Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (45 page)

“James Fenimore wants to train him to chase Dennis Savage and mow him down.”

Did I mention that J. is spending nights on our living room couch? That’s where Carlo usually stays, so Carlo dug up a sleeping bag somewhere and now he sleeps on the floor near the piano. Except sometimes, during the night, J. creeps into the bedroom and joins Cosgrove and me—“Because he’s quite worried about things,” Cosgrove explained—and Carlo usually drags his bag in, too. I know they’re all family, but it’s beginning to feel like a bunkhouse at Camp Mudgekeewiss in there.

(If you’re wondering when Cosgrove and I fit It in, we’ve always been afternooners. Just because breeders equate sex with night doesn’t mean we have to. So huh?)

I like having everyone on hand, actually, as long as I can count on a few private hours in the noontime, when Carlo is at the gym and J. hunting for a job or taking Cosgrove to the Park to get into some mischief or other. One good thing about us is: Sooner or later we’ve all got something to do.

Dennis Savage never comes down anymore, for the obvious reason; but I talked him into making us dinner. I said we hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks, and anyway, he likes to cook, and of course the idea was to warm him with amity (and scotch) so we could finally say something like “Poor J.’s all alone downstairs, so could we ask him up?” Who would say no?

“We just got to handle it right,” Carlo kept saying. “We should truly watch our timing, you know.”

“Don’t worry about me,” J. told us. “I have very choice titles cued up on the video. Pee-wee Herman and a selection of Looney Tunes. And for dinner it’s a fresh green pepper and teddy bear macaroni.”

He said this calmly, reportorially. Oh, J. is calm, but he can’t figure anything out now, because he believes he is the sinless being punished for his sins. He just doesn’t know what he is at this point. Carlo knows, but he and J. are keeping some distance in a polite way because of their set-to, so Carlo isn’t saying anything.

“Normalize
this dinner,” I urged Carlo and Cosgrove as we went upstairs. “That’s the key. Remind him of the good old days and maybe he’ll want them back.”

Why is it that people change? Dennis Savage was always grouchy but he was also always reachable, even if you had to implore a little, or at least threaten to bite his knee. And Virgil Brown was sweet and curious and devoted and now he’s a self-important, dreary load. What happens to people?

Dennis Savage had made one of his greatest dishes, veal scalloppine
all’Anna, with these incredibly thin slices of prosciutto cooked onto the veal, and black olives and artichoke hearts, and he whips up this stunning fetuccine with sun-dried tomatoes, some weird sort of mushroom, and beer. I know he thinks we’re unworthy of such gourmet prep—what he really wants at his table, impressed and hoping, is some naïve hustler who’ll get drunk on la dolce vita and stay over and do everything.

Dennis Savage looks tired and unwilling, but he puts a decent face on it. He’s even nice to Cosgrove.

Carlo and Cosgrove carefully simulate an atmosphere of Merry Friends at Festive Table, exclaiming at things they took for granted years ago: the framed Chairmen of the Board LP, with Dennis Savage’s and my favorite seventies dancing cut, “Finders Keepers”; his collection of Doctor Dolittle books, including all the original Stokes editions and some foreign translations; his impressive home-entertainment-center breakfront with its orderly little rows of CDs (though for some reason Cosgrove decided to teethe for a bit on Dennis Savage’s jewel box of the EMI
Anything Goes
and Dennis Savage got truculent).

Boys and girls, it just wasn’t the same. Are Dennis Savage and we even friends anymore, in the real, deeply felt, desperately Stonewall sense? It’s not only that we are fresh out of the delight that comes with getting next to intimate acquaintances and feeling one’s skin, so to say. It’s that we’re tired of one another. These visits used to be relief.

Now they’re a chore.

Dinner was slow: great eats and nothing to say till Carlo idly asked, “What kind of animal
is
a veal? Don’t recall ever seeing any such thing.”

“It’s beef,” said Dennis Savage. “Baby beef. Calf.”

“What?” Cosgrove cried.

“Veal is—”

“A
baby!
Who didn’t even live yet? I’m not eating a baby!”

“I worked all afternoon on that veal, buster, and you are, too, eating it!”

Cosgrove sorrowfully eyed his plate. “It was a little calf named Juniper,” he said, “who frolicked in the dell.”

Carlo comforted him (and ate his veal), but another wedge thus got driven between the two sides, and relations did not advance with the hours. Trying to urge it all along, I said, “Have you heard from Billy?”

Dennis Savage looked so weary then. So unable to deal with it all.

“I mean,” I added, “maybe he—”

“And maybe he didn’t.”

We never had an opening to bring J. into; we left the same people we had arrived as. We had failed, you see, and we came home to find Fleabiscuit barking at us, leading us to J., who had fallen asleep in front of the working television; and suddenly he looked thirty years old.

“We can’t go on just like so,” Cosgrove told me one afternoon when the rest of us were away. “There are pains in the heart.”

“Whose heart?” I asked.

“Everybody’s. It isn’t right anymore. Carlo was mean to James Fenimore. And Dennis Savage is lonely. Why can’t we fix it up?”

He and I were working on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, which has replaced bird-watching. J. usually joins us, but today he was out beating the streets in search of employment. Cosgrove loves doing puzzles so much that he has almost abandoned Zelda, and he plumes himself on choosing the music we listen to as we solve the puzzle. Today it was
Parsifal
, Wagner’s opera about the utterly uncorrupted spirit whose ability to empathize redeems the world.

If only Stonewall had a hero like like that, I was thinking; at the same time, I realized that if I said that aloud one of my friends would reply, “We
have
a hero like that: Jeff Stryker.”

Why can’t we fix it up? Because there’s a shortage of hot and an excess of hunger.

“I’m sorry for Billy,” Cosgrove said, trying a piece every-where
he found an opening; this is what I call “needle in a haystack” puzzling. It’s like looking for a lover. “He really occurred to be nice.”

Fleabiscuit came running out, looking at us as if he’d just had crucial news and wasn’t sure how to convey it. Then he ran into the kitchen to consult his water dish and see if there was any Mighty Dog in his food bowl. (There always is: Cosgrove is a soft touch.)

“Just a little while ago,” I said, finding and placing the last piece missing from the puzzle frame, “everyone in the stories was almost content. Did we all have what we want?”

“As far as I know,” Cosgrove replied, studying a piece shaped like a revolver.

“It’s just that I’m getting tired of those Boy Scout Jamborees in the bedroom every night. All that talking keeps me up.”

“James Fenimore talks to work things out. He will chat at night.”

I’ll say. About four in the morning, you stir awake to a heavy three-way discussion on how to assert yourself, or what gay really means, or the other armchair therapies that Carlo and J. like to administer.

Well, this one night I got a little sharp, and Carlo got sharp in reply, and J. chimed in, so I said the whole thing was we were waiting for Dennis Savage to take him back. And, like, when was this going to happen, may I ask? So Carlo did a little something on that matter, and J. will have his riposte, and then Cosgrove piped up. All this natter is going on, and I am getting irritated.

So I put it out that J. is maybe a stranger in our midst.

“Look who’s talking,” says he.

“No,” says Carlo, moving in quick, because this touches upon something he has had in mind for a bit. “No, you
are
the stranger,” he tells J. “Because one day you are so cute and the next you are the icicle from hell.”

“I never,” says J.

Carlo squirms out of his sleeping bag to confront J., and pull
him off the bed, and look deeply into him, and have his effect.

“No,” says J., leaning against Carlo and holding him; but Carlo doesn’t hold back, and that can be dangerous.

“Yes,” says Carlo, opening J.’s pajama jacket. “It was like now you had had us all, so we didn’t matter to you.” Pushing the jacket back off his shoulders. “Got your Cash muscles by then, you’re moving on.” Tracing the ridge of the right pectoral, thumbing the nipple. “I had him. Clunk. Oh, I had that one, too. Clunk.” Smoothing his hair down, and J. standing there. I don’t know what he’s thinking. “Clunk, I had them all, right? The chesty blond with the big buttons, and the good old dark-haired boy with the shoulders who suddenly gets shy, and this one, and them. Clunk. Clunk. I’m ready for anything now, right?” Unbuttoning J.’s pajama bottoms and letting them drop to his ankles. “Except by now you are truly not The Kid Himself anymore. You’re some guy scoring up clunk.”

“I have to admit that’s somewhat true,” said Cosgrove, who can bear a grudge.

Shivering as he stepped out of his pants, J. said, “I am loving and nice,” in a tone I had never heard out of him before.

Carlo ran his hands over J.’s skin, around his waist, and up and down the sides of his torso, and J. rubbed his cheek against Carlo’s.

“I know the kind of nice you are, boy,” said Carlo.

“Actually, he is usually a very loyal boy,” said Cosgrove, no doubt repenting of his momentary lack of camaraderie. He was petting Fleabiscuit and seemed a little apprehensive.

“What did you want from Cash that we don’t give you?” Carlo went on. “Why didn’t you ask me? I could do that hot stuff for you.”

“I was wrong,” said J., reaching up to Carlo’s shoulders as Carlo worked on J.’s neck and shoulders like a masseur.

“You were selfish, so I’m going to punish you now.”

“No,” said Cosgrove.

“Some say it’s a shame to give a heavy spanking to a nice little boy like you. But who says you’re nice now, huh?”

“He’s particularly nice,” Cosgrove offered.

“I’ll give it to you Daddy-style, bare-bottom across my knee.” Carlo was holding J. close, rubbing his back and moving against him; and J. was moving along with Carlo. “You like that, pal?”

“I didn’t mean to make anyone sad.”

They were kissing now, as Cosgrove stared, his head shaking. Fleabiscuit shook his head, too.

“Yeah, you did.”

“. . . no . . .”

“You got to be spanked, and I wish I could tell you how truly glad I am to be the one who’s going to do it. What do you think—light, medium, or heavy?”

J., still on Carlo’s mouth, breathed out, “Extra heavy,” and Carlo said, “Sizzle you up first for this,” and they went at it, kissing and feeling like porn in 1969, reel one . . . or no, like maybe reel four, after we had figured it all out. Carlo was giving J. that mouth-to-mouth wherein the aggressor’s lips kind of overlap the victim’s, as if the top guy is eating up the bottom’s face. “Why’d you do it, Virgil?” Carlo kept asking him. “How come you did that?” Taking the boy by the middle and bending him around, turning him, lifting him. “Why’d you walk out and put on these big lats? Why’d you stop being cute?”

I had to speak. “He has the right to be what he wants to be. And he doesn’t owe explanations to—”

“I want to eat your cock,” J. told Carlo.

Cosgrove and Fleabiscuit looked at me in horror.

“You’re going to lay across my knee is all you’re going to do.”

J. dove down, tongue at the ready, but Carlo pulled him up.

“Hot you up till you’re all set for it,” Carlo told him, “and you’re going to work real well.”

Justice and caprice is who they were then. The man who invented sex and the kid who could only love had traded responsibilities. That’s how I know that Stonewall is over. But what’s the next era?

“A kiss and fuck,” said J. “So we can get acquainted.”

“You little bitch.”

“I want to see how you come, Carlo man. I want to feel you inside me. I’ve got real good suction.”

Carlo guided J. by the waist and, sitting on the edge of the bed, thrust the kid onto his lap.

“Yes,” said J. “Now. Yes. Carlo is king, and I’m going to give it up for Daddy.”

He rubbed to and fro against Carlo, murmuring “Yes, Daddy” over and over.

Cosgrove pressed his head against me, hiding his eyes. Fleabiscuit did, too.

“All set now?” said Carlo, feeling the boy, running his left hand through J.’s hair and his right over his butt, clamping his right leg over J.’s legs and grabbing J.’s neck with his left hand. “You ready for me, boy?”

“Spank me right up the shit,” said J., and Carlo obliged, extra heavy. Cosgrove groaned and Fleabiscuit yipped. It took a long while, and it must have been the real thing, because when Carlo let him up, J. was crying.

“Now we’re going upstairs,” said Carlo.

“No!”

“You want more?” Carlo turned to me. “Where’s his clothes? No, fuck it.” He turned to the closet. “We’ll take pot luck.”