Faggots (14 page)

Blaze Sorority was a pen name. His real name was Alvin Sorokin and by day he was an assistant vice-president at the Immigrant Savings, specializing in trusts for the elderly. However, as B.S., the eternal Blaze, he moonlighted, writing twice-monthly features, sort of historical overviews, for the
Avocado.
There has been much talk of late that the
Avocado,
as the faggot world’s very own and special paper, has been less than courageous, more puerile than pertinent. Not true. With columns as perceptive as those Blaze was turning out, the faggot community has no basis for complaint. Blaze told it all. Witness this piece, written earlier this month:

“Leaders!? Heroes!? Whatever is that ditz Blaze Sorority going on about?” the Divine Bela, Bertram Bellberg, big and burly and with a lovely, constant smile, said aloud in his one-room apartment on Weehawken Street, his own pen awaiting inspiration for his twice-weekly
Women’s Wear
column on happenings in fashionable New York.

“We have so many wonderful models and leaders! Winnie Heinz and divine Lork, whose English improves with every collection, and Horst Esterhazy, the stomach of deaths muscles up to here, and Ronnie Gartenhoffer, our best dancer, and the perfect Adriana, though she’s straight, and the distinguished Dr. Irving Slough, he’s very leader-y, and I have heard tell about that top movie-man, Randy Dildough, and Hans Z. and all his other models, and that writer, Fred Lemish, and Billy Boner, our very own empire builder, and Patty, Maxine, and Laverne, and that most gorgeous, though very wicked, Dinky Adams, whom simply everybody falls in love with, though he’s not someone I’d like my brother to marry, if I had a brother…

“Oh, goodness, dearie me, whatever is Blaze foaming on at the mouth about so!”

We now come to matters of a rather delicate nature. These would seemingly pertain to Fred Lemish’s problems with his bowels and his regularity, or booms, as Algonqua was wont to euphemize them when he was a lad. Whatever had gone wrong with his early training, toilet or otherwise, he could for years not consider being out of range of a john; when be had not daily voided, he would be reluctant to leave his current home base unless he could pinpoint a clean extra-home toilet somewhere along the way.

While this way, as noted, had led him into the various inner sanctums provided by the distinguished Messrs. Cult, Nerdley, Fallinger & Dridge, and while their joint investigations into these sanctum sanctorums had provided him with various intellectual hypotheses as to why he might be who he was and is (including the current favorite Reasons for The Problem: 1: Algonqua smothered me to death with her “Love”; 2: Lester hated me; 3: I want to be Hurt; 4: I don’t want to be Hurt; 5: I want to Hurt somebody else; 6: I seek the tensions of my shitty childhood; 7: I seek as lovers only those who embody the identical responses that Algonqua and Lester, those cocked-up fonts from whence all patterns flow, programmed into me; 8: I refuse to compete in any way with ultra-straight brother Ben; 9: I’m still trying to be accepted as “one of the boys” I never was in youth; 10: I have a bad relationship with my body and need constant re-affirmations by a bevy of parading beauties that I Am Hot; 11: The World, and God, say I must not be; 12: I’m afraid of the Outside World and its Responsibilities, plus 97 others, ((…but what if I was just born responding to cock and ass, like Ben was born responding to tit and cunt?…what if all those neurotic Reasons were just post-natal…re-adjustments?…)), plus other questions, or rather, the same question asked a number of different ways: why can’t I get out of this life style that is going crazier and more out of control and more mad, and legitimized!, by the minute?, is it just a reluctance to leave the familiar and fear of exploring the new and different?), this way had also not yet revealed to his satisfaction why it continued to localize its revenge on his stomach and its adjoining tributaries.

Yes, why was everything so complex and difficult to comprehend?

And when would he get some pleasure from his ability to feel?

And when would he be able to swerve his restless passions toward shaping his deeds, perhaps toward altering the world a little?

Was he naïve?

God damn it, it’s hard.

These perplexing conundrums, perhaps not yet to be answered, were ones that daily made their unsolved presence known. Perhaps the sufferer had to live a bit first—the Reasons and intellectual Hypotheses, indeed the Questions, nought until one Lived! Experienced! The Liver could be in analysis for those 12 or 97 years, but until that inner sanctum was vacated, until ONE WENT OUT INTO THE WORLD—to quest, to explore, to EXAMINE, to do!—does anything become clear…?

Was Dinky, and Love, his ticket to ride?

He had made a certain amount of progress. He could actually highlight when the courageous change came about, permitting him his breakthrough, or breakout, into the utilization of nonresidential conveniences. It was when he was twenty-seven, and on a pleasure trip from his then London film-executive duties, to Dublin, to visit a married writer classmate and his very dissatisfied wife. Fred simply could not shit in their tiny room with no heat and freezing seat, and if an instrument for pure torture had been created just for him, he was sitting on it. Later, when he and the bickering couple (shades of Lester and Algonqua and their snappy banter: “It’s your fault!” “He’s your son, too!”) were on a tour of the lyrical Irish countryside, all pale mists and the sun trying to break through to greet at least the afternoon, he was of course woefully in need of evacuation. When finally death seemed preferable, he modestly requested that the Mini Minor be stopped, he bolted behind a wen or shillalah or whatever the fuck they call a hill-cum-tree in Ireland, he dropped his drawers, gave three solid days of solid Irish fare an exit visa, and then utilized one pair of Harrod’s boxer shorts and strips from the tail of his favorite black-and-white checked Turnbull & Asser shirt to wipe his blushing ass. Then he returned to his host and hostess, and their journey, feeling better in one way, not in another, when oh when would these traumas pass, such an appalling inability to control myself!, when will I be able to shit where and when I want to?, what terrors am I so internalizing?, and directing toward myself and not courageously out against the world?, the heritage traced back, its ancient lineage, always to that memory of his third grade in Hyattsville, when he had to Go, and ran, not down to the little boys’ room, but thunderously, would he make it!?, all the way home, a half-hour’s jog before jogging was fashionable, or necessary, hopefully scrunching in his cheeks, not quite making it, shitting in his Woodward & Lothrop Kiddie Shop (Size: Husky) underpants two blocks from Target Zero, then waddling the remaining distance, sheepishly making entrance to the garden-apartment building through its rear, furtively checking into its garbage room, removing first the corduroy long pants, and then the sack of offending offal, disposing of the latter in the covered metal can, stooping then to utilize some Washington
Star
to wipe as best he could his browned-off bottom, reuniting with the corduroys, walking pensively upstairs to the empty-as-usual Lemish residence, crying one of the last cries he can remember crying, taking a bath, disinfecting his tush and his long pants with some of Lester’s Lilac Vegetal, and finally heading back to third grade, wondering what reason he could give to Mrs. Hand for his absence that would not be construed a lie.

Who knows what early traumas gave birth to such as this?

On Washington Square, in his handsome apartment of stark white walls and carpeted gray platforms, pillows and hammock, stainless steel, and floor-to-ceiling books, where he sometimes (though not of late; why aren’t I reading them? or writing one of my own? what am I refusing to look at?) pretended he was Henry James, Fred was now deep into rehearsal.

“OK, kid, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I really love you, Dinky. I’ve missed you a lot. Your being away has made that abundantly clear. I can’t live without you.” No, that might scare him. Dopple & Diddy say “You must not need another person to complete your life,” even if I am spending every minute thinking about him. “I think we’re terrific together. Your fine mind. Our great times together. I know I’m a lot more successful than you are but we mustn’t let that get in our way. I know you want to make it on your own. Not be known as Mrs. Fred Lemish. But what else does a guy make money for but to help his loved one? A down payment toward building and sharing a life together. I’ll pay for you to go back to architecture school and you can pay me back when your success comes in. Which we both know it will. And I want you to come and live with me. That’s what I’m really proposing…” I wonder if it would be cute to get down on my knees here? I wonder if he really loves me? What if he says No? So he says No. I can understand that. He wants to keep it going slowly. He’s wisely said he distrusts overnight romances. Can I keep it going slowly? It couldn’t be going any slower and I’m going swiftly crazy. At least I just got a postcard. From Savannah. Wonder what’s in Savannah beside the old synagogue on the postcard? “To Humanism,” he wrote. That’s a good omen. Now let’s see, what else can I throw into my sales pitch? The hotel? I think I’ll hold off on that one till I need it. Always be prepared. Hope for the best and expect the worst, Algonqua’s creed. No risk no gain, ditto. He really is terrific…“You really are terrific. We can really go places together, places that two people can’t go on their own. I really believe that. You don’t have to answer me right away. Take some time to think it over. Just know that I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you and I hope you feel both of these things for me. Yep, take your time to think it over. Let me know tomorrow.” If I were a man courting a woman, would I be so nervous? How would Cary Grant woo, say, a reluctant Irene Dunne?

Then he went into his toilet to shit. He noted that the shit was falling in squiggles and this caused him, naturally, to be fearful. Had he once again come down with a case of last year’s fashionable disease, the galloping trots, known medically as amebiasis, an amebic dysentery, also known in the gay world as the P.R. disease, there being a good deal of it around (“of epidemic proportions,” Fred finally discovered from a Dr. Kelvin Knell)? Fred had caught it, not from foreign travel, but, so far as Mini Diary calculations could reveal, at the Everhard (“it is transmitted through feces and its fastest incubation, within eighteen hours, can only be accomplished by directly eating shit. Did you directly eat shit? Otherwise it takes three days.”).

Prior to that wretched experience, which took three months and a lot of potassium-replenishing bananas to sort out, his first encounter with the squiggles was four years ago when he and Feffer (Feffer the bright, Feffer the beautiful, Feffer forever!) were traveling across the U.S. in the Ford Mustang Fred had bought for the occasion, the occasion being not the trip but the wooing and winning of Feffer, with whom Fred was convinced he was in love. The cross-country captivity, during which their love was meant to be nurtured and grow, produced, yes, a certain affection on Feffer’s part for Fred (“I am helplessly and hopelessly in like with you”), and a very bad case of the squiggly shits from Fred’s end over Feffer. This was diagnosed by a hippy doctor in Taos as colitis, a nervous occurrence, God knows Fred had been nervous, as mile lapped mile and he was scared shitless, or perhaps this is better phrased as scared into shitlessness, was this actually happening to him:
Love?!

And so now Fred sat peeping down on squiggles again, and he began to sweat, wondering what anxiety-producing iota is lurking in his subconscious to effect a return of the squigglies or which of his many triumphant conquests in or near a boudoir has returned the dread ameba.

Stop it, Fred! In your shit or out of it!

Was the God of Shits passing around a message?

Jesus, Fred, are you a case!

So ’twould appear that if Fred Lemish spent half as much time writing as he did hoping Dinky Adams would say “I love you,” he’d have a ten-foot shelf.

And if Dinky Adams spent half as much time legitimately planting and fertilizing as he did scattering his seeds to the winds, he’d be New York’s leading gardener.

Though, of course, as we shall continue to see, he already is.

…I want my cock sucked, I want my cock sucked…, Anthony finally, courageously, finishing his third joint, made entrance into the E & L.

The Hudson River Docks, the Erie and Lackawanna dockage area, Ellie to her friends, a huge black hole of Calcutta: interlardings of communal pierage, fingers jutting out to the water, pilings sinking, a wrought-iron inspiration with sagging seams, a mammoth cavern now useless to the outside world, a hoary giganticism—into this darkness, Anthony entered.

Lobster, brioche, asparagus hollandaise, champagne, baked Alaska, Abe’s stomach, perhaps even his heart, was not accustomed to such fancy fare. Later he would take a Gelusil, but for now, in such lavish surroundings, high up in the Pierre Tower, though a bit impersonal, no touch of home, he had enjoyed. Randy Dildough had been charming. A deal was certainly in the making. Abe felt wanted.

After cigars and coffee (Abe would be up all night), Randy got down to business.

“Tell me, Mr. Bronstein, about your property.”

Abe was ready. “Mr. Dildough, I must call you Randy, you are too young I should call you Mister, you have been so kind as to woo me after my big success with
U.S. Mobsters, Inc.,
that I come to you first with my second motion picture, to which end I have engaged the same writer, also the writer of that fine film you no doubt know,
Lest We Sleep Alone…”

“A fine film, a fine writer, though I do not know him personally,” Randy noticed that his words were peculiarly beginning to come out like Abe’s.

“You would like each other. Two fine boys. Fred Lemish is his name and he is currently writing for me an original screenplay property entitled
Fathers and Sons and Brothers and Lovers,
which is an excellent title and, with the addition of ‘Brothers and Lovers,’ one which the masses will not confuse with the fine novel by Turgenev.”

“It’s an excellent title. What’s it about?”

Abe sat silently on the uncomfortable gilt chair, now his back was hurting, so many men his age had conditions of deteriorating discs, looking out at the clouds drifting by, the stars appearing, the city lights twinkling, all so close from here, before deciding to plunge right in.

“It is about how some sons become gayish and some do not. You are understanding me?” And he brought his gaze back into the suite.

Though in his crotch he was beginning to sweat, always the true precursor of his nervousness, Randy answered snappily: “I understand.”

“I think it is time, don’t you?, for a movie about gay homosexuality. Not exploitation, mind you, I am not this kind of film maker. I want an honest exploration of this new kind of love which so many of us have not understood and which I am understanding is now all over the place. What do you think?”

“I will have to think about it.”

“As you know, my first film I financed myself. This second film is to be more expensively mounted and therefore I come first to you since your reputation in this field is preeminent.”

Randy coughed slightly, an unexpected frog in his throat. “What field?”

“The motion-picture field.”

“Ah, yes.” He frogged his throat again. “Well, I am very flattered that you came first to me.” He now ran his finger around the inside of his collar at the back of his neck.

“This makes you nervous,” Abe asked, suddenly recalling Fred’s warning on Randy’s secret gaydom. “It is making me nervous, too, I must tell you. But I am also thinking that important things, the big things, are never easy and full of nervous. I have said something to offend you?”

“No, no…why are you even thinking this?…It’s just that the subject matter…stockholders…” Randy was trying to get a grip on himself, returning, after just a moment of uncharacteristic lapse, to his former self, which was, he realized, just what they were talking about “…it’s not what I expected, after
Mobsters,
so nice and safe, crime, you are outlining something very controversial, and as such requires thought and reflection and of course a look at your script by Mr. Blemish, and budget and actors, and, if I am not mistaken, this is still some time in the future, you are now only commencing activity, and hence is nevertheless a bit premature, the times not ripe, in terms of actualities actually arrived at, please come to me when…” why was he rambling on so, both speaker and listener wondered to himself?

“But you too are a fegala,” Abe said, so simply.

“No no no no no,” said Randy, rising from across the tiny table room service had wheeled in, “no no no no No…,”…when would they wheel big tables in?, “…it has been a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Bronstein, and I hope you will bring your fascinating project back to us when it nears orgasm…”

“How can you live such subterfuge?” Abe asked, declining the implication to stand up. “When I am wanting a young and tasty poopsie, I am marrying her.”

“No, no, Mr. Bronstein, you are sailing on the wrong boat, it has indeed been a pleasure, please call again, do…” and Randy was now standing in front of Abe, hoping that by this closer gesture he would get the message and leave, wondering why he was not handling this episode with more cool, where was his legendary spine of iron, nerve of steel, mouth of tungsten, why was this man, who did not, simply did not, remind him of his father, the stalwart Ralph, affecting him so?

“Randy, please to sit down, I am sorry I am touching home base and I am not meaning to insult you, but do you not now even further see why such a film as this must now be made, to deal with this head on, confront it, take bull by your horns, and say: this is me, I am it, and no hanky panky, you only live life once, and we must try to understand, no more masquerade, to be a landmark man…”

“Mr. Dildough…aaaah Bronstein, please to leave my office, I am having other appointments, many minions waiting, backed up for days, I am not a faggot, never never never, please to leave and my best wishes to you and your fine wife…”