Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (11 page)

Virgil seemed a little startled; apparently, he hadn’t been planning to share his vision with the rest of us.

“It’s just this little contest piece,” he said.

“Why don’t you read it at Roy’s dinner on Friday?” I asked.

“Yes,” Cosgrove agreed. “A star-intensive event!”

“No,” Virgil replied, with immense conviction. “No, I’ll read it only if I win the contest.” I could see him thinking, That could be twenty years from now, and they’ll forget all about it.

I
won’t.

Roy was right: Nicky did cook the dinner: prosciutto, melon, and watercress salad followed by London broil with wild rice and mushrooms, and, for dessert, Grand Marnier over raspberries and sherbet.

“Primo!” Dennis Savage cried, as the salad appeared.

“Nicky always produces,” said Roy.

“I want extra-well-done meat,” Virgil warned us.

“Me, too,” Dennis Savage added.

This is, for some, a problem in our group: We all like it more or less burned to death. “Yes,” Nicky promised. “Yes, I will.” But it clearly threw his timing off to put the beef back in the oven. Cooks assume that there will be a well-done zealot or two, not a house full of them. It wilted the mushrooms and dried out the rice, but Nicky was happy if Roy was happy, and Roy was happy.

“A toast to the kitchen,” he said, raising his glass.

“Everybody likes Nicky,” said Virgil, joining in.

“Let’s not get carried away,” Roy joked.

Cosgrove pulled in with a bag of CDs and his catalogs, breathless and brisk and in charge.

“Just hold on,” he told us, “because I got British dance bands and a very suspicious-looking opera by Berlioz and look at this weird thing.” He held up Lucia Popp’s
Slavonic Opera Arias
. “That’s sure to be rare, because who knows what ‘Slavonic’ is? Then I got Rachmaninoff’s
Second
Symphony, not just his First.”

“Who’s conducting?” I asked.

Cosgrove examined the box. “André Previn.”

“Victor, EMI, or Telarc?”

“One guy did all those? How am I supposed to know which—”

“I told you, the devotee commands the trivia.”

“Quick, what are the differences?”

“Victor is incomplete, with shallow sonics. Telarc is excellent. But the EMI is one of the classic performances of Russian music—and it’s out of print as we speak.”

For a terrible moment, Cosgrove checked the box, then flourished it aloft—it was the EMI—for all to savor the cover shot of Previn conducting batonless, his hands floating and his features dim, lost to the rapture.

“You really scored,” I said. “This is something no one else can have.”

“And all for three dollars a disc!” Cosgrove exulted. “Yes, there I am, crossing West Tenth Street, innocent as a clam, when . . . What are they serving?”

“London broil,” said Virgil.

“Very well done, my portion,” Cosgrove sang out; in the kitchen, Nicky sighed.

“Take no notice,” said Roy. “Nicky’s always making little noises.”

“Anyway, there was this street fair. So I saw a booth of used CDs and scooped them up!”

“I don’t see what’s so great about those little mouse records,” said Virgil, who can understand any fetish except someone else’s. “Bud’s got a million records—why don’t you tape some of his?”

“It only counts if you own them in the true format. Listening to tapes is like kissing your uncle instead of some nice friend.”

“My uncles were okay,” Virgil airily recalled. “Though one had this sort of ruthless streak.”

“Still,” said Cosgrove, admiring the jewel boxes spread out before him, “it’s a giant haul in the Western world. A whopper haul for me, Cosgrove.”

“I hope no one’s all opposed to gravy,” Nicky called out from the kitchen. “Or forks. Or plates.”

“How come you sound so warlike?” asked Virgil, proceeding into the kitchen.

Their voices lowered, and I pretended to admire a Mucha reprint hanging in the vicinity, hoping to tune in on the conversation in my harmless yet resolute writer’s way. As I had suspected, Nicky was feeling unloved and exploited and Virgil was comforting him. When Nicky said, “Sometimes I want to curl up and die,” Virgil answered, “Dying is easy—
comedy
is hard,” a phrase he picked up somewhere. I thought, No: Comedy is easy—
friendship
is hard. There’s so much there there.

“So, Virgil,” said Roy, as Virgil parked himself next to Cosgrove and his CDs, “how’s that Dream Man thing coming? Bet you’ve got some major boner in mind, long and fat, with one of those pointed heads I love.”

Virgil just looked at him.

“Yeah,” Roy went on. “Some call them donkeys and some thumpers, but I—”

“No,” said Dennis Savage. “No, if it’s the taxonomy of cock size that we’re addressing, can we please get our terms straight? The heavy endowments are called, in ascending order: exploso cock . . .”

Roy was intrigued.

“. . . raw, long and quivering, suitable for any occasion—”

“Veined and pulsing, with a mushroom cap?” Roy asked. “So cream-filled, and bouncing high?”

“No, that would be the next larger size, the bazooka cock.”

Roy was silent, pensive and shivering in his dream. Virgil, eyeing him, whispered something unkind—or so I guessed—to Cosgrove. Cosgrove nodded.

“Bazooka cock,” Dennis Savage went on, warming to his subject as a Classics scholar fields questions from the floor on Beauty and Truth in Petronius Arbiter, “is neither rare nor common. Certain connoisseurs claim the ability to detect the bazooka by a man’s walk or the set of his shoulders, perhaps by his pronunciation of the word ‘often.’ ”

“Bazookas pronounce the
t
?” Roy asked, hopeful, eager for a code.

Dennis Savage shook his head. “A legend,” he pronounced. “The true bazooka is deceptive, elusive. You know the phrase ‘a grower, not a shower’? The bazooka is like a strange and fearsome rumor that courses through the public ear, not only showing but then—so
implausibly
!—growing in power and purity till it must be revealed to one and all as an official proclamation.”

“It is real,” Roy intoned. “It is near us.” He could have been in a trance.

“Someone in this room is a sleazoid,” Virgil observed.

“And his initials,” Cosgrove added, “are Roy.”

“Exploso,” Roy reviewed. “Bazooka. Yes, and then?”

“And then,” Dennis Savage replied. I have to tell you, he had not looked this quietly yet consummately joyful since Hamilton College invited him up for an autumn alumni panel on “The Four Best Years of Your Life.”

“Well,
what’s
then?” cried Roy.

“What’s then is last, and hugest, and perhaps more a magic than a reality. Yet it is truer than truth.”

“Oh, Lord,” Roy murmured, looking at me now. But this was Dennis Savage’s scene, and I kept still.

“What’s then is the Godhead, before which all humankind—the intelligentsia, the clerisy, the military, the press—make their solemnly frenzied kowtow . . .”

“Say it!”

“. . . the seldom-seen but oh-so-devoutly-to-be-wished-for . . . Red October.”

“Yes!”
Roy cried. “Oh,
yes!”

“Although,” Dennis Savage concluded, with a wry chuckle, “I still wonder how appropriate such talk is in an age of epidemic.”

“True, but it’s all fantasy,” Roy assured us, as Nicky began parceling out the laden platters. “I dream to the bitter end, but I don’t do anything with anyone. Besides, who knows where the heroes are?

“Well, given your field of interest, you must frequent Folly City.”

“I’ve never been,” said Roy, accepting his plate. “A strip joint is just a little too downtown for . . . Thanks, Nicky, the dinner looks fabou.”

“It was kind of hard keeping everything together with so many demands for—”

“Right.” Then, to Dennis Savage: “How far do they go? To the nude?”

“Each dancer does two numbers. First, a strip to the almost, then a dance in the, uh, full truth, entering—as tradition and the management demand—with a hard-on, as the crowd goes more or less wild.”

“No!”

“Well, yes, actually.”

“But are any of them . . . exploso? Bazooka?”

Dennis Savage nodded. “And, once in a blue moon, one glimpses Red October.”

Roy let out a squeal.

“There’s seconds on everything,” said Nicky, joining us at last with his own plate. Nicky: average in every respect, pleasant, undemonstrative, resigned. Does he remind you of Bert Hicks? No—Bert was a player, quite formidable in his tactful way even when Scott Hellman was exploiting him. Nicky was no player. Nicky was a hopeless adherent: Being treated as subsidiary by the man you love is preferable to not being treated at all.

“Of course,” Dennis Savage went on, “the special feature of Folly City is that the dancers are available, at the going rate, for private shows.”

“A show?” said Roy. He seemed pensive. “They dance for you at home?”

“If somebody wants to hire me,” said Cosgrove, “I do the Russian kazatski.”

“A private
show?”
Roy repeated.

“Well,” Dennis Savage replied, “sex. That’s where the dancers really make their money. I gather they’ve closed the back room where this used to take place, so now you take them home or to their hotel or whatever.”

“You gather? You aren’t a regular?”

“Oh, most gay men in New York know about Folly City. You don’t actually have to go there.”

“But do you?”

“I’ve never been.”

“A likely story,” Cosgrove whispered to Virgil—whispered, I should add, as Olivier might have whispered “Never came a poison from so sweet a place” to the top balcony of the Old Vic. “He probably dances there himself, when no one’s looking.”

“He’d have to,” I observed.

“Why don’t we . . .” Roy began, then halted, probably hoping somebody would help him. I did: “Plan a trip to Folly City and see it for ourselves?”

“Well, don’t you think we should?”

Nicky said, “Count me out.”

“I’ll be listening to Slavonic opera arias,” said Cosgrove, showing Virgil the wondrous libretto booklet, with critical introduction and texts in four languages.

“I think it would be fun,” said Dennis Savage. “Refreshing and so on. Like a field trip when you get to miss a day of school.”

“How much do these private shows cost a guy?” Roy asked.

“It greatly varies. A full-fledged date would run you upwards
of a hundred, but a quickie around the corner in a peep-show booth could fall as low as—”

“A peep-show booth?” said Nicky. “Is this a life?”

“They print all the words to the arias, see?” Cosgrove told Virgil. “So you can sing along at the significant moments.”

“What’s a good night for this trip?” asked Roy.

Dennis Savage wasn’t sure. “I’ll confer with certain sages of my acquaintance and we’ll set a date.”

Nicky sighed and Roy let out a tiny thrill.

“But I warn you,” Dennis Savage went on, “there are cases of innocent and even noble men who blundered into Folly City on a dare and, overnight, became addicts, slaves to a passion that cannot be named among decent people. Can you risk that?”

“You mean, it’s like crack or something?”

“I mean, it’s like truth. It becomes its own Red October.”

Roy was so intrigued he was virtually squirming in his seat. He said, “I think we should go and make our visit.”

It took a few weeks to get everyone’s free nights aligned, and by then Dennis Savage had bought himself one of those trendy haircuts where they shear off the sides but leave it extra full on top. I thought he might be just the tiniest bit Cretaceous for this essentially youthful look, though I said nothing; and Virgil wasn’t sure how he felt about it. As so often, it was Cosgrove who tendered the most direct opinion: Whenever Dennis Savage appeared, Cosgrove would cry, “Here comes Ragmop!”

It was Saturday afternoon, and I was hoping to get a little work done before we went to Folly City, for Cosgrove had gone upstairs with his Gameboy to finish off his and Virgil’s Tetris championship. I once thought that video games might become Cosgrove’s fascination—we have three hand-held systems, plus the Super Nintendo hooked up to the television—but, as Demento’s lifelong adherent, I should have realized that something as street-corner as video games could never tempt Cosgrove’s need to assert his individuality.
Anyone can play video games. Collectors seek the arcane—the fantasy, really. We’re not talking of an accumulation of matchbooks or butterflies. We’re talking about encircling something that most people do not know is there.

(Sometimes I think that’s all that writers ever do. We get so deep into our perceptions and analyses: But is anybody listening?)

Anyway, I wasn’t getting any work done, because Nicky had arrived, early, fretting and loquacious. He had been absolutely opposed to this trip and absolutely determined to come along—“Because,” he explained, “sometimes you have to humor Roy or he gets all intense about everything.”