Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (25 page)

“Oh, it must have, by now. Of course, he’s planning on a real dinosaur, and . . .” She touches Dennis Savage. “Come on, boyo, what ails you?”

“We’re always planning on real dinosaurs,” he says. “But then we find—”

“Here’s a cab!” Stephen calls out, to us all.

Linda holds out her hand to me.

“Nice to meet you,” I say, taking it.

“Where’s Virgil?” she asks Dennis Savage.

He starts to make a telling gesture, but Stephen is already pushing his family into the cab, and the Tomjoys take off for the north.

“You know,” I said, as they vanished around the corner, “I keep thinking of questions that Virgil and Cosgrove left out of their sex survey. Essential ones—like ‘How do you hold your lover?’ ”

He nodded as we went back inside.

“But what’s your answer?” I said.

“It depends on the lover. You hold a fine, eager young chap by teaching him. They love that—getting smarter, more powerful.
You hold an older, perhaps more sturdy man by sharing his sorrows and celebrating his victories.”

“How do you hold Virgil?”

“I did, for fourteen years, by giving him structure, entertainment, and praise. I was his college, emotionally, psychologically, and culturally.”

“Fourteen years is a long college.”

“Yet everybody is graduated sooner or later.”

We got into the elevator.

“How do you hold Cosgrove, while we’re at it?”

“I don’t. He has nowhere else to go.”

“I knew we weren’t going to get a straight answer on that. I just wanted to enjoy hearing you finesse your way around the question for the hundredth time. ‘He has nowhere else to go’—as if he were checking into a hotel during a blizzard.”

“Ah, here’s my floor,” I said, doing an exit.

That was ambiguous, indirect. Yes. But the second ending is more elucidating, for in it Peter and I are having a postmortem lunch at the Broadway Diner, my local joint.

“I knew it couldn’t continue indefinitely,” Peter is telling me. “The way he would go
on
about his family. Besides, I’m too young to settle down. I visualize turning forty and . . . well, the
ideal
man shows up, and
he’s
forty, so—”

“Define ‘ideal,’ ” I said.

“Oh, well, isn’t that the problem? Some piece of poetry passes the night and you’re a convert to Young Energy. A bodybuilder catches your eye and you think, Ah, the Power of Fathers. Then all those supplementary considerations, like straight as opposed to wavy hair, or skin tone, or lip context—”

“Excuse me,
lip context?”

“Well, there’s high context, the full, sensual kind, and then we know of low context, the thin, dangerous, perhaps even executioner’s lips that—”

“Jesus!” I said, resting my head on the table. “Over twenty
years after Stonewall, the taxonomy still isn’t finished!”

“I think I must love a dark-haired but blond-skinned and not overly chiseled muscleboy with . . . well, not notorious but at least presentable abs and some chest hair, either in T formation or just for emphasis along the pectorals, and a long, long torso and simply no hips at all, but immensely filled-up thighs of the smooth and supple yet thunderous variety that I imagine one would have to be born with, and . . . consider . . . yes. The ass must be high, firm, and round, and I know this is rare but I mean
really and truly
high, because how could you love someone who didn’t . . . Well, what are you moaning about down there?”

I raised my head; people were looking. “I have never approved of the concept—in fact, before now I never even heard of it—of considering a man lacking a high, round ass as unlovable.”

“Doesn’t Carlo have a beautiful ass?”

“Deliriously so. The Museum of Modern Art has a pedestal waiting with his name on it. They plead weekly.”

“And Carlo is the
key man
!”

“Yes, and what’s wonderful about him is his love and smarts, his cultivation of friends, his passions, so large they—”

“I’ll tell you what’s large about—”

“Even as a joke this conversation is disreputable,” I told him. “Some men are lookers, that’s all.”

He was grinning at me.

I said, “What happened with that kid from the Roxy? The writer.”

Getting back to his food, Peter said, “I have to tell you, he has a
lot
of talent. He’s quite, quite the discovery.”

“And how’s the writing?”

The third ending is Cosgrove and I at sleeping time, when, for some reason he refuses to explain, he insists on being held tightly. If I happen to tire and turn over, he engineers me back and sets it up again.

I asked him, this night, “That question, ‘What’s your favorite
activity with your partner?’ Would you mind giving me your answer to that?”

“In winter. When it’s so cold out that we have to run the heater all night and be under extra covers. And no one can come in and get mad at me. It’s so still that I feel safe. Do you think Alfie just liked me, or did he admire me, too?”

Suddenly, porn had lost all sense of taboo. It had been subcult, dangerous, a thing of the night town. Now it was sitting on the coffee table when Aunt Laura dropped by with your Christmas present. Porn was so acculturated that even Kern Loften, the most prudent man of my acquaintance, began to amass a Collection of Magazines. You know how you never seem to have more than a very few friends who share your particular taste in men—maybe only one friend? Mine was Kern. He and I would spend afternoons going through his library, wondering and speculating. We’d play Anyone You Want: One would show the other photos of more or less naked men, the player to choose the icon of his choice for the date of a lifetime. I could never play this game with anyone else, because only Kern knew what I knew. I’d show Dennis Savage shots of Clint Walker, Richard Egan, Jim Cassidy, and Stutz—and where Kern would cry “Who could choose?” with a comprehending edge of despair in his tone, Dennis Savage would ask, “What is this, Save the Whales?”

“Whales,”
he says! Because the particular type that Kern and I responded to was, basically, full, big, and huge. Bodybuilders, you could call them, I guess: but with a trashy masculine tilt, the kind of men you saw not in bodybuilders’ contests but in dreams. Dirty smiles. Keen eyes. They had “mystos”—a term Kern recalled from
a sitcom that had enthralled him in his youth,
The People’s Choice
. I could never quite make out, from Kern’s enthusiastically garbled reports, exactly what happened in this show, except that there was a talking dog named Cleo and that in one episode the series star, Jackie Cooper, was unshirted by an eccentric sculptress and cradled in the arms of her blond Amazon assistant. Why? Because he had
mystos
.

Whenever Kern would readduce this dowdy footnote of television history, I’d pass a remark. I mean, Jackie Cooper? But remember, Kern’s and my youth was a time starved for homoerotic stimuli; the juxtaposition of virtually any bare torso with a Magic Word, a grown-up’s summoning term, fed our imaginations. I could visualize young Kern coming into power in this way, making his first realization of the great world that he must explore. I thought back to my own such moments. That gave us a point of contact, and “mystos” became one of our conjure words. Let someone mention a circuit beauty and we would remark, say, “Mystos 7”—his score on a 1 to 10 scale. Few established media stars could make it past 4; there was something unpredictable, uncontrollable—perhaps threatening to hetero culture—that marginalized anyone with a strong dose of mystos. But gay life was filled with 6’s and 7’s, and there was one porn firm, which specialized in our type, that regularly produced 8’s and 9’s. It even had a 10, Vic Astarchos.

I don’t know if you recall this guy. He had a certain fame, perhaps, among a certain coterie, but for Kern and me he was absolute, with a face that was intelligent rather than pretty, dark curly hair cut short, and a torso of doom, the abs as articulated as the Rockies and the V of flesh where the waist overhangs the thighs as built up as the Berlin Wall. Everything about him was big; even the navel was not slit but gouged out.

We are talking Major Man. There were local touches of magic within the panorama, too, for instance in the very light dusting of hair along the pectorals, an almost unbearably earthy touch on the statuesque physique.

“Is he available?” Kern would ask as we pored over Vic’s pictures. “Is he in town? Is he real?”

In one shot, Vic was standing nude in a doorway, his left arm thrust up, emphasizing the heaviness of the neck and shoulder muscles; his expression was almost angry, as if he’d been surprised by the prying camera. In another shot, he was walking out of the ocean, surf to his waist, hands cupping the water, the whole thing breezy and athletic—yet the face was still serious, deep.

“He’s full of himself?” Kern ventured.

“He’s revolutionary,” I said.

“He’s wondering why.”

“He’s had them all.”

We speculated about him endlessly; we even told each other stories about him. “Vic at the Gym.” “Vic at the Opera.” “Vic Falls in Love”—but that was improbable. Why would anyone this complete need anything as complementary as a lover?

No one else ever became initiate of our cult, but then nobody wanted to. Have you noticed how angry some gay men get when you mention some icon of the day whom they don’t happen to fancy? In this one matter, heterosex culture may have achieved a higher stage of evolution: When straight men talk about women, you don’t find one of them getting all wounded and defensive if he doesn’t share another’s enthusiasm; he just chimes in with one of his own favorites. But put six gays at the dinner table, mention . . . oh, Ryan Idol or Lucas Ridgeston, and everybody starts screaming at you. What’s their problem?

Anyway, I promised to tell you about someone, and the story starts here, on an evening in late spring, when my phone rang well after midnight. This is never a good sign; but it was Kern, who had just been to the St. Mark’s Baths and had a tale to tell, of such elated nature that it could not wait for daylight.

“You went to the baths?” I asked.

“Eric dragged me. You know how cheap he is. It was Buddy Night or something, and there was a discount if you got there by a certain time.”

This was indeed news, for Kern was strictly a barfly when he went out at all. “Call me
passéiste,”
he once told me, “but my idea of where you have sex is your bedroom, not a urinal.”

“So what happened?”

“Someone was there. Guess.”

“I need a hint.”

“The ultimate.”

I thought, That could be almost anyone, because the gods thoughtfully did not sprinkle but rather inundated life with beauty. It’s the only thing that allows no short list. Or wait. “Not . . . Vic Astarchos?”

“Yes!”

Now, this was a headline, for though we’d eventually learned that he lived in New York, we had never actually seen him, not even on the Island or at Flamingo.

“Is this just a sighting?” I asked. “Or was there . . . contact?”

“‘We are not alone,’ ” he reminded me. Then, after a deep breath: “So there I was, still trying to get my bearings in this postmodernist brothel—which floor am I on? Where’s the coffee bar? Why is that man wearing jeans and mirror glasses and carrying a whip? Suddenly, I see this . . . person coming toward me down a long hall. First glance—it
can’t
be! Second glance—it
is
and get ready. We pass, I try my nicest smile, he just nods slightly and moves right on.”

“More! More!”

“Was I crushed? Let’s face it, a sensory overload like Vic Astarchos doesn’t visit the baths to meet a presentable but not incendiary chap like me. He wants artistic meltdown. I figure, I have a job I like, I have a nice apartment, I have stimulating, supportive friends. I’ll get over it.
Then
I figure, Run after him, jerk, and offer him money!”

“Holy cow!”

“Well, he’s a porn star. They hustle, don’t they? The worst that can happen is that he’ll get offended and brain me.”

“Where’s Eric during this?”

“He missed the whole thing.
So
. I catch up with the god one floor down, nosing around in the open doorways.”

“He won’t find anything there but schmengies. The Talent roves.”

“That’s what Eric said. Anyway, I’m about to make my pitch when some guy comes up and tries to cop a feel under Vic’s towel as he passes. Now, dig this manly style: Vic simply knocks his hand away without even looking at the guy. Vic
negates
him.”