I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (7 page)

He could be very funny. Once, in his apartment, he performed a version of
A Little Night Music
with Bette Davis in the lead, bungling the lyrics, quoting lines from her films, haranguing the audience with homophobic paranoia. He did Hal Prince, shaping Concept Production. He did Sondheim, tearing his hair. He did Kate Hepburn, sneaking into the show during “A Weekend in the Country” and trying to usurp Bette’s role. I was literally on the floor, holding my stomach and screaming for mercy.

He was popular but loveless: the face was wrong. He worked out at Sheridan Square but, on the street, never nodded to the others who did, as most of them do. He scarcely cruised at all. His queen act centered on romance and sex; in real life, he stepped around them. There were times, rare ones when we were alone together, when I thought he was about to say something intimately sad,
homo,
but then he would cut over to some slashing line,
gay,
like, “You want hot truth? Love is so stupid they should give it to straights” or “I’m loud and crass and that’s my fun—love me or leave me!”

*   *   *

One spends the first years in New York collecting coterie, one’s next years trimming it. I moved on to a crowd in a lower key, given to ties and quiet pricey restaurants. At L’Aiglon one night I told them about Harvey’s routines and they just looked at each other blankly. (It was a dull group, but the clothes were fun.) I kept in touch with Harvey and told him of my doings, and he became fascinated by the company I kept. They had names like Crosby and Raymond and were smooth operators. In their gentle way they made good stories, and in his rowdy way Harvey took them into his act. “Bette Meets Crosby,” he would announce, then show me how the diva fared among the townhouse gentry. The adventure varied with his mood. “Tea is served,” he once narrated, enacting it, “and Bette deftly raises a pinkie. But the potent tea has unaccountably excited her, and she finds to her horror that she has erected a
tremendous boner
just as Lady Fashionbury leans over to enquire after her health!”

He stopped and looked at me. “We aren’t close, are we?”

I said nothing. It always unnerved me when he went into his own voice.

“Still, I’m going to ask a favor of you. If you say no, we won’t mention it again, all right?” He came over to me, smiling. “I want to come along with you to one of those dinners you have with your gentlemen friends. The Crosby gang. Harvey Meets Crosby. Yes or no?”

“Well … actually…”

He waited, towering above me. “Yes or no?” He grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet. I saw the swings again, and my brothers fighting alongside me and Jim hating me. “Just say yes or no.”

“Yes or no.”

He let me go and moved away. Then he roared with laughter. “How’s your love life?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“You never speak of it.”

“I keep secrets.”

“Yes, I’m well aware. You keep a good secret. Do you ever think about … back then?”

“You know,” I said, “I’d rather direct this scene than be in it, but I wouldn’t know what to tell the actors. What is this scene about?”

“Why won’t you take me to meet the Crosby gang?”

“Because you threatened me.”

“Is that the only reason?”

I lied. “Yes.”

“You want hot truth? I don’t even want to meet them. I truly don’t. I’d just make them angry, wouldn’t I? I’d dip my spoon into the fingerbowl and say, ‘What delicious consommé!’ And, tasting my pheasant, I’d turn to Crosby and say, ‘It’s absolu de
lish!
’ No, I wouldn’t say it. I’d
scream
it, right there in Le Grand Can-Can or wherever it is you go to.” And he did scream it, right there in his apartment. “Absolu de
lish!
It’s
ab
solu de
lish!
” He paced and frumped like Davis in her Elizabeth movies. “Why, Layt-ty Crospy, how haugh-ty you seem tto-ttay!” He pushed me back down on the couch. The damned aren’t always tender. He was furious—not, I think, at me. “They all have lovers, don’t they, the Crosby gang?”

“No, not all. A few. Nothing long-lasting.”

“That type doesn’t need lovers, anyway. They have fuck chums.” This too he screamed out. “
Fuck!Chums!
Once a month, with the lights turned down and a little Mozart in the background. Oh, it’s delicate and soigné. I’ll bet they don’t even fuck. Fuck is too lewd for that coven. They
cuddle!
” He sat down across the room from me and kicked off his shoes, calming down. “That brother of yours, the handsome one … Jim. He’s gay, isn’t he?”

“No.”

“You’re wrong.”

“No, I’m not.”

Harvey pulled off his socks and threw them in a corner.

I cleared my throat. “What
is
this scene about, by the way?”

“The scene is about how to hold a lover. Do you want a lover? Don’t answer; almost everyone does. Almost everyone.” He began to unbutton his shirt. “You’re my oldest friend and you know my secrets. Not all of them. But some of the best ones. Now let me tell you how to hold your beautiful gay lover. By being terrific in bed? No. That will guarantee a good premiere, but beautiful lovers by nature have already had much taste of fabulous carnal technique. You won’t hold him that way. Am I making you nervous?” He got up and slowly peeled off his shirt. “What else? By having pees or thighs of death? No. Who doesn’t, nowadays?” He unbuckled his belt, opened his pants, and took them off. Nude, he presented the most spectacular member I’ve ever seen. A bit longer or heavier and it would have been grotesque; like so, it was … well, champion queer. “Cock of death, too, has been called premium. But cock, I’ve discovered, is made for tricking, not love. Oh yes … yes, how often you’ve heard a man sigh that cock is everything. Once you’ve been fucked by a big one you can never go back to the minor leagues. Have you heard this?” He stroked himself fleetingly. “I’ve seen men weep as they lay before me, vulnerable and poetic, waiting for me to begin. They weep for joy. For a moment, one imagines that nothing else in the world is as important as cock. The wonder of it! But they don’t stay. They don’t take you in their arms and just hold on so quietly and happily. They don’t look at you, at any time of day, with those wild eyes one hears tell of. They don’t need you. Nor, I’m sorry to say, will wit or social grace avail you. No, there is only one way to hold a lover: by having a handsome face. You may have noticed that I do not. Not partly or nearly. Not
possibly.
And once one isn’t handsome, one never will be. Everyone talks about power, but everyone wants beauty. It’s sad, because you can acquire power but you can’t acquire beauty. Do you know why everyone wants beauty? Because beauty is the only thing in the world that isn’t a lie.”

He extended his arms, palms outward. “I am not offering myself to you, incidentally. I simply wish to show you, as generously as possible, a choice irony of contemporary urban life. Would you ever so mind going now?”

I got up. At the door he said, his eyes on the floor, “Somewhat needless to say, if you tell anyone about this…”

“I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

He looked up. “Were you ever?”

“All my life. Till about five minutes ago.”

He opened the door, then gently pulled me back as he thought of something. “Tell me, where is your brother now?”

“Here. He lives a few blocks from me, in fact.”

“What would happen if you said hello to him for me?”

“I haven’t spoken to Jim in years.”

He considered this. “You always had a very strange family. What was that littlest one’s name?”

“Tony. He bit your foot.”

Naked in the doorway, he watched me wait for the elevator. “That was all a long, long time ago,” he said. “You can forgive me now.”

“No, I can’t. And I never will.”

“Was I that awful to you?”

“It wasn’t just you.”

“Who else?”

I shook my head.

“It’s ancient history,” he urged. “An old story.”

“This story isn’t finished yet.”

“If you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you.”

I just looked at him and he shrugged and closed his door. So who did have the biggest boner in Hollywood? Harvey Jonas did, for all the good it did him; and it did him none; and that’s fine with me. You want hot truth? That scene was about the ruin promoted by childhood calamaties. About how something goes wrong in infancy and nothing feels right thereafter. About being haunted by nameless worries.

I promised not to expose the secrets of Harvey Jonas. But he owes me satisfaction: for my bicycle pump, for what happened at the swings, and mainly for some other matter that I’d rather not mention just now.

There is no crying anywhere in this story.

The Precarious Ontology of the Buddy System

Thinking back on the couples I have known, I note how many of them were unsuited for each other—Alex and Joe, for instance, or Mac and Nick. What is surprising about the gay fascination for the misalliance is how many odd couples actually seem rather made for each other, once they hook up. I marvel. When Dennis Savage, that very exponent of Stonewall-era sexual cosmopolitanism, picked up a youngster at standing room for
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,
I took it as usual news, at best a passing headline:
ALLURING VETERAN NABS NEW BOY IN TOWN
. But this was the boy it took four dates to land, and when their spotty rendezvous schedule grew constant, then insistent, I stood by, amused and supportive. When I met the boy and found him very young, very silly, and very uneducated, I held my peace. And when I saw this archon of the Circuit, the notable (if fiercely flawed) Dennis Savage, become so involved with this boy that he began to lecture me on the evils of the single-person family (especially mine), I smiled. One must. But then this kid moved in with Dennis Savage, and the kid was called Little Kiwi, and Dennis Savage acted as if he owned every place Little Kiwi was in, like a father, a creditor, and a king all at once. What was I to do? Especially as they would show up at my apartment whenever they chose. Actually, what I did was: I thought, There is a tale in this now. Another story begins to stir in this our gay life.

As Lord Mayor of the Circuit, Dennis Savage intends his visits as an honor, but somehow he always shows up when I’m pushing a deadline and, as he lives in my building, there’s never a warning. If I bar my door to him, he goes into some grotesque routine in the hall, which makes for crabby neighbors. Worse yet, now that Little Kiwi has moved in with him, they go everywhere together, often in the company of Little Kiwi’s disreputable dog, Bauhaus. But people tell me how lucky I am to have Dennis Savage’s confidence—“and that fetching number who walks in his shadows! My, my,
my!
” Will you listen to the sound of them? As if we were still in the late 1940s, when all the bars were unmarked and only bombers wore bomber jackets.

I’ve told Dennis Savage to call first. I’ve lectured him on the rudeness of poking into my fridge uninvited. I’ve warned him that Little Kiwi’s fabled charm is lost on me. And all he says is, “Have you noticed how lamplight picks up the tones in his hair?”

“How old is that kid, anyway?” I once asked him.

“Old enough to love.”

“He has the interests of a child of eight.”

“He voted in the last election.”

“For whom? The Velveteen Rabbit?”

“Everyone adores him. They dress up for him and bake a pie. Look at you.” I keep house in jeans and a sweatshirt. “And what do you give us to eat? BLTs!”

Actually, I give Dennis Savage BLTs. Little Kiwi subsists on grilled-cheese sandwiches and sliced tomato.

“Everyone wants Little Kiwi,” says Dennis Savage. “You should know this. Except no one can have him but me.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Dennis Savage chuckles. “I dare you.”

How satisfying it would be to outfox Dennis Savage, though on the other hand his relationship with Little Kiwi is too fascinating to menace. I always listen for the sour notes in the gay duet, perhaps because the local Sloan’s, at First Avenue and Fifty-third Street, seems at times to be populated exclusively by quarreling moustaches. But in these two I see the seamless fraternity of the worldly and the naïve, the hip and the unspoiled. Dennis Savage has been everywhere; Little Kiwi knows nothing.

Despite my complaints, I enjoy their visits, though they do tend to take over. One evening, as spring gave way to summer and my workday dwindled into daydreams and staring out the window, the two of them and Bauhaus paraded in.

Dennis Savage went into the kitchen to see about a snack, Little Kiwi was poking into the two huge cardboard boxes my new stereo had come in, and Bauhaus grabbed a sneaker in his mouth, ran around in a craze, crashed into the piano, and lay there.

“Hey! This would make a great boat,” said Little Kiwi, laying one of the boxes on the floor. “Would somebody push me around in my boat?”

“I’ll push you, little darling,” I said. Suddenly Dennis Savage came roaring out of the kitchen, steel in his eyes.

“Well, well, well,” I remark. “Look at somebody nervous about something.”

Dennis Savage takes a long breath and smiles. “This is a funny apartment and you are a funny man.”

“It’s a funny world.”

“How would you like no head?”

“Now I’m playing store,” Little Kiwi announces, hauling the box up on its side. “Who wants to buy a dog?”

“What else do you sell in your store?” I ask. “Kisses?”

Little Kiwi looked at me for quite some time, then shot the same look at Dennis Savage: confusion? distrust? fear? I must admit, lamplight does rather pick up the tones in his hair.

“You know,” I said to Dennis Savage. “I think it’s time you and I took Little Kiwi to the Island.”

“What island?” Little Kiwi asked.

“Fire.”

“Could Bauhaus come?”

“Surely,” I replied. “What’s Fire Island without Bauhaus?”

“I’m going to pack!” Little Kiwi cried, racing out with the dog.

“It so happens,” says Dennis Savage, “that I had just such a trip in mind.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “Of course. Of course. Of course.”