Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (5 page)

“Something stable?” I asked.

“Something more than cum,” he said. “We flash forward. Tom has money and power, and we have remained in touch. He opens Weasel’s. Remember? Down near where the Triangle used to be? It was the first dance club after the Tenth Floor. Big. Rich. Hot. Right?”

Carlo and I nodded.

“Spartan decor. The usual menorah lighting and waiters to die—the Tom Driggers waiters, homo straights. God, he had an eye for that type. Tattoos and no underwear and ‘C’mon, I’ll
pay
ya next week!’ What are we supposed to derive from that? Tell me.”

We couldn’t.

“Look, I like it hot, same as anyone. But what I always wanted was somewhere there would be a door that I could walk through, any day of the week, and the person in the room behind the door would know how I felt just by the face I had on. On the back side of the door would be all the assholes and schmucks and idiots who fuck your day up. But on
this
side I’d get a human being instead of an android.

“That’s all those beauties turn out to be, after a good long while. Fabulous androids. Blond boy in black T-shirt and khaki shorts. Or dark hair, jaw for years, sculpted soft mouth that gives out with irresistible ‘Yeah.’ Classic gym hunk dancing in a tank top, arching his back by the water cooler. You want it, they have it. Order now—they do everything. Except feel. Put your arms around them sometime, try them for warmth. There’s nothing
in
them!

“So. Enter Little Virgil. I know he seems unaware, but it may be that all his amateur theatricals are his defense against what he sees. It’s not that he doesn’t know what’s real: It’s that he
does
. He and Cosgrove have reduced the cosmos to nice and mean. ‘Please be nice’ means Affirm me. ‘You’re being mean’ means You won’t give me what I need. Virgil has his job and Cosgrove has his chores, followed by endless playtime. Life is a weekend. So they make
videotapes, they cook, they sing, they giggle, and every now and then, when no one’s looking, they fuck each other.”

He extended a hand in the air as if balancing, weighing something. “You thought I didn’t know, right? What am I, the gay King Arthur? So what? This is how I wanted it, behind the door in the room. I don’t need to startle myself with drive-by icons. I thought I did, once—I was wrong. There’s nothing better than high-concept sex except a high-concept lover. That’s what I wanted. Someone . . .”

“A fruit of worth,” I put in.

“I’m wandering. . . . Weasel’s. Oh. That night . . . Yes. I was in an awful mood, something like the tenth night in a row of a very heavy case of no-lover blues. The last place in the world I wanted to go to was a disco. But I’m not going to improve the quality of my social-romantic life in an empty room, am I? And Tom had been nagging me to come down there. He intimated that he’d set me up with one of his people. Terrific, but I wanted a
person
for once. I’d
had
people. Had them up to . . . Don’t you ever offer your guests coffee or something?”

“Who wants what?” I said, heading for the kitchen.

“Tangerines all round,” said Carlo.

“I want black coffee,” Dennis Savage grumped.

As I ground the beans, I said, “Cosgrove calls this ‘fresh-squoze style.’ ”

“Well, isn’t he the phrasemaker.”

“Why be snide about it? You used to find them endlessly amusing.”

“Having one little rascal on hand is amusing. Having two of them, ganging up on you and calling you strange names and conspiring and spooking, is not amusing. That’s Dien Bien Phu for life.”

Carlo said, “I truly think those two are getting sweeter and more secret every day.”

“Why secret?” I asked.

“I’m not all the way sure. But I believe it has to do with how guys who don’t know them just see two tasty morsels there while we see something else. Something with more in it.”

“More what?”

He shook his head. “Haven’t figured that part out yet. But it’s something we know that nobody else ever will. Something in how we see each other, I believe.”

Everyone served, we settled back down for the rest of the tale.

Dennis Savage took a sip of coffee for dramatic emphasis and plunged in. “I got through the door of Weasel’s, and I wasn’t in a great mood but I looked fine. You don’t enter a disco showing your feelings; you show the feelings of the guy you want to get.”

“Or the guy you want to be,” I said.

“Same thing.”

“No,” said Carlo. “It truly isn’t.”

“Before we open
that
can of worms, can I close up
this
one?” said Dennis Savage. “Weasel’s took up the ground floor of one of those long, deep buildings, and I was heading for the room at the back, looking for Tom. I saw him, just as I made the doorway. But I also saw one of his employees—you know that job, where they’re always hustling through the place lugging cases of beer? So here’s this guy heading right for me with a case, a classic android—golden-blond, rippled up, and a face in a million, on the short side but horribly wide-shouldered and tight-waisted.
Horribly
. A colored tattoo on his left biceps—the Tom Driggers touch, of course. This boy is roaring through the room, and as he reaches me, instead of leaving us both maneuvering space, he edges me tightly between his case of beer and the wall—I mean, he’s
pressing
me with this thing! And as he moves on, he calls over his shoulder, ‘Get the fuck out of the way, asshole!’ ”

Dennis Savage immediately turned to me and said, “What would you have done if that had happened to you?”

“The appropriate response—the classy and valiant response—would be to grab him by the hair, jerk him back so that he’d drop his box of beer, and give him a solid kick in the shin. Down he goes, and that would feel great. On the other hand, you would be surrounded by bouncers and bartenders and physically
thrown out of the place, which is one of the least egosyntonic experiences I know of.”

“Exactly.”

“Besides, you’re connected to the owner, right? It’s a little like I’ll Tell Teacher, but you could have gone right to Tom Driggers and said—”

“ ‘Did you see that?’ Of course he hadn’t. Tom misses whatever he can’t use. I told him what happened; I was so mad I was shaking. And he just stood there. He didn’t get it and he didn’t want to, and now I can’t tell you how angry I was. I’m a
customer
in this joint and this guy is an
employee
. He’s supposed to make things
pleasant
, not
assault
me!”

He turned to Carlo. “What would you have done?”

“Well, you’re right about all the staff guys falling on top of you. What you
could
do is offer the culprit guy fifty bucks for a blow job, and go to a stairwell or a back alley, and
then
let him have it. A little no-risk retribution there.”

Dennis Savage nodded, visualizing it. “I felt so . . . diminished. So
helplessly
furious. It was as if
nothing
I did for myself could ever really make a difference—all those evenings at the gym, all the worrying about my haircut and my clothes, the psyching up before a big weekend at the beach. No matter how hard I worked, there was going to be some piece of hot stuff locking me out, and Tom was aligning himself with it. Okay. One side of me knew it was his nature never to admonish an android for anything. But the other side hated him for holding me hostage to his upside-down world in which nothing matters—but
nothing
and
nothing!
—except the clarity of hot. You
hear
me? That’s what it was. I never spoke to Tom again. He sent me flowers. He kept calling, and I kept hanging up. He even wrote me a letter, which was quite an event for him.”

“Did he deal with the episode itself?” I asked.

“No. That would have been to admit that it had occurred.”

Smiling his thorny wry smile, Dennis Savage shook his head. “The funny part of it is, years later the blond kid turned up on
Ryan’s Hope
, tattoo and all.” He laughed. “I was so glad when it
went off the air. I hope to pass him, a year or so from now, undergoing meltdown in some gutter.”

“I always thought the most beautiful men would be the nicest,” I said.

“But what if there’s nothing special inside of them,” said Carlo, “to live up to this special picture they show on the
outside?
They think they should be a movie star, or someone on a yacht. But all they’re good for is hotting up the sheets. A few days later the money’s gone and they’re back where they were. No yacht, no movies. It makes them mean.

“I truly say
that’s
what you ran into that night in Weasel’s. Here’s this guy—young, handsome, build. And what’s he doing? Sipping one of those cocktail drinks with fruit and a little paper umbrella by a Hollywood pool while producers do the seven-year-contract shuffle? He’s hauling those damnhell stacks of beer! Running them upstairs, downstairs, hurting his back and making him sore, and where’s it getting him? Sure, now and then some fat cat’ll take him to Key West for a weekend. But he’s got to put out for it, doesn’t he? Or he’ll bunk up with someone like himself, another guy just as sore as he is. Two of them together can’t even make the rent on a little room in the slums. And right in the middle of this, here comes this guy who hasn’t got a worry uptown or down, strolling into Weasel’s with all his bills paid, and the blond beauty lugging his beers is thinking, What’s
he
so glad about? It’s like in Vietnam, sometimes, when American soldiers would capture a village, and instead of cowering the villagers would be giggling. So the soldiers would get mad and shoot at them, and now they’d be crying and screaming, and the soldiers would feel righteous about it.”

“How do you know about that?” I asked.

“You remember my buddy Daniel Johnson? He’s a vet.”

“So how come you’re not like that?” Dennis Savage asked Carlo. “What makes you so pleasant and easygoing and, resent it though you may, caring? When they were sorting out the gifts, who gave you what?”

Carlo was silent for a bit. Then: “Can I say something about Tom Driggers? If you don’t go see him off, and you come to regret it, you will never be able to undo it, and you’ll hurt real tough. But if you do go, and come to regret that, it won’t matter. Because giving too much never feels as bad as giving too little.”

“What do you say?” Dennis Savage asked me.

“I think there’s some pathos in this man hanging around waiting to be forgiven. But he is in fact partly responsible for the incredible growth of Attitude in gay New York. It’s unfair to exculpate him just because he’s dying. One thing has nothing to do with the other.”

“Listen to this,” said Dennis Savage. “It was something like three months after the Weasel’s disaster. Tom had finally given up on me. I was feeling low that whole year. As if I’d already got everything that was coming to me and it would be downhill from there. Remember?” he asked me. “You must have noticed.”

“It’s hard to tell with you. Your depressed is rather like your playful.”

He sighed. “So the night was young and I had to do
something
, so I just went out walking and there I was, passing the Forty-sixth Street Theatre, where
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
was playing. It had been running for a year and I hadn’t seen it, and I was looking at the people waiting to go in, and checking out the pictures, and feeling utterly miserable and left out, and then I saw this big blowup of the chorus boys doing what looked like a striptease—that number where they change from football uniforms into cowboy drag?”

I nodded; Carlo hadn’t the faintest idea what we were talking about.

“Well, you know chorus boys. There was one in the center of the shot who must have been the sexiest hunk ever photographed. I mean, he was just . . . vast truth. Two hundred pounds of original sin.”

“Sounds like one of Tom Driggers’s boys,” said Carlo.

“Exactly. I hadn’t taken much money with me, and all I could
afford was standing room. In I go. Two minutes before curtain, this astonishing kid takes the place next to me. Black hair, pure white skin, wide eyes, and slim, slim, slim. He looks like Walt Disney’s Pinocchio just after he turns into a real boy. Well, we start talking, and he’s bashful, which only adds to the attraction. And he’s so busy trying to sound grown-up that he makes himself even younger. He said, ‘I heard this play has a country-western score, so I’m a little skeptical.’
Skeptical
, coming out of that little-boy mouth.”

Smiling, he shook his head.

“He’s new in town, so I offer to take him around. And we have a few dates, but he keeps dodging my come-on. He was so fucking sweet I was going crazy. Anyway, I finally got him to Bud’s for dinner, and then I took him upstairs. We spent the weekend together—boating in the Park, bicycling to Brooklyn. Sunday he made breakfast, and everything was burned. The toast was burned, the eggs were burned, the plates and napkins were burned. And he talked in his sleep. I held him in my arms and he held on to me, and out came these confidential non sequiturs about his family. Just strings of . . . of what?”

“Feelings,” said Carlo.

“He said, ‘Pop is so nice to me.’ Or ‘Anne will take me to her dance.’ One night he started a story about I don’t know what, something with ‘the anonymous Greeks.’
Anonymous Greeks.”

“What does that mean?” Carlo asked.