Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (30 page)

“I couldn’t possibly face a party in my present mood.”

“Very well, but it’s my famous horseradish meatballs and seven-layer cake.”

I paused, delicately.

“What’s the movie?” I asked.

“La Dolce Vita
. Peter insisted.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

I did go out on my bike, riding straight west, turned onto Eleventh Avenue and pedaled down into the West Village, braking at something like the spot where Mike might have stood when he first realized that he had the power. In those days, the Village teemed with punters on summer weekends; today the place is nearly deserted.

I thought of Mike here, and everybody going Who Is That Guy? at him. I thought of Carlo cradling him that night long ago in the Pines, and “You should save that for your tombstone,” and how Kern might have felt when he first glimpsed Mike in the baths, the Mystos 10 wolfness heading right for you, touch the godhead. Your Vic. Your Harry.

No, your
Mike
, I kept saying to myself as I started home. The sky had grown black with cloud; it would pour any minute. I ran lights and overpedaled all the way up Third Avenue. Your Mike: because he was the living end and I vainly dare to soar and all of you know I stole his picture, because it’s part of life. And it had his insides, so I hid it. But when I got home I started looking and I couldn’t find it anywhere.

“I don’t have a cabaret act, do I?” answered Dennis Savage, entering upon another coughing fit.

“Some have cabaret acts,” said Cosgrove. “And some have bronchus.”

“Bronchitis,” Dennis Savage corrected, for the hundredth time.

“It’s nice when guys have a hobby,” observed Carlo, our referee. “So they can get all fulfilled.”

“A
hobby, yes,” Dennis Savage agreed. “Not a hobby a minute.”

“We had this hobby for four weeks already,” said Cosgrove. Whispering to Virgil, he added, “And he has bronchus.”

“Bronchitis!”

“What’s it to you if they want to put an act together?” I asked Dennis Savage.

“Everyone’s against me. Great!”

“Anyway, it’s not a hobby,” said Virgil, priming the tape recorder. One of the many innovations of his and Cosgrove’s act was the use of taped piano accompaniment (by our boy, hem-hem) instead of live music. I thought this a little dangerous, given that Virgil has the mechanical expertise of Squirrel Nutkin and Cosgrove can’t even master a cock ring. But Virgil has been applying himself, because he wants to take a serious shot at stardom.

“You’re just annoyed,” he told Dennis Savage, “because we’re going to be famous.”

“And everyone will be nice to me,” said Cosgrove.

“Let’s get our costumes on, Cosgrove,” said Virgil, briskly, efficiently. He has no time to waste.

“Costumes,” Dennis Savage fumed as the kids went into the bedroom to change. “Banjos. Medleys. Vegas lounge patter. ‘How you folks doin’? How fine’re you today?’ This isn’t an apartment—it’s a variety show.” He turned to me. “And where did they get those costumes, or do I guess?”

“I helped them pick the clothes out, as you have dourly surmised,” I said. “Virgil paid for them on his plastic.”

“I thought he had a limit of fourteen dollars.”

“They’ve been upgrading him for good conduct.”

“The sneak.”

“Wow,” said Carlo when Virgil and Cosgrove trooped on in their finery: charcoal gray slacks, white turtlenecks, and navy blue blazers. “I want to eat them with a spoon.”

Cosgrove giggled.

“It won’t hurt you,” Virgil told Dennis Savage, “to admit we look formidable.”

“Who’s been teaching him words?” said Dennis Savage.

“Stop grousing,” I told him. “They’re only trying to find self-affirmation.”

“Yes, but for every one who goes up, someone has to go down.”

“Carlo,” said Virgil, “will you announce us so we can make our entrance?”

Grinning, Carlo broke into it as the kids ran into the bedroom: “And now, the world-famous Paradise Bar and Grill presents that erotic little duet . . . what’s the final name of this act, anyway?”

“We don’t have one yet,” Virgil called out. (The Von Sondheims had been changing their billing by the week.)

“Well, you truly got to take some title to yourselves, don’t you? Or how could I announce you?”

“What about Company?” I said. “Just like that.”

“How about The Little Fiends from Hell Who Think They Sing and Dance?” Dennis Savage put in.

Virgil, in the doorway, said, “I think the name should be sexy yet suave and just a little fun-filled.”

“I could call you The Fire Boys,” said Carlo, as Cosgrove joined Virgil at the bedroom door, “ ‘cause you’re so hot that when you turn up, the whole place goes red in flames.”

Virgil, thinking that over, said, “I think I would be more of an ice boy, actually.”

Cosgrove said, “I want to be The Ice Boy of the Casbah.”

“Presenting that internationally acclaimed act,” Carlo intoned, as Virgil and Cosgrove scampered back out of sight, “The Ice Boys!”

In the bedroom, Virgil started the tape and he and Cosgrove sauntered out, stepping to the beat. Like everything they do, it looked completely ridiculous yet won you over with its charm. Virgil’s projects attract not through expertise—he has none—but through absolute lack of attitude. If the world is a series of interconnecting systems based on accumulations of money, power, fame, or whatever, Virgil operates as if there were no systems, as if there were nothing in the world but the wish. You think of success, then accomplish it. Virgil is wonderful because he acts as if the world were comprehensible, or a miniature golf course, or his life.

The act:

“Here we are, Cosgrove,” Virgil proffers, speaking in rhythm. “Here we are, now then.”

“Yes, we’re there.”

“Fine night, Cosgrove.”

“Yes, I’d say.”

“What’ll come next, now?”

“Why don’t we toot?”

“Something smashing?”

“Something cute!”

Whereupon, meticulously timed to a piano flourish on the tape, their smiles and body language and hand gestures cliché Las Vegas lounge—even cliché Port Authority Terminal waiting room—but, to be sure, sexy yet suave and just a little fun-filled, The Ice Boys launched their opening number. Virgil sang:

You say potayta, and I say potahta,

To which Cosgrove replied:

You say a chickpea, so I say regatta—

“Stop the show!”
Dennis Savage thundered. “That’s not how it goes!”

Virgil regarded him patiently. “Cosgrove only remembers his own words.”

“But it doesn’t make sense that way.”

“It does to me,” said Cosgrove.

The taped piano was noodling on, the act stalled, the joy oozing out as air leaves a blown bicycle tire.

“What will people think of you,” Dennis Savage pursued, “if you can’t get the lyrics down?”

Carlo said, “They’ll think they’re pretty nice to see. Did any good-looking guys ever flop in front of a gay audience?”

Dennis Savage had not taken that into account. He was so busy rating the kids for their lack of talent that he forgot to bottom-line the event: Sweet little boys in white turtlenecks and blazers will hit one hundred on the gay entertainment scale. Ed Sullivan wouldn’t have hired them. But Chita Rivera would; and Chita knows.

Well, Virgil and Cosgrove got on with the act—a further helping of chickpea and regatta culminating in a
Chorus Line
medley with top hats and a strutting exeunt.

“A couple of visits to Broadway and he’s a choreographer,” Dennis Savage moaned.

“Seven visits,” I reminded him. “By now, he’s virtually the show’s dance captain.”

Carlo was clapping as if Steve Reeves, Richard Locke, and Rick Donovan had just blended the epochs in a marathon threesome, and Virgil asked him if he’d like to be The Ice Boys’ business manager, in a three-way split. Carlo said sure, what else did he have to do?

“Carlo will get us booked at various posh nightclubs,” Virgil explained to Cosgrove, “and then we perform.”

“We get money, too?” Cosgrove asked, his eyes wide as the fantasy enlarged.

“Only if someone is stupid enough to sign this act up,” Dennis
Savage said; and Virgil replied, “You really should never rain on our parade.”

Dennis Savage shrugged. “Except, let’s face it, you’re terrible.”

“Carlo?”

“They’ve got something,” Carlo said.

Now everyone looked at me.

The thing is, you know, that they’re so weird that they’re sort of fun. A public that knew nothing of their backstory might take them for an extraordinarily high-concept satire. So:

“This is hot stuff,” I said.

With a whoop, Virgil and Cosgrove began celebrating their arrival as artistes and invited the rest of us down to my place for refreshments, which of course meant Virgil’s famous grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches and Cosgrove’s specialty, Sliced Deli Pickles à la Cosgrove.

Dennis Savage begged off, and, sensing something deep coming down, I stayed behind with him.

“Okay, best friend,” I said when we were alone. “Now what?”

“A little talk.”

“Yes, it’s time for one, I can tell.”

“Does it bother you, at the multifarious social functions you are privy to, having to introduce our smashing little Cosgrove to your associates as your beau, or your boy friend, or . . . What word
do
you use, besides that pathetically noncommital ‘live-in’?”

Though he has been with Virgil for many years now, Dennis Savage never refers to him as his lover. “They were lovers,” he will say, or “Was that Name Name’s lover, or just some trick?” But it’s always They, never We.

“I mean,” Dennis Savage went on, “you do have a certain credibility to protect among the cognoscenti, right? They’re going to judge you by—”

“Do you think they judged me when I never had anyone in tow all those years. Do you think they pitied me, or presumed I was too awful to love?”

He was silent, as he always is when I reroute one of his conversations.

“You’ve raised a valid point,” I said. “How much are we judged by the company we keep? And, FYI, I don’t use any term when I introduce Cosgrove. I just put a proprietary hand on his shoulder and say, ‘This is Cosgrove.’ ”

“All right, think back now. Of all the men you’ve known or known of. Not movie stars or porn models. Just people in the world, like us. Whom would you most, to the depths of your being, have wanted to claim as yours? Think of who. Think of why. Think not only of what you would have done in bed but what it would be like at breakfast the next morning. Think! Who was your secret ice boy? Not just for Saturday night, but for life.”

I thought, but I already knew the answer. I always know it.

“I’ll guess,” he said. “Give the hints.”

“Tall, suits, Voisin, Brahms,” I said.

He smiled. He loves to guess. But his tries weren’t even coming close.

“More hints,” he said.

“WASP. Nice. Strong. The most dazzling butt in the East Sixties.”

He couldn’t call it.

“One more hint.”

“Straight.”

“Are you
still
doing that?”

“What me?”

“I ask for the love of your life and you give me—”

“You asked a question and I answered it. Anyway, haven’t you had your moments of crossover? And Carlo—”

“But
we
always know what we’re doing when we sneak across the border. You always hope to believe in the improbable, don’t you?”

“Anyway,” I said, “nothing happened.”

“Who was it, finally?”

“Bill Upton.”

He drew a blank.

“I may never have mentioned him. We met at D’Agostino’s.”

“Ah, romance!” An interlude as he coughed up some more bronchitis. “For some there’s eternal Rome. For others it’s Paris in spring. You find it in D’Agostino’s!”

“You know those days when you suddenly realize you have to have a sweet or civilization as you know it will dissolve? And you’re fresh out of everything—Entenmann’s, applesauce, chocolate, ice cream, plums, Grape Nuts—”

“Grape Nuts is a duty, not a sweet.”

“So I got myself together and hiked up to the grocery. And then I couldn’t decide between a box of animal crackers and wholewheat doughnuts.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Now, I don’t want to hurry you. The tale is Proustian and the teller is Flaubert, I can see that. Every detail shall be comme ça, precisémént. But I just wondered how much time this will take, because in three months my taxes are due and—”