Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (3 page)

Elated at being the center of attention, Cosgrove suddenly turned apprehensive. “They won’t make me sing, will they?”

“Most of them just sit there,” Virgil assured him.

“I thought you liked to sing,” said Dennis Savage.

“Only my famous personal medleys.”

“Look,” I began.

“Can I please go to the opera with you?” Cosgrove asked me, most winningly. “I just think I need to, in my suit.”

“Of course you can,” I replied, already dreading it; but Cosgrove hadn’t quite placed himself among us emotionally then, and he needed encouragement.

“Cosgrove meets Wagner,” said Dennis Savage, as if pronouncing the title of a porn loop.

“Would you lighten up?” I said.

“Yes, as you have lightened up on me because I won’t see Tom Driggers.”

“Did I say a word?”

“But what are you
thinking?”

“You are so mean,” said Virgil.

“Don’t you judge me,” said Dennis Savage. “Because you don’t know what happened.”

Bauhaus, Virgil’s pet, a Gila monster disguised (not well) as a dog, crawled out from under the couch, growling at phantoms he visualized somewhere between the television and the bookcase. He froze. He pointed. He rolled over. He went to sleep.

“And,” Virgil continued, to Dennis Savage, “you’re entirely snarky.”

“What does that word mean?”

“It means,” Cosgrove cut in, “that he says bad things about me, and makes me cry.”

This was an allusion to old times, when we were still collecting and integrating our odd little family: when Dennis Savage thought Cosgrove might undermine his relationship with Virgil. When everyone we knew was still alive except our great-grandfathers. When it never occurred to us that maybe you don’t
have
to spend the summer in the Pines.

Things are so different now that Dennis Savage and I speak of Before and After. Before was, you used up a weekend prowling for partners, no limit as to how many or what you’d do. After is, you spent a weekend ministering to your live-in, Cosgrove, because while amusing himself at a street fair he ate twelve coconut Sno-Kones in a row and came home in vast distress—in fact, diarrhetic—and
had to be not only cared for but euphemized. (We settled on a diagnosis of Compulsive Bathroom Manifestation, in the style of the trendy affliction, such as your Decreased Intelligence Clarity, your Unenhanced Attention Commitment.)

You become so aware of age. I remember my epiphany, when I was playing a tape of Barbra Streisand’s last night on Broadway in
Funny Girl
for my young friend Allan the Actor, a
Funny Girl
buff. “The Music That Makes Me Dance” is the key cut; he was duly blown away, and I was thrust back to my long-gone days of innocence and youthful thrill. Everything was possible then, though so little was permitted, except for Saturday matinées in New York. But theatre would lead to liberation. “Did you actually see the show?” I asked Allan. He said, “I wasn’t born then.”

Oh, you become so
aware
of age, boys and girls!

If Cosgrove was going to sit through
G
tterd
mmerung
, he’d better familiarize himself with the action; so I parked him with a German-English libretto booklet and went off to visit Tom Driggers in the hospital.

I expected to greet a pride of his hot mondo trasho monsters, but he was alone, packed in bed in a silent room. He looked like a dirty, broken thimble.

“Well, is he going to make his entrance?” Tom asked me. “I want to shake hands with him and say goodbye. Does he know that I miss him? Some folks don’t especially know a thing like that.”

“I brought you some strawberries. I even washed them.” I put them on the table by the bed. “They’re all set to go.”

“Oh, hey.”

As we made our fitful conversation, I kept thinking back to Tom Driggers in his youth as an upstart entrepreneur of Free Stonewall. He was something to see in those days, a kid striking it rich, betting each new dollar against the last, double or nothing and never losing. He owned the world, because everything that matters is for sale, or so, for some, it seemed. Tom Driggers was a happy man. His hungers were satisfied, yet he could stay hungry. Unlike most
of the men who ran the gay service industries, he was easy to work for—in fact, a pushover. And unlike most of the men with the money to concoct their sex lives at will, he was young and arrestingly nice-looking. He virtually ran sex in New York. He decided when and where and who would do what and to whom, as the old limerick goes. He had a very potent sense of free choice.

What I mean is: Do you remember the 1970s?

I wondered what Tom Driggers was remembering. He was floating in that end-of-term hospital haze that says, There is no time, place, world. There is only the end of my life, very soon.

“What happened between you and Dennis Savage?” I asked.

I could see him trying to think back to it, but people like Tom Driggers don’t absorb much, even at their best. Ten years later, on his deathbed, he had as much recall as Siegfried after drinking Hagen’s potion.

“He sort of . . . he just got mad at me suddenly. And he wouldn’t speak to me ever again, and he wouldn’t explain. Is he always like that?”

“No, he usually explains. At length.”

Tom lay quiet for some time. Then: “We were very close, you know. He was a different kind of friend than everyone else. See, he never asked me for money or wangled into staying at my Pines place.” He pulled his blanket more tightly around himself, as if tucking himself in, a child without parents. “He really . . . he really liked me, I know that much. He was so . . . well, serious about things. You’re always saying the wrong thing with someone like that. No one comes much anymore. They did the first times. Would you ask him to come see me? I won’t say the wrong thing. I’ll say anything he wants.”

When I got home, I went right to Dennis Savage’s, where another visit was just ending. An older man of our acquaintance had dropped by, a man from Very Before. When we were in our early twenties, he had hit fifty—a presentable, even an attractive fifty: But all the same, he was an Old Queen standing on the border of
invisibility. (Don’t blame me. I didn’t make the world; I don’t even forgive it.)

Now this gentleman was even more senior, yet he was looking back to the sexy seventies, pleading with Dennis Savage to make a certain limited peace with our communal past by paying respects to Tom Driggers on his deathbed.

Dennis Savage was taking it all in a good mood, till Virgil came home from work and, introduced to the visitor, said, “They call me Tuffy.”

“Who calls you Tuffy?” asked Dennis Savage. “Name three.”

Virgil looked at him. “My gang. The Lost Boys.” His upper lip went up and his teeth peered out.

“What is that mouth doing?”

“If you don’t call me Tuffy, I’ll swoop down on you and drink your blood.”

“Nobody calls you Tuffy,” Dennis Savage began, but just then Cosgrove came in, and he called Virgil Tuffy, and luckily Carlo arrived at the same moment, because the two of us had to help Dennis Savage over to the couch and pacify him. Lately his nerves have been like nails scratching slate.

The older man of our acquaintance made his departure, pausing only to meet Cosgrove. Virgil introduced them. “This is Tuffy.”

“I thought
you
were Tuffy,” the man said, smiling.

“Somehow we’re both Tuffy,” Cosgrove told him.

“Are you one of the Lost Boys, too?”

“I’m the Lostest Boy of all.”

The man turned to Dennis Savage. “Maybe tomorrow?” he said. “He hasn’t much longer,”

Dennis Savage, dazed, made no reply.

“They come at me from every side,” he said as the door closed. “On the left it’s Tom Driggers and guilt, and on the right it’s a legion of Lost Boys swooping down to drink my blood, but guess what? We absolutely
can’t
have two people named Tuffy. We shouldn’t even have one.”

“I’ll be Tuffy,” said Virgil, “and Cosgrove can be Tuffy-boy.”

“Hold me down,” Dennis Savage feebly begged. “Make them stop.”

Virgil took Cosgrove into the kitchen to get dinner started—spaghetti and salad—and once Dennis Savage got a few sighs out of his system, the room went calm. He even got a little buoyant.

“What a
refreshment,”
he exclaimed. “Imagine: socializing with someone who’s older than I! They said it couldn’t be done,” he concluded, in song, echoing an ancient television commercial. Cigarettes?

Carlo decided to marvel. “How old is he?”

I said, “He’s so old, he’d have to be carbon-dated.”

But Dennis Savage topped me: “He’s so old, he remembers the Great Vowel Shift.”

“He was dressed real swank,” said Carlo.

“It’s generic,” Dennis Savage replied. “T-shirts for the beautiful boys on the streets of New York. Jacket and tie for the mature male. I love old men. ‘They make me feel so young,’ ” he sang. “You know, Club MTV should run a special edition for people over fifty-five. Methuselah Disco.” He froze. “I hear whispering. The gremlins are up to something.”

“That guy used to own the Witch’s Hat house,” said Carlo. “Remember? On the Island? Way to the east, on the last walk. How come he was here?”

“Oh, everyone’s after me about Tom Driggers. But the more they hack at me, the more resolute I become. Even unto death. No for an answer is what it is. I, Dennis Savage, tell you this. You may bury me in a plain coffin in potter’s field. Oh, and let my tombstone read—”

“ ‘I was a big silly queen who flamed up and down the patios of the world,’ ” I helpfully put in.

Carlo said, “I want my tombstone to say, ‘He was free.’ ”

Dennis Savage paused, reflecting on that. He nodded. “We were all free, weren’t we?”

We other two nodded.

“We made our choice, right? Each of us. We were gay and free.”

Nods.

“I mean, there’s social heritage, genetics, and the breaks, but otherwise we made our own arrangements, each according to his desire. No?”

Yes.

Dennis Savage broke into a grin and said that the old man who had just left had recalled working with me on a charity variety show at the theatre in the Grove in the late 1970s. “I asked him what you were like to work with, and he described you as ‘difficult but worth it.’ ”

“You’re
a bargain, you ruthless pixie?”

“How would you describe yourself, Bud?” asked Carlo.

“Fun but worth it.”

“I need a nap,” said Dennis Savage. “Go downstairs. I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

“Spaghetti and salad? That could be five minutes.”

“It’ll take Cosgrove two hours just to identify a green pepper. Trust me.”

He went into the bedroom, and Carlo and I went downstairs to my place.

“That Dennis Savage is all busted up about Tom Driggers, huh?” said Carlo.

“Not precisely. But out among the gay population there is a general need for him to be, so there’s this war going on.”

I poured myself a drink and gave Carlo a tangerine, his latest passion.

“Well, you know,” he began, pulling the fruit apart. “I guess if Tom Driggers is passing on, then the whole thing really is over. Because Tom was the center of this here gay life, I do believe.”