Buddies (31 page)

“Everybody but straights.”

He nodded. “I’m not straight.”

It’s a cultural thing, Carlo says. It’s not whom you bed, it’s whom you’re kind to, whom you respect, whom you like in some important way. It’s who your buddies are.

“I’m not straight,” he repeated. “At least, not anymore.”

“There’s no crossing over,” I told him. “What you’ve been is what you deserve to be. For life.”

He looked at me for a moment. “Who let you make the rules, may I ask?”

“I don’t make them. I discover them.”

“Dave,” said Little Kiwi, joining us with the unsavory Bauhaus, tethered and gamboling, “would you come help me walk a dog?”

“Go,” I said, figuring that Dennis Savage had cooked this up so he and I could talk.

They headed over the dunes and I went inside.

“Mission accomplished,” I said, finding Dennis Savage among the kitchen things, where he was halfheartedly setting up for lunch.

“I want to thank you,” he said, “for making a difficult day so much easier.”

“Oh yeah? How about thank you for brightening my stay by dragging in that gay Babbitt?”

“Actually, he’s a rather eligible dude, all told. He’s got money, he’s intelligent, he’s medically attractive, and, you must admit, he’s awfully nice looking.” He fussed at a stubborn jar top. “A nice, big fellow.”

I shrugged.

“Yes,” he said, “I thought you’d noticed.”

I took the jar from him. “I’ll tell you what I noticed.” I opened it. “When that kind gets off the ferry, there goes the neighborhood.”

“My hero,” he observed, reclaiming the jar. “According to Little Kiwi, this guy really did just get off the boat a week or so ago, so it’s too early to tell what he’ll be like once he gets his bearings. I remember how rough-hewn you were when you first came out.”

“Well, I don’t remember you before three or four weeks ago. It’s the charitable thing to do.”

He spread peanut butter on right triangles of whole wheat toast.

“I hope that’s crunchy,” I said. “Smooth is for straights.”

“Funny his waiting this long to take the step, isn’t it?” Dennis Savage mused. “What must have been going through his mind all these years?”

“You surely don’t buy this jazz about his not knowing he was gay till he was in his forties, do you? How can you not know what you’re attracted to? It’s like not knowing that you’re wearing pants.”

“How soon did you know?” he asked.

“I
never didn’t.
”

Silence and peanut butter.

“Have you never heard someone say,” he asked finally, “that he wasn’t sure what he liked?”

“A euphemistic cop-out for gays who can’t confront their fate. Gays who keep looking over their shoulder to see what the straights are thinking of them. You remember Britt Kelso? One of the most effeminate characters going, right?”

“You and he were good friends, as I recall.”

“Okay, we were. Till I got sick of his constantly putting down all his friends behind their backs. God knows what he was saying about me.”

“I’ll tell you sometime, when you’re in the mood.”

“The day I forgive you for that, they’ll make me Pope. Anyway, we kept running into each other, and finally we had dinner. And while telling me about the superb hunk he is currently dating, he blithely lays upon me the scoop that he is also seeing a woman. We’re talking about a male who was almost certainly known in high school, to his despair, as Britt the Flit. And after a lifetime of being the absolute bottom, he has become A Real Man. And did he enlarge upon the moral beauty of bisexuality, let me tell you!”

“If that’s what he wants.”

“He does it to impress himself! When Michael and I gave our joint birthday party, I told Chuck about this and he hit the ceiling. He called it ‘gay fascism.’ He said Britt was disputing my right of sexual choice.”

“Aren’t you disputing his?”

Bauhaus crashed into our midst like dirty work at the crossroads and began barking at Dennis Savage. Then Little Kiwi and Uncle Dave trooped in, and Bauhaus jumped up on Little Kiwi.

“What is it, boy? Speak!”

Bauhaus barked twice.

“You do?”

Bauhaus barked once.

“He says he wants to dance on a grape.”

“Little Kiwi,” said Dennis Savage, “enough is enough, okay?”

“He wants to dance on a grape?” Uncle Dave asked.

“It’s his great new vaudeville act,” said Little Kiwi, eyeing the walkway. “Later we—”

“Should we eat outside?” said Dennis Savage quickly. “Or is it too hot?”

“Oh, there were such breathtaking men on the beach as we walked there,” Uncle Dave said. This sounded so odd, however true, that we all stopped and looked at him. “I mean,” he added, “it’s quite a place you’ve got here.”

“He’s getting the hang of it,” said Dennis Savage, setting lunch out.

No. It would be some while yet; he had much to learn. As we ate, he asked the questions one usually hears from the raw recruit—where are the places, who are the people, what are the terms, how do you
know?
Never in my life was it more clear how fully developed gay life had become in Stonewall’s mere fifteen years, how much more there was to being gay than to being homosexual. Sexual taste you can be born with; but gay is a host of techniques to be acquired.

It’s interesting, too, how differently the system tends in other gay places. San Francisco’s gay, for instance, is less elegant and knowing and demanding than New York’s, more fraternal and expedient and amiable. In New York, gays tell the recruits you must
become
—if you can. In San Francisco, they say You have
arrived.

Perhaps Uncle Dave ought to have gone west instead of east, for with his big lumbering physique and shaggy blond mustache he’d already be in, whereas in New York he’d have a lot of nouns to memorize and concepts to assimilate. I’ll give him some credit: he was moving fast.

“I don’t know,” he said as we brought the plates in. “Somehow I was expecting quiche.”

“Real men don’t cook quiche,” Dennis Savage told him. “Real men
order
quiche.”

“Real men,” said Little Kiwi, “long to watch Bauhaus dance on a grape.”

I was about to say something pointed, but Dennis Savage pulled Little Kiwi over to the sink to do the dishes—which unfortunately left me with Uncle Dave. I grabbed
Martin Chuzzlewit
and hotfooted it outside, but he followed me and, before I could sit down, said, “I hold the opinion that one of us owes the other an apology and I don’t know who that is, but if you won’t say you’re sorry, I will. Now, how about that?”

Tell me, boys and girls, who can resist such an overture? I apologized for being short with him and we shook hands. Again
Martin Chuzzlewit
bit the dust, as we talked over breaking into the Circuit, and I then let him in on the Secret Sex practices of Dennis Savages, but the subject overheard us and came roaring out to chide me in what I can only term a viciously inflamed manner, and while he was out of the house Little Kiwi gave Bauhaus a grape to dance on (actually he just rolls over them on his back, whimpering), and then Little Kiwi came out and said, “Hey, everybody look at Bauhaus,” and I gave Dennis Savage a few smacks to keep him in shape, and Little Kiwi put
Cats
on the stereo so Bauhaus could dance to something, and Little Kiwi told Dave, “They get fifty bucks for this on Broadway.”

And Dave told Little Kiwi that it was amazing how much he looked like Seth when he was in his twenties, and that in fact the boy still looked the way he did when he was a little kid.

“He behaves the same, too,” I put in.

And Bauhaus calmed down, and there was one of those pauses, and then Dave asked Dennis Savage if gay life was always like this.

I could see Dennis Savage thinking, Maybe, except when somebody dies—so I quickly suggested we take Dave on a tour of The Pines and the Grove, so he could see all of gay from clones to queens; and we could end up at tea, where the houseboys must be obeyed.

Away we went, Dennis Savage and I recounting events long past, some sage and some silly; and the names of those we knew and only knew of came rolling out. Here was where the last of the great drug fires occurred, there the house where the most spectacular party was given, here the site of the first and only annual Looks Contest, there the house so desirable that the wife gave up the kids in the divorce settlement in order to keep it.

“It must really give you a break to be so close to your history,” said Dave. “To be a walk away from all the things you’ve done.” He looked ahead at Dennis Savage and Little Kiwi, walking with their arms around each other. “Is that common, to walk like that?”

“It’s more Grove style. The Pines generally tells its tales through eye contact.”

He and I had slowed to a stop, and he said, “You know, I’m just beginning to realize how much there is in all this. Yet anyone can do it. I still remember, when Virgil left for the east … and he was so open about it. I thought, You just go and do it.”

The other two had stopped and turned.

“Is he,” Dave went on, “what you’d call … well, typical of life in the gay community?”

“Little Kiwi? I wouldn’t call him typical of life on earth. How’d he get that name, anyway?”

Dennis Savage and Little Kiwi started back to get us.

“Oh, his sister Anne had a doll named Kiwi. A little man doll. And when Virgil was an infant she started calling him Little Kiwi, and the family took it up. I was the only one who called him by his Lord-given name.”

“Why?”

“Because he asked me to. A man’s going to grow up sometime, and his name’s a part of that, I guess.”

“So is his sexuality,” I said.

He nodded. “So the little birds leave the nest.”

“The big ones, too,” I noted.

“Well, but he was the favorite in the family.” Little Kiwi had reached us and was staring at Dave. “And it surely tore them up when he lit out of the state.”

Little Kiwi put his arms around Dave and Dave riffled his hair.

“It surely tore them up, that’s true.”

“Well,
really!
” said a disgruntled wimpy older man, edging past us with, I expect, his wife.

“Yes, really,” said Dave, in a contemplative manner.

“Oh dear,” said the wife. Some people have to have the last word.

Well, we did the Grove, and we did tea, and we did the Pantry, and we did cocktails on the deck, and we did dinner, and during dinner Dave and I went back to a theme we had, shall we say, touched on earlier: that of the timing of self-awareness. How could Dave not have known he was a homosexual all those years? And Dave admitted that he’d had the knowledge all along, but could not accept it till the night he got into bed with a man he wanted sexually.

“What man was that?” asked Little Kiwi.

“Your father,” said Dave.

And we were quite, quite still.

“Just remember how confusing puberty can be,” he said. “Stimuli of so many kinds working on your senses. Heavy pressures from your gang to do what everyone else does. Your self-confidence trying to get organized. And all through this you’re randy as hell. Of course you’d be confused—confused about a lot of things. You take a chance on a girl at a party, kiss her, and instead of getting mad she goes along with it and does nice things to your ego. So of course you think you’re in love. That lasts for three days. Then it’s some other girl—same thing. Another girl. Then your first crush. It’s like flying to another planet—and that lasts three weeks. And you’ve got a best friend, too, and you know how teenagers get sometimes, swimming together, or rough-housing, and all. So, okay, you think he’s got a great body, what’s wrong with that? You’re conscious of your own body, so why shouldn’t you notice his? You get hard thinking about him, but teenagers are always getting boners. You wake up from a very unusual dream, and he was in it … can you be blamed for what you dream? Maybe you killed someone in a dream once—that doesn’t make you a murderer, does it?”

“Confusion,” I said. “I guess I can see it.”

“Besides, you don’t want to think you’re queer, so you’re busy twisting everything around for yourself, rationalizing. And since you can’t figure out what two men would do in bed, anyway, your dreams aren’t all that risky. Meanwhile you’re proving you’re a man with the available girls. It gets so you can hold mutual bone-off sessions with your best friend and think of it as he-men keeping in shape for the ladies. And finally there comes one time, one event or something, with another guy … and I guess that’s when you either face up to the truth and stop double-talking yourself, or you decide to live according to the confusion and turn away from the truth.” He put his hand on Little Kiwi’s head and stroked his hair. “Like father, like son,” he mused, as Little Kiwi blushed.

“I’m dying to hear how this comes out,” I said, “but since we’re also responsible for introducing you to gay, why don’t we walk along the beach before it gets too windy to bear and you can finish the story in the famous magic moonlight we have here?”

So we all got into sweaters and hooded sweatshirts—Dennis Savage had to outfit Dave somewhat; we wouldn’t let him on the beach out of uniform—and we put Bauhaus on his leash, and off we went to the water’s edge where the hard sand is, and there we made Dave turn back to gaze upon the strip of lights that comprises what may be the only gay colony in the history of the world. You say, “What of the Grove?”, but the Grove was founded back in the days of the haunted homosexual, of the loving war of queen and hustler, when to be homosexual was to be faggot, queer, bent—Franklin Pangborn or Lucius Beebe, instead of … well, for instance, reader: you. The Grove is not gay. The Pines, for all its attitude and casually frantic code of behavior, is gay. And as we regarded it, now in its blasted morale of chaste amusements, of the no-fault cruising of look-but-don’t-touch and the survivor mentality that hits those who have simply lived to be thirty-five, we began to tell Dave of its days of glory. Of riding the ferry in a bracing air of anticipation, being able to throw off our covers and be; or of heading for tea, a whole house in force, just to see who our people were, who we are; or of meeting, some weekend, someone’s older friend, who would unveil forgotten mysteries of the pre-Stonewall days. Liberty, self-knowledge, anthropology: culture. Our place, in our time. Manhattan is ours, too, in a way—in several ways—but Manhattan we must share. In The Pines, we are the majority.