I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (11 page)

I joined him at the window. “I can cite one person who met him.”

Dennis Savage smiled, utterly misconstruing the allusion.
Three
infatuations, I say. “Who but you,” he asked, “would get sentimental over the story of a hustler who developed an opinion? I believe you wear those dark glasses so we can’t see you weeping at the pathos of a loveless world.”

“Never!”

“Look! Down there. Look at them all, the strangers! As if callous, impenetrable beauty were more attractive than feeling intimacy. As if no one dared face himself. I tell you, all gays are liars.”

“I haven’t wept since I was a child!”

“And that,” he said, “is the most stupid lie of all.”

The Case of the Dangerous Man

I hate to give Dennis Savage credit for anything—he’d only get pompous—but his concept of the Imaginary Lover is all-basic to gay culture. It is everyone’s direst secret. Few men will as much as breathe his imaginary name to their best friend, much less provide a physical description or character sketch. “This,” as Mac McNally once said, “I must not share.”

Yet one notes references to the Imaginary Lover everywhere. You are conversing to the dim accompaniment of some dreary television show, a nameless hunk appears, and your comrade discreetly stiffens: this is a clue. You are strolling along the street, something elegant strides by, and your companion murmurs, “I want to bear his child”: this is annotation. The unique charm of the Imaginary Lover is that he can never lose his appeal as real humans do, invariably, eventually, for he is a fantasy—plausible but a dream. You may spot someone who looks like him, or cracks his jokes, or lives where he ought to live. You even seem to know what it’s like to climb his stairs, and press his buzzer. But to run across the man who accommodates your precise measurements of the romantic utopia is unlikely.

This is just as well, I think, for keeping the fantasy fantastical allows everyone to play. In a culture run by the fascism of looks, the Imaginary Lover is a democratic exercise. A beauty knows he might well land something comparable to supreme, even be one. A nice-looking fellow has a shot at it. A homely-but-hot man is ever loveable. And certain
objets trouvés
may win out through force of personality; unthinkable but true, my favorite combination. Below a certain level of appearance, however, a gay man is in big trouble; yet everyone can dream. And, though no one likes to hear about this, I know that the ugliest man in town visualizes himself being fondled, or toughed up, or tucked in by some divo just as easily as the handsomest man can. But why does no one like to hear about this?

Carlo shook his finger at me when I spoke of the matter late one night. And when I went on undeterred, he held his hand over my mouth and said, “I want you to please stop. I don’t want to know about morals, or politics, or death, or feelings, or any of the other things that ruin everybody’s fun.”

“What morals?” I asked.

“Trolls,” he said. “Talking about trolls is talking morals. Or politics.”

We were confessing our episodes to each other—My First Time in Bed, My Worst Time in Bed, My Sleaziest Pickup (Carlo had about twenty-five possibilities to choose from; I had none), My Most Daring Pickup (mine was my neighbor Alex: after watching him for a year, I held up a sign in my window asking to come over and watch the Oscars). Suddenly it struck me that all over New York gays were exchanging these stories, and the stories were all the same but the storytellers all different. I wondered how it felt to hear smoking-car braggadocio from a troll, and I verbalized it, and Carlo got upset. But why?

“You always want to make a case out of everything,” he said.

This is highest offense to Carlo, the paragon of the carefree gay. There are no cases in Carlo’s life. Everything just happens; nothing is questioned, challenged, repudiated. Naturally, he is one of those typeless beauties whom everyone craves, dark but smooth, bright but uneducated, solid but slim: nice and hot. Naturally—you’ve got to be super cute to enjoy a heedless life. Carlo has more best friends than anyone else I know, all former lovers, for if his erotic appeal is considerable, his gift as sympathetic company is overwhelming. Some men don’t truly love him until after their affair has ended.

He is perhaps the most “episodic” of my friends in that he would fall hopelessly in crush every year in late fall and fall out again by the following spring. He favored size, age, and the Latin school of charm, and his lovers were so good-natured that they never held it against Carlo when he abandoned them. Except he never did abandon anyone: he simply collected another best friend. And I note that none of them was spectacular, in the Imaginary Lover manner. They were teddy bears, a little coarse but terribly nice, probably fun in bed and even more fun the next morning. They were all alike, yet they had nothing in common; like Carlo, they had not defined themselves in any certain way. After I had known all of them for years, the thing that sprang to mind when they did was not something any one of them had said or done but how large they all felt when I was jammed onto a couch next to them.

And this is possibly because they did, after all, have one thing in common, something Carlo shared with them: they had jobs but no career. They were gym trainers, or hotel orderlies, or movers. Now and again they hustled. They were the kind of people who never receive junk mail or utter beliefs or yearn for something that happens later than next week. They could be amazingly loyal, even valiant. They just didn’t subscribe to anything.

Does it matter? I suppose that depends on what set you run with. But I was raised by a couple who urged me to make something notable of myself, and they didn’t mean a banker or a doctor. The world is full of these; artists are ever few. So they sat rapt before my puppet shows (though they were always Punch–and–Judy
guignol
in which all my brothers were murdered), and gave me piano lessons, and took me to Broadway. And when it was all over I was a little crazy and very smart, and I was bound to regard cool Carlo and his unsophisticated lovers with befuddlement. They lacked a theme. Or I would come back from the Eagle having approached someone because of his charm and deserted him because he was professionally unmotivated, and Dennis Savage would chide me, one of his most enthusiastic activities. “Stop making judgments,” he once said, “and consult Chatty Cock.”

Well, you know, we have these little talks, and, much as I would enjoy kicking his bum in, he is the dearest thing I own. So I say, “Who is Chatty Cock?”

“Chatty Cock,” he replies, “is the spirit of the Circuit. He has perfect instincts. He knows what to wear, whom to go with, whether to prevaricate or denude himself—”

“I’ll bet a piaster on that.”

“—because he doesn’t agonize over bourgeois ethics. He doesn’t weigh the advantages, as you do. He doesn’t try to comprehend the Circuit. Life is short. Consult Chatty Cock and let a thing happen. You need spontaneity.”

“You need a muzzle.”

“When things get tough, you might assume a restorative posture of comic resistance, reducing the Circuit to a vanity.” Dennis Savage doesn’t merely theorize; he dictates a proposal to Yale University Press. This is what comes of letting your children attend small, elite men’s colleges with pungent English departments, like Hamilton, instead of Sensible Preppy Places like Duke. “When comedy is called for, you might turn to Satyricock.” I swear I heard him pronounce the
y.
“Satyricock doesn’t get much, I admit, but he’s popular and famous.”

“I visualize President Taft.”

“He’s not dear to look at, but he has balance. He’ll never figure in disreputable dish, as someone I know so often does.”

“What if I don’t believe in comic resistance? What if I take everything seriously, including the question of a person’s vocation? What if I want my associates to
stand
for something? What about ideas?”

“Then you’re in the grip of Murder Cock, and no good can come of it.”

“Murder Cock?
He
sounds like the boy to follow.”

Dennis Savage shakes his head. “See, with Chatty Cock, everything is casual narcissism: do I want to or don’t I? With Satyricock, everything is burlesque. Note the choices?”

“And with Murder Cock?”

“With Murder Cock, everything is resistance and counterattack, death and debris. Follow him and no one will like you anymore.”

I must admit, he remarks something there—you can have love, war, or nothing. But the trouble with Circuit Theory is the Circuit doesn’t observe it. The Circuit is inconsistent, volatile, pandemic.

“Why don’t you be like Carlo?” Dennis Savage goes on. “Carlo is Chatty Cock personified.”

“Men are what they do,” I grumble.

“Not Carlo.”

“My point exactly. Carlo doesn’t do anything.”

“Carlo is a lover,” he replies. “That’s his calling.”

Surely it was; some calling. And what happens when the ace handler of teddy bears runs into a grizzly—better, when the eternal amateur hooks up with a man who does something? This episode is about the marriage of Chatty Cock and Murder Cock.

*   *   *

Carlo would launch his affairs by taking his latest beau around for coffee and commentary, and this year the event fell on My Usual Evening With Dennis Savage.

At my knock, Little Kiwi opened the door a crack, studied me through a magnifying glass, and said, “I detect a literary man.”

“I detect a little crumbun,” I replied, “who’d better—”

“Little Kiwi!” Dennis Savage cried from behind the door. “I told you to—”

“Inspector Wilberforce,” Little Kiwi corrected, as I passed inside. “The Supreme Detective.”

“They’re not here yet,” Dennis Savage told me. “But soon. Autumn doesn’t really get going till Carlo pairs off in his annual rite.”

“Plus the intrepid canine wonder,” Little Kiwi went on, “who has a mystic alias never yet revealed.” This, of course, would be Bauhaus, Little Kiwi’s phenomenally D-list dog, just then cheezing up under the sofa.

“Oh no,” said Little Kiwi. “He ate Oysterettes again.”

“Well, who
gave
him Oysterettes?” When he gets tired of palling around with me, Dennis Savage can get a job as a young George Burns in some vaudeville act.

“He eats the box, too,” said Little Kiwi, examining my belt buckle through his glass.

“If someone I know doesn’t leave off detecting the guests,” said Dennis Savage, “he’s going to get the spanking of his life tonight.”

“Oh, you always say that,” said Little Kiwi. “And then nothing happens.”

Something did happen: Carlo’s new lover, Daniel Johnson, came in. I think the word for him would be “stalwart.” He looked like the hero of a western, and moved like one, and sounded like one. Even Carlo seemed awed, and the rest of us were notably subdued, for us. Inspector Wilberforce quite neglected to introduce the canine wonder.

Daniel Johnson was not shy, and he appeared to be observing us keenly. No doubt Carlo had told him something of us, and now he was matching the tales to the subjects. What had he heard? Did Carlo mention the time Little Kiwi blundered through an arcane door, found himself locked in a strange hallway, and disrupted Bloomingdale’s housewares department trying to get back into the store? Or the time Dennis Savage and I followed Kern Loften around at a party for hours waiting for him to sit down because we wanted to put an egg under him just before he landed? Mild tales, I know. But they’re ours, all the same. Our secrets. Daniel had us at several disadvantages: one, he knew our dish while we didn’t know his; two, as the honored guest he commanded our courtesies; and three, he was to die. And he knew it; but he seemed not to care, which is a new one in my catalogue of the Gay Mentalities. I’ve checked off archetypes who luxuriated in their distinction and archetypes who suffered it, but never one who behaved as though there were some eight or nine things that mattered more. And, to judge by the tone of his conversation, morals, politics, death, and feelings were clearly on the list.

Carlo was in bliss, as always at this time of his year, so he was missing a lot. But I noticed that Daniel responded to my mention of
Vile Bodies
not with some bawdy slogan but with a reference to Waugh, and that he nodded in affirmation when I suggested that if Cyrus Vance had been one of the hostages in Iran, the whole crowd would have been freed the first night, and, for that matter, that no one tried to call him Dan or Danny. This was a very self-possessed man.

“Is it permitted to ask how you two met?” Dennis Savage asked.

Carlo grinned.

“I picked him up on the street,” said Daniel. “It’s not something I normally do. But I saw him and I wanted him, and I figured maybe he ought to know about it.”

“In those words?”

“Just about.”

“I have never been so completely picked up in my life,” said Carlo. “And I’ve been picked up by experts.”

“Where did this happen,” said Little Kiwi, recovered from his shyness and strutting around with his hands behind his back like someone in a tweedy salon thriller of the 1920s, “may I ask?”

“This happened at the corner of Bank Street and Seventh Avenue,” Daniel replied, suppressing a smile.

“A likely story!” cried Little Kiwi, whirling around and pointing. “I suppose,” he tried to snarl, “there were a hundred witnesses?”

“A nun smiled at us,” said Carlo.

“Inspector,” I put in, “why don’t you show Carlo and Daniel your new sweater?”

“Okay!” Little Kiwi loves a new idea. Racing off, he paused drastically at the bedroom door. “Don’t anybody leave this room.”

“Go! Sweater! Put on!”

He vanished.

“
This
takes him shopping,” said Dennis Savage, meaning me, “and lets him buy a large.”

“He insisted.”

Carlo was fastened on Daniel, but Daniel was listening to us, and each time his eyes blinked I felt as if a camera had gone off in his head, freezing us in our sport. This was something new in Carlo’s love life for certain; his other beaux never saw anything but Carlo.

“Look!” cried Little Kiwi, in his new sweater.