The Price Of Dick (13 page)

My brain was spinning with this new
information. I really didn’t know how to respond. There’d be no way in hell I’d betray Dick’s secret even with the knowledge that his friends didn’t care about his sexuality. My silence seemed to egg Joey’s confessional along.

“
I mean, there was a time I really wanted to do something with him in freshman year. We showered together in the dorm one time late at night after some tag football. I woulda done anything he wanted if he’d asked, and I caught him looking at me in the shower. It looked like he had half a woody on him. But if I even got within two feet of him, he’d stick out that arm like I was invading private territory. I thought it was all his trumped up act though.”

I was
still digesting this bizarre data when I realized he was awaiting a response. I was immersed in the irony of the predicament of pretending to be straight for a friend who was pretending to be straight for friends he didn’t realize wouldn't give a damn if he was straight or not.

Life gives you these moments to ponder as
tests of your sanity. I said nothing. Somehow he took that silence as a confirmation of his assumptions.

He slapped my shoulder.
“I knew it! That is so cool. Your secret is safe with me, bud. I won’t even tell my brother. I just knew it though, I knew he was bi. When you look like him why would you want limitations, right?”

He was laughing and nodding to himself as he ambled back into the apartment. I
felt rooted to the sidewalk with a secret I could never tell my friend without injuring his precious ego. I’d have found it funny if it didn’t make me feel like I had a bear trap ready to snap on the other foot.

Hustle was the name of the
game I played for the next few months to get paying photo jobs. The economy was taking a bite out of all of us, and the number of rent-paying shoots dwindled to just a couple a week. That meant belt-tightening. The dreams of getting a bigger place, maybe a condo with a better-equipped studio would have to slide onto the back burner again. I tucked the real estate brochures back into a drawer. Dreams for another day. Thankfully, Dick’s business was steadily building, along with his income, and he could pick up some of our financial obligations. He took on some of the bills and bought groceries, and surprised me with an occasional goody like a bottle of wine and some carryout from the local barbecue joint. We were really treating our union as a partnership. It felt good to know that after so much time fending for myself there was someone there to help.

As we neared summer,
one day in the middle of the week, he called after lunch to see if I was busy. I wasn’t, unfortunately. No jobs at all. He came home. As he kicked open the door, I knew why. His arms were loaded with gift-wrapped and bowed boxes, which he held in place with his nose. He piled them all on the coffee table.

“
Merry Thanksgiving-Birthday-Mas!” he said.

“
What is this?” I asked. My mind went first to the notion that he had another girlfriend and had gone shopping for gifts to begin the new dating ritual. I wasn’t prepared to endure another just yet. Ants crawled in my stomach.

His smile was huge.
“The secretary at work had a birthday...”

“
And you stole all her presents?” I quipped.

“
And she had so many gifts and got so many more from her family that I started to think.” He looked at me with the most sincere expression I’d ever seen on his face. “You don’t have any family. You don’t have any Thanksgivings or Christmases or celebration on your birthday. You’re all alone on all those special days. And so...well, Happy Birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas, bud!”

I felt the surprise on my face as my eyes
moved from him to the gifts on the table. “What?” I still didn’t believe it. It had been a long while since anyone had bought me a gift.

“
It’s nothing radical. Some shirts and shorts. A pair of Levis. Oh, and some running shoes. Since you train with me for my triathlons, I knew you needed a good pair. And a new camera case. Just little shit. Nothing major. Certainly nothing expensive because I know we still got bills to pay.”

Words fell away into emotions. I realized my eyes were unexpectedly wet.
“You didn’t have to do this,” I said, feeling overwhelmed by the gesture.

He smiled.
“That’s the point,” he said.

I saw
his own eyes had become moist. “Why?”

“
Because you’re my friend. Because you changed my life. Because you’re teaching me stuff about myself I didn’t know, and I realized I wanted to learn to be like you.”

That did it. I wiped the tears from
my cheeks, speechless.

“
You want a hug; don’t you?” he joked.

I did.

And there you have it: the
main reason that friends can fuck up friendships. Because it feels like they are becoming something more. It’s an established fact that friends can actually physically fuck their friends and stay just friends as long as the deeper emotional aspect doesn't become entangled in it all. If you let the emotions in, then you start doing things for each other, and worrying about each other and being all nicey-nice with thoughtful gifts and cards. You stand at the door waiting for them to get home and putting on your best Mrs. Brady hair and clothes. That’s the snare.

The atmosphere altered; we both knew it, and both
intentionally attempted to ignore it, because neither of us wanted to be lovers or boyfriends, or in a romantic relationship. Those were our three curse words: lover, boyfriend, relationship. For the moment, I didn’t want to sleep in a bed with anyone, give up my space, snuggle with or be committed to someone. Since the end of my last relationship, I’d learned to enjoy the full extent of my freedom. And if I ever wanted a relationship again, it certainly wouldn’t be with an individual that couldn’t even publicly acknowledge me or our relationship. That would be adding additional work to something that was already a job in itself. Our sustainable, if unique, relationship would have to endure the same as it had been.

The changes I noticed over the next few weeks and months would have been trivial to others
. The way conversations between two people who live together evolve over time. Ours had more of a business tone. Mutual business. How to get more people into the studio, what kind of lights to buy when we got additional finances, the possibility of buying advertising when a few extra dollars rolled in. The key words to these dialogues were the “We” and “Us” and “Our.” It became our business; the two of us. More full-time for me, his a part-time job after his regular hours at the investment firm.

Dick
’s creative contribution was to the prop box, and I believed it stemmed from his own personal fantasies. The fact that his office was two blocks down the street from a costume shop called Johnny Knockoffs didn't hurt. It was a role-player's paradise. Dick approached the prospect of dressing up for the shoots with childish glee. It was astonishing to watch him put on a costume and slip into a role like a second skin. It reminded me of Tony Curtis’ role in
The Great Imposter
, or Leo DiCaprio’s in
Catch Me If You Can
, where these two men could adopt alternate personalities as easily as most of us changed our socks.

He became a pirate, a vampire, a football player; whatever costume, outfit or uniform he put on. He not only looked the part, he lived the part. With solo shoots of him I could make sales to the hetero magazines and e
-book publishers again and supplement our income. He became the quintessential fantasy man in my photographs. But there was one role he played with more zeal than all the others. The Cowboy. He related to this persona on a much deeper level than the others.

The one bit of information I seemed to have always possessed about him
, but not realized its importance, was that he’d always been partial to cowboy movies. He’d told me that, as a child, he’d seen the movie
Shane
over a dozen times and
Lonesome Dove
was a film he watched at least once a year, every year since he was a teenager. He could quote it, and would lip-sync the dialogue when he watched it. These movies had become an absolute obsession with him.

*  *  *

I was delighted to have the opportunity to use Dick’s obsession as the basis for an entire weekend shoot when an old friend called to ask me a favor. Willie Brandt was a seventy-year-old, weathered, dyed-in the wool, gray-haired, mustached and bearded farmer with enough scenic pastures, ponds, barns, horses, farm animals and bales of hay to provide the backdrop for an endless supply of western-themed male-male romance shots. His daughter was getting married in a month, and since I’d done such a beautiful job on her modeling photographs, he wanted me to be her wedding photographer. It wasn’t the most fun way to make a living, but it inspired the trade-off I needed to do the shoot. Dick was ecstatic. I lined up two more photogenic, gay male models to take with us and we packed up our own set of props to spend three days surrounded by  rural beauty to create our art.

He prepared for this shoot like he had no other, buying a Stetson, some cowboy boots, genuine leather chaps
—western style, not gay bar style—button down denim shirts, work gloves and letting the stubble on his face grow for three days. I was surprised at how much darker it was than his actual hair color. He lifted weights harder than I’d ever seen him, but I don’t think it was as much for the aesthetics as it was to burn off his nervous excitement. I’d never seen him look forward to anything with this much anticipation. His energy was palpable.

Willie let me know that everything would be available for us to use.
The barn, farm equipment, horses, wild lands, ponds and the old farmhand bunkhouse where we’d be staying. He had every western accessory known to man, including spurs, bullwhips and the like. I didn’t tell him specifically what types of shoots we’d be doing. He assumed it was similar to the model shots I’d done for his daughter, only with men and of a more western theme. Since Willie was a man in his seventies with advanced arthritis, we didn’t have to worry about him showing up unexpectedly during our shoots. It took him ten minutes to go up the stairs in his own house. Most of the shoots we’d be doing would be far outside the range of view from any of his windows.

The ni
ght before we left for the hour-long drive to the farm, Dick watched the
Lonesome Dove
trilogy on the small television in his room again. I heard the music all night long. I’m certain it’s left a permanent imprint on my brain.

I
’d carefully chosen the models for this shoot. I wanted them to reflect the sensual characters of the All-American farmhand, or the Wild West cowboy. Along with Dick who was an exemplary specimen for the rough and rugged cowpoke, I selected Perry, a model in his mid-thirties with a handsome, suntanned face, short-cropped brown hair with a dash of gray at the temples. He was six foot four of solid mature masculine muscle with an engaging smile, a professional I’d worked with on numerous occasions for the hetero book covers in spite of the fact that he was an out and proud gay man.

The callow greenhorn would be a young model named Anthony who had just turned
twenty-one but looked like someone I’d definitely card before allowing him to purchase liquor. Long platinum hair fell straight in even bangs just to the top of a bewildering set of black brows and blue eyes framed in ebony lashes. There was a sprinkling of fading freckles over his perfectly aligned nose, and he had a real beauty mark to the left side of a plump Valentine heart-shaped mouth. He had a swimmer’s build, which meant he was lithe and smaller in size in contrast to the bulging muscles of the other two men. He didn’t have a lick of tan on his entire body. He carried a naturally innocent air about him that was in direct contradiction to his true personality. He was a boy who knew he was attractive and was quite adept at getting what he wanted. Every time I’d shot him, he’d brought along new tales of his club conquests. Doubtless his virginal appearance was a draw. It would work well with the story vignettes I had in mind for this shoot. All three had been eager to meet and work with each other and they had plenty of time on our drive to get to know one another. Dick was pulling the I’m-straight-but-maybe-just-a-little-bit-bi-curious-act again. It made me nail-bite due to my nerves, because it ate up so much precious time during a shoot, but he always delivered the goods, so I maintained, despite my reticence.

He rode shotgun; the two other models shared the backseat with a suitcase full of props and a stack of cowboy hats. Conversations were animated;
anticipation ramped up for the location setting of the three-day shoot. They were also intrigued that I invited a straight man to participate in an all-male romance shoot. They played their roles just as he wanted; making himself the focal point of their conversation about the project. He told them the same lines and stories I’d heard many times before. I rolled my eyes. Ducks in a row.

*  *  *

Willie Brandt awaited us on the porch of his Norman Rockwell picturesque farmhouse. He looked every bit the elderly retiree in a pair of loose, comfy beige slacks with a thin, brown belt that struck him just about mid-ribcage, and starched linen button down shirt. He was bald, but I was the only one who knew that, because as he greeted us he wore a spanking new trucker's cap whose brim had still not been broken in. It made the hat look stiff on his head. He was sipping iced tea in a tall glass that rested against his gray beard. I smelled the fresh lemon and mint as we approached him on the porch. Looking at him, no one would guess that the man was worth millions and had made all his money on an invention that had nothing to do with farming. He simply liked living on and running a farm. I’d only shared this information with Dick because he’d been so curious about the man who was willing to open his home to us. Looking at Willie as he sat there, all warm smiles and countrified hospitality made one realize that this was an aspect of country life that we folks in the city completely forgot.

Only Dick stepped forward during the introductions to personally shake the man
’s hand. I figured it was instinct from business behavior. He seemed fascinated while appraising the diminutive man with the arthritic hands. Willie was putting the entire farm at our disposal, and his daughter, Tina would assist us when we wanted to incorporate the horses in our photo session. He dropped the keys to the ranch hands' bunkhouse in my palm and pointed us in its direction down the gravel road that wound away from the house and behind the red barn. They were separated by half a mile.

It was a dusty ride to the one story, wood
frame bunkhouse. A neat, simple structure that stood beneath a lone oak that looked about a hundred years old. The building had square windows with white curtains and a traditionally tin roofed porch which held four straight backed chairs. It seemed to be in the flattest, emptiest part of the country. We could see endlessly in each direction; nothing but hay bales in fields, telephone poles and blue summer sky. There wasn’t another house, save the main farm house behind us, for miles.

Our anachronistic
accommodations looked as if plucked from a fifties John Wayne western. I assumed Willie had wanted it that way for the purpose of authenticity. There were three rooms: one main living, cooking, and dining area, one large bunkroom with four beds and matching dressers, and a bathroom with a claw foot tub, toilet and sink. There was a door in the bathroom that led to an outside shower that was hemmed in for privacy on three sides by a slatted wood structure on a concave concrete base with a drain its center. It would make a great setting for photos. Beyond this was a large field of nothing but grass and rolled bales of hay surrounding a large, crystal clear pond reflecting summer sky. The floors were plank wood, furniture was minimal. A breakfast table and four chairs, the customary stove, refrigerator and sink. There was one sofa that apparently survived since the sixties, two overstuffed armchairs and a real hand-made oak rocker. A Hollywood studio would have had a hard time matching the quaint interior that seemed to be a holdover from a long gone, simpler time. Anthony and Perry seemed disoriented by the Spartan surroundings while Dick reveled in them. He had on his Stetson before they’d each chosen a bed and unpacked.

Our host had stocked the refrigerator and cabinets with all the basic
food essentials. After lunch, Willie's daughter Tina arrived to accompany us to the horse barn. She was a buxom, twenty-year old blond girl who looked every inch the country girl who belonged on and loved the farm life. Willie described her as sweeter than honey on Sugar Crisp cereal. Her smile was real and her warmth genuine.

The animals were majestic, noble creatures and Tina was more than happy to help teach the guys how to saddle and mount them for the shots. It wasn
’t necessary to ride them any further than the corral. They added such splendor to the photos. The men enjoyed their pretend cowboy moments on the backs of the beautiful creatures; none more so than Dick. He was immersed in his role. We finished that round of shots as evening darkened to a deeper blue around us and the sun found the western edge of the blank land.

The three men seemed tired, but still invigorated from their experience with the animals as we made our way back to the bunkhouse. Tina bid us farewell. I
’d see her next at her wedding. We double kissed and good lucked each other in parting.

As night fell deep around us, Dick was eager to build an outdoor campfire that would serve a two-fold purpose: to cook
our actual dinner and to do the part of the shoot where three cowpokes were cooking some campfire grub. We’d do this near the corral where the horses had been loosed to stroll and eat. Their silhouettes against the starry backdrop would be a wonderful accent for the realistic setting. The night was balmy, the moon at three-quarters, and Dick happily channeled his inner Shane as he cooked burgers in the cast iron skillet, squatting in his jeans, boots and Stetson. Anthony and Perry revived themselves with cups of strong coffee drunk from the tin prop coffee cups as I caught it all with my camera. Any one of the many shots, chock full of home-on-the-range atmosphere, could be sold as stock for a typical Zane Grey.