Like People in History (60 page)

"So you spent the night with Horace," Wally said. "And I suppose you're proud of that."

"Not really," I quickly said.

That was untrue, naturally, but in the months we'd been together I'd discovered that Wally (like so many of his generation) possessed an ethical system astonishingly more rigid than my own (or that of my flower children generation); a system wherein a deed like screwing with a straight boy was not only not the turn-on, subversion, and giggle I considered it, but also somewhat suspect. Suspect of, if not "internalized homophobia," then at least a Serious Lack of Seriousness.

Wally and I had exited Central Park, crossed CPW, and walked a block and a half. We were a few doors from Alistair's building.

"So what happened to Alistair and Matt?"

"We're here!" I announced, aiming myself at the building foyer.

Wally held me back. "Tell me!"

"Later. Why, don't we deal with this mess now?"

"One answer! No, two!" Wally corrected.

"Okay!" Wally had now opened himself up to being annoyed on my terms. "Horace Brecker III turned out to be a terrific lay. Partly, I suspect, out of a month or so of horniness, partly out of drug-induced passion. We made love for hours while the yacht circled eastern Long Island, and when the MDA wore off, we passed out completely. We didn't return to the Pines for over thirty-six hours, and when we did, Horace packed up and jetted to San Francisco the next day. There, after a scandalously short time, he proposed to that woman he'd been seeing for years. And she accepted. No, he and I never saw each other again, although he did send me a note thanking me, saying not only that he never once regretted what we'd done, but that the night had been exactly the kick he needed to convince him to settle down once and for all."

"Jes-us!" Wally said. "Heterosexuals are crazy."

I let that pass: to me gays had always seemed at least equally gaga.

"And Matt?" Wally insisted.

"They went to Europe, just as Alistair said they would. Both were gone by the time Horace and I returned. Without even leaving a note. Of course I thought I'd hear from one or the other soon enough. But it was two months before, one day at work, the Grunt rather sheepishly asked for the keys to my apartment. Matt had empowered him to collect his things, to pack and ship overseas."

"So you
didn't
quit the magazine as you threatened?"

"Did too!" I defended myself. "Right after the holidays, when I had what I considered enough savings plus a bonus. It was another half year before I even had to think of money again."

"Did Alistair make Matt a literary lion in Europe as he said he would?"

"For a while... after a fashion.... Matt was published in a few quarterlies in Paris and London. He did a poem suite in
Paris Vogue
with photographs by Helmut Newton, which wasn't too shabby. He appeared with an interpreter on 'Apostrophes,' the Frogs' so-called intellectual TV show. But that was about it! The poetry didn't cross to the States until some time after I'd left
Manifest,
when Harte finally published Matt's poems.

"I never found out what happened, whether Alistair and Matt disagreed on the next step in Matt's career, or whether they developed personal disagreements, or if Matt suddenly felt that he'd sold out. After a year or so, even those few mentions and photos of him in foreign magazines stopped. I knew from friends that Alistair and Matt were no longer seen in each other's company. No surprise, given how hardheaded both of them were.

"Alistair returned here, then to L.A. Matt stayed in Europe and moved to Italy, modeling for Armani in Milan for a while. There was talk of him dating another model, some Brit who people said resembled me. But I never confirmed the rumor—or checked out the model. However, over the next year or so I'd never open
Esquire
or
GQ
and come upon Matt's photo without having one emotion or another. Usually when I came upon his photo, I'd simply be irritated the rest of the day, but one time—you're going to laugh—I didn't even recognize Matt in the picture at first, given the way he was dressed and posed, but I got a hard-on, a real diamond-cutter!" ,

Wally didn't laugh. Neither, however, did he seem upset. "And that was it?" he asked. "You never saw Matt again?"

"Once, at the Pines. It was a late Sunday afternoon, and I'd been visiting someone who parked his ketch there. I was opposite the restaurant and shops and disco. Across the water, I saw these three guys come out of Bay Walk next to the Pines Pantry. Two of them looked European. Older. It took a minute for me to recognize Matt as the third. His hair was long, past his shoulders. He'd shaved off all facial hair. He was wearing a loose turtle-neck top and baggy linen trousers. His face looked, I don't know, harder, more adult somehow. Maybe because, as predicted, he'd lost his foot."

"You mean he...?"

"...wore a prosthetic. I couldn't see it clearly, but he was walking with a cane. It was from how he walked and leaned on it that I could tell."

As I spoke, I remembered how stunned I'd been when I'd seen Matt that day at the Pines. How I'd been so elated to see him I'd lifted one hand and opened my mouth to shout across the harbor slip for his attention. Then Matt had moved, walked maybe three steps, and I'd seen and instantly known his foot had been taken off. My shout died in my mouth, an expanding blue balloon fizzling,

"Did he confirm it?" Wally asked.

"I... I couldn't talk to him," I admitted.

"Because he wasn't perfect anymore?"

"Because I knew if we'd stayed together, he'd still have had his foot."

"That's medically ridiculous!"

"I know."

"And
that
was the last you saw him? Then you'd heard that he died?"

"Well...," I hedged. Hoping to change the subject, I went on. "I did see Alistair again, when he moved back to the city. Wally? Can we go up now?"

That distracted him.

"What exactly are you going to do up there? What do you want me to do?"

"I'm not sure, Wals. Support me with the White Woman."

"A cinch!"

And then, before he let me go, Wally said in a different tone of voice, "Thanks for telling me all about you and Matt."

"Do you feel better about him now?"

"This may sound weirdso, but I feel like we would have gotten along if we'd ever met."

"Right," I said. Perhaps it was my own ego-generated shortsightedness, but I had this terrible feeling that each of them was so self-involved, they would have totally ignored each other, or at the most, brushed each other off.

"Gird your loins," I cheer-led. "We've got Dorky to deal with!"

"Where are loins exactly?" Wally asked. "And what precisely does it mean to gird them? To use a girdle, or...? What are you muttering, Rog?"

The outer glass door was locked. We had to stand there and knock and gesticulate and make stupid faces to get the attention of the nighttime lobby attendant. And when he did finally deign to tear himself away from his magazine long enough to peer at us, he turned out to be someone I didn't know.

"Oh great! A stranger!"

The magazine dangling from one large, hairy, pale hand was
Health and Fitness
, a Spandex-clad couple—overoiled and overmuscled— prominent on the cover, throwing "show" poses at each other among cutouts of giant oranges and lemons, doubtless in citric reverence of Florida. The lobby attendant was white, young, with a square head, big shoulders, and that specific kind of thick neck only found on obvious fans of bodybuilding. I assumed he was an incessant masturbator. His first response to us was that universal shrug denoting "What's up?"

I gestured for him to unlock one or more of the several glass doors separating us. When he'd disappeared and appeared again with a medieval chatelaine's set of variously sized keys, managed to get a few doors open, and was flat against the final glass separating us, he shouted, "What do you want?"

"To get in and see someone!"

"At...?" checking his watch, "four-fifty
A.M.?"

"That
is
what you're here for, isn't it?" I shouted back. "To let people in."

"Who you seem'?" He was looking us over, Wally and me, sizing us up but not giving away his evaluation. Were we dangerous? I couldn't tell what he'd concluded, until he suddenly opened up and let us into the outer foyer.

I said my cousin. It was something of an emergency.

Exactly the wrong
move:
he grew instantly suspicious. "What kind of emergency?"

I'd been phoning and not been able to reach my cousin all night.

"They had a party. Till late," he explained. "Might have had the phone off the hook."

"We were
at
the party," I explained back. "Left early."

"It's over." He shrugged. "You got a key to the apartment?"

"Not with me."

"You sure they're expecting you?" he interrogated.

"Yes," I lied.

"No!" Wally told the truth.

"You expect me to wake them up?"

That was exactly what I expected.

"You're living in a fantasy!"

"Something's wrong. I know it. My cousin and I grew up together. I know whenever something's wrong with him."

That bullshit unnerved him a bit.

"What's wrong?"

"He's sick. Even in a coma."

"Not a fire?" he asked.

"A fire?" I stupidly said, "No! No fire!"

To his relief. "If you and your cousin are so close, how come I never saw you before?"

"I don't usually visit at five
A.M
. Call upstairs! I promise to take any flack. In fact, I'll take the phone as soon as you—"

"I thought he's in a coma?"

"I'll talk to his roommate!"

"Oh." He lifted the phone, still hesitating. "If you were here before, how come you left?"

Who did he think he was? Hercule Poirot?

"We had to be somewhere!" I tried to hide my growing irritation.

"Where?"

"What's the difference?"

Wally said, "Across town. To demonstrate at Gracie Mansion!"

A minute of incomprehension from the attendant, then: "Oh yeah! I saw it on the news. That makes sense, you being gay and all," he added for his own benefit. Then, still testing us: "You see what some of them put on the roof?"

"He did it." Wally tapped my shoulder. "He was one of the guys who put the banner up on the roof."

"No kidding!" The lobby attendant smiled, and the smile humanized him. I could picture his mother showing around a photo of him, a few years younger, wearing that smile, proud of her son. "You got some fuckin' balls!" he added with a chuckle. "You're lucky they didn't catch you."

"They did catch me. I was in the Tombs most of the night."

"No shit!" That information seemed to do the trick;—out of sympathy or something else, he began to dial upstairs, as he asked what the jail was like.

It took a while for anyone to answer. In fact, he was about to say "See!" and hang up, and I to interfere and try to take the receiver from him, when...

"Sorry to bother you, sir. It's Stanley downstairs. Someone to see you. Mr. Dodge, really. Says he's his cousin..." To me: "Name?" I gave it, and he reported it into the receiver and hung up. "You can go up."

"We can?"

Before I could say anything else stupid, Wally took me by the shoulders and guided me toward the elevators.

"So far, so good."

In this harsh light, I thought Wally looked pale. I hoped he wasn't coming down with a cold or... I suddenly trembled with the thought.... How many times in the past decade had some gay man thought exactly that—that he was coming down with a cold or flu—only to find himself in a hospital bed surrounded by tubes and machines from which only death released him, months later?

"Hel-lo?" Wally chimed to get my attention.

The elevator arrived. We got in. He punched the floor number. The door closed and we began to rise.

"Cold feet?" Wally asked.

"I was just... It's been, you know, a while since I've thought of so many of the people from the Island, from the late seventies, 1 told you about tonight.... I still can't believe that I'll never see them again. I keep expecting to turn a corner and have Ray Ford grab me from behind and spin me around and bear-hug me till my ribs threaten to crack, and I never go to any gathering without expecting to see Dick Dunne or George Stavrinos or Vito....

"I don't get it! Nature is usually so tightfisted with what it provides. So very prudent how it husbands its resources. Why would Nature go to the trouble to create so much luxuriance in what after all was a group of nonreproductive creatures? Why create such an extraordinary generation of beautiful, talented, quirkily intelligent men, and then why let them all die so rapidly, one after the other? It doesn't make the least bit of sense. It's not natural. It's not the way Nature behaves.

"It's certainly not comprehensible in a society filled with such mediocrity. And, Wally, before you begin to argue, I do consider your generation of gays to be filled with mediocrity! What made my group stand apart was not only our attractiveness, our social cohesion, but that by the time we appeared at the Pines in 1975 or so, we were already achieved individuals, architects and composers, authors and designers, illustrators and filmmakers, choreographers and playwrights and directors and set designers and...