Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (33 page)

Think of the potential of my proposed social experiment. MTV is probably the single greatest influence on the minds of American youth. What a message it could send to them on the morality of tolerance!

Of course, MTV could never ban rock’s homophobes—nor
rock’s anti-Semites, its racists, or its exploiters of women. Haters—even evilly reveling haters, dancers in blood, Farrakhans so hopped up on murderous anger that their eyeballs balloon—are part of the System. How could they possibly be isolated, marginalized? Disgusting, even alien, as he is, Shabba Ranks is more “American” than a gay man or woman. Hatred isn’t unique to America, but only in America is it a business. Televangelists, “family-values” groups, rap: Hatred is capitalism.

And so I was saying to the usual enraged queens, and one of them said, “Banning videos is censorship.”

“No,” I said. “Censorship is the silencing of ideas by state force. Throwing bigots into prison is censorship. Throwing bigots off a television channel is free and democratic, as long as the channel and not the state makes that choice. They can go elsewhere. They can still sell their records. They can go on
Arsenio;
he drooled over Louis Farrakhan.”

“Who are
you
to judge?” cried the other queen. Remember, we’re talking about demonizing homophobia—yet
gay men
are rolling their eyes and going red. Am I wrong or are
they
filth?

I decided to turn on the charm. I said, “You two must have pathetically unintegrated ego structures. You’re ugly, you’re old, you’re fat, and you scream at anything you don’t agree with.”

“I’m not screaming!”
one of them screamed.

“Yes, you are,” I replied. I felt so tired then, so aware of how sides can slip in even the best protected house of cards. Virgil. I thought we were safe. I knew he was growing, but I figured he was content. You know, I felt miscast in my own play? I turned away from the screaming queens to admire the Bill Upton refreshment table, crowned with an elaborate birthday cake frosted in the design of the logo of the Lincoln Center musical
Hello Again
—Bill must have been saluting an actor friend’s anniversary.

Remember the argument? The screaming queen counters with “Well, you’re screaming, too!”

“No, I’m not,” I said, laughing at him. Everyone was looking at us, but still I grabbed the guy by the hair and ducked him in the
birthday cake, logo and all, long and hard, all the while enjoying the noise he made, like a walrus buffeted by ice floes.

“More!
More!”
I cried, obliterating the cake with his brainless head. So our boy had another of those scenes at another of Bill Upton’s soirées, and this time I marched out without waiting for the crowd to unite against me or for some schmengie to bleat out “He shows no remorse whatsoever” or for Bill to be his stalwart, disappointed self. I told him “I’m not fit to know you” as I passed. He tried to follow, but friends held him back. “I don’t have the style,” I told them.

I ran the four blocks home, barged into my own apartment, and asked Carlo and Cosgrove to go upstairs so Virgil and I could have a talk.

“Where’s Dennis Savage?” I asked him.

“In bed. He’s still sick, you know.”

“I saw you and Cash in the office tonight.”

“I saw you, too.”

He showed no remorse whatsoever.

“All right,” I said. “What’s next?”

Sitting on the couch, he swung his feet up, took it nice and easy.

“I’m moving in with Cash. Tomorrow.”

“You don’t know anything about him. How—”

“You’re wrong. I’ve been with him every day for three weeks now.”

“When?”

“In the days. I quit my job, and I didn’t tell Dennis Savage or anyone. I knew what you would say if I told you. So when I left in the morning, instead of going to the magazine, I went to Cash’s. Then I helped him run the club in the afternoons. And then I would come back to Dennis Savage’s.”

“You blindsided him!”

“I secretly knew you would blame me for this. But I had to see what it would be like with Cash. He calls me Skyman, and he whispers whole stories in my ear about the adventures of Skyman.
And when he comes to the door in the morning, all he’s wearing is a T-shirt, and I just go ape for the way he is.”

“Don’t tell me any more.”

“It’s no one’s fault. And you would like Cash, regardless of a certain look on your face. He is very, very nice, mostly. And he never laughs at me, unlike some people I could imagine.”

“Will you stay with Dennis Savage if we promise not to laugh? You could have Cash on the side, opening his door in the morning. You don’t have to break up the household. Who’ll take care of Cosgrove if you—”

“Cosgrove has to grow up now. I couldn’t always be taking care of him. Besides, I’m planning that he will visit me. I’m going to take him for steak dinners at Tad’s with long bread, onions on the side, and potato-in-the-jacket. That’s Cosgrove’s favorite treat. If he’s a good boy, I let him have an extra salad.”

“Virgil, you’re the center of his life. His sunlight. He’s only content when you’re around. If you desert him—”

“I’m
not
deserting him, you rascal man.” He sat up. “You . . . guilt-trip man. I am only moving across town, and there will always be room in my life for Cosgrove!”

“Orphan abandoned on East Fifty-third Street. Teacher in shock. Friends downcast. Film at eleven.”

“You can
not
hope to blackmail me with that!” he said, weeping. “I know what it is,” wiping his eyes. “And you won’t make me sad. I took Cosgrove off the street and got him a home. I made him safe, whatever you say. How long do you look after someone before it’s his turn to go out to the world? I kept saying that he could go to Tad’s by himself, but he wouldn’t go without me. The man who cooks the steaks knows us so well he calls Cosgrove Chico, and says ‘Chopped steak well done, si.’ He says, ‘Special for you.’ When he serves Cosgrove, he says, ‘Como eso, si? You like it like this?’ I told Cosgrove he can go there anytime he wants.”

“He needs you.”

“Oh, this is what you say parents always do. They try to get you to do things because it’s supposed to be for everybody’s good.
And it’s just because that’s what
they
want. Then they say you’re mean when you won’t . . . What’s that word you use?”

“Placate them.”

“Yes.” He got up. “I better go upstairs and tell Dennis Savage what it is. He doesn’t suspect anything, does he?”

“I don’t believe so. Virgil.”

He paused.

“I hope you’re going to be very gentle with Cosgrove about this. You know it’ll dismay him.”

“Look who’s talking. The big meanie who laughed and laughed at Cosgrove.”

“I didn’t know him then.”

As to what then transpired between Virgil and the usual suspects, I can say nothing—not because I have at long last been seized by a respect for the privacy of my friends’ feelings, but because they were too glum to talk about it.

The next day, Virgil left us. You might say that, like Dennis Savage, he quit his job. He decided to move sparely, quickly; he had never had much in the way of clothes and he decided to leave his eleven years’ worth of hobbycrafts to Cosgrove. He packed a valise and the attaché case I gave him several Christmases ago, and of course there was the aged, withered, and infinitely stale Bauhaus to lead off. Down came Skyman to render his farewells, giving each of us a warm hug—long ones, I must admit, reconciliatory with me, apologetic with Carlo, and profound with Cosgrove.

What did Dennis Savage get? I never asked, and he never told.

Carlo set a tone for the house by adopting a “Let’s see” attitude, keeping open the possibility that this was nothing more than an aberrant junket on Virgil’s part and that he would be home in a few weeks. Cosgrove, who lives for the day and doesn’t know how to believe in possibilities, spent the afternoon that Virgil left alternately weeping in the armchair and stamping up and down on Virgil’s discarded toys.

Dennis Savage behaved impeccably, philosophically, and practically, immediately placing an ad for a houseboy—as if that were
all that Virgil had been. Dennis Savage’s attitude could be summed up in the ad’s headline: “
LOOKS COUNT
.” Carlo thought the whole thing premature. I call it reckless. Cosgrove wondered how “we could get a new Virgil.” We were going to get
something
, because Dennis Savage was offering very attractive terms. He even joined a gym and went on a crash diet, in order to facilitate employer-applicant rapport for the interviewing period.

“We have to look on the happy side,” he told me. “After all, I’ve been virtually monogamous for eleven years. Now I can catch up on all the new erotic practices. There’s a whole next generation out there.”

“The smart ones haven’t been doing much.”

“So who needs smart?”

As the weeks rolled by, Virgil pursued his honeymoon with Cash Westman and was not seen, except of course onstage at the Nine O’clock Song. Cosgrove would return from these gigs emotionally depleted, having made, I imagine, overtures of every conceivable kind to Virgil, all of them, surely, sorrowfully, patiently rebuffed. Surely.

“He isn’t as nice as before,” Cosgrove told me when I asked how it was going. “He’s not mean to me, but he’s always like his mind is somewhere in the occult. But then I said I wouldn’t go on as The Ice Boys unless he gave me a hug and a little kiss each time. And that’s better than no Virgil at all.”

It was, at least, until the act’s booking was up and Virgil declined to seek further engagements. That night, Cosgrove came home, climbed into bed, and cried all night.

But Dennis Savage was rejuvenated. I’ve never seen anyone lose weight so easily—or, rather, so quickly; but then he was hitting the gym like a neophyte bodybuilder, living on lettuce and solid white tuna, forked up raw from the can.

One night he strode in to show off, and what he had to show was his packet of answers to his houseboy ad. Cosgrove was working on a jigsaw puzzle—one of Virgil’s bequests—and Carlo was watching a Clint Walker movie.

“Here comes The Man of a Thousand Salads,” I announced, letting Dennis Savage in.

“Turn the TV off,” he suggested, “and I’ll show you some
real
skin.”

He read from the letters and passed round the pictures, and all I could think was, Is this happening? Has Little Kiwi abandoned us without a glance behind him? Cosgrove was staring at the pictures like Columbus in mid-Atlantic, examining the horizon for a sight of the thing that saves you. I didn’t say so, but it seemed to me that the person who might save Cosgrove wouldn’t be answering an ad for a live-in whore.

“What’s
his
name?” Cosgrove asked, looking over an applicant who sent in a coy nude, “artistically” lit and posed, a shot in the dark.

“He calls himself Hardin,” said Dennis Savage, examining the accompanying letter.

“How can anyone even see him like this?” said Cosgrove plaintively. “How will we
know?”

“I like this one,” said Dennis Savage, handing me another snap. This kid, smirking in running shorts and Reeboks, was hardly the successor to Virgil whom Cosgrove hoped for. But in another part of the forest he could prove useful. The look was pure hustler, absolutely guaranteed do-everything hotness and no strings attached.

“Billy,” Dennis Savage said.

“He looks mean,” Cosgrove observed.

I asked, “Didn’t you once treat me to an endless spiel about what you wanted was personality along with the sex?”

Dennis Savage shrugged. “Maybe that’s how I felt that week,” he replied, gathering his mail. “This week—”

“You tell me this,” I insisted. “To the depths of your being, whom would you most have wanted to claim as yours?”

“Oh . . .” He tilted his head and thought about it. “The one I had, I suppose. But we may have gone as far as we needed to go.
The occasional setback, while temporarily painful, often has a stimulating effect upon the system as a whole.”

“Listen, he’s Doctor of Philosophy,” said Carlo.

“He’s Doctor Pompous von Fruiter,” I said.

“He had bronchus,” said Cosgrove.

So Dennis Savage went upstairs to give Billy a call; and Cosgrove, woebegone at his puzzle, feeling each piece as if it might put him in touch with Virgil, perhaps by astral projection, asked Carlo, “Mr. Smith, will you please help me with this puzzle?”

Carlo said, “No, just climb into my lap and I’ll hold you for a spell.” Whereupon Carlo stroked the boy till he fell asleep, exhausted by apprehension.

Then Carlo said, “He’s afraid that with Virgil gone he’ll be thrown out on the street.”

“He knows better than that.”

Carlo shook his head. “Virgil was his magic. Magic’s gone now, so anything can happen. It doesn’t have to make sense.”

“I’ll have a talk with him tonight.”

“Be better if you could get that Virgil back where he belongs. I know Cash’s scene. That’s not our Virgil boy, no way.”

I sat next to Carlo on the couch. I said, “They invited me to dinner, he and Cash. Next Sunday. Skyman called me this afternoon. He said they want to take us one at a time. I suppose they figured I’m the easiest of the family.”