Buddies (30 page)

“By Pines standards, that’s black tie.”

He smiled. “I guess I’m doing everything wrong. It’s bound to happen when you fall in among strangers. I came to say goodbye to Seth before I left, and he … see, we’ve stayed in touch all these years, and I’ve known Virgil since he was a sprout. Seth asked me to look in on him when I got to New York.”

I turned to Little Kiwi, sitting quietly with his back to us as if he were a figure in one of Samuel Beckett’s plays. “You mean you’re related to something human?” I asked him. “You actually have a father?”

“Now I will never talk to you again
forever!
” said Little Kiwi, leaping up. “
Come,
Bauhaus!”

Bauhaus didn’t; Bauhaus seldom does.

“I better walk you down to the Pantry,” I told Dave, as I ruffled Little Kiwi’s hair. “First time out here can be tricky.” Little Kiwi turned and put his arms around me; he’s vulnerable to affectionate demonstration.

Dave regarded us quizzically. “I thought,” he said. “I mean, it isn’t the customary thing to … is it?”

“How do I know till you ask?”

“I understood there was someone else … in the picture.” He looked like someone who catches children with their hands in the cookie jar, then gets flustered when they fail to act guilty.

“There is someone else,” I said, stroking Little Kiwi’s neck. “Dennis Savage. He’ll be along presently. In fact, he’s not someone else, he’s some
one,
the whole thing. Right?”

Little Kiwi nodded. He’s the only gay I know who reached his mid-twenties having had carnal intersection with one man and no others. It’s an accomplishment of some kind, certainly, but Dave looked as if he were seeing something he shouldn’t.

“Why doesn’t Bauhaus come when I say?” Little Kiwi asked.

“Why don’t you train him to?” I replied.

“I don’t think he’d respond. He has such an artistic kind of temperament.” Little Kiwi turned to Dave. “We may be putting on some shows later, so you should get set.”

“Why do I have the impression,” I asked, “that if this were the 1970s and we could still have sex with all the trimmings and not spend the following week waking up screaming, I would nevertheless be spending my trip watching you put on shows?”

Little Kiwi thought about it. “Because,” he offered, “my shows are a legend of the Island.”

I was about to respond, but I caught sight of Dave, and he was a sight. If he had known the kid himself since he’d been a, yes, sprout, then he couldn’t have been surprised at what passes, in our set, for quaint charm. Yet he was staring at Little Kiwi as if … I don’t know, as if the kid were exposing essential secrets.

It occurred to me then that I really had no handle on Dave—had no idea why someone so oddly out of tune was there at all. Who was he, besides a friend of Little Kiwi’s family? As we walked along Ocean Boulevard—about a mile of wooden slats four feet wide—he said, “If my wife and I had had kids … a little boy like Virgil, say … I guess I wouldn’t be here right now.”

His wife?

“I guess raising children can wed a couple in a way that ordinary mating can’t. Sharing that flesh-and-blood thing, really, that creativity. Putting those little people to bed, and holding them when they’re sick. Then they ask those funny questions, like—”

“Why are you here right now, on a gay beach?”

“I discovered I was gay after being married for twenty years.”

I think he expected me to congratulate him or mount some club demonstration, but I looked at him in disbelief.
Nobody
discovers his sexuality after being anything for twenty years; you discover it in youth, when it forms. And anyone who says otherwise is a bloody fucking liar.

“Anyway, if Amy and I
had
a whole family, I guess I would have let that carry me along.”

We walked in silence.

“She was very nice about it when I told her,” he finally said. “She didn’t believe me, of course. Maybe I didn’t even think she would. But I guess after twenty years of sex, they can’t be expected to believe you’re a faggot. She told me she figured there was another woman and that I was trying to spare her feelings.”

More silence.

“Maybe we got too used to each other, after all.”

He was carrying on a one-man conversation, answering questions I hadn’t asked.

“I sort of knew about Virgil all along, so his dad was the first person I told. With his son and all, he’d have to understand.”

You’re really good-looking, I thought, but I don’t like you. I’m not sure why.

“I caught Virgil here just before he left town, and he said if I was coming out I ought to do it here, because Fire Island is like … well now, I’m not sure I remember all that he said. I gather this is something of a homosexual amusement park, and as far as—”

“Just follow the walkway there past the ice-cream stand,” I said, pointing. We had reached the harbor. “You’ll see it.”

I felt him gazing puzzled at my back as I marched away, leaving the impression that he had committed heavy faux pas. But so he had.

“What’s the idea of inviting that gringo clown out here during my stay?” I called up to Little Kiwi when I got back.

He was on the balcony again, playing with the fancy umbrella Dennis Savage had given him for his birthday, the folding kind with a wooden handle colorfully painted and shaped to resemble a puffin.

“What clown?” he said. “Uncle Dave?” Suddenly he switched to a raspy voice as he animated the umbrella, handle side up. “Dave is no clown,
gskwark!
This is Randolph the Puffin speaking.”

“Oh, not this again,” I moaned.

“He’s the nicest man in Ohio,” the puffin said.

“Randolph,” said Little Kiwi, “let’s—”

“Just a minute, kiddo, he is
not
nice. He swindles a woman for twenty years—no doubt with lots of shadow-fucking along the way, whereupon he comes home and says, ‘Not tonight, honey, I’m beat’—and then he grandly presents himself here in his … his Sears Roebuck party socks and expects the gay world to dance a jig, right?”

“Who’s this nasty man?” Randolph asked Little Kiwi.

“I’m warning you, boy,” I said. “I’m burning a short fuse today, thanks to your father’s paddle buddy.”

“If you don’t start being cute,” Little Kiwi warned me, “no one will like you.”

“Or read your greasy books,” Randolph piped in.

“Randolph,” I said, mounting the stairs, “today a puffin dies.”

With a yelp, Little Kiwi dashed into the bathroom, but I got my foot in the doorway before he could lock himself in, so he ran to the window, stuck the puffin out, and rasped, “Listen, gay America! A crazed fiend is after me, Randolph the Puffin!”

“O puffin,” I told him in a Shakespearean manner, “thou hast bought the farm.”

“Help! Danger! Fire!”

“What the Judas heck is going on here?”
shouted Dennis Savage from below as he stamped into the house.

Little Kiwi and I froze. “Now we’re going to get it,” he whispered.

“I go to support a friend who, despite being celibate for the last three and a half years, is about to die,” Dennis Savage went on, as Little Kiwi and I came out onto the walkway. “Have you
any idea
what that’s
like?
Do you realize that right now I’m shaking with rage and fear because who knows which of us will be next? And
look
what I
find
when I get here!
Look what I find!
”

He heaved up one of the dining table chairs and threw it across the room.

“I find the two of you cavorting and yelling and making this house the scandal of the walk! What were you doing in the
bathroom,
for heaven’s sake? You can’t make a ruckus in the regular places?”

He crossed the room and picked up the chair. Suddenly calm, he sat in it, looking suavely up at us as if he had just devised some picturesque new Pines stunt that would soon be all the fashion.

“And,” he went on quietly, “I see that umbrella’s still with us. Little Kiwi, I told you, that joke staled after a week.”

“It staled for me,” I said, “after fifteen seconds.”

“And the icing on the cake,” said Dennis Savage, “is he won’t take it out in the rain.”

“I don’t like getting wet,” said Randolph.

I laughed.

“Don’t be his audience,” said Dennis Savage. He really was upset—not at us, but at the state of health in general. “Don’t. Okay? Because he’ll just go on doing it.”

“I’d go on, anyway,” said Little Kiwi, in his own voice.

Dennis Savage shook his head. “I’m just not in a mood for these games. Do you want to see me break down in front of you?”

“No,” said Little Kiwi immediately, but then Randolph and I both said, “Yes.”

“Very funny,” said Dennis Savage. “Did your friend get here?”

“He went to the store for various assundries,” said Little Kiwi.

“That’s various
and
—”

“Did you meet,” Dennis Savage asked me, “the new boy on the block?”

“Little Kiwi’s paddle uncle?” I said, coming downstairs. “We met.”

“Nice guy, I hear. But he picked a rather unterrific moment to come out in. Great timing they have in Cleveland.”

“The whole state’s like that,” growled Randolph.

“Who told you he’s a nice guy?” I asked.

“That time Little Kiwi’s parents came to New York,” said Dennis Savage, “his father went on and on about Uncle Dave. Especially about their college days. You may think you’re joking about that paddle-brother stuff, but from the way he was talking, you’d have the idea that they were—”

Footsteps.

“Later.”

“Had a hell of a time getting back here,” said Uncle Dave, pulling in with the groceries. “Every street looks the same. The guys sure don’t.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

Dennis Savage quickly introduced himself and busied Uncle Dave in unloading the haul. I stood aside, silently grumbling. Dave Bast was a resentable intruder, I felt. But I do believe that a book of coming-out photographs ought to include a view of Uncle Dave’s face when Randolph the Puffin leaned over the edge of the walkway and asked, “What flavor of ice cream did you get?” Little Kiwi was crouching so he couldn’t be seen on the main floor and Uncle Dave was a veritable study.

“What’s … that?” he asked.

“That’s Randolph the Puffin,” said Dennis Savage, waving it away as if it were just another element of an ordinary day, soggy corn flakes or a burned-out light bulb. “Were you planning to cook this as well as buy it?”

“What flavor?” Randolph repeated.

“Do I talk to that?” Uncle Dave asked Dennis Savage.

“You do if you’re gay,” I put in. “Because if you’re gay you’ll have some taste, however slim or broad, for the camp theatrical. But if you’re straight, you can talk all you want and it’ll never hear you.”

I spoke mildly, but I guess he saw what was in my eyes, because he said, also mildly, “Would you like to settle this outside?”

“I’d be glad to,” I replied, “you gringo son of a bitch.”

Dennis Savage exploded like a fresh mine. “
This,
” he almost screamed at me, “is my guest, okay?” And he told Uncle Dave, “This is my best friend! So the two of you just cool off!
Now!
”

Little Kiwi, hanging over the walkway railing, looked—as he always did when these things happen—like the first person eliminated in an all-night Monopoly session. Uncle Dave held his ground but said nothing more. I retired to the deck with
Martin Chuzzlewit,
thinking that if Dickens had seen a gay America instead of the intolerant jackoff straight kind he did see, he might have had a better time here. But then there was no gay then. And, in the first place, Dickens was probably an intolerant jackoff himself … and there was Uncle Dave asking if I’d like to Talk It Out.

“Tell you what,” I answered. “I’ll stay out of your way and you’ll stay out of mine. We’ll get along.”

“That’s not good for me,” he said.

“Who gives a flying fuck what’s good for the likes of you?”

He stared at me as if I had the wrong man.

“You spend twenty years in the closet,” I went on, “and you come out here with cruising tips? ‘The guys sure don’t’?” I stood up, because if you are going to fight, you don’t give the enemy an advantage. “I don’t know you,” I said, “and I don’t like you,” I added, “and I don’t believe in you,” I concluded. “So huh?”

That usually does it. But he stood where he was and said, “I know there’s a misunderstanding here, and I think we can compensate it.”

“Compensate as an intransitive verb without the preposition. Now I’ve heard everything. What are you, an accountant or something?”

“Yes, as a matter of—”

“You compensate
for
quelque chose. You don’t compensate
chose.
Got me, buddy?”

“I can’t get why you’re so down on me. We hardly met and you’re … I could tell … you were mad about something.”

What would Jimbo do at this point? I wondered. Jim would settle down and be amused.

“Was it something I said? Because I apologize. I’m new here, I told you. I’m bound to say the wrong thing, I guess.”

I sat down, put
Martin Chuzzlewit
to the side, and regarded him.

“Virgil said you might point me in some directions. You know. Hints on how to … I…”

“Start with the library. Stonewall classics. William Burroughs, Edmund White,
City of Night, The Movie Lover, The Boys on the Rock, Danny Slocum.
The life. The spirit. The themes.”

Typical! I thought, watching him. He doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

“I thought I ought to start by visiting … the places. The right places. You know.”

“No. Do I?”

“I mean, Where do you go to be … gay?”

I nodded. “Acceptable question. You could go to a Pasolini movie. You could go to a west side
conversazione.
You could go to the hospital…”

“Oh boy, you don’t ever give in, do you?”

“Well, who gave you the right to be gay, anyway?” I said. “We don’t run this club on open admissions.”

“Okay, who does get in?”