I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (10 page)

At Carson’s urging, Jimmy told us stories about his adventures, our coterie ranged around him, a Central Committee on gay style, as Carson wandered in and out with
table d’hôte.
It sounds stiff, but I remember being spellbound. Jimmy had actually grown up in an orphanage, run away, held a thousand jobs, and lost them for reasons he never understood. (I could have told him: a boy this beautiful has to keep moving—at liberty, he could blow a community apart.) I saw, as he spoke, that I had misconceived what a hustler is. He doesn’t lack opinions—he lacks psychology. Jimmy knew nothing of human interaction. He couldn’t read a face or gauge vocal tone, couldn’t extrapolate vibe, could scarcely tell you what someone looked like.

And what ghastly tales he shared. From anyone else, these stories would have been ace dish. After hearing them from Jimmy, I wanted to run into a church and shiver. Once he told us about a bordello he worked in Dallas, where the boys were never allowed to leave. The place was run by a huge fat slob and discipline enforced by a nameless hunk covered with tattoos.

“He had no name?” Dennis Savage asked. “None at all? What did you call him?”

“I never said anything to him.”

“No, how did you refer to him when he wasn’t around?”

“We called him The Man.”

“Tell them what you called the fat guy,” Carson put in.

“Sheila.”

We laughed; Jimmy didn’t. He was like a TV news reporter reading text, each story a meaningless announcement. He told us that when one of the bordello boys tried to escape, as deterrent punishment The Man would strip the culprit, paddle his butt, then roughfuck him.

We were scandalized; and somewhat aroused. “
Roughfuck
him?” cried one of us. “Fan me with a tulip, mother!” cried another. “What on earth,” I asked, “is roughfucking?”

Jimmy looked at Carson, got a nod, and said, “That’s when the top man lays you face down on your junk, and after he starts to punk you he turns you on your side and locks his arms around you so you can’t pull away. Then he finishes you off by pumping as deep and hard as he can. It hurts a lot after your ass has been paddled.”

Of course we wanted more details. We have read Mann, Joyce, Proust. We are the cream of the cultural capital and we want the
eyes
of the story. “Was he ruthless?” we asked. “The Man? Did he get off on hurting you? Would he comfort you afterward?”

Jimmy thought. “No. He just … he came in and did it and then he went away somewhere.”

“Your junk,” we were murmuring in a daze. “What’s the other side called?” and when Jimmy answered, “Your candy,” we weren’t sure what move to make. Then he added, “The Man called it your honeycomb—because it’s so sweet to rim, I guess,” and we became quite riotous.

Walking home, Dennis Savage and I marveled at this noble primitive brought among us.

“I wonder,” said Dennis Savage, “if I should try roughfucking Little Kiwi.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

“On the other hand, I wouldn’t know where to buy a paddle.”

*   *   *

“Carson,” I said once when we were alone, “can this story be true?”

Carson beamed. “He’s the real thing, my boy. Just keep encouraging him the way you do, you and the old gang. I’ve got to get him into shape for the gay life, don’t I?”

“Do you?”

“These are just the tryouts. When he’s ready, I’ll take him out for his debut.” I must have had an odd look on my face, for he patted my shoulder and said, “No, don’t worry, my old. He picks things up very easily. And he looks
marvelous
in a sweater.”

Carson had us over for dinners and Jimmy was the conversation piece, fascinating as such. We had had our fill of collegiate dazzle, show biz dazzle, and porn star dazzle; proletarian dazzle was a novelty. It was like meeting Wild Bill Hickok after a decade of Guy Madison. Paradoxically, Jimmy did look marvelous in a sweater. And he was picking things up, as Carson said. He had the ability to
listen
that makes genuine charm. He was learning the nouns and terms. He never read, but he took to fine music and was wild for film. By the time the opera season was in swing, barely three months after he had moved in with Carson, Jimmy had seen more Ingmar Bergman than I had logged in ten years. It was at the opera that I met them, in fact, the two superb in pinstriped vested suits with identical grins heading toward me on the Grand Tier promenade.

“Isn’t he something?” Carson asked me of Jimmy. “He outclasses half the people I know.” And Jimmy looked around us to see if it was true.

It was. Gays were spraying the Met with bitter
mots
and anguished looks, their input and output alike a distilled put-down, while Jimmy could shake your hand, hold your eye, and ask about the things he remembered you liked. Others went through motions; Jimmy, because he had to learn them and was warned that they mattered, legitimized them.

“Everyone’s looking at you,” I told them. “You couldn’t attract more attention in this place if you were Leonard Bernstein and Franco Zeffirelli. I can feel the eyes on my back.”

“Leonard Bernstein conducts my record of Beethoven’s Fifth,” said Jimmy, in a tone you might use for “Leonard Bernstein eats asparagus tips” or “Leonard Bernstein roughfucks Sylvia Sass when he’s in Budapest.”

No opinion, still. But he was smiling now, often. There cannot have been a nicer hustler in New York; Carson’s friends would call up when Carson couldn’t possibly have been in just to hear Jimmy’s voice. I wondered if anyone of the gang fantasized slipping into Carson’s shoes, or perhaps assuming Jimmy’s contract when Carson finished with him. Of course, without Carson’s amazing apartment and amazing bank account and amazing social calendar, a Jimmy might seem questionable. And was there not, in some minds, a sense of failure attached to the taking of a lover on salary—though we know that half the romances in the Great World are predicated on the doing of a deal?

Everyone hungers, but who
loves?
I wondered, when Carson took me to lunch for my birthday and spent most of it picking the absent Jimmy to pieces. I was thinking of the subculture’s great love stories. Did a single one of them involve a hustler? You can be destroyed, as Mac was; or amused, as Carson is. But loved?

“He asks too many questions,” Carson was saying. “Why doesn’t he quit while he’s ahead?”

“Stop complaining, Carson. You’ve got the hottest partner in the seventeenth precinct.”

“Oh, I admit his sense of devotion is touching. And he does have the most spectacular nipples on the east coast, big as half-dollars. Yes. True. Yes.” He sighed. “I just wish he’d stop … what do I wish?”

“I wish you appreciated what a neat couple you make.”

“I wish you knew what it’s like working the Circuit with a god in tow. Everyone comes running up to ask
Who is that one?
in that breathless way.” He imitated: “
Who, Carson, tell? It’s sizeable, isn’t it? What’s his service? What’s his code name? Does it talk?
How would you like to live with that?”

“His code name is The Man.”

“You know what he calls the stereo? The ‘record machine’!” He made a face. “I wonder if I suffer from sex nausea. Like Shakespeare in the late romances.”

“Your trouble is, you can’t accept good fortune.”

“It’s sizeable, isn’t it?”
He snorted.

*   *   *

It lasted through April, and ended sweetly, calmly, and sadly. This was Jimmy’s doing, those his qualities—Carson always liked to go out fighting. He told it far and wide how he threw Jimmy out, and no one believed him. The likes of Carson seldom make it into a room with a Jimmy let alone dismiss him. But I know it was Carson who pulled the cord, because Jimmy came over to my place when he left on his way to the rest of his life. Everything was wool and cotton; the boy had been done over so completely you might have glimpsed him in
GQ.
Yet he retained his honest incomprehension of the patterns by which we enact ourselves—so well that if he were to appear on a soap opera his artlessness would shatter the great American television screen.

“I have to talk,” he said as he set down his suitcases. “And I don’t know what to say.”

“We need a drink.”

“Scotch, neat. A twist if you have one.”

You churl, I told myself in the kitchen, because I was thinking I knew him when he couldn’t have named a brand of beer. Not surprisingly, he had had no trouble securing a place to move to; he was already set, in fact. I couldn’t identify the name he gave me, but I could visualize the scene: more money than Carson, less to do, and atrocious friends. Love seats, plane trips, and cast parties. East Seventies stuff. Was this the step up or down?

We talked. “There’s only one thing I can do,” he told me. “I tried to be so hot in bed that he would never let me go. And I know I’m good. I know I am. I spoke to him, you know, giving the choices. There’s pimp style, little-boy style, party style…”

And roughfuck, I thought, trying and failing to see Carson getting paddled. Junk side down, I thought. Flip over on your candy, I thought. Should I offer him my money and my life?

“… if someone would pick me out of the crowd like that and … well, keep me. I used to wonder about it. You know? Imagine it? How he would look and the things he’d say to me.” He grinned, sadly. “He wasn’t anything like Carson.”

I told him that we all fantasize.

“I admire him,” he said.

I told him that Carson was beyond admiration, or too far before it.

“He isn’t easy to get along with. But I’m going to miss him. I’ll miss all of you. This was a wonderful year. It was the first thing I’ve ever belonged to.”

I didn’t tell him that the only thing he had ever truly belonged to, because gay is the most class-conscious of cultures, was Sheila’s bordello. Because opinions are what define us. Because, despite our best intentions, Jimmy was all candy and all junk. Hell, most of the people I know divide you in half if you didn’t go to Yale, Chicago, Penn, or Swarthmore.
I tried to make myself so hot in bed.
Who doesn’t? I told him, “You’re a gay Galatea.”

He waited for the explanation, as he always did, antennae quivering. “Pygmalion sculpted Galatea,
created
her. Then he fell in love with her.”

Jimmy nodded. “Only this time he didn’t.”

“Next time,” I said. “In fact, I was going to suggest—”

Suddenly he blurted out, “Why do I like him? Why? He was so cruel … last night he said … he said…”

“Because we get crushes on the men who teach us to be wonderful.”

And in crashed Dennis Savage and Little Kiwi, at least without Little Kiwi’s endlessly horrendous dog Bauhaus. The commotion eased the atmosphere, and Jimmy took his leave, clapping us all on the shoulder and swearing to stay in touch. Little Kiwi, who had had limited exposure to this son of sex—father, should I say?—stared at Jimmy and, at the last minute, impetuously rushed forward to throw his arms around him. Jimmy rubbed his back and kept saying “Okay, okay, okay.” Little Kiwi backed away as red as some people’s underwear, Dennis Savage and Jimmy shared a grave look, and off went the hustler with his suitcases.

*   *   *

That should be the end, Jimmy vanishing into the cashmere despair of the service routes. “He came in, he did it, then he went away somewhere.” But, some years later, as I walked up the aisle after
Evita,
a strong hand gripped my arm and I turned and there he was, the pair of us too stunned to speak. He was with a grisly moneygay group, one very tall haughty queen in a fur shako especially regrettable.

“Jimmy,” he sizzled, “if you would
detach
yourthelf. We have to get to Roddy and Roberto’th thoiree.”

Gosh, I thought, somebody still lisps. Jimmy held on to me, whispering as if he were passing contraband.

“Do you see Carson?”

“Yes, of course. He—”

“Would you please tell him something for me? Something important?”

“Surely, but why don’t you—”

“Get out of it, you Tribeca queen!” screamed the haughty shako. “Somebody puth him
away!
”

I reached up and dislodged his hat, and he would have charged and queened me to death but for the crowds pouring past us.

“Look,” I said to Jimmy, “why don’t you call him yourself? Or you could even drop in on him. Messengers aren’t all that effective outside of Sophocles.”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand.”

“Leave these dreadful people,” I told him. “Come home with me, and we’ll call Carson, or even—”

“Jimmy, please.” It was another of the Roddy-Roberto set. “Hugh is having a fit. You’ll blow the whole deal if you don’t come now.”

Jimmy clasped my hand, said, “I remember all of you,” and left. And I stood there thinking, Why
Tribeca?
This sweater is from Bloomingdale’s.

Naturally, Dennis Savage scoffed when I told him. “That old dish!” he cried. “Half the guys in town don’t even know who Jimmy is! And look at you waving an
Evita
playbill at me, you
follower!
”

“Oh, Christ.”

“How many times must I tell you? Gays
create
sell-outs; they don’t attend them.”

“I come to you with the last paragraph of a romantic tragedy and you lecture me on hip!”

“All right,” he said. “You met a devastato at the theatre and he asked you to take a message to friend Carson. Now for dessert:
What
did he want you to tell him?”

“Just for that, I’m not saying.”

“I’ll guess: ‘Carson, please take me back for you are the love of my life.’ Right?”

I said nothing. He remembers all of us.

“Or, rather,” he went on, “that’s what you
hope
the message is, don’t you? The name is love. And that is so bizarre, and so inane, and so likable, that it could almost be true. I’ve always said gay needs more romanticism. You may hawk antique dish and attend old shows, but emotionally you’re in the vanguard.” He went over to the window and gazed down on Fifty-third Street, upon the parade of the bribed and deluded. “The name is love,” he repeated. “The name of a thing is strategic. And there are three names in gay: your own, the name of your one true best friend, and the name of your imaginary lover, whom you never meet.”