Buddies (9 page)
“Well, that’s hopeless,” Calvin said.
“Then go home and face the music.”
Calvin sighed. “Would … would someone like to come with me? I wouldn’t mind it if someone else was there.”
“Mind what?” I asked.
“Stop being a bully,” said Dennis Savage, “and take him home. Stay with him till Greg’s under control.” He helped Calvin into his Perry Ellis windbreaker.
“Then come back,” said Carlo, “and tell us everything.”
“You know what I think?” I said at the door. “I think someone or other made up that story about Greg and his college roommate and Calvin heard it somewhere and decided to boost the legend. And that’s our picture. That’s the respectable beauty of Stonewall. Because I don’t believe there’s anything in that apartment but a pompous lacrosse captain who’s afraid he’ll fart at a key moment of the awards banquet.”
“Let’s go then,” said Calvin. “And you’ll see.”
“My, didn’t you calm down,” I noted. “You were quivering like a flan when I got here.”
“Take him home, you beast!” Dennis Savage roared.
We walked. At the time, everyone I liked lived on the west side but everyone I knew lived in the east fifties. Greg came out of the bedroom as we walked in, pulling a tennis sweater over his jeans. Dennis Savage was right: he comes out and you just think. He was tousled and sleepy. He stood there, running his hand through his hair. We parked by the front door. Nobody said a word. I couldn’t read either of their faces.
At length Greg spoke. “You know how I first hooked up with this guy? I raped him. He touched my arm and asked me to wait for another time. He promised to bring me beauties in his place. No one had ever had him, he said. He wept, but I held his hand and whispered to him. While I was stripping him, he leaned his head against my chest and pleaded with me. I told him if he didn’t cooperate I would tie him to the bed and hurt him. I made him take his choice.”
And he grinned.
Calvin turned to me, speechless, avid, his eyes wild. He was so turned on the air around us was crackling and falling to the floor in bits.
“What choice, Calvin?” I asked. “What choice did you make?”
Greg came up behind Calvin and put his arms around him. “Stick around for the drinks,” Greg told me. “Quentin and Edward are coming. We’ll probably go on to dinner.” Calvin was smirking like a cowboy about to hang a rustler.
“So,” I said. “The Ideal Couple. Continuous performances. All live acts. Come see the Celebrity Cocktail in the Dazzling Penthouse, where Best Friends Invent the Traditions of Stonewall. Starring the Big Scary Preppie Bear and his Christopher Robin.”
“I’m not such a scary bear, am I?” Greg purred in Calvin’s ear.
“Who says you’re the bear?” I said.
“
Everyone
but you,” Calvin replied. “I told you how it was with us.”
“You told me something else.” Was this the aim of Stonewall—to fill lavish apartments with the right sweater, the right brunch flowers, the right lover? Were we perhaps going to raise up a midtown suburb, a gay bourgeoisie voting Republican and muttering about interest rates?
Liars!
I thought, watching them.
Arrangers!
The puppet makes the promise and the stringmaster collects it. Then they put on the show. “
You
didn’t make any promise, man,” I told Calvin. “
Greg
did. Greg is your puppet, you lurid Bloomingdale’s pimp!”
“What ever are you speaking of?” he asked, with a smile.
“So long, Cal.”
And whenever I heard people call them the Ideal Couple, I said, “Oh, you mean Citizen Pain and the Battered Bride?” And of course everyone would get mad at me.
A trip to the island of fire—but, for once, to neither Pines nor Grove, and among Strangers.
I didn’t mind being the only unattached male in the house, but it felt odd to be the sole person of either sex without a tattoo. My brother Jim and his pal Danny D., typical ironworkers, sported standard regalia on their upper arms. And Brenda, Jim’s date, was of the downtown bimbo class: they’ll do anything for attention. Even Norma, girlfriend to Danny D. and a strictly reared Italian from Bay Ridge, shyly revealed a tiny heart inked into her right instep—“so I can hide it from my parents,” she told me. Thus all four representatives of the straight-couple class were decorated. And, of the freelancers, Laurie the tough-guy lesbian weighed in as well, with a death’s head on her left shoulder. That left me as the only
tabula rasa
in the house.
This was Water Island on a July Fourth weekend in the early 1970s. I had just discovered Fire Island, just begun to sense how neatly it essentialized gay, made its complexes intelligible; and I never turned down an invitation. Water Island, the first colony east of The Pines, was where Norma and Laurie shared a four-bedroom house with two women who had gone off on vacation, and Norma, who knew Jim through Danny D., offered Jim and Brenda the third room and me the fourth. Perhaps because of her sweetheart upbringing, Norma liked wild men, and may have been disappointed by my mild manner.
This,
she must have been thinking, is Jim’s brother? Don’t they have something in a dangerous? “I’ll bet you’ve got a
terrific
sense of humor,” she told me as we shook hands, one of the most tactless salutes I’ve ever suffered. Besides, my sense of humor isn’t terrific: it’s occult.
Laurie, at least, seemed pleasantly jived at my appearance. Better a gay, her smile betokened, than another of these hardhat supermen. Her handshake was a vise, and I was amused to watch Jim take up the challenge and squeeze it out with her. He won. He’s slim but deadly.
Brenda, an elated blonde, was my kind of person: she likes everybody. Danny D., too, was easy to get along with, provided you were not a Commie, a groveling cheat, or a faggot. He used the terms indiscriminately—Billy Martin he dubbed a Commie, Walter Cronkite a groveling cheat, and Norma a faggot the night she refused to accompany him to a Jets game. He had an engaging quirk whereby he would converse avidly with himself, usually to express what he feared to articulate directly. “What’s this for?” he said at Jim’s place once, handed a present. “It’s because someone likes you,” he answered himself, holding it. “Open it, you jerk.” “No, I’m not ready now.” “Everybody’s watching you.” “Well, maybe.” “If you don’t, I’ll deck you busted.” “Okay, okay.” Jim grinned at me as Danny D. ripped off the wrappings, as if to say, See what fun ironworkers are?
Water Island let me down. A drab batch of broken-down houses too far from The Pines, it didn’t even have a ferry stop, much less such amenities as a grocery or liquor store. You landed at The Pines, laid in supplies, took the last leg by water taxi, and waded into the bay to gain the blasted boardwalk. Nor was there much beach life, any coming and going. For that you had to walk to The Pines, and it was no mere hop and skip. Here I was hoping to jade myself on gay data, stuck in a straight version of Fire Island.
We had unpacked. Jim and Brenda into their room and Danny D. and Norma into theirs had retired for nookie; Laurie nodded toward the sea with a look of Let’s go and I went. We sat topless in the late-afternoon sun and she said, “Tell me about it.”
I told her about my family, about ironworkers, about writing, about New York, about those opposites nostalgia and ambition, about gay men, and about lesbians, though she was better informed than I. And I told her, who knows why, about the time we were all at the Jersey shore when I was ten and Jim eleven and I jumped him to give him a dunking and he threw me off and, his eyes on ice, told me that was the last time I’d sneak up on him. Then he held me under the water so long my lungs were about to burst when some stranger pulled us apart.
“One of those quaint family capers,” I concluded, “that most people never mention.”
“How did you two make that up?”
“We didn’t. They sent me away to school, so we didn’t see each other much after that. We’re still trying to sort things out.”
She nodded and we watched the water dance.
“Now you,” I said.
“Guys like me have no past,” she said. “What you see is the whole thing.” She was right, in a way: real men don’t go around lamenting their fearful kismet. But then, as Ernest Hemingway finally discovered, you can be a real man or a writer, not both.
“Does it hurt getting tattooed?” I asked.
“Tickles. Kind of funny having a brother out here. Mostly all we get is lovers and dates. Jim know about you?”
“I imagine so.”
“Ironworkers are pretty homophobic. Doesn’t that boil you?”
“Does it boil you?”
“They don’t figure me for gay. They wouldn’t even if I plowed Norma on the dining table. Women are beyond their typing rituals, see. We’re exempt.”
“Pardon me for busting into heartthrob city,” said Norma over our shoulders. I had the feeling that she wasn’t being ironic. “But cocktails are served.”
“We’ll get there,” said Laurie.
“If you feel that way,” said Norma, leaving.
“Doesn’t she know,” I asked, “that one doesn’t launch dinner on Fire Island till nine o’clock at the earliest?”
“Jesus, you
are
gay.”
I decided to try her patience. “If I got a tattoo, could I too pass as a man?”
She eyed me cannily for a bit, then chose to answer seriously. “Fact, they’re a bargain. Cheap. Though all the artists want to stroke you up, doing it. Had to bust three guys before I got one would do his job and leave me be.”
And she was not kidding, boys and girls.
* * *
“It’s the loveboats!” Norma caroled when we joined the others on the deck. Brenda, in Jim’s lap, held a goblet of wine. The men had bottles of Heinekens. Norma was doing revolting things to helpless slices of bread, salami, and cheese with a kit of molds and styli almost certainly Not Available in Stores. Laurie took a beer, and, though I wanted one, too, I asked for wine to avoid showing solidarity with a particular side.
“It takes a classy person,” said Brenda, “to drink wine.” She sipped hers, smirking at Jim. “Tongue me, big boy,” she urged.
A curiosity of the house was a battered but working upright piano just inside the doors to the deck. I took my wine over and rattled into some Gershwin, though I find playing by memory difficult. Norma was thrilled to have live music to entrance her weekend commotion. Putting the thumbscrews to a hunk of munster, she carefully mimed Alert Sensitivity as I flailed through the release of “Nashville Nightingale,” getting not a single note right.
“That sounded very tricky,” she approved as I paused, defeated.
“That sounded like Arnold Schoenberg,” I confessed.
“Hey, piano man,” said Danny D. “Know any Scott Joplin?”
“Danny!” Norma cried. “Don’t barge in with your B&T mentality! Maybe Jim’s brother will favor us with Puccini.”
Danny D. looked behind him. “She talking at you, Harry?” “Not me.” “Who’s she talking at?” “I don’t know, but she better watch her step. She talks that way to
me
and pow! she’ll be touring the far side of the moon.”
“Well, naturally—” I began.
“Him, too,” said Danny D., indicating me.
“The kid’s okay,” said Jim. “He’s with me.”
“Bud,” said Norma sweetly, blinding an apple, “can you play Musetta’s Valse Song?”
That one’s a cinch. Partway through, Norma began to sing along, in one of those dowdy translations common around 1905:
And when I go out twirling on the boulevards
The men all crane their necks to spy me …
By the end she had opened up and was letting it rip right up to the climactic high B, for which she executed an antique coquette pose and accidentally upset some of her hors d’oeuvres.
“Hey Caruso,” said Danny D., “you dropped your foodies.”
Jim and Laurie exchanged a look, but Brenda clapped as Norma explained that she had trained as a singer and gave it up on parental suggestion.
“So who can blame them?” asked Danny D.
Actually, Norma was, like thousands who dally in that quarter, not good and not terrible: she fielded a sweet, tiny voice with neither authority nor musicianship. But now she felt encouraged, and the show was on. Norma produced a book of arias from the piano bench, and we ran through it till Danny D. came over and banged on the lower keys. “What is this?” he asked, “an opera house or the beach?”
Facing the bay as the sun sank away somewhere over Passaic, we dined uneventfully till one Sal, a neighbor, popped in. Now, The Pines is intent and Water Island zonked. So, if everything matters in The Pines, nothing matters in Water Island. Yet I got an intent feeling, in the laden comments passed and batted back, that Sal tended to drop in moochingly at mealtimes, that he and Norma had a small bit of a past she would gladly forget, and that Sal did not realize that forcing one’s welcome on women was not the same thing as forcing it on men like Danny D.
Because Danny D. suddenly said, without the slightest provocation, “Look, can I tell you something? I don’t want to see your fucking ugly face around here till I go, which is Monday night. So shove off, you Commie jerksucker.”
Sal, a mite stunned, stared at him.
“And you got five,” said Danny D.
“He means five seconds,” said Laurie helpfully, “or else.”
Sal waited out the five—more through confusion than defiance, I expect. But when Danny D. rose up, Sal sprang for the walk. At a safe distance, he turned to reply. Danny D. was still coming, and Sal vanished.
“That smart chick knows the code,” said Danny D., of Laurie.
Now, what I wish to note here is that, in any other social group I have access to, such a scene would have considerably changed the complexion of the evening. Amongst trendy liberals, direly subtle commentary would have broken out, positions established. The literati would have prowled Danny D. for backstory and parts of him would filter into the
Paris Review
and
Grand Street.
A gay crowd might fashion it into dish, a condign scandal to do into tatters over tea. But this group went on as if nothing had happened. And, by their lights, nothing had: Danny D. didn’t like an intruder and thus efficiently disposed of him.
