Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (7 page)

Virgil and Cosgrove were down here all the time, because Dennis Savage was trying to become a writer and he needed a silence, a room of his own, to create in. I didn’t mind; I wasn’t working much. After publishing twenty-one books in fourteen years, I was discovering the joys of CD liner notes and magazine work: You write a few pages, announce, This is finished, and take the rest of the month off.

Anyway, the kids had also taken up the pleasures of the CD, especially my portable Sony D-10, a tiny box that hums with Beethoven, Wagner, and show tunes. You juice up the machine in the wall, plug in two headsets, plant Virgil and Cosgrove with the player between them, and enjoy the peace—broken, at intervals, when they suddenly join in on a line they like, such as “In the
tea
, my Lord,” and “Don’t ask me how at my age one still can grow,” and, in
Show Boat
(which they adore because it has a prominent banjo part), “Maybe that’s because you
love
me.” They stare off into space when singing out these lines; it’s quite bizarre.

Actually, many things in my apartment have long delighted and attracted them: the wind-up Victrola, my high school yearbooks, my old French Meccano building set (which they love to take out and examine but never literally
play
with). Still, the jewel in the crown is always the banjo. When I played, they would hover, watching my fingers and singing along. They even danced, an improvisational combination of do-si-do and the finale of
A Chorus Line
, Virgil’s favorite musical. For novelty, I showed them how to turn the banjo into the Japanese koto by stopping the fretwork way at the bottom of the fingerboard, where the strings sound high and diffuse.

This they
loved
.

“The
koto!”
Virgil breathed out.

“Teach me, now,” said Cosgrove.

I did teach them; and Virgil decided to buy his own banjo, so
I took him down to Matt Umanov’s on Bleecker Street and helped him pick one out. That night, Dennis Savage banged at my door, shouting,
“I’m going to kill you!”

He was coming down a lot, too, to show me his pages and take criticism, resisting all the way. Usually the kids are deep in their CDs when he arrives, but one evening they got out the banjos to show him what they could do.

“Play some Sondheim,” he suggested, probably figuring that of all composers, Sondheim is the least banjo-friendly.

He underestimated the possibilities. Virgil plunged into the first bars of
Pacific Overtures
(on the koto) and stamped on the floor.

“Nippon!”
Cosgrove howled. “The froating kingdom!”

“No,” Dennis Savage suddenly begged in a poignant manner. “No.”

“We froat,” Cosgrove concluded, cutting to the last line of the number.

Dennis Savage was floored. “I didn’t think you could play show music on the banjo.”

“We can play anything,” said Virgil.

“How about ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’?”

“Actually,” I said, “you
can
play show tunes on the banjo. For instance, harp effect.” I ran through the chords of “(Everything is beautiful) At the Ballet.”

Virgil was humming; he knows his art. Cosgrove tried a line: “Raise your arms, and there’s a dying swan!” This is not pure Kleban. And Dennis Savage was contemplating all of us, and our past and future. He does this pretty often now; time has made his melancholy avid.

“ ‘I was pretty,’ ” he sang.

“ ‘I was happy,’ ” Virgil sang.

“I was Cosgrove,” Cosgrove sang; but someone was banging on my door.

“Guess who I saw in the gym today!” Carlo cried as I let him in.

“Give us a hint,” said Dennis Savage.

“Someone you’ve met. Incredible-looking. Redhead’s complexion with hair half-blond and half-brown at the one time. You keep looking at it, want to smooth that hair.
Beautiful
strange, everything tight and trim, thighs, tips, abs, mustache. Clone of death. Especially how he carries himself, swaggering around like he invented rimming.”

Dennis Savage was stumped.

Cosgrove said to Virgil, “I bet it’s one of those chicks with dicks.”

Virgil said, “Cosgrove”; and Cosgrove was abashed.

“Clone of death,” I put in. “Are people like that still around?”

“This one is,” Carlo answered. “That whole weight room was in a hypnotic state. He was taking turns at the weight bench with some cute little mud puppy who wanted to do some innocent flirting. But our man suddenly starts feeling the kid up.
Everybody’s
watching. And the guy tells the kid, ‘I could get high on your cream. I want to fuck you like crack.’ ”

“Jeepers,” I said.

“Someone we’ve met?” Dennis Savage repeated.

“We all knew him. Some time ago.”

“And he’s still—”

“He’s
stiller
. He was never like this before, he’s new! He’s tough and he’s tight and he’ll take no prisoners.”

“I insist upon guessing this,” said Dennis Savage.

“Look at it this way,” said Carlo. “He could also be one of your maybe B or B-plus hunks, junior slim grade, always having boy friend fights with Scott Hellman.”

“That’s Bert Hicks,” said Dennis Savage. “I mean, half of the description is Bert Hicks. The other half is . . . who?”

“He
says he’s all Bert Hicks. But he’s surely got someone else’s eyes. You know? Like he’s been having nothing but the most evil sex for ten years. And like where did Bert Hicks get that shithouse build on him?”

“Gyms are public places,” I said. “Anyone may enter.”

“Builds like this don’t happen in public.”

“Not to Bert Hicks,” Dennis Savage agreed. “And where’d he get the heavy eyes from? No one knew that about him before.”

“No one knew
anything
about him before,” said Carlo. “He wasn’t the kind of guy you needed to know about.”

That isn’t true. Bert Hicks wasn’t the kind of guy
Carlo
needed to know about—not a heavy traveler along the Circuit, a craftsman of cruising. A quite good-looking but also nice, funny, intelligent guy in his early twenties at the time, the very early 1980s, Bert respected Stonewall style, but up to a point, meaning he did
some
of the gym and wore
some
of the clothes and went to
some
of the Places. Stonewall was competitive; Bert half tried. What are you supposed to do, kill yourself? Some of the men of that era had but one thing in their lives beyond work, food, and sleep: cruising. Bert had one thing, too: Scott Hellman.

Another of my villains, Scott did
all
of the gym, the clothes, the Places, the orgy in Room 213. He was everywhere, celebrated.
Too
handsome,
very
built,
so
hot. He and Bert were something between best friends and lovers, constantly quarreling, mostly over Scott’s incredibly shabby treatment of Bert. Like some—not all—really dazzling men who do it because they can, Scott drove Bert berserk with frustration. Scott would set up a dinner date, then B.I. (for “Better Invitation,” meaning you cancel at the last minute because someone more attractive beckoned) or simply not show up at all. Scott would “borrow” money. He’d exploit Bert in creative ways, such as inveigling him into taking Scott’s visiting mother to the Brasserie while Scott went on the town.

But Scott got away with it because Bert was in love with Scott, and because Bert knew he could never get Scott to treat him fairly but he
could get Scott
. That price was worth Bert’s paying. So Bert thought.

I didn’t. “You’re much better-looking than you think you are,” I once told him. “Dennis Savage recently remarked that you’re a walking ad for the not too muscly but nicely chiseled look. You’re good company. You’re punctual. You return phone calls. I’ve also
noticed that you trouble to keep up with major cultural things. You don’t let your mind go bad.”

“So?” he asked, grinning at all this nonsense.

“So you can do better than Scott Hellman.”

His opinion, of course, was that better than Scott Hellman Rock Hudson couldn’t do, but he played it politic with me and made one of those “Oh, I suppose” gestures.

“For instance,” I continued, “I can’t imagine having a conversation with Scott. All I ever hear him say is ‘Boy, what a fuck
that
was!’ about somebody or other. Sure, he’s a knockout, but he lacks content. What do you two do after sex?”

“Lie there. Dream. Be happy. Or that’s what I
would
do if Scott didn’t jump up and grab a shower and race off somewhere.”

“To cruise?”

“He does other things. He and some friends are running a pool championship. They meet someplace downtown.”

“Gack
. What a gringo.”

“Gringo?”

“Carlo’s term for a thuggishly macho intolerant straight. He means it as a compliment, unfortunately.”

“Scott has his junky side, okay, but who doesn’t?”

“He cheats on you like crazy.”

“We both cheat. Everybody cheats.”

A silence as we ponder that. I think it’s always true of some people, sometimes true of some other people, and never true of the three or four people left over.

“Tell me,” I said, “what do you guys do when you’re alone besides fuck?”

He shrugged. “What does anyone do? We . . . Well . . .”

“How come everyone I respect finds Scott stupid and boring and you don’t? Because they all respect you. Kern Loften told me he spent a goodly portion of the Dress to Kill Party discussing Chinese literature with you.”

“Well, we both majored in—”

“I’ll bet I could name a half dozen of the most imposing novels
of the postwar era and you’ll have read them all.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” he protested; but he was a gambling man, and insisted I proceed.

“
Pictures from an Institution
.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s easy.
The Naive and Sentimental Lover.”

“Yes.”

I was impressed—it’s John Le Carré’s only novel that isn’t about spies, and it’s intensely homoerotic, and thus not renowned, especially among the fluttery Le Carré academics.

“Okay.
Cities of the Red Night.”

“Yes,” he said, but uneasily. Did he
want
to lose?

“The Once and Future King.”

“No. Well, it was read to me, as a child, but I didn’t actually—”

“That’s a yes. Anyway, that was all cinch stuff. Now I roll out the cannon. It’s 1976, and everyone’s opening—but how many finish?—the extraordinarily colloquial
JR
, William Gaddis’s genius work, the novel of conversations.”

“Yes,” he said, turning white—
why?
—“but only to pass the afternoons while Scott was off meatracking. Besides, you’re wrong, Gaddis’s genius work is
The Recognitions.”

Jesus, he
was
well-read. I tightened the survey. Something international, epic, too intrepid for the riffraff . . . Ah! “Elsa Morante,” I said.
“History: A Novel.”

“Yes,”
he cried, in despair. “It was the greatest novel of the last ten years. But I do more than read. Scott isn’t the only—”

“I think Scott is sapping your confidence, if you’ll forgive my forwardness. In fact, I think Scott
needs
to sap your confidence. It may be that you’re what Scott wishes he were, if only he could—”

“Are you
crazy?
He’s the only man I know who’s totally content with what he has. Every time I look at him, I just wish . . . I wish . . .”

“You know, Carlo’s opinion is that half of looks is how you carry yourself.”

“That’s fine for him to say. The most startling forearms and the longest torso and the biggest dick in the city, and his opinion is, It’s all in the walk.”

“If you moved like a winner instead of like Scott Hellman’s victim, you could get any guy in—”

“Goddamn it!”
he shouted, throwing himself on my couch.

“What? What? What? What?”

“Well, he did it again, didn’t he?, is what!” Bert crossed his arms tightly against his sides, as if, unleashed, his vital organs would come crashing out. “I told him if he stands me up
one more time
. . . and of course he did. I mean, I’ve asked him and I’ve lectured him and I’ve stood him up myself and I’ve humored him and I’ve not returned his phone calls and guess what I finally figured out?
Nothing
takes!”

“Of course it doesn’t,” I joined in, warming to my subject. I’ve loathed Scott Hellman ever since he picked Dennis Savage up in the Eagle, then, as they were going out the door, saw someone cuter, picked
him
up with a smile, and ditched Dennis Savage without a word. “Scott lives to betray and betrays to live.”

“Well, brace yourself for the news, because I made a stand and he thinks it’s a bluff, so naturally he . . . But it isn’t a bluff this time. I’m moving to San Francisco.”

“What?”

He nodded dramatically. “Surprised, aren’t you?
Great!
Wait till
Scott
finds out! See, I only just happened to meet this kind of valiant guy at the baths. What a
hero
!” Bert shook his head gently at the fond memory. “He’s going to put me up till I can find a place—and, hang on, his firm is looking for someone with a background in Chinese. Me.”