Everybody Loves You (10 page)

I waited.

“I haven't been out here in a long time,” he said. “I didn't want to come particularly.”

Tom, I saw you and Champ McQuest in a private film.

“It's just that nothing's going on in New York now. No work for me. Thought I'd take a vacation here. It doesn't seem the same, though. I feel cold.”

He pulled the spare blanket over himself.

“Everyone's been nice to me. I really appreciate it.”

What happened after the film was over? What did you say to each other? Everybody loved him but you, right? Or did you love him gringo-style, without touching? Come ye out, Pants-Down Johnnies, in Tom Adverse's Club Stonewall, where you can have anything you want. Except Tom Adverse.

“A while along, it's almost like you don't have as many friends as you once did.”

“Hey!” said Little Kiwi, leading in Carlo and Bauhaus. “This is the night, so everyone should get ready.”

“You be nice and tough, Little.”

Of course, you can't be both nice
and
tough, but, typically oblivious, Little Kiwi sat on the bed, patting Tom's chest and heartening him for the work ahead.

“Uh-huh,” said Tom.

Carlo glanced at me, everything in his eyes: poor busted guy.

“I suppose you heard we're going to lay for the ghost. Behind a barricade!”

Tom put his hand on Little Kiwi's shoulder. “It's more serious than that.”

One cannot understand. One must simply forgive.

—The Cocktail Dandy, 1988

It was another of those nights, boys and girls—no rain, now, but everyone sticking close to home as I fiddled with my tapes and the others sported about. We sat in on a television movie, held a game of Risk (everyone played except Tom), and still no one headed upstairs.

Apparently we were staying up to see the ghost.

It got so late that Dennis Savage and I had to rustle up an antipasto plate to keep everyone fit and happy. “Like,
tot-tal
s
lämi,” said Bert, tucking in. Then we heard Bauhaus whining upstairs and Little Kiwi gave Carlo an Extremely Meaningful Glance and slithered away.

“I should know better than to ask this,” said Dennis Savage, “but what's Bauhaus doing in the bedroom?”

“The kid himself leashed him up there,” Carlo explained, “as part of his Ghost Patrol.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake!”

Tom went outside, I assumed for a cigarette. House rules banned smoking indoors.

“I think this joke is getting out of control,” said Dennis Savage.

“It's no joke,” Lionel told him.

“Like, it was rillly a
hor-ror
show!” Bert agreed.

“It was marsh gas,” said Dennis Savage.

“In a second-floor hallway?” Lionel challenged.

Beeping like the old RKO radio tower, Little Kiwi, upstairs, yelped out, “Ghost Patrol calling Carlo Smith. Come in, Carlo Smith.”

Carlo grinned. “Got to go,” he said, getting up. “Duty's calling.”

Yes, I'd guessed right. Tom was standing on the deck looking at the ocean, the white gnat of a lit cigarette the only motion in the picture. A pose in the shadows.

“This jive about ghosts,” Dennis Savage warned us, “is offensive to Stonewall pride. Are we not men?”

“Sometimes it can be very difficult to believe in anything,” I said. “Some people can scarcely deal with the most ordinary things in life, no? Until we are all direct and articulate with each other … until we can face each other fairly, how can we possibly approach the metaphysical?”

Dennis Savage stared at me. Lionel mimed the tugging of a sage's grey beard. Bert said, “Oooh,
school.
”

“I mean,” I went on, “how can we even discuss the existence of supernatural phenomena when some of us can't even believe in … Where'd Tom go?”

The porch was empty.

“Believe in what?” Lionel asked.

A crash overhead.

“Little Kiwi,” Dennis Savage called out. “Would you come down here, please?”

“In a minute!”

“Love.”

“What's going on up there?” Dennis Savage cried.

“Ghost Patrol! Remember our motto—”

“It's the most commonplace thing, all about us. It's the very essence of our revolution. Yet some of us can't … see it.”

“The two of you goons get down here pronto and stop wrecking the house!”

Upstairs, Little Kiwi complained to Carlo, “He never lets me have any fun,” and there was another crash, followed by a thud.

“I'm going up there,” said Dennis Savage, rising.

“You'll be sorry,” Lionel told him.

The lights went out upstairs. Dennis Savage paused. In the silence, we heard Little Kiwi giggling.

“I'm telling you,” Lionel insisted, “there's something in this house.”

“Oh, please,” said Dennis Savage, and up he went.

I excused myself and went outside, following the cigarette light to Tom, brooding down near the water. He nodded at me, but said nothing. After a while, I asked him, “What makes you think it's Champ McQuest?”

Nothing.

“Talk to me, Tom.”

“It was fine of you to ask me out here, I know that. I want to be nice when people do a friendly thing. But I think I better go back to the big city tomorrow, get me off your hands.”

“Come on to the house. You'll feel better inside the party.”

“If you get the chance to be nice to someone, you should take it. That's a lesson I learned.”

“Didn't you say one has to be tough?”

“There are people to be tough with and some to be nice with. That's the lesson that I mean.”

“Come on back, Tom.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

He threw the cigarette into the water.

“God fucking damn it to hell,” he said as we walked back. “Jesus shitfaced baboon sucking
damn
it all fuck!”

Nothing specific. A mood piece.

Then Tom halted. “I don't want to go back there,” he told me. “You know somewhere else I can stay?”

“What's the matter?”

He turned back to the ocean. “I've been making so many mistakes that I just can't rectify. No
way.
You know that feeling?”

“Who doesn't?”

He was turning from the ocean to the house and back, a man without a place. Suddenly he stopped moving. “Why'd the house go dark?” he asked.

I looked back. All the lights were out.

“I think they're trying to lure the ghost out.”

“Man, they shouldn't be doing that.”

“Listen, Tom, what exactly did you see when … what did the ghost look like?”

He thought about it. From the look of him, I expected no more than an uh-huh, but then he told me, “It looks like a movie.”

Just at that moment the house lit up to shouts, screams, and the barking of Bauhaus, and Tom and I ran up onto the deck and inside. Everyone was on the second floor, amid a barricade of chairs. Little Kiwi was studying one of his Polaroid three-by-threes. Carlo was flat on his back on the rug. Dennis Savage, his face as white as Mr. Softee, staggered over and grabbed me by the arms.

“I
saw
it!” he cried. “I saw a
ghost!
”

“It came through so fiercely it knocked Carlo over,” Lionel reported.

“Like, shove me down the sli-yed!”

“Oh, no!” Little Kiwi wailed. “There's no picture in my photograph!”

He held up his Polaroid print: empty black.

“Maybe the flashcube didn't—”

“Ghosts probably don't—”

“Everyöne was like môving so—”

“Where is it now?” I asked.

“It went out the window,” said Lionel. “Just … zoom.”

Tom was not, as I had assumed, behind me. “Tom?” I called.

The reply was a fabulous series of crashes from the porch.

“My dinosaurs!” Little Kiwi shouted.

I raced downstairs and outside. The whole porch was a wreck. Tom was on his knees, in a stupor, slowly picking up the pieces of Little Kiwi's model collection.

“Tom?”

He shook his head.

“Are you okay?”

He laid some plastic parts on the deck table and looked at me.

“It's all right,” said Tom. “He said it's all right.”

I felt the others piling out behind me.

“Tom,” said Little Kiwi, “you didn't knock down my dinosaurs, did you?”

“He said it wasn't me. He won't be back again. He wanted to make sure I … he talked to me…”

Tom knelt again and picked up the iguanodon.

“It's all right now. He talked to me.”

Carlo righted a fallen deck chair; next door, two men had come out on their balcony to investigate.

“He talked to me.”

Tom began to weep: this big, beautiful, kind man with a broken middle C.

“He said … he said…”

“What, Tom?”

“He said, ‘Remember me.'”

It was not a message from the past, then, but for the future.

Tom held out his arms, showing us the wrecked patio. “I'm sorry,” he said, the tears running down his cheeks. “I did this to you.”

“You didn't do this,” said Carlo, coming up to Tom. He put his arms around him, and this time Tom accepted the embrace.

(“Does this mean there really are ghosts?” Dennis Savage murmured in my ear.

“
I
didn't see one,” I whispered.)

“It's all right,” said Tom, very gently breaking away from Carlo. “Okay?”

He put the iguanodon on the table.

“Okay, now? Is it okay?”

*   *   *

Yes, Tom. It is okay.

The Boffer

I cherished my toys. I shielded them, hoarded them. I kept my toys neat and slick and whole and true, and by the time I finished college and came to New York, my toys were still alive and perfect, in closets in my parents' house or on shelves in their garage. My toys. And when I took my present apartment at Fifty-third and Third, I brought some of them along—the Meccano construction set my dad lugged home from France in 1955; Plasticville: The City in a Box; my Sneaky Pete Complete Home Magician Outfit; and about a ton of Lego.

The Lego I eventually passed on to my little cousin Scott, and it gave him such a kick that I added Plasticville. The day I came over with it, I showed him how to set it up, snapping the building walls into right angles, aligning the fences, dotting the crisp lanes with mailboxes, benches, and lampposts. A serene American village then lay before us, with a church, a K mart, a barn, a school, and houses. An informal civics class. See? They get the kids when they're too young to know any better; they recruit them, make them straight for life in a village with a church and a K mart.

At least it didn't work with me. The Meccano set still rests under my bed on Fifty-third Street, but the Sneaky Pete Complete Home Magician Outfit I had to give to Little Kiwi, to distract him from his obsession with
A Chorus Line.

Dennis Savage blamed me for this, of course. I had taken Little Kiwi to the theatre for his birthday one Wednesday afternoon, and he was so entranced with the show that he went out the next day and came back with a
Chorus Line
cast album, coffee mug, and T-shirt. The record he played day and night, the mug he not only used for everything from water to ice cream but carried around with him like a shaman's fetish, and the T-shirt he wore incessantly till Dennis Savage wrested it off him and scrubbed it in the sink. (At that, Little Kiwi couldn't wait till it had dried and put it on half wet.) This is not even to mention the
Chorus Line
scenes and numbers he insistently favored us with. At the nine thousandth haunting repetition of “Kiss today goodbye,” Dennis Savage groaned and told me, “You started this. Do something.”

I started this because I sometimes think it the truest act of friendship to introduce someone to something instructive or delightful that might—who knows?—change his life. Still, I did something. I gave Little Kiwi my Sneaky Pete Complete Home Magician Outfit: and
A Chorus Line
dissolved before our eyes. In a trice—in a bath towel, actually, which he wore as a cape—Little Kiwi reinvented himself as La Dolce Pita the Magnificent, complete with his assistant, Ferdinand (the inevitable Bauhaus, Little Kiwi's dowdy dog, half German shepherd, half weasel, and half kraken; and I know that's three halves, but you don't know Bauhaus). Visiting Dennis Savage became recreationally hazardous. Without even waiting for a lull in the conversation, La Dolce Pita the Magnificent would run through the Sneaky Pete program, beefed up by card tricks with a deck he found in a joke shop, all this to the tune of Johann Strauss's “Roses From the South” on the stereo. Those who have taken these journeys with me in the past will not need to be told that La Dolce Pita was somewhat less than magnificent in his command of the magician's arts.