Everybody Loves You (4 page)

“See, Waterloo,” Dave asked it, “the cat?”

Waterloo, now guarding the kitchen with grim eyes and ruthless tail, didn't turn.

“Everybody out,” said Jim. “I got a date coming.”

*   *   *

Dave and I ambled the three blocks to my building, and I took him up onto the roof to watch the sun go down, Dave blithely chugging his Scotch.

“What are you planning to do with yourself?” he asked me, and I told him; and “What part of the south are you from?” I asked him, and he told me. There was some more of that, back and forth, then silence. Dave kept passing me the bottle, and I would take a sip, and he would take a slug. We were looking down on the street and up at the darkening sky, out of conversation with nowhere to go. But some men are comfortable having nothing to say or hear, and Dave was one of those.

I remember thinking then that I was twenty-five, and had thus far done nothing worth mentioning. I was going to have to do something about that.

We drank and listened to the town. Even on the hottest days there's a wonderful wind up on my roof, fifteen floors above the street.

Dave stretched and leaned against the railing, handing me the bottle. Blue T-shirt over a white T-shirt. He nodded at me very solemnly. “Johnny Boy'll be back soon,” he said. “I can always tell, somehow.”

I was a bit startled, and stuttered, saying, “It must be refreshing to have the place to yourself, though.”

He thought about it. “I don't think it is,” he said. “Because when he's there I always know where my morning coffee's coming from. Johnny Boy goes around the corner for it. He gets up before me, and does his shower, and then out he goes. So when I'm just coming out of the bathroom, he's got all the stuff set up. Buttered roll, you know, or a Danish. He likes to surprise me. And he gets all fussed about the sugars. I like to look over and see him fussing with the sugars for my cup of coffee.”

I was staring at him again but he was looking away, didn't see.

“I like to have him around,” he said. “Guess I'm just used to his ways.”

I nodded.

“He has to do this now and again. The ladies just love that young lad and he feels obliged to respond. I've no quarrel with that. Every lad should have his day off.”

He passed me the bottle.

“His day off,” I asked, “from what?”

“From being serious. Thinking about how it feels.”

“How what feels?”

He shrugged. “Your brother should be telling you, not me.”

“How it feels to be really close friends?”

He looked evenly at me. “Well, we've grown to depend on each other. Is that what you'd call really close friends?”

I tried to pass him the bottle, but he went on, ignoring it.

“We can swing into this balance sometimes. You know? Swing right into it. Then it's hard to swing out again. Very hard to do that, very close friends. Now, maybe I don't like to see him go off with the ladies all the time, but he's got a right. He wants to show me what he can do. Show himself, too. He may well be there with some sugar right now. Right as we speak, here. And he's pleasuring her so nice, you know, just laying there, nothing doing but pleasure.” He reached over and took the bottle from me. “And he's thinking, What if someone could pleasure me that way? If I was laying there. That's how it starts, you know. I believe so. Who do I know could pleasure me so? Who could I ask?” He hefted the bottle and took a long one.

I was staring at him again, speechless. And he nodded at me, and gestured in some odd way, and smiled, and shook his head. See, you had to be there; we need the visuals, the two T-shirts and the bottle of Dewar's and the endlessly kind wisdom in his eyes.

“So he asked you,” I said.

Dave shook his head. “That's a tall order for a lad, asking like so. I had to figure it out and help him along. Mind, I was not needful to plow Johnny Boy for myself. I started in to pleasuring him because it was the best way to hold him, you know. And I was needful to hold him, that's true. Needful of his ways.” He smiled. “Well,” he said, and that gesture again: Think nothing of it? Let's discuss? None of the above? “Well … tell you the truth, I was not all so sure how I was to proceed. I waited till we were in bed one night, in that darkness, you know, with the traffic going by, and sirens, and the sign lights going on and off at the deli. And I got him to talking about things, and one thing that we talked on led to another thing. And finally I got to ask him to roll over for me, if he would be so kind, and he gave me no quarrel about it.” Another swig of scotch. “He gave me no quarrel.” He regarded me. “You know why?”

I shook my head.

“Because I believe my young lad Johnny Boy was brought here to be my buddy. My really close friend, like you're saying. And I was brought here to be his, you know.” Another swig. “It sometimes happens. As long as you're very tender about it, everything is okeydokes.”

I flashed just then on a wise old queen of my acquaintance who habitually hired street trash to perform his sex for him. Describing the comely clarity of one kid in particular, he said, “He's the sort of boy who was
put on earth
to wear a Mexican lace shirt and black Speedo shorts, and have them
ripped off him
by reckless
muscle
hunks!” I flashed on that, for some reason.

And I had been right about those two all along; I know everything. But that's not what the story's about, yet.

Dave shrugged. “What the hell,” he said. “If that's what he wants. I just got to see him happy. And that's why he'll always come back. I got a hold on him.” He extended the bottle. “Really close friends.”

“What is it like when he comes back?” I asked, taking the scotch. “Is he embarrassed?”

“Hell, no! He comes in like a barn dance! Wants to tell me how it was.”

“You don't mind that?”

“Mind?” He smiled. “He looks so happy talking about his ladies, now what kind of buddy would I be to mind?”

“Isn't there any … I mean, he walks out on you and then just—”

“He doesn't walk out on me, my friend the kid brother. He just takes a little side trip.”

“Doesn't he do … I mean, just some punctuation…”

“Yeah, some punctuation here,” Dave said, laughing.

“… some token gesture, to say he's glad to see you?”

Dave was humming.

“To say he's back?”

“Well … he always shakes my hand.” He nodded. “Does it real special, too. A long, solid shake like we just been through a war together. You know why? Because he knows, a way back of all this, that I liked what he was so I went after him. He knows. That'll occur from time to time, men going after lads like Johnny Boy. And he knows that the thing I went after him for isn't in the fucking. Do you know that? I'll tell you what it is.”

This is what the story is about.

“It's in the feeling. The feeling that we have together.” He passed me the bottle. “Like we're walking along the street about eveningtime there with a good dinner inside us, and we both know that when we get home we're going to talk things over and then I'm going to pleasure him, put a hold on my Johnny Boy. And nobody knows that but us. It's in the feeling, because we know it and they don't. See?”

“Yeah.”

“That's why,” he said. “Why one guy may just go after another. For the feeling.”

“Is anyone after Jim?” I asked. “That you know of?”

“How much truth do you want, my young friend?”

“How much have you got?”

“Listen.” He set the bottle down. “What it is. You got to be just a little afraid for someone to come after you. That's the kind of thing it is. And Jimbo ain't afraid of anything.”

“That's his problem,” I said.

He looked at me for quite some time.

“No, it ain't. It's just how he is. And I'm how I am. And you. Like that, down the line.” He kicked a foot in between the railings, pulled himself up, and gazed up at the sky, dark now, and the city heavy below. We didn't speak for a while, and I heard the darkness moving around us.

“He'll be home soon,” said Dave. “I know that much.”

I thought of him aiming the cat for Jim, and talking to the man with the attaché in the hall.

“I know his ways.”

I thought of the wise old queen gloating over the stagey savaging of his gutter Ganymede, and of Dave singing for Johnny Boy and talking with him to set aside the cares of the day, and asking him to roll over if he would be so kind.

“Shake his hand. Going to ask him how he feels.”

I thought of my book contract, and the place of the visual in contemporary society. I thought of very close friendships, having a hold put on you. Then I thought of what I was planning to do with myself—but (as Immanuel Kant once said) every story is about love. It's in the feeling.

Dave finished off the bottle.

“Maybe tonight,” he said.

“Johnny Boy,” he said.

“To be home with me,” he said.

“Coming home tonight now, don't you think?” he said.

“Dave, I wouldn't be at all surprised.”

Do-It-Yourself S & M

Well, the boys and I are sitting around Dennis Savage's place, talking S & M. As with most New Yorkers, none of us is an expert but we all have firm opinions. One of the group points out that while S & M's rituals tend to the piquant, at least its platonic essence favors devastating hunks. Another (whom I have long suspected of harboring atrocious fantasies) observes that S & M has more sheer style than alternate love modes, recalling for proof a movie he saw in which a weight lifter made passionately tender love to a bound boy and, at climax, strangled him. A third is amused to note that S & M originated gay's unique gift to the world, fisting—the equivalent of Italy's opera and Finland's sauna.

Also on hand is a man I loathe, an activist who lives and breathes Movement. But which one? He isn't as much in favor of anything as he is against everything. Besides, he is one of the least charismatic people I've ever met, the Fearless Leader as schmengie; and shouldn't our heroes be men of style and vigor? Most social or political movements take their tone from the most admirable—at least the most striking—characters available. (Think of the champs and exemplars who instructed the spirit of '76—Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Tom Paine.) Gay liberation is the only movement I can think of that often throws its worst people to the top.

Like this guy. In his veins flows dialectic, not blood; and when he talks love he means murder. Murder for you and love for him. After years of attacking that excrescence of gay life, Fire Island Pines, he finally decided to see it for himself. No sooner had he stepped off the ferry than he screamed that he had found Paradise and ran amok, chasing anything that moved. At the sight of his furiously hungry eyes, his K mart
pour le sport
attire, and his fish-white belly, the houseboys ran for their lives, locked themselves in their houses, and wouldn't reappear till the activist was back on the boat.

Of course, now that he's in the city, the activist has retrieved his cool, replete with abrasive, ecumenical putdowns and plans to rule the world. At Dennis Savage's, he outlined the utopian gay future, which included among other benefits “coupling by assignment,” racial quotas for everything, and sumptuary laws beyond a Methodist minister's meanest dreams. Dennis Savage and I shared a profound look at this, but his other guests were blithely intrigued, for this was the mid-1970s, and we thought we had the world wired down. We took the activists about as seriously as we took Methodist ministers.

“Will we be able to put in for certain preferences?” the activist is asked.

“Yes,” another agrees. “Like the ads: ‘Applicant favors sizable S with full toy shop. Must be nonsmoker and love screwball comedy.'”

“Smoking will be prohibited in any case,” says the activist. “And screwball comedy is a sentimental fascism.”

“Well, can I still have an S?”

Dennis Savage gets restive. This was not one of his better parties—short on connection but deep in lecture, a compound of closed systems, like a night of anonymous bathhouse encounters. Dennis Savage likes interlock, a density of communion and a streak of culture. Surveying this soiree of jerks, he becomes touchy, railing against everything like a sitcom mother-in-law. “S & M!” he scoffs. “It's a hoax. It's a mess of paradoxes.”

He notes them, to murmurs of dissent, under the activist's beady eye: “S & M teaches us the ultimate hunk—doesn't it?—in those cartoons … Tom of Finland, Etienne, A. Jay. But let's look in the pages of
Drummer,
let's examine their real-life counterparts—skinny sillies scowling in a pantry! S & M assures us that its erotic transaction is the most intense in the gay world. Am I right? And what is it made of? Cheesy intimidation. Aggression. Name-calling. Is this love? Is this our revolution?”

The activist nods, smiling. It's sure news that the Movement won't tolerate S & M, comes the day. “And as for style,” Dennis Savage continues, “it may be style to you, but all I see is dreary routine.”

“You've never been there!” cried one of the group. “S & M is a frenzy! Why, people have killed each other in mid-session! You call that routine?”

“You must admit,” said another, “that the S & M scene would make a wonderful movie.”

“Actually,” replied Dennis Savage, “I don't think it would make a competent Looney Tune.”

Cries and whispers followed, then laughter, then the various exits, for it was getting on. The activist, however, showed no signs of leaving, and when he visited the bathroom—drink in hand, be it said—Dennis Savage held a war council.

“Help me get rid of him,” he begged. “Throw a drink in his face or something.”