Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (32 page)

They were looking at me, Cosgrove pleading, Carlo inviting, and Virgil tolerant.

“Me come too?” I said. “Sure.”

I should have realized that Cash Westman would turn out to be one of Carlo’s old tricks and thus a maddeningly bracing hunk; but who would have guessed that Cash was wild for kids? He welcomed Virgil and Cosgrove to his SoHo club, deserted in the dead afternoon, as Boswell drank in the chatter at Child’s Coffee-house. Never, I think, have I seen a man so erotically playful with strangers, not just flirting but pervasively seductive. Carlo diplomatically explained that Cosgrove was “hooked up with Bud here.” I don’t think Cash was listening, as he was busy tracing the lines and planes of Virgil’s face with a long, lean finger. He told Virgil, “I want to call you ‘Skyman.’ ”

Virgil was reserved and Cosgrove was staring. I looked at Carlo, signaling, Do Something.

“The Ice Boys are truly New Wave,” Carlo said. “You’re going to like them.”

Cash, still fascinated with Virgil, nodded.

Now Cosgrove tried to Do Something. “Some boys are easy,” he said. “I know one boy who has to be paddy whacked and doggy-fucked as hard as can be.”

“This boy?” Cash murmured, his eyes on Virgil’s.

Then Virgil finally Did Something. He put his arms around Cash and rested his head against Cash’s chest. Cash held him close and stroked the back of his neck. It was very unpleasant, a splendid moment that gives no joy.

“Virgil,” said Cosgrove, “will you help me fix the handkerchief in my jacket pocket? It’s all fluffing out.”

Virgil slowly nuzzled Cash’s chest, ignoring Cosgrove and their new act and some outstanding responsibilities.

“We have to to do the citydance,” said Cosgrove. “Please.”

Virgil let go of Cash, took half a step back, then stuck a finger inside Cash’s belt, pulled him close, grabbed him by the shoulders, and kissed him.

“Who’s he supposed to be?” I whispered to Carlo.

“That little Virgil’s always got a surprise for us,” replied Carlo, not smiling.

Cash and Virgil broke apart, staring at each other.

Cosgrove coughed lavishly. “I wonder if I have bronchus,” he said, watching Virgil.

Cash finally noticed us, and smiled. “Let’s hear the act.”

I was repositioning Cosgrove’s handkerchief and Carlo was setting out the tape equipment. Virgil pointed Cosgrove to the banjo cases, and they took out their axes, Cosgrove nervously fumbling and Virgil pensive, distant, his ear on new music. I had seen flashes of this developing Virgil, in sudden confidences in strange places or impatience with those he should treat gently. But I hadn’t seen him throw it all on at once like this. Had he no thought of what
Cosgrove was feeling at this moment, or what I might need to say to Dennis Savage when he asked about the audition?

It went fine, by the way. Cash was dazzled—yes; yes, we know that, but I mean he really liked the act. Perhaps he realized that the Ice Boys’ charm lay in a magnificent lack of perspective. “ ‘You say a chickpea’?” he echoed, at the end.

“It’s The Ice Boys’ version,” said Virgil.

“Wild. And you’re the pianist?” he asked me. “Why don’t you play live?”

“Virgil wouldn’t let me.”

Cash grinned at Virgil. “You’re really in charge, huh?”

Cosgrove said, “He has the lock and key to my inner soul.”

I think it was at that moment in particular that Cash and Virgil fell in love. Virgil was standing on the stage, ten feet from Cash, who was down near the first line of tables. They were simply looking at each other. But it had the atmosphere of fucking.

Cosgrove started to cry, and Virgil said, “Cosgrove, I told you not to be nervous for the audition.”

“That’s not why,” said Cosgrove. Virgil at least took him in his arms—which was the least he could do, I thought—and Carlo pulled Cash off to the side to explain choice details about our beveled ménage.

Anyway, we collected ourselves, and The Ice Boys were offered an engagement, and Carlo and Cash talked business—Carlo, I’m thrilled to say, driving an advantageous bargain for our side, with all sorts of perks about flyers and free entree for friends of the act, and so on. In the cab going home, the four of us indulged in some victory cheers, but, let’s face it, this wasn’t a happy outing.

You know what I did? I called Bill Upton. Term it impulse; we all have such from time to time. It was much later that evening, and I was well advanced upon the splendor of my cups. I shot high.

It was a nice call, real citywalk, a little brandy with your chocolate. Bill was right there, no tape, and he responded warmly
to my name, and we went over those days when I was twenty-three and had nothing to lose. I was blitzed enough to tell him that the second greatest thing about him was the way he looked when he’d take off his suit jacket, because he had such wide shoulders and such a tight belt line and such a dreamy butt; and that the greatest thing about him was he didn’t get upset when you told him.

He asked if I was still “a caution,” and I explained that I have retired from the field of battle. So he invited me to a party, on the same night as the Ice Boys’ opening. Bill Upton’s parties run late, so that was neat and I said yes.

Dennis Savage managed to shake his bronchitis and suffer a relapse a few weeks later, so he was unable to attend the Boys’ debut. I can’t say that he expressed more than perfunctory regret, and I told him that boycotting Virgil’s project would drive a wedge between them.

“Oh, there are so many wedges already,” he replied. “A wedge of age. A wedge of energy. A wedge of adventure. It’s such hard work trying to be an ice boy at my age.”

“He needs—”

“Encouragement? Were you going to?”

I nodded.

“Say? Yes. Encouragement. How we all need it. But he gets all he wants from inside himself. One day I looked in the mirror, and you know what I saw? He was a young thirty and I wasn’t there at all.”

“Can’t you just wish him—”

“Of course I can. I
won’t.”

So the rest of us went off to the Nine O’Clock Song, Cosgrove excited because this was the third time in a week he’d been in a cab. Virgil was composed, and Carlo, turning around in the front seat, was studying him. When we reached the club, the kids went in with their banjos, and Carlo, bearing the tape machine, loitered while I paid the driver.

“Want to hear a news?” Carlo said as I turned around. “That kid’s been sleeping out.”

“Virgil?”

He nodded. “And I don’t mean a little East Side nooky. He’s been doing it slow-mo, and rough-me-up-style, and standing-in-the-window, and the whole rest of the all-the-way handbook. You see his eyes? They look like the moon.”

“He seemed very quiet.”

“Sure he’s quiet. A boy is quiet because he’s thinking about it. How great it was and how great it’s going to be. Tell you something else. He’s taking heavy chances. I know Cash.”

“Virgil’s been seeing Cash? But when? He works in the daytime and he rehearses at night.”

“What do you want to bet?”

Cosgrove met us at the door, proudly showing off The Ice Boys’ PR photograph. It was posted in front of the club, too, along with those of the other acts on the bill: the usual chorus boys brimming with Broadway, a rather attractive woman comic, and one quasi—drag queen. (He worked in pants, but the kind of pants Carmen Miranda might have worn to a lambada contest.) Cash ran a smart and friendly place: The food was decent, the service admirably functional and attitude-free, and the entertainment organized around the notion that if you don’t like this act, a few minutes later you’ll like
that
one.

The talent dressed in one big room at the back, and Cosgrove immediately befriended the drag queen and spent the spare minutes telling him about Miss Faye. Virgil was testing the tape equipment. Carlo was talking business with Cash. I went out front, where tables were filling with the performers’ friends. Lionel was there with his latest—he never runs out—and Kenny Reeves had brought Rick Conradi, who was now writing a cabaret column for one of those neighborhood giveaways that pile up in your mail room and that nobody reads. Carlo came out and table-hopped. I wondered what Bill Upton would think of this place. He was an enthusiastic theatre- and concertgoer and he loved a party. But did straight
men, even wonderful ones, ever truly make the scene? Why do gays always have to invent the arts?

One of the chorus boys opened, followed by the comedienne, then another chorus boy. I haven’t heard so much Jerry Herman since the summer of 1979, when someone I was after told me the story of his life in a piano bar.

Then Cash brought on the Ice Boys, to cheers from our crowd and a welcoming buzz from the others. Virgil had drilled Cosgrove ruthlessly to ensure a flawless performance, but that was all run-throughs in an apartment, the two of them alone or buoyed up by family. Suddenly Cosgrove was onstage, playing to strangers, and he clearly had no idea how to treat the assembly. Look over their heads? Look through them? He chose to stare right at them as if looking for someone in particular, and whenever he spotted a familiar face, he said hello.

That was odd, but the whole act is. Nobody knew how to take it, not even our confederates. Well, how would you take it?: It must be a spoof, but it isn’t acting like one. There were Cosgrove’s bizarre emendations on Ira Gershwin in “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” what we might describe as the Chickpea Effect. Ah, but on the line “If we had to part then that might break my heart,” there was Virgil’s tender enfolding of Cosgrove, to show the pain of parting, what we might describe as the Two Chickpeas Hotting Up the Stage Effect. I mean, even Carlo—who has seen this act many, many times—was so taken by that moment that he turned to me and whispered, “Sweet
damn
it all!”

So was it one thing or the other thing? No one knew how to handle the Ice Boys until they got to the Opera Medley. I had begged them to drop this, partly because they accompany the selections on their banjos but mainly because I think it’s the sole part of the act that is witless rather than piquant. But they insisted. “I wrote some of these lyrics myself!” Cosgrove wailed. You can tell. At least it’s short, snatches of familiar operatic excerpts sung to English words, mostly hoary parodies. For instance, Virgil doles out the F Major strain of Escamillo’s aria as:

Toreadora, don’t spit on the floor!
Use the cuspidor;
That’s what it’s for!

while Cosgrove delineates the Wedding Chorus from
Lohengrin
as:

Here comes the bride!
All dressed in white!
Stepped on a turtle
And down came her girdle!

Well, at this the entire audience, freed from indecision as to what this act meant as a Platonic concept, began to laugh and roar and shout for joy. So I was wrong about the Opera Medley. It’s so clearly idiotic that it centers—defines—the act, tells the audience what to do.

The Ice Boys were a big hit. There were calls for an encore, and Cash had trouble working his public down to announce the next performer. Backstage, after the revue was over, I found Cosgrove running around the room like a puppy with a red rubber ball. But I couldn’t find Virgil.

“In the office,” the drag queen told me, with an odd look.

The office, where Cash shuffles his papers, has a window in its door. The door was closed, but through the window I saw Virgil and Cash, both in the nude, going at it hungry and wild. So Carlo was right; but maybe this was temporary, like just one of those things or let’s call the whole thing off and I ran away and visited with our friends out front but I didn’t want this new information interfering with Bill Upton’s party so I jumped into a cab and there I was at Bill Upton’s where I didn’t have to think about anything except Can I finally be an ice boy and behave myself?

Bill Upton’s: and nothing had changed, including Bill. He had aged maybe three months; I looked like The Picture of Dorian Gray’s great-uncle. The piano, the steamship prints, the robust leather couch. The smooth, straight, upright host who liked you no
matter what. Everything as it was—including the same angry, stupid queens. Only instead of fighting about Maria Callas, now I get to fight about politics.

Jesus, was he friendly when I walked in! I wondered, If I played handball, would I look like this at his age? He grabbed me like Apollo dating Hyacinthus. Turning me around, showing me off, dazzling me. Great, remind me what I’ve missed all these years.

Do I have to outline the fight I got into with the queens on the subject of censorship? Except it wasn’t about censorship, and I know I’m repeating myself, but it’s
never
about the immediate topic, do you realize that, boys and girls? It’s always about the rage of the inferior intelligence confronted by an idea. Rich minds like to be challenged; it gives them a chance to rethink their worldview. Empty minds are threatened by challenge, because they don’t want to think: They want to be petted. They’re like beggars. They insatiably need to be given.

I have to admit, my mind wasn’t on the conversation, as I was busy rehearsing what I would say to Virgil when I got home. I do recall saying that MTV should ban all performers who make gay-bashing statements, because “music television” has become so integrated into the rock industry that no singer or group whose videos were dropped from rotation could be called major, not to mention personal appearances on the various specials. The notorious Shabba Ranks had, not long before, announced on British television that all gays should be killed—I happened to have been in England at the time and caught the moment, though it was difficult to understand what Ranks was saying through his loathsome accent. Yet Ranks was allowed to do a guest shot in MTV’s annual spring break show. I was so disgusted that I turned the set off, despite the skin festival that MTV’s beach programming provides.