Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (8 page)

“What’s the job?”

“Who cares? It’s a chance to—”

“Bert? Just tell me what the job is, okay?”

“Why should I?”

“Why won’t you?”

I waited.

“Bank teller,” he said, his hands over his ears.

“Bert, it’s so
sketchy!”

“What’s so great about being a librarian? Anyway, this San Francisco guy told me I really stand to score out there.”

“You can score here. That’s—”

“No,
Scott
is here!”

“Dump him!”

“I
can’t!
Don’t you see that? Don’t you see how
amazing
he is? He’s so . . .
Scott
. No one who sees him can . . . I mean, no one can know anything. It’s all Scott. It’s all love. It’s all me. Everything . . . all mixed up. That’s
why
San Francisco. It’s not . . . Listen, okay? Will you listen? San Francisco is not mixed up.”

That was the last we heard of Bert Hicks. As for Scott, he hit thirty-seven or so and began to slow up. Less gym, fewer parties. He decided to let his body find its natural condition, and he got some light reading done. He thought rain was reason to stay in. He gave up on
GQ:
all that young. He stopped having brunch with people he admired but didn’t like. He ceased to matter, except to himself.

The interesting thing was, Did he ever miss Bert? But when I asked, people told me I was being ridiculous.

End of flashback. “Carlo,” Virgil was saying, “you’re just in time to hear Cosgrove and me on the koto.”

“Do what?”

They played a selection.

“Dueling banjos, huh?” Carlo said when they had done.

“That was ‘Finishing the Hat,’ ” Cosgrove said. “In a way.”

“I always wondered what was meant by ‘hammer and tongs,’ ” Dennis Savage told us. “Now I know.”

“Why discourage them?” I asked. “Music blesses any house.”

“Oh, look who’s playing supportive and benign, with his bunny rabbit ways.”

“Last night he spanked me,” Cosgrove put in.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” I said.

“We see the truth,” Dennis Savage announced. “We take in the world. We learn of corruption.”

“First of all,” I said, “it was a very light spanking; and, second, he asked me to.”

Virgil froze Cosgrove with an accusing look.

“I was depressed,” Cosgrove pleaded.

“If you’re depressed, you should come to me,” Virgil advised him.

“Yeah,” said Carlo, imagining who knows what unspeakable filth. “Can you see that?”

Dennis Savage said, “I may have to write about this.”

A mild alarm went off in my head.

“Hold your horses, buster,” I told him. “I patrol this territory.”

“He thinks he’s so Peter Rabbit,” Cosgrove grumbled, about me. He was annoyed because he’d got in trouble with Virgil.

“So what do you call that stuff you play?” Carlo asked the kids.

“Music,” said Cosgrove.

“No, what’s your outfit? Got to have a name there, for the theatre signs.”

“The Koto Brothers?” Cosgrove offered.

“Seems like you should be some kind of
ensemble,”
said Carlo. “Listen, first you got your Symphony Orchestra. Hear that? Then comes your Philharmonic. That’s fancy. But hottest of all is your Ensemble. Like a Baroque Something Ensemble, or the Something Van Beethoven Liquid Ensemble. See?”

“Oh!” said Cosgrove, seeing it. “The Von Sondheim Koto Ensemble!”

“Of Manhattan Isle,” I added, as Dennis Savage’s eyes shot darts of molten lead, arrows exquisitely poisoned so your brain jellies as you live, and assorted impatient shrapnel.

And Virgil said, “Yes!”

“Why
Von?”
Dennis Savage asked.

“It sounds like us,” Cosgrove answered.

Carlo agreed: “It’ll look dandy on the marquee.”

“For our succeeding selection,” Virgil began; but Dennis Savage took the banjo from him and laid it on the couch.

“Intermission,” he explained.

“What I’m thinking,” said Carlo, “is what’s next about Bert Hicks?”

“That’s easy,” said Dennis Savage. “Invite him to dinner.”

Well, it
was
Bert Hicks and it
wasn’t
. Or, like, it
was
Bert Hicks. But never in all Stonewall had you seen a man so reinvent himself by going clone. It was as if you had left Gloversville and come back ten years later to find Tacitus’s Rome where Gloversville had been. This guy was built and torrid, a sinful package of afternoon delight. Jesus, what confidence good looks give you!—not to mention the red-gold hair. Yet it was the same face, the same (one presumes) insides. Whatever hurt him originally and led him into a no-win relationship with Scott Hellman must still shimmer, with an elated ache, within him. Yet his eyes shone.

You devil, I kept thinking. You
devil
! as he sat in Dennis Savage’s living room, sopping up the host’s Hundred Ingredients Beef Stew, one of the spectacular taste treats in the Western world (though I always crinkle up my mouth and pretend it’s garlicky, to keep the cook from becoming content and aging too quickly—getting indignant keeps him fresh). You devil: You pulled it off. You upped and moved and changed and now you’re some kind of absolutely winning man. But Dennis Savage, after motioning me into the kitchen, could only shake his head.

“This is uncanny,” he said. “This is danger.”

The kids were rather intrigued by Bert, until Cosgrove asked him, “Do you know many of these chicks with dicks I’ve been hearing so much about?”

Bert smiled. “I only know bods with rods.”

There was a pause.

“I know some really hot tanks,” Bert went on, “who spread out for you like they’ve been trimmed a thousand times. But they still have that first-time tightness. I know heavy street trash, sexy
blond boys who’d snuff you for a twenty, but they love to be fucked coco-style, on their back like a chick. I know Bill Congdon, a man of the world with the biggest tattooed dick in San Francisco, an eagle with veins. I know Wesley Tusan and Bob McCrack, first-floor-front apartment in a building in which there lives a very handsome and innocent boy who walks on crutches and has highly developed abdominals which excite Wesley and Bob. Their idea of a party is you all come over and drink a few cold ones with the door open till this boy passes by on his crutches, and Wes and Bob pull him into their place and they take his crutch away so he’s helpless, and then we all strip him and stretch him out on the bed and everyone takes a turn whipping the kid’s ass. He’s so beautiful like that, and I kiss his tears just then. I know Paul Nestling, a real hairy fucker, whose idea is if you can think of some sex thing and he isn’t willing to do it, he’ll give you ten straight cash dollars. I know Pete Puleo, he won the South of Market rimming contest three years running. Some of the judges haven’t waked yet. I know amputees and ex-cons and shit freaks and killers. But I can’t say that I know any chicks with dicks.”

There he paused, grinning and positive about himself and without a shred—not a shred—of self-mockery. He had passed into the looking glass. Boys and girls, he wasn’t one of us anymore.

Cosgrove phrased it well. “I don’t like this guy,” he whispered to Virgil, and they went into the bedroom to practice their new Von Sondheim Koto Ensemble
Me and My Girl
medley.

“How’s Scott?” I asked Bert.

“I was about to ask
you.”
He was still grinning. “I haven’t seen him.”

“Excuse me for remembering, but wasn’t he the love of your life?”

Bert laughed. “Those are juvenile infatuations. Oh, I am going to see him real soon. Scott. Yes. That’ll be happening. But I thought I’d . . . I’d land here, you see. I’d make my presence known. Gym talk really travels. And then . . . yes, my old Scott Hellman. Scott will get what he wants.”

Dennis Savage took away Bert’s empty plate.

“Great dinner,” Bert said, surveying us. “God, you guys are still the same. Still holed up in this enclave, huh?”

“Huh,” I said.

“Those kids are really right little numbers. Jesus, I’d love to tie their hands at the wrist and cane them. First one, then the . . . What’s that noise?”

“The kotos are messing up on their Gay,” I said. “Noel Gay,” clarifying.
“Me and My Girl?”

“That’s some theatre show?”

“Right,” I said, trying to remember what musicals he and I had seen together.
Ballroom? King of Hearts? One Night Stand?

“So, Rip,” Bert very heartily continued, turning to Carlo. “You’re as titanic as ever. So fucking
buff
! They remember you back in San.”

“There were some good times then,” said Carlo quietly.

“Good times?” Bert echoed. “It’s Cum City.”

Dennis Savage beckoned me into the kitchen. “What on
earth
does that think it’s doing?” he said.

“Talk about the San Francisco Earthquake.”

“He doesn’t deserve my stew.”

“I can see why he wanted to redecorate his outside, but why is he playing this role? He was nice before, and now he’s—”

“Shit freaks and killers, did you hear that?”

I was thinking about it, and took too long to respond, so he said, “What are you getting so
inner
about?”

“Well . . . that was the feeling of the seventies, wasn’t it? That the best men were the ones who had the most sex? Hot was the first virtue. Is there any stew in the pot for me to take home?”

“I’m bringing it to school for lunch tomorrow.”

I struck a pathetic pose and begged shamelessly.
“Please.”

“You chiseler,” he muttered, shoveling leftover stew into a plastic container for me.

“Thanks awfully. Do we have to go into the living room again?”

“Foolish man,” he said. “We haven’t asked the fifty-dollar question yet.”

So back we went. Bert was exhorting Carlo about some frantically devious sex practice and Carlo was shrugging; in the bedroom, the koto group was exercising “Once You Lose Your Heart.”

“Cock,” Bert is going. “Fuck,” he insists. “The allness of it,” he invokes. “Come on, Rip.”

“Where did it get me?” Carlo laughed.

“Man, you are a legend. Guys are dreaming about you, wondering what you could be like. And
where did it get you?
What does that mean, coming from you?”

“Who could believe what something
means?”
Carlo replied.

“Like that’s such heavy trim.”

“I just don’t—”

“Morbid stuff, you know?”

“I’m asking—”

“I know a guy, pro wrestler, just this side of three hundred pounds, big crusher kind of man, and when he stretches you out on his—”

“Why did you come back to New York, Bert?” Dennis Savage asked.

Bert paused, smiled—real slow and certain—and then he said, with an air of Surely You Knew This All Along, “Revenge.”

Bert looked up his old pal Scott Hellman in due course, and they started in right where they had left off. Except now Bert was the cynosure who got everything God can give, and Scott was the guy who gets stood up. Oddly, seeing his former boy friend walking around like Mr. New York energized Scott, recalled him to his days of note. He began, almost, to compete. He reinstated himself in the weight room and retrieved his sense of style, dressing down with the abandon of a disco teen. He was calling up old friends, running with a crowd, bumping into you on the street clearly on his way to where.

Actually, he wasn’t bumping into
us
because we didn’t seem to get out on the Circuit anymore. Dennis Savage and Virgil had their day jobs, I had my daily walk or bike ride, Cosgrove had two households’ worth of chores to do, and who knows what Carlo’s up to when he’s out and about? But by the evening, barring the odd dinner date or theatre trip, we were all in either of these two apartments, cutting our capers.

Dennis Savage complained about it: “No one ever wants to go anywhere. Are we waiting for Godot or something? I remember a time when we were heading somewhere
every night
—parties and dancing and crazing around in the Village.” He became keen. “I remember it
vastly.”

“How about I treat us all to
Grand Hotel?”

“This already is
Grand Hotel
! Everyone’s all checked in, and no one’s checking out! Every night the kids are
in the house
, rehearsing the Yokohama Harakiri Dozo Band, or whatever it is. And you are
in the house
, playing records. Carlo—who, as I recall, has his own place—is
in the house
, mooching dinner.”

“You’re in the house, too,” I said.

“I can’t go out by myself. I’ve forgotten where everything is.”

“Have you some more pages for me? Of your stories?”

He did. But no sooner had they landed on my desk than I spotted familiar names in his text, places I intimately knew, things I’d said. Three sentences in, I realized that he had viciously purloined a recherché episode in my past and proposed to bandy it in his fiction. I thought it best to deter him.