Like People in History (23 page)

"Are you worried?"

"I'm just being reclassified."

"I've heard," Alistair tried not to sound alarmist, "the minute they reclassify you, it's off to Fort Dix for basic training."

"I'm twenty-four years old," I argued. "The tri-state area is filled with eighteen-year-olds. They won't bother with me!"

"From Fort Dix they're going straight to Southeast Asia, Cord said."

"They want guys who can't write their names!" I protested, getting more nervous. "Not someone who's been taught via the Socratic method. Can you picture me in a gyrene's haircut, asking, 'But, Sarge,
why
exactly should I scream "Kill, Kill, Kill"?'"

"I hope you're right," Alistair said, and despite my factiousness I felt a sudden chill: even if I did manage to get out of going to Southeast Asia, I'd still be drafted, pulled out of my comfy life, forced to take orders from cretins, forced to sleep and shit and
shower
with a hundred creeps! Yecch! "And you?" I asked Alistair.

"I took the Queer-Clause so fast pearls rolled all over that draft office."

"I thought you didn't want it on your record."

"In case I decide to run for senator?"

"I'm just repeating what you told me a few years ago."

Alistair shrugged. "A girl's entitled to change..."

"Anyway I thought you did all that just to break up your mother's relationship with Albert," I said, my vague "all that" being, I thought, understood to include my cousin's ill-fated relationship with the gardener.

"Want to know the funny part? As long as I was making trouble, they stayed together. The minute I left, they split."

I found myself thinking that one way Alistair now differed from how he'd been was his near refusal to talk about his family—partly, I suppose, because he now found them boring, and partly because, like Julian and virtually everyone nowadays, Alistair wanted to be considered sui generis: a complete, distinct individual. The end result was to make him humble, even modest.

"Ex-cuse me!" Kenny the houseboy was in the doorway. "Our guests are asking for you;"

Meaning Julian was demanding me.

"Tell him to keep his falsies on," I blared, which made silly, skinny, unpretty Kenny shiver in delicious anticipation of an incident.

"When do you go for your physical?" Alistair asked. When I told him the date a few weeks hence, he said, "Don't worry, we'll keep you so doped up the night before, they wouldn't dream of taking you."

Inside, Iron Butterfly was playing "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" on the stereo, turned low. People were at the table drinking wine, smoking from the bong. Besides playing messenger, Kenny was clearing the table of the picturesque remains of
masalla murgh,
lamb
korma,
dal, roti, and various chutneys. Candles in the wrought-iron Mexican candelabra had burned down into grotesqueries. Marijuana smoke filled the air.

Julian was seated at the center of one long side of the table, approximately where Christ is placed in Da Vinci's mural. When 1 chose my own seat across from him, he glared at me, while continuing to pick at the torn ends of what had been a quite tasty
chapati.
Then he relented and kissed his fingers at me. I searched for and found Cord—standing against a wall near the kitchen: as far from Julian as he could get.

The bong was returned to Julian, who began to refill it.

Having an audience, naturally he played to it. Even without a musical instrument.

"This Michoacán grass," he began in his whiskey-fuzzy South London accent, "grows in only one place in the world!"

"Michoacán Province!" someone sassed.

Unfazed, Julian went on. "But
where
in that huge and wild province? I'll tell you where! It grows in a valley hidden within a giant underground cavern, fed by mountain streams and illuminated by air vents dangerously eroding the cavern's limestone roof."

He checked for listeners: most of the group was hooked.

"Only a hundred people in the world know the location of this miraculous subterranean two acres of farm," Julian went on.

"They belong to two families: the Figueras and the Modestos. The Figueras and Modestos do everything themselves: plant the grass, harvest it, weigh and wrap and porter the stuff out of the hidden valley.

"They only sell it clean. Stems are fed to the burros or burned for heat when they're camped at night upon the frigid Mexican plateau, headed toward the U.S. border at Arizona. I've bought kilos of the stuff and never counted more than a dozen seeds. When I unwrapped my first kilo," he paused, "it was so powdery, so rich with buds and flowers, I found myself blinded by a haze of cannabis pollen. Absolutely stoned in seconds without having smoked!"

He sipped his wine. We all turned to watch the person with the bong. Was it our imagination, or were we getting higher than usual?

We waited with anticipation. Part and parcel of the experience of smoking grass and calling ourselves "dopers" were the stories of where a particularly good batch had grown, a sort of oral tradition.

"Eventually," Julian continued, "I persuaded my dealer to bring me to the source of this wondrous bounty! One night, I was taken there.

We traveled for hours by jeep, then by mule. When we arrived, the blindfold was removed and I was in a dark place surrounded by all these amazing people with faces right off Olmec stone carvings."

Julian went on to tell how he managed to charm the Figuera-Modesto families—not into giving away their grass or the secret location of the site—but into making him an honorary member of their clan.

"At first they wanted to cut open my scrotum and take one
teste
out," Julian said, "since single-balledness is common among male Modestos, but I persuaded them that simple bloodletting would do."

He showed us a scar on his left thumb that might have come from anything, an accident with a milk bottle.

"I'm now a co-owner. I plant and reap my own parcel."

Expressions of "Gee-whiz!" and its variants went around the table.

I got up to take a piss.

The story was typical of Julian: far beyond even the legendary stories potheads commonly fabricated or overembroidered, it aimed into the realm of the singularly fantastic. But then, everything in Julian's life was fantastic, one of a kind, unprecedented. Nothing was, or could possibly be, common, nothing ordinary.

Including the story of how he'd met me, which I'd overheard as: "There he was, virtually naked in the rain, handing out fruit and freshly baked bread to hundreds of starving children at Woodstock. And he was a virgin!"

Would Julian have bothered with me if we'd met in a more ordinary way?

I wondered.

"You really don't see it?" Cord asked when I walked out of the john and looked into the kitchen.

"See what?" I asked.

"In him! Oh, never mind!"

I stopped Cord. "What?"

"He's so..." Cord searched for the word.

"Phony?" I asked. "Nah. He's just a big kid. A big deprived kid, enjoying himself for the first time in his life."

Cord shrugged. "You're more forgiving."

"Peace. Love. LSD, brother!" I gave the vee sign.

"But I guess you can afford to be," Cord said.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

But he'd gone into the dining room, where the group around the table was breaking up, people getting up to dance to the Stones' "19th Nervous Breakdown," and now Cord also was dancing—or rather shaking himself in place—surrounded by his friends. The next thing I knew they were all leaving.

"You like that bit o' fluff, do you?" Julian said into my ear a second later, as I watched from the sidelines.

"He's cuter than you are!" I provoked back.

"Far too serious," Julian pontificated. "He'll get in big trouble being that serious. Especially since he has such a little prick."

I was getting real tired of Julian knowing everything. "Who says he has a little prick?"

"He has. This big." Julian crooked his little finger.

"He does not!"

"He does too. And it'll hurt when he uses it on you," Julian said, "because he doesn't know
how
to use it. That type never does."

"Want to make a bet?"

"You would! You'd let him fuck you just to disprove me!"

Seeing how irritated I'd gotten him, I said, "I'd let him fuck me to irritate you!"

"You wouldn't dare!" Julian's face said he was joking, but his voice had taken on a certain hysterical edge I now recognized.

Others recognized it too; they'd turned toward us as a group.

"Oh, wouldn't I? Watch me!"

"You fucking little slut!" Julian shouted, as I'd known he would, and grabbed me, as I'd known he would.

I could just make out Cord Shay's face among the chorus watching as I hauled off to throw the right uppercut punch which would connect terrifically to Julian's jaw, knock him out cold, incite reams of gossip column speculation for weeks to come, and effectively end our romance.

"You're coming over later, aren't you?" Alistair asked over the phone.

"I've been at your place all week," I protested.

"Cord Shay might come," he tempted.

Cord had been there almost every night since he'd first appeared.

"You really don't have to baby-sit me, Alistair. I'll survive."

The truth was I appreciated like hell what I'd just called Alistair's baby-sitting. It was thirteen days since I'd decked Julian Gwynne, almost a week since he and his band had gone on their European tour, a tour I was supposed to have been part of.

Instead, I was stuck in this pasteboard cubicle again, nine to five, five days a week, my desk covered by pads of yellow legal paper upon which I doodled endlessly; the single manuscript I was supposed to be evaluating was untouched, in truth unread by me save for its ho-hum preface. Naturally I was second-guessing myself, wondering if in shoving off from Julian I'd completely ruined my life. He'd taken it hard at first, then—as I'd intuited—gone on with his life as though I'd never even happened. That hurt. Even worse, with Julian gone, there was little to divert, amuse, or enlighten my otherwise colorless life. Nothing but—now—the wild improbability of maybe later tonight getting close enough to Cord Shay to lay a tentative hand upon one of his perfect thighs, tightly clothed though it would no doubt remain within the unbreakable armor of his steel-gray work pants.

Alistair said, "I know you'll survive. I just thought you liked Cord."

"Of course I
like
him! I only wonder if I'm, you know, barking up the wrong tree." Before Alistair could say anything, I asked, "What did Alan say when you asked about Cord? You did ask?"

"I asked, and like Christopher before him, Alan was vague."

I sighed. I groaned.

"But neither of them is as cute as you," Alistair quickly said, "and Cord likes you. The only reason he's coming tonight is that I said you'd be here."

"Saith Alistair Dodge. Matchmaker from Hell," I said.

What I wanted to say was
Why? Why match me up with Cord?
Could Alistair merely be trying to cheer me up? That did fit in with what I'd so far seen of the new, improved, post-success Alistair. Why couldn't I believe it? Because, unenlightened me, I still hadn't forgotten the old Alistair, capable of anything.

No, the real problem was Cord Shay himself. I had to admit to myself

I wanted him, physically wanted him, and I'd never admitted that about any man or boy before. Sure, I was interested in his mind. Whenever we were together, we'd talk for hours, mostly about politics, and in fact, to show him I wasn't with him merely for his body or in fact myself brain-dead, I'd actually begun to talk back to him, which meant I'd had to actually think about what he was saying, which in turn meant that I was beginning to
think
radical politics for myself—exactly what Cord wanted me to be doing.

"Suit yourself," Alistair said. "Don't come. But don't complain to me if after all your softening up of Cord, someone else wangles him between the sheets."

He'd hit my hope, and fear, with the precision of a Kentucky marksman.

Maria suddenly appeared in my doorway shaking a piece of paper.

"I've got to go," I said into the receiver. "Alistair, I'll be there!"

I hung up as Maria handed me an interoffice memo, and I was so noodled that after reading it twice I still hadn't a clue what it was about. Maria said I had to sign, confirming I'd read it. I was left to stew about Cord Shay.

For a second, I actually thought of dialing Carl DeHaven in his cubicle on the other side of the twenty-sixth floor and asking if
this
could possibly be my real life; and if so, what I'd done to deserve it.

Then I remembered how Carl was acting around me recently, and 1 was dissuaded. We'd briefly, if to me unsatisfactorily, talked about this alteration in his behavior: what it came down to was that Carl thought I'd been deceiving him all these years by not telling him I was gay.

It didn't matter to Carl that I myself hadn't been at all cognizant of the fact. Nor did it matter that Carl had always thought Debbie and I were an item, and as soon as he found out we weren't, he'd moved in on her so aggressively they were now living together. It didn't even help that Carl considered Julian's band one of the all-time greats. His sense of betrayal remained—"God, the things I must have said about queers! Oops!"—and could not be shaken. We'd never be close again. Nor would Debbie and I, since she'd sworn fealty to Carl.

Which left me with Maria, dizzier than ever, and Frank Kovacs, more despicable than ever now that he was both fawning and just beginning to suspect the truth: my to-him-magical connection with his rock idol was over.

Which left me with Alistair, who'd become willy-nilly the somewhat distracted ringmaster of his own nightly circus. There were moments when I suspected that anyone with long hair and a pair of bell-bottoms capable of saying "Groovy!" would be admitted to the place. Little by little, however, the mass in what had become known as "Penthouse Perdu" (named after either the breakfast or Proust's novel; it was never made clear) could be separated more or less into three groups: