Gossip
Authors: Christopher Bram
A Novel
Christopher Bram
To Ed
A Biography of Christopher Bram
They met in cyberspace, made love in Washington, New York and Miami, and ended their affair on the six o’clock news. One could say that William O’Connor and Ralph Eckhart had a very nineties relationship.
—Maura Morris, “Strange Bedfellows,”
Village Voice
I
SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
better. I was thirty-four years old. I’d made peace with the who, what and where of myself. I did not crave importance or fame. Nancy thought I might be depressed. She would, but she may have been right. We’d been each other’s sounding board, witness and back scratcher since college.
I went down to Washington to see Nancy Wenceslas. She was feeling unhinged in her new life and wanted my help. “I seem to need a mental health visit, Eck,” she admitted sadly. So I went. The other thing began as a lark, a diversion, a harmless stumble. But the stumble became a fall, a long slide down a slippery slope that later landed me in the public white noise. You probably think you know all about me, if you ever caught my name.
The world is full of other people’s words.
“Hear about Keanu and Geffen? Woo woo.”
“In your dreams. Wishful thinking by some old fag.”
“I hear Klein pays beautiful men to humiliate him.”
“Gee. I never have to pay for that.”
“Proposal: Clinton is Bush with a Southern accent and est training. Respond.”
“Who said that? You’re an idiot cynic to say that. After the last Republican convention?”
“But he’s right. Talk is cheap. All the nice talk from the Crats hasn’t changed squat.”
“My dears. If you want to talk like newspapers, go to a room and leave the rest of us to our fun.”
What sounded like a party had almost no sound at all, only the sporadic dice-like click of my computer keyboard. Our sentences were silent, instant, words jetting across the screen, lines scrolling into oblivion. Once you grew accustomed to it, Gayworld was no stranger than talking on the telephone. You stopped seeing the format, abbreviations and misspellings:
The Cardinal: Who the f is Gefen???
But I was a newbie and still found the chatline odd and metaphorical, an elastic black hole, a computer game of words. I often felt like I was talking to imaginary spirits on an electronic Ouija board, with only the example of my friend Peter Hirsch to assure me that these people were real. Peter had introduced me to Gayworld, goading and coaxing me into the future with the promise of bold new freedoms.
The dark green ether was honeycombed by rooms much like my own, mostly in New York, with occasional aliens dropping in from other area codes. I sat in my shadowy shoe box five stories above East Ninth Street, beneath my overloaded bookcase and a ceiling that shed yellow eggshells of paint. A cold November rain beat against the glass and slurred in the leaky window frame, but there’s no weather in cyberspace. It was the Tuesday night before my trip to D.C. and I’d turned on my computer to chat before bed, like dropping into a bar, only I didn’t have to get dressed. I wore a ratty sweater and the gym shorts I sleep in when I sleep alone. Peter said that when his boyfriend Nick was out he sometimes sat naked at his keyboard, not for sex—one used the phone lines for that—but simply to remind himself that he was more than a bombardment of electrons.
Everyone had a handle, a pseudonym, so it was like a masked ball in the telephone system. We were an eclectic mix of fantasy egos: the Cardinal, Billy Budd, Tom of Chelsea and Shanghai Lily, who was Peter—“It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.” Peter had met most of the regulars and reported that they tended to be techies and nerds. A nerd manqué myself, I was in no hurry to meet anyone. I enjoyed remaining mysterious. Torn between pretention and camp, I became Sergeant Rock, which seemed a good joke, although people who didn’t know me had no truth to rub against it.
“Mr. and Mrs. Clinton appear to be making enemies left and right. (Pun intended.) What do you New York types think of that?”
There was a new handle on the screen tonight: Thersites. He insisted on talking politics, but only Billy Budd rose to the bait. Our preferred subjects were movies, books, gossip and computers—the medium was often the message here.
“My dear Thirsty. I rap my fan across your knuckles,” went Shanghai Lily. “Politics nix.”
Dry and soft-spoken in life, Peter was a tyrannical hostess in Gayworld. And his camp side, which peeked out in an occasional “dear” at the bookstore, ran wild. He was forty-two, a former actor-singer who worked with me at Left Bank Books, although we’d known each other before. I’d gotten Peter the job a year ago when he needed to get on group health insurance. He was okay now, but still carefully rationed his time, energy and passions.
I couldn’t remember who or what Thersites was. A character in one of Plato’s
Dialogues?
I pictured an older man in the boondocks with a classical education and too many magazine subscriptions.
“Anyone going to Hell this Friday?”
“No way. Got caught in the darkest back corner last time.”
“The elephant’s graveyard,” I quipped.
“Bingo. You never know whose clammy butt you’re pawing.”
“I prefer Tunnel of Love at Wonderbar.”
“More like the Broom Closet of Love,” I typed. I knew the clubs well, but hadn’t visited them in months.
“Whatcha doing this weekend, Sarge?”
“Going to DC to see a friend.”
“Woo woo.”
“A friend from college,” I explained. “A woman.”
“I have tickets to Rigoletto,” announced Billy Budd.
“SOSO,” typed someone else—same old same old.
“And I take the flying boat to Bermuda on Friday for bridge with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor,” said Shanghai Lily.
I knew that Peter was scheduled to spend Friday at St. Vincent’s for his monthly tests. “May you come up trumps every time,” I told him.
A longer entry crowded the screen:
“You say that you are coming to Washington, Sergeant Rock? What a coincidence. I live in DC. You sound like an intriguing fellow. Would you care to meet for coffee while you are in town?”
Thersites. He’d been drafting the invitation while the conversation moved on.
“Thanks but I won’t have time,” I quickly answered.
“Don’t be shy, dear. Go meet him,” said Shanghai Lily. I could just see Peter smirking lewdly at his screen.
“Please, Sergeant. I meet so few people F2F”—face-to-face.
“Do it, Sarge.”
“Go get him, tiger.”
“What else is there to do in DC?”
Everyone jumped in, a pack of computer yentas determined to see Sergeant Rock, who never met anyone, actually make a date.
I couldn’t think clearly in the cascade of input. “Can we step into a room and discuss it?” I told Thersites.
“Certainly.”
I brought down a box and clicked myself in.
“Wish me luck, gentlemen.” Thersites clicked himself in with me. I clicked again.
The others would see our box sucked to a dot while an empty field filled my own screen. I needed the space to think. Because, despite myself, I was already tempted. What else
was
there to do in D.C.? I expected several long, heavy conversations with Nancy, but she would be busy during the day, and coffee with a stranger, even a stuffy old man, might break up an idle afternoon.
“Hello,” he began.
“You live in DC?” I was stalling. Being alone in the digital dark with a stranger had a disturbingly erotic quality.
“I began in Maryland but now live in the District.”
“I might like meeting for coffee but don’t know my schedule yet,” I typed.
“Mine is quite flexible.”
“Give me your phone number and I’ll call when I’m in town.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
He must have a boyfriend or, more likely, a wife. “What if I give you the number where I’ll be?”
“When are you most likely to be free? Day or night?”
“Day I guess.”
“Then why don’t we meet at the zoo? Do you know the National Zoo?”
“Yes.”
“Let us say four o’clock, Thursday afternoon, the zoo.”
The zoo made it comically wholesome. Maybe he was literal about having coffee. He must be retired if his schedule was so flexible. Talking with a real New York homo might be enough for an old Southern gentleman.
“OK. If I’m free.”
“Excellent.”
“What if something comes up and I can’t be there?”
“That’s a chance we must take.”
“You don’t want a number where you can reach me?”
“Let’s leave it like this. For the suspense. (Gentle laughter.)”
He made it easier for me to stand him up. “Suit yourself. Where in the zoo? It’s a big place as I remember.”
“The reptile house.”
“What cage will you be in?”
“(Hysterical laughter.)” Only the most literal man would regularly type in his stage directions. “Shall we meet by the pythons?”
“OK. What do you look like?” I typed.
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”
“How old are you?”
“Ibid.”
He spoke in footnotes. A retired academic? “But how will we know each other when we meet?”
“It adds to the mystery.”
I decided to take no chances. “I am 34. I have a shaved head. I am more Mr. Clean than Sergeant Rock.”
“Stop! I refuse to read what you wrote. I want us to surprise each other.”
“(Sigh.),” I typed mockingly, although the irony wouldn’t transmit. “All right. I will be there if I can.”
“Excellent.”
“I will look for a male who is looking for a male. Am I right to assume you are male?”
“(Gentle laughter!) Most definitely.”
“I feel like Kitty Carlisle.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Shall we rejoin the others?”
“I will say good-bye. Until Thursday at the reptile house.”
“See you Thursday. If I can make it.”
His cursor blossomed into a square, the black bar blinked and he was gone.
Back in the main room, the yentas were hungry for details:
“Who is he?”
“You meeting him?”
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” I replied.
“Did you at least learn what a Thirsty-ditty-do was?” said Shanghai Lily.
“Not yet. There’s a good chance I won’t.”
“Puss puss puss,” someone chided.
I told everyone good night and booted down. I took out my date book and lightly penciled, “Reptile house, 4 pm.” If it was a joke, Thersites had a very private, cryptic sense of humor.
When I replaced the computer jack with my phone jack, the telephone promptly rang.
“So why not meet this guy?”
After the silent words, Peter’s velvet voice was so startlingly physical that I could
hear
his long, deadpan face, his lanky frame, his elongated fingers.
“I don’t know if I’ll have the time. I’m not going down there for fun, you know. Nancy needs my help.”
“You are such a frigging Boy Scout,” Peter said. “You know, most people, if a friend sold out, would write them off as a lost cause. They wouldn’t take time off to go hold their hand.”
I frowned. “That sounds like Nick talking.”
Peter clicked his teeth, embarrassed to be caught with a borrowed observation. “It is. But he has a point.”
“Come off it, Peter. Nancy’s a good friend who needs to see me. And she didn’t sell out.”
“Okay, okay. She seemed nice enough the few times I met her.” He quickly disowned the charge. “But you know Nicky. Power corrupts. They’re all crooks or cowards and D.C. is closet city.”
