How Long Has This Been Going On (83 page)

The Kid decided to get that old picture of himself that he's always dragging around, to show to all and sundry the glory of Johnny in youth,

opulent and irreproachable in his plundering, consciousless joy. But Elaine said, "No, Johnny! That daguerreotype again, oh please!" and the Kid held back. "My youth is officially over," he announced, with a grand bow.

"No," Walt observed, "your youth is over when you feel that your one true love has..." Walt stopped, unwilling to offend the Kid. "When something goes terribly wrong in your whole existence."

"You New Yorkers always know life," said Peter. "I want to come with you to the Great City of the Western World." He pronounced it with capital letters; I heard him. And he was fast and funny, and, I thought, He has possibilities.

"You're too young to go anywhere," said Lois.

"Are you
sure?"
Elaine asked him.

"We can put him up till he finds a place," said Walt.

"City life is hard on a new boy," said the Kid. "I'm afraid they'll beat you down."

"They're already doing that here," Peter replied. "That's why I want to get out." He turned to Lois. "I could be the gay Dick Whittington. Where's my cat?"

"There are cats here," said Walt. "But now it's mainly Winston the dog."

"Sure, he's my protégé."

Hearing his name, the dog ambled over to sample the affections of the company.

"Enjoy it while you can," Lois told him, "'cause, come bedtime, you'll be out in the yard, guarding the homestead."

"No, I
have
to come to New York," said Peter. "Don't I?"

The Kid said, "I warn you, it's a tough gig."

"I'd be splendid there," said Peter, pacing and camping. "Note my characteristic poses:
thus,"
as he struck one. "Or
thus,"
another. "Then I—"

"It's not just style," the Kid insisted. "It's determination. And what about money?"

"I'll bankroll him," said Lois.

"Lois!" Elaine cried. "My J. P. Morgan!"

"Heck, I've been laughing at Johnny's nun-and-blind-man joke for forty years. Maybe Peter's the next—"

"What nun-and-blind-man joke?" the Kid asked.

"'Nice tits, lady. Now, where do you want the blinds hung?'"

"God, I'd forgotten that! It stayed with you all this time?
That?"
"Something about that nun showing off in such delight," said Lois. "Then she's so embarrassed. But what happens
after
the joke? Doesn't she snap back? She says, I am stronger now."

Elaine added, "She says, We have to fight. We have sneaked through and paid no price. We think we're safe. But that little boy in Backtown isn't safe, and I don't feel I've sneaked through any more. Who's safe? George Bush is safe. No one else is safe."

"Wow, it's history here!" Peter exclaimed.

"No," said Lois. "It's self-defense."

"It's about going home," said Walt. "You aren't given a home, you find one. You make one."

"Oh, I've got to be a part of this," said Peter. He was so inspired that his eyes were tearing.

"You remembered that ridiculous old joke," said the Kid, moving to Lois. "Those nights in Jill's, Lois.
That
was
home."

"Huh."

"Home is where your friends are," said Elaine.

"Where your kind is," said the Kid.

"What you fight to protect," Elaine insisted. "We utterly mustn't back off now. The biological family is rotten. It's made of hateful mothers and molesting fathers. Trust me, I've seen their children! Up the new family!—the one you choose!"

"Yes!" cried Peter.
"Yes!
I'm ready to choose!"

"God, the things we've known!" cried the Kid, taking the hands of Lois and Elaine, drawing Walt along with him, and Peter as well. "Home? Going home?
This
is home. This is my church. This is community and truth. This is our style, our very gay life. It's made of us, you see."

Elaine and Peter were in tears, and everyone was clutching each other, except Lois, who disengaged herself with the words "Fancy stuff," and moved to one side to pet the dog.

O
N A SULTRY Monday evening, three men and a woman walk out of the weekly ACT UP meeting in appalled silence. Standing on the sidewalk, not ready to move on just yet, they look at each other in disbelief.

Finally, one of the men—mid-twenties, slim and effeminate, earring and savage haircut, Silence = Death T-shirt—says, "There are three places where I, as a gay man, feel truly in danger—a suburban mall, an Irish bar, and an ACT UP meeting."

Another of the men, physically much like the first, says, "Did I actually hear that black woman demand that we change the name of the group because 'ACT UP' has become gay-identified?"

"Why was it
founded,
for Christ's sake?" says the first man. "Moms have the P.T.A., little boys have the Little League. Don't we get one fucking group of our own?"

The third man—big, black, much older than his friends, a volatile personality who shifts from flamboyant queen to stately collegiate within a phrase... it's Jezebel, in fact—said, "The trouble
began
with this town-meeting style of congress, is what. The idea that all opinions are created equal.
Some
opinions are worthless diatribe specially
designed
to call
Mention
to the
opinion
holder and mess
up
on everybody
else!"

"I heard that!"

"Amen!"

"What they keep pushing all this leftist agenda on us? Ain't they enough piss-shit
leftist
groups they can join? They got to infiltrate ours?"

"Because we let them speak," said one of the other men. "Anywhere else, these lunatics would be told to shut up. We give them a stage."

Now the woman spoke up. "What do you think of the notion that some of these spoilers are F.B.I, moles?"

"No way," one of the white men replied. "Even the F.B.I, isn't as disgustingly destructive as the commissars we've welcomed into our midst. The quota police. Every committee has to have ten black women.
Ten black women, ten black women."
Noting the company now streaming out of Cooper Union, signaling the meeting's end, he shouted,
"What the fuck do ten black women have to do with gay men dying of AIDS, you blithering idiot bitch cunts?"

"Come on," his friends said, pulling him away. "We'll go to Eats and chill."

"Luke is fine, I
told
you. It's some miracle, I guess. Oh, here it is."

Chris fished a worn leather account book out of her shopping bag.

"Cousin Tom's journal," said Walt.

"Luke wants you to have it. It's worthy reading—it made the plane ride seem like a trip on the trolley." Chris performed a stage shiver. "Lots of purple passages. Tom always was brutally direct."

"How's your baby?"

"Timothy is ideal. Ebullient, ravingly healthy, and he's utterly and breathlessly mine, mine, mine—and don't think J. doesn't know it."

"Is J. jealous?"

"No, it's what he wants. Mother-baby bonding is part of his plan. I believe he hopes to be discovered as some marvelous repository of male lore and wisdom when Timothy is fourteen or fifteen, and then he'll wean him from me. But I carried that tiny being for the better part of a year. He
grew
in
me,
and that baby knows it."

"Boy, you're not a gay man manqué nowadays."

"Will you drop me from the club?"

Walt, so often quiet and self-absorbed lately, smiled and gave Chris a hug.

"Hey, boys and girls!" the Kid called from the living room. "Come quick and see!"

"We have such a big classy apartment now," said Walt, leading Chris, "that you can stay in shape just by walking from room to room."

"Gaze!" cried the Kid, indicating an old movie playing on television.

"At what?" asked Chris. "Oh, Anne Baxter?"

"It's Denise Darcel, and, no, I mean the man."

"I couldn't spot Denise Darcel?" said Chris. "That surely proves I'm no longer a gay man of any kind."

"Will you
please
look at the
guy?"
said the Kid.

All three watched as a stiff and savorless yet arrestingly handsome man remonstrated with the obdurate Darcel, told her off, and stormed—mildly—out of the scene.

"That's Derek Archer," said the Kid. "My first movie star."

Denise Darcel prowled around the room, then threw a vase against the wall for a fade-out, and a commercial came on.

"Mute the set, Johnny," said Chris. "We have to talk."

"Aren't you going to ask me what he was like?"

"I saw. Steamy but stolid. A fancy-pants who'd sell his mother to make it."

"That's not the point. He was one of those gays who were destroyed because he lived too soon. Twenty years later, he could have come out and enjoyed life, but instead he was forced to cushion himself inside the role of the elegant joe. He fooled no one, of—"

"Joe who?" asked Walt.

"Post—World War Two parish lingo," Chris explained, "meaning 'heterosexual male.'"

"You're back in the club."

To the Kid,. Chris said, "All right, now, this actor you were so thrilled to see across the arc of the years. Did he leave a mark on you? Influence you?

The Kid was wary. "So how come you ask?"

"So how come he's not in your play? Your first movie star? Was he a benefactor? A mentor?"

"I have
selected
from my many occasions. This a play script, not
Sixty Minutes.
I have boiled my days down. I have reinvented, crystallized."

At a look from Chris, Walt left the room, closing the door behind him.

"Johnny, I only get into the theatre once a year, so it has to be a
hot
show.
A Gay Life
is epic and sharp and funny and touching—but what have you left out?" "Plenty, but as usual your Piscatorian epic style has added in everything but the Barry Sisters doing 'Matchmaker, Matchmaker,' so perhaps—"

"You've left out a Great Love. You've got gay history and showbiz tattle and T-rooms and arrests and Stonewall and disco and politics, not to mention birth, death, and infinity. But the protagonist only has sex and friendships, never an all-encompassing romance that would... well..."

"What? Make him miserable every time he thinks of it, like Walt? Or march him at gunpoint from his chosen field of endeavor, like you? Or a thousand other examples I can name of love's walking wounded."

"Low blow, Johnny. I'm happy with J. and Tim. And Walt was always a moody boy, always... questing and disappointed. Besides, I'm not talking real life, I'm talking art. Your play needs a love story."

The Kid stared at the silent television (where Derek Archer was leaning out of a stagecoach to call up to the driver), then remoted the power off.

"I want it hard stuff," said the Kid. "No sentiment."

"The tale needs feelings."

"It's too late, besides. We start previews in two weeks."

"You've got seventeen days till previews, and, anyway, you could slip this in in a night's work. It's six terse scenes—the meeting, the stirrings, the seduction, the honeymoon, the catastrophe, the last meeting years later, when each man is so much further along in his life that rapprochement is—"

"Fucking Jesus!"
the Kid screamed. "Don't you
ever
run out of ideas? Are you always this
theatre genius?
Why don't you write your own play?"

He paused, embarrassed at his atrocious manners.

"All right," he said. "I'll add it in."

"Don't do me any favors."

"I'm sorry," he snapped. "Don't I ever get to create something on my own?"

"This
is
your own, Johnny. Somewhere in you is a Great Love that you're trying to hide on the back burner. Now, bring it forward and let it boil up."

"All right."

"And kindly stop growling."

"Can I make it the movie star? That way he can die early on."

"Is that who your Great Love was?"

The Kid was silent.

"Whatever works best, Johnny."

* * *

Eats is a scum-glam-rock bar way down on Second Avenue, where the East Village sort of ends and nothing sort of begins. It gets a mixed crowd—gays and straights in indistinguishable underworld uniforms, transvestites in fall kit, skinheads, grungeboys in Mohawks that would terrify an Indian, dopers, sellers, and the odd group of N.Y.U. students talking semiotics. The jukebox is unpredictable—new-wave punk groups one moment, classic Motown or Delta blues the next. When "Stop! In the Name of Love" comes on, a horde of boys will rise to sync along, complete with the ritual hand motions.

Jezebel and his friends fall into a booth, still enervated from the evening's meeting.

"How far we've come,", says one of the men. "That's what I keep telling myself. Imagine pollsters asking about 'the gay vote' in 1950 or something? We've gotten
somewhere
fast, anyway. Am I not right?" he asks Jezebel.