before I knew what half the words meant. And there was an adaptation of the
Iliad
set to the music from Prokofyef’s
The Love for Three Oranges,
with the famous March treating the scene in which the Trojans pull the Horse into the citadel. The music was threateningly satiric and so caught my ear more than Sousa might have, and I listened more closely, and imagined. There was something rich here, some telling music for the tales. I asked for more, and Mother made the leap. For my third birthday, in late January 1952, she took me to Broadway to see
The King and I.
I remember little of it. One moment stands out, when the king, about to beat Tuptim, meets Mrs. Anna’s imperialistic gaze and runs off in humiliation. The psychology was too dense for me and I asked Mother what had happened.
“No talking during the show,” she whispered.
I was taken aback. “Are you still my mother?” I asked, and she went,
“Shh!”
Still, it was a momentous afternoon: that day my life took on its format.
I could not have said why at the time, of course. But I knew that I was suddenly mad wild for theatre. Sundays, fine or bitter, I would study Section Two of
The New York Times
for the theatre ads and articles. (We called it “Section Two.” New Yorkers refer to it as “Arts and Leisure,” and today when I mention “Section Two” everybody goes “What?”) Annually, I had one birthday show and one in the summer to grow on, so I had to choose carefully. It was never difficult: something in a logo, the ring of the names involved, the charisma of adaptational source—these were my map. I picked
The Pajama Game,
for instance, because Peter Arno designed the logo, and Arno was a
New Yorker
artist. I figured the more exposure I had to
New Yorker
types, the faster I’d grow up. Then, too, I would devour the playbills my parents brought back, especially the song listings, where a title like “My Home’s a Highway” or “I Feel Like I’m Going to Live Forever” would tease my imagination.
Most telling of all, of course, were the show recordings. My parents were record-oriented, and bought nearly everything, some several times over—there must have been six or seven
Carousels
floating around the house at one point. Here was a vocabulary, and a catalog of ideas. What did it mean when Julie Jordan liked “to watch the river meet the sea”? What were “vittles”? “Gullets”? Why, in “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over,” has April “cried” and why was May “pretty”? Here, also, was a lesson in stagecraft, in how composition is made vivid, pure, just. To see a musical after having memorized its score is a rare pleasure, for you get not only the device of the entertainment, but the aplomb of verification. To see the dream become fact is to stoke the imagination for more and bigger dreams.
With all this homework to do before selecting a subject for the matinee, I couldn’t hope to catch a flop. Only hits stayed open long enough for me to consider, sample, and clear them with the authorities. I caught the major statistics of the day:
Can-Can; Fanny,
perhaps my introduction to opera in its expansive vocalism;
Damn Yankees; Plain and Fancy,
which touched on the Amish folk and underlined the notion of a culture within a culture;
My Fair Lady,
to which I was more assigned than devoted, because I sensed that popular things were less interesting than recondite things;
The Most Happy Fella,
more opera;
Li’l Abner,
with its enlightening novelty of musclemen
en cabriole; Happy Hunting,
confronting a legend in Ethel Merman;
New Girl in Town,
more legends in Eugene O’Neill and, yet in the making, Gwen Verdon;
Goldilocks,
more terrain covered in the silent-movie setting and, once the allusions were explained, D. W. Griffith and Mary Pickford. I didn’t realize it then, but I was learning history, genre, personality, taste. Friends, I was being activated. Of them all, one stood out experientially, partly on sheer size, partly for its spectacular voices and orchestration, but mainly because it played to the utmost that intent, deluded fantasy about romance that all Americans, straight and gay, long to believe in and find best articulated in operetta:
Kismet.
It blew me away.
