Everybody Loves You (3 page)

*   *   *

The speaker stopped there; he had finished. After a moment, the man who had been listening to him quietly took out some plastic and laid it on the check, and as the waiter bustled over to them, my magazine friend burst upon me, loaded down with apologies. I had to hear them, of course, and soothe them, and assure him that I wasn't in the least put off, and by the time we had settled down the two men to my left had gone.

“The worst of it,” said my friend, “is that our star writer has gone on an autobiographical binge—this after ten years of that wonderful ‘Letter from Paris' column, and ‘Down and Out at the Venice Film Festival,' and ‘Backstage at the Oscars,' all that kind of thing
no one else living
does as well. Suddenly, he can't so much as turn on his word processor unless he's all set to write about his childhood, and his family, and all these
grisly events that shaped him,
for God's sake. I mean, please, thank you, but
who cares,
right? We all have families, who doesn't? But do
I
go around telling about it? Do
you?
”

“Shall we order?” I said.

“That's the marvelous thing about New York, isn't it? No one really
has
families, because we all leave them somewhere when we … yes, we've
got
to order because I'm utterly … how's the veal, though? Do they do it Swiss style?”

So we lunched and spoke of metropolitan things, such as what well-known actor was beating on, absolutely
beating on
his wife; that the apartment crunch is starting to ease up a bit, unless you want a terrace or a really
dependable
no-frost fridge; and where you can get ceramic refrigerator magnets bearing the logos of classic Hollywood movies.

We parted on the street like boulevardiers, urbanely waving, and quick to move along, and quite, quite sure of ourselves, and without any family to speak of.

The Handshake Deal

I didn't come to New York to write; I came to get published. But what I ended up doing was play piano in bars, make party tapes, put out romance comic books for the firm that published
Superman
and
Wonder Woman,
and update
TV Guide
's squibs on old shows in syndication. (When you read about what's doing on
I Love Lucy, Surfside Six,
or
The Saint
—even today—it's mine.) In the spring of 1974, I got my first respectable job, on the staff of
Opera News,
and in late summer of that year I talked my way into my first book contract. I called my parents, a few friends. They were shocked and thrilled. Then I thought I'd tell my brother Jim. He wouldn't be thrilled, but he wouldn't be shocked either.

In fact, he was silent, distracted, holding a shoe in his hand. I was about to ask him to try to remake contact with the planet earth when I heard a pathetic mewing from somewhere in his apartment.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“Mice,” he said. “Mice are going on.”

“Mice squeak. I hear—”

“Laid in a cat,” he explained, “to catch some mice here.”

“Laid in?”

“Borrowed it.”

I decided not to pursue that one. Somewhere outside, probably, some poor slob was pacing the street calling out, “Felix! Felix!”

“Something wrong with it,” he went on. “The mice come out to play and that fucker doesn't even notice.”

“You don't seem very impressed with my news.”

“Must be a cheese factory next door or something. Why should I be impressed? You always wanted to be a writer and you knew you were going to get there, so what the fuck? Tell me some news and maybe…”

A mouse zipped out of the kitchen and disappeared behind the sofa as Jim heaved the shoe at it.

“It's like an army of them,” he went on.

“Where's the cat through all this? Hiding?”

“I locked it in the bathroom yesterday to hunger it up so maybe then it'll straighten out and eat mice.”

“Jesus!”

“Fucking coward cat. I'm not giving it any Puss 'n Boots Number Four or so when it isn't pulling its weight here.”

Someone hit the buzzer downstairs.

“That's my man Dave coming around,” said Jim, buttoning him in. “Now that Johnny Boy's tomcatting out on him, you know.”

Whose story is it, who tells it, and what is the story about? Walking the three blocks to Jim's, I had thought it would be my story, about my ambition. It wasn't. But listen.

*   *   *

Dave and Johnny Boy. Okay, they're hard to do. Because it wasn't what they said to each other or whatever was in their eyes—easy to record—as it was the threatening clarity of their pauses. Their hesitations around each other. The way they would start to move toward each other, freeze, back off; and they would be smiling right then. It was all rather highly charged, needs the visuals. And there were those things you would hear about them, too—like “Johnny Boy's tomcatting out on him.”

So just listen.

*   *   *

Dave came in and got the cat out of Jim's bathroom, first thing, and told Jim, “You got to aim your boy at a project.” He was in the kitchen opening a can of cat food. He petted the cat as it ate. “Don't you need to train this baby?”

“The fucking cat and the fucking mice,” Jim muttered.

“You wait, my friend, and I'll show you what it is.”

“Mice in my fucking house, you know.”

Dave was about thirty-five then, a rangy, ham-handed, jocular, greying blond southerner who went through life in a blue T-shirt on top of a white T-shirt. Johnny Boy, his inseparable companion, was a trim, muscly guy in his early twenties. Like Jim, they were ironworkers, freelancing on construction sites in and around New York. Dave drove a motorcycle and Johnny Boy had a mustache. Dave took it cool and easy and Johnny Boy ran to the moody. Dave was the chief and Johnny Boy, grinning, did as he was told. It was Dave who had named him Johnny Boy, and this story, I learned on the day of the mice, is theirs.

“Now watch,” said Dave, after the cat had fed, taking it over to where the mice were disappearing. He set it on the floor, knelt above it, and petted it some more as it arched its back and purred. He whispered to it. When it tried to move, he held it fast.

“Listen,” he said. “Listen to the mice, cat.” The cat vaguely listened. “Its name,” Dave told us, “is Waterloo. Waterloo the cat is listening to mice.”

Soon enough, the cat grew still, focused on something. I saw its eyes widen, and I knew some mice who were in a lot of trouble.

“When you have something in mind for your little pal, you got to aim him at it, see?”

“Dave,” said Jim admiringly, “you are a gentleman and a fuckmaster.”

“Yep. Look at Waterloo. Look at this swift mouse-killer. Waterloo the cat is going for it.”

Sitting on Jim's couch at the nightly bull sessions, Johnny Boy would fall asleep in Dave's arms and no one as much as glanced at them, except me. “He ran all over the site today,” Dave would explain, hefting the boy into his lap, “and now he's all tuckered out.” And when the party broke up, Dave would stroke Johnny Boy's hair and say to him, “Come along, lad.”

They lived together.

Dave petted the cat, enjoying its concentration. He looked at Jim and Jim nodded.

“You got to aim him, Jimbo.”

“I see that, my amazing Dave.”

Dave turned to me, smiling. “Or what?”

“You aim him,” I replied, “because that is a righteous thing.” You had to talk wild to stay abreast of Jim's buddies. They were wild men. I liked a few of them a very great deal.

“Hey, Dave, guess what?” I said. “I just sold a book to the Viking Press.”

“Don't they got enough books of their own?”

“No, to write one. I sold a
deal.
”

“Oh, so that,” he said, coming over. “Now, that's a headline.” He shook my hand.

Dave and Johnny Boy had this game. Dave would break into popular song, using a familiar tune but making up silly words. Such as:

I'll bake a tart

In Capistrano.

He'd sing this sweetly right into Johnny Boy's ear, and Johnny Boy would patiently say, “It doesn't go like that, Dave.”

“How does it rightly go, Johnny Boy?”

“‘I left my
heart,
'” Johnny Boy would tell him, “‘in San Francisco.'”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah.”

Or:

They tried to sell us

Egg Foo Yong.

Johnny Boy would say, “‘They tried to tell us we're too young.'”

Dave would reply, “You're too young, puppy. I'm old enough.”

“Old enough for what?”

“Old enough to take you,” Dave would pensively drawl, and they'd back off and pace around each other as if they were going to fight. Then Dave would feint and grab Johnny Boy by the waist and swing him around right there on the street, Johnny Boy yelling like a kid on a roller coaster.

I told Jim, “I think those two are lovers.”

“You got to be wrong there, sport. Johnny Boy's a cinch with the ladies. They line right up for Johnny Boy, you know.”

“What about Dave? Does he have a steady girl?”

Jim thought. “I expect he's married somewhere down south if you got the right state. Probably more than once if I know Dave. So what, though? Dave is not a guy to lay out his credentials for you. Dave is not afraid of what someone knows about him.”

“Don't you think they're radically affectionate for … for…”

“Two straight guys?”

“… right.”

I hadn't come out to Jim, so I wasn't sure what terminology we were to use in this context. But he was.

“Those two boys are very close, I'll say that,” he said. “They are very close. They love each other. But not fucking love. Friendship love. I've seen other guys like that. Something clicks off inside them, see. And like this one has this crazy sense of humor … and that one can get everything organized, which the other can't. And they just go right for each other, so they have someone to talk to, you know. To talk about things together and set aside the cares of the day. They think about each other all the time, too. But that doesn't mean they have to fuck together.”

“We come from the same part of the world in the same era,” I said. “The same
house,
not to put too fine a point on it. Yet I sound like a metropolitan
flâneur
and you sound like Zane Grey. How did that happen?”

He laughed. I don't know the answer myself and anyway this is not our story. But I am telling it. So let me put my oar in here: I had seen plenty of gay couples very much like Dave and Johnny Boy, usually hanging out on Sunday afternoons outside the Ramrod, their eyes dim after a long post-dancing love scene; or strolling the sand at the Grove to greet a lesbian couple and sit down on their blanket, the two women smiling at each other in memory of their own first years together. The cool man and the keen kid, that bracing union of grace and energy that means money in the straight world and love among gays. I tell you, I have seen gay couples exactly like Dave and Johnny Boy—except if you had plunked those two down in our setting, outside the Ramrod or on the beach at Fire Island, they would have stood out like a cancan ensemble in Middle-earth. Of course, this is a difference of culture, not of sexuality. All those tales of tensely available truckers and butchers that I hear (a little too often) from my midwestern friends similarly takes in what you might call enemies of the parish. Still, were Dave and Johnny Boy uninhibited cutups or was something going on there?

So what is the story about?

I mean, was something going on that I should know of for future reference? (Like now.)

Let me tell you.

*   *   *

After Dave aimed the cat and petted it and told it to listen for mice, any time someone came through Jim's door that cat would run up and lay a dead mouse at his feet.

“Don't you ever run out of these?” I asked, stepping around the mouse to hand Jim the sweater he had asked me to bring back from our folks'. “What is this, Walt Disney's
Cinderella?
”

“This is cat heaven,” said Jim, throwing the sweater at the couch.

Dave, holding a quart of Dewar's, caught it in the air. “I'll drink to that,” he said. After taking a swig the size of the wave that obliterated Atlantis, he told me, “Tell Waterloo the cat how your book is coming.”

“Fine.”

“Hear that, Waterloo?”

“Fucking mice bodies,” said Jim, kicking the latest one out into the hall.

Johnny Boy was still out—as Jim put it—tomcatting on Dave. That means that one of the girls who lined up for him had lucked in and Johnny Boy was bunking with her and only saw Dave by day on the site.

“Here's a nice sweater,” said Dave, playing with it. “I could use me one of these some time when it gets cold. Where do you get them?”

“Any store,” I told him.

“It's a fucking old used sweater,” said Jim.

“Nice color,” said Dave. “What color of shade is this?”

“Charcoal grey,” I said.

“That is a real uptown shade for a sweater on the site, yo Jimbo?”

Then Dave looked at me because I was staring at him.

“What's on your mind, my friend?” he asked me.

What was on my mind was what this story is about, but before I could answer we heard a man scream in the hall. Jim pulled the door open, and there was one of his neighbors, in a vested suit and carrying an attaché. He blushed.

“I … I thought I saw a mouse,” he announced.

“Well, now, that mouse belongs to Waterloo the cat,” said Dave, coming up to the door.

The man said, “Thank you”—as upper-middle New Yorkers will when they don't know what just happened—and moved on.