Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (20 page)

“This man is lying,” I said, coming forward. “He’s a friend of the aggressor in this fight.”

“Hey,
you
lyin’, you bitch, I never saw any you before. I don’t know
any
these guys, lyin’ prick.”

Ignoring him and concentrating my gaze upon the cop, I calmly went on, “They were talking more or less cordially together when the incident occurred, so they are friends on some level. And everyone standing around here will contradict what this man says. The man who is injured allowed his dog to attack
this
man’s dog, and he himself attacked the man when he protected his dog. The injured man committed assault, and the man you have in handcuffs is innocent.”

The cop I was addressing, one of those seen-it-all cynics who
thinks every citizen is guilty of something, didn’t like me, the Hispanic, either of the two dog owners, or the dogs. But my outburst energized the community, and suddenly everyone, strangely silent while the Hispanic was selling his lies, was eager to talk. At once, the cops took statements, released Tim, arrested the other guy—he didn’t need the ambulance, it developed—and the Hispanic as well, for obstructing justice, when he started screaming at one of the witnesses.

“Neat,” said a voice behind me. “I call that Ivy League control. Master class, my friend.”

I had turned and there he was. “Peter Keene’s out blading,” I observed.

“You’re biking. Nice hat.”

“It isn’t fair to mock helmets. They’re not supposed to look hot, they’re supposed to protect you.”

He smiled, patted my shoulder apologetically, and, with a confiding look, said, “Have you noticed that palling around with lookers means you meet other lookers? As a rule, even?”

“No. I’ve noticed that palling around with intelligent and stimulating people means you meet other—”

“I’m dividing the whole world into categories, but there’s so many of them, you know.”

He was grinning, coasting around on his skates, figure-eighting and so on.

“Categories,” he sang in a pleasing baritone as he slowed to a stop just behind my left ear. “Like him,” he said, nudging me in the direction of a handsome young stoic of a runner in green shorts. “What do you bet he squeaks when he’s fucked?”

“You just-came-out guys always act as if sex were some new invention and you owned the patent. This has all been done. It’s old news.”

“There’s a book in it—the categories, I mean. Types. Green squeaky runner. Mambo boy. Hot nerd on ice.”

“Listen well,” I told him. “There are only five types—evil queen, silly queen, tearful queen, business queen, and dangerous queen.”

He sat back on the concrete divider and said, “Pitch it to me.”

“The evil queen is enraged and invidious. The silly queen is vapid and contentless, though he can, particularly around the age of twenty, have Looks Control. The tearful queen is dissatisfied, whiny, and always has the wrong boy friend. The business queen has his life in order, his goals identified, his attainment of them in process—”

“That’s what you want to be.”

“That’s what I am.”

“Remains to be seen, I suspect. Well, and the dangerous queen?”

“I don’t know if I like you or not.”

He leaned his head to one side, eyeing me quizzically as a dog does when it hears a quirky noise.

“You keep changing form,” I added. “When we meet you, you’re this ever-so-up-for-it hightown type, with the ties and hesitations. Then you’re on your knees before Carlo, throwing dignity to the blust’ring wind or swallowing wave.”

He raised an eyebrow at that.

“Lovelace,” I said. “ ‘To Lucasta.’ ”

He nodded.

“And now,” I continued, here you are with seventies muscles and nineties gear, erupting with the confident rap of a veteran.”

“Well, perhaps you might think of it as business queen with dangerous queen ambitions and, oh, just a vestige of—”

“Your shorts are too sheer, your nipples are too spiked, and your eyes are too trashy.” He was pooling around on his blades again, rolling where they took him. “Stop transforming yourself,” I concluded. “Relax!”

“It’s the long hot summer,” he sang out, sailing away.

I remounted my bike to ride off, but he skated up in front of me, braking to grab my handlebars and block me.

“Okay,” I said, letting him. “A few weeks ago, one of my literary protégés came to town from Louisville. We’d known each other for years by mail and phone, but at last we met. Joey was enchanted
with New York—his first time, you see—and I showed him Central Park. Then he took me to a party in the deep East Village at which everyone was a zine editor in his early twenties. Except me, right. But I was in tangy shorts, a silk shirt, and dark glasses from our Park walk, so I was not entirely out of fashion. I used the expletive ‘way cool’ at regular intervals. I never cried out, ‘What idiot chose this disgusting music? I want to hear
Flahooley
, or at least Brahms’s Second!’ I seemed to be, in a narrow way, part of it—and, truth to tell, I did not hear some feckless youth murmur to a friend, ‘Who’s Grandpa?’ But it was a long party, and I drank from nine to something like five
A.M.,
and somewhat later, I awoke in a black apartment stippled with those little red lights that everyone has but me because I don’t own the new equipment.”

“Dennis Savage says you use a typewriter,” he reported, still in charge of my handlebars.

“And balance my checkbook on an abacus. Now, you have to understand that I was very befuddled. From video games, I know that heat-sensing lasers might toom out of the colored light holes—”

“You’d passed out and they’d all gone to bed!”

I nodded. “I felt my way along the walls to the bathroom, took a whizz, then stumbled into someone. I still have my dark glasses on in a dark apartment. I’m still befuddled. So I say Something Key to this gentleman—who I
think
was nude—and then it’s later and I’m on the street hailing a cab. I got home in one piece, but the question is, What had I said to whom did I meet?”

He was smiling at me, cruising the place, and drawing conclusions, all at once.

“The next day,” I said, “I found out. The guy I’d met was in fact Joey, and what I said was ‘I need someone to tell me where I’m supposed to be just now.’ ”

Peter laughed and said, “That’s so nineties.”

“Whom does that concept remind you of?”

“I’m immediately due for three weeks off. You want to go biking with me some weekday in the Park? We’ll be evil queens
checking up on the business queens and the silly queens. Well, and the . . .”

“Tearful queens, a surprisingly common type.”

“Yes, but the . . .”

“Torah queens.”

“. . . No . . .”

“Indignant and enfeebled yet strangely sinister queens.”

“Dennis Savage promised that you’d be friendly to me in his stead.”

“All right: dangerous queens. Just don’t get your hopes up.”

“How about Tuesday, eleven
A.M.,
at the Sixtieth Street entrance, by the Zoo? Rain date Thursday. I’ll make you like me.”

“You’re on,” I said, and he let me go.

We were both prompt, and the day was so glowing that New York felt like Prince Valiant’s castle. It took us two minutes to reach the summit of the hill that gives on to the loop encircling the Park, and already Peter had cruised nine men and a dalmatian.

“Look,” I said, as we waited for the light to change, “don’t you ever turn it off?”

“Carlo says you get the best sex hot off the street.”

The light changed, and we chugged into the roadway. About three pedal revolutions later, Peter was staring at four workers one hundred feet to the east engaged in repaving the pathways. They were shirtless in the heat, and one of them was a looker, but Peter was silent till we reached the Seventy-second Street transverse.

“Can we cut around again?” he asked.

So we bent back along the lower subloop, and when we reached the workers again I led Peter off the road onto the grass so he could fill his eyes—because otherwise I’d know no peace. As we dismounted, I said, “Let me show you how this is done. No, don’t look yet. The rules are: One, Don’t let him know you’re watching him. Two, Don’t let
any
of them know you’re watching him. Three, Both of us cannot watch at the same time. Four, We have to appear
to be in conversation, idly glancing this way and that. Got me? Now,
you
look. Before he senses it and catches you, calmly turn back to me.”

Peter was already looking.

“Describe him,” I said.

“A little less than average height, straight black hair, slightly exotic features, unbelievable bod. Twenty-. . . six?”

“Now me,” I said as Peter turned away. “Nice smile, hair in bangs, I haven’t seen that look in . . . Quiet, friendly, extremely excellent V-slope in the torso, just enough hair across the chest to inspire confidence, pinprick navel . . .”

“The jeans ride quite low on his hips,” Peter went on, as I pretended to adjust something inside my helmet. “That’s a lovely look. Very sweet face . . . Slavic?”

“Czech,” I put in, bending down to check the gearshift.

“Marco is his name. Or Anton. He has an enchanting accent, in which he tells impenetrable jokes about life in America.”

“Married,” I said.

“Don’t be too sure.”

“What you wish, and what is likely to be true, are not necessarily the same thing.”

“How long can we keep cruising?” he asked, turning back to me.

“Provided we don’t burn a hole in him with the fire in our contemplation, we could quite naturally lay our bikes on the grass and sit like picnickers, covertly drinking him in. That is, if you haven’t had enough.”

“I never have enough.”

So we did that, taking in our man as he trucked stone blocks in a wheelbarrow. We had ideal vantage, close enough to discern but distant enough to seem uninterested.

“We have to at least pretend to be conversing,” I told him, breaking into his reverie.

“Why is it that a man who is half-dressed,” Peter offered, “is sexier than a man who is naked?”

“It’s the juxtaposition of symbols and the tension of contexts,” I answered, missing Dennis Savage. He would love this. “As middle-class observers, we perceive the jeans and clodhopper shoes he’s wearing as working-class—virile, iconically uncivilized. Pure sexy. A woman of his own class would say, Gee, he’s cute. To us, it’s way past cute. It’s redemptive. We seek his erotic power to enrich our own paltry sense of ecstasy.”

“I don’t believe a word of it! And I wish you’d speak for yourself.”

“Then there’s this thing about hot men going shirtless in the city. All right, we’re in the green world—but Fifth Avenue is a minute away by foot. The city is civilization. Civilization is clothes, façades, protection.”

Staring at the worker, Peter was listening so hard the tips of his ears were clenched.

“So,” I continued, “to go half-dressed in the city is to be half-formed in civilization. Open, uncovered. Natural. Real. On a beach, a man in Speedos is axiomatic. In the city, a man in jeans is incendiary. It’s a matter of how one reads the text.”

“That is . . . I must say, it’s the most—”

“He sees us.”

Peter, turning to see, ventriloquisted, “Are you sure he’s cruising
us
?”

“I’m not sure he’s cruising. But he’s definitely got a bead on us.”

“He’s so beautiful. I want him. How do I get him?”

“You spoke the history of gay life in three sentences.”

“What would Carlo do?”

“Oh, Rip would get him. He never fails.”

One of the other workers approached our man with some distraction, and the two of them went off to another part of the site.

“But,” I warned him, “you have to be Rip-tough to do that. Some of these guys—”

“I need a hook.”

“I hope we’re joking.”

“I’m not . . . maybe . . .”

I shrugged. “Catch him at quitting time. You live nearby—if he wants a shower or a beer . . .”

“Good Lord, am I capable of this? Do . . . well, do you know a lot of men who would . . . try to pick him up?”

“Yes, a lot, over the years. But I feel bound to point out that almost none of them was, like you and me, educated.”

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe civilization has a drawback.”

We considered our dream man: laughing at a colleague’s sally, resting, working his wheelbarrow. At odd moments, he looked at us, but it was never more than a glance.

“I don’t know what it is,” Peter said. “I’ve been in the city for over a decade. I must have passed a thousand like him. I scarcely . . . Why is it suddenly . . . Well, I just feel that he could give me some speck of information that I . . . If he could apprise me . . .”

“ ‘I need someone to tell me where I’m supposed to be just now.’ ”

He said, “Oh.
I’m
the one you think that’s about.”

About a week later, Virgil and Cosgrove had just got in another load of proofs and were taking inventory when I came in from a downtown run to the Strand Bookstore with a very successful haul: a mint copy of the anthology edition of E. F. Benson’s
Lucia
novels (easy to find but almost always in decrepit condition); the sumptuous John Ardoin–Gerry Fitzgerald Callas book (one of the rarest items on the resale circuit—no one voluntarily parts with it, and it’s said that the disposition of an owner’s copy is a routine feature of the gay will); and a forgotten Patrick Dennis novel that a friend had asked me to pick up for him. I detail the transaction in case some sociology professor wants to know what gay men read.