How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (21 page)

“Have you fucked yet?”

Ken drew his head back slightly. He didn’t exactly smirk, but I could see his teeth.

“Listen,” he said. “Red is strange and interesting, and he flexes the tightest pump ever seen. He’s the man to know. But is he one of us?”

“Does he call you?”

“Yes.”

“To do what?”

“To talk, mostly.”

“But do you date?”

“Just dinner in junkhouses, because he’s afraid of fancy places. Like he’s never had champagne or red snapper. All he wants is not to be criticized and laughed at. And I’m his pal, so I don’t. If you treat him right, you can put your hands all over him, and he doesn’t suspect anything. He’s trusting. And he thinks it’s this joke format we have, so he feels me up, too. Is he bold? Is he laughing all the time? Sure. Then he gets quiet the way heteros may at times do. And he rests his hand on my head and says, ‘You’re my pal, right, dude?’”

“We used to say, ‘Man, that’s heavy.’”

“It rocks. He’s naive and scared and he’s in my power.”

“You sound like Davey-Boy.”

“Oh, this important thing, now—Tom-Tom’s birthday party. He wants you to come, too.”

“I’m flattered. Is it just your group, or—”

“Oh, no. Never. Birthdays? We don’t do them, because every year after twenty-five you’re less marketable. It’s nothing to celebrate, is it?”

I said, “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

There followed one of those silences during which you realize that you have been offensive. He rebuked me in mild tone: “It’s rude to suggest,” he said, “that I couldn’t reasonably hold an opinion that doesn’t accord with yours.”

He was right, and as I apologized, he did the fast-forward thing, skipping on to “It’s Tom-Tom’s office friends. He likes them but they problem him. Or just one of them does but the others enable it. It’s complicated, like everything with Tom-Tom.”

A thought hit me. “Would Tom-Tom like Dennis Savage, do you suppose?”

“He liked him in that video, all right. But your friend is too old now.”

Honest as ever.

*   *   *

T
OM
-T
OM’S BIRTHDAY PARTY WAS
one of those “meet at someone’s apartment for drinks, gang goes out to dine, and the rest of us pick up the check” evenings. Ken forgot to warn me that Tom-Tom’s co-workers were straight twentysomethings. Not one of my favorite groups. Also, for someone who is supposed to be closeted, Tom-Tom seemed to have no secrets from the males, who were doing that trendy nineties thing of flirting with the gay boy and making lewd tease jokes. There was only one woman, and she apparently hadn’t heard the news about Tom-Tom. She, too, flirted with him, but quite sincerely, it appeared, and on the way to the restaurant she took his arm, which I’m quite sure he doesn’t like. True, he never tried to discourage her. But when I walked him and Ken home after dinner, he did nothing but complain about the unwanted attention.

“And if I tell her to stop, she just does more,” he said. “She wants to go steady. I won’t even date her once—why should I? And it’s not as though I could skip her calls. She’s in the
office!
She’s at lunch, when we go, trying to feed me right at the table. Like a … pet doggy!”

“What does she feed you?” Ken asked. He was worried—I guess—at how distraught Tom-Tom sounded and trying to soothe him with a distraction.

“Guacamole chips,” said Tom-Tom. “You know heteros can’t go out without ordering chips and dip. And when I tell her to stop feeding me, she goes right on doing it, so I have to emphasize, and she says, ‘Don’t be so defensive!’ She’s pushing at me and accusing me and she’s walking arm in arm with me and I
don’t
want to
do
it any
more!
”

“Can’t you take your arm away?” I asked.

“Yes, and I
told
you, then she
accuses
me. She’s Bridezilla! Or it’s that sarcastic tone of ‘I won’t bite you,’ and other stupid things. Well, it’s not about biting me, is it? I don’t want her helping herself to my arm!”

After a bit, Tom-Tom added, in a quiet voice, “I’m never really happy except with my true friends, Kenry.”

“That’s a cute nickname, Tom-Tom,” I said.

“What nickname?”

Ken laughed. “That’s my
name,
cousin Bud.”

“Kenry?”

They both nodded.

“How come I didn’t know that?” I asked. “You’ve been family for … years.”

“Well, you’ve always been sort of in your own family, haven’t you, oh my cousin?”

Pensively, Tom-Tom put in, “It’s funny that you two know each other”—which, translated from the Chelsea, meant “I never met a gay male over the age of thirty-five before.”

*   *   *

T
OM
-T
OM WAS SO UPSET
about the girl in his office—Maureen by name—that he made an appointment to swing by on Saturday to talk Strategy and Feelings with me. But meanwhile something else had happened. A longtime friend named Stanley invited me to the opera on the spare half of his pair for the Friday night before. He had somehow ended up with two singles, so we were separated. At the last intermission, he set up a meeting after the opera’s end at the usual place, and I agreed without thinking about it. But we weren’t going out after, so why meet?—and in fact Stanley got delayed. He may have slipped on a pat of butter in the Grand Tier and was even now being seen to by the emergency medical team; or maybe he was just gabbing. In any case, I split, thinking nothing of it. Wouldn’t you have done the same? But Stanley saw it differently; and Stanley was mad.

No, he is not an episode in my past—did you ever know a gay man named Stanley? He was just a music-and-theatre friend, and not one of the more engaging personalities, at that. But when I got home, Cosgrove told me that there was an “interesting” message for me on the tape, and he watched me as I played it. The words were simply “This is Stanley and I want to talk to you.” The low, menacing tone, however, revealed that Stanley believed that he now held screaming rights to me.

“At last we know that someone’s in trouble,” said Cosgrove, barely restraining his glee.

“One is in trouble only with one’s fate,” I said. “Not with some jackass braying for attention you don’t owe him.”

“The terror,” said Cosgrove. “The brandings.”

“Go make cupcakes or something,” I told him.

Okay. Now came Saturday and the meeting with Tom-Tom; but first we had Red Backhaus, who dropped in on some social pretext but who really wanted to talk about Ken. Do you wonder if you ever get to be the protagonist of your stories? I’m the best listener in the business, but why am I always the adviser when no one else is?

It’s a living, I guess. Red’s patter is like dodgeball: it keeps coming at you from all directions. He says things like “What I hate is when chicks say they want to fuck you when they really mean they want to
fuck
you. You know?”

Tom-Tom arrived almost immediately after Red, and the two of them got very curious about each other. It was engrossing to see Tom-Tom gradually accustom himself to Red’s conversational gambits, which sound like the mad outbursts of one of the wilder characters on a cutting-edge cable-channel series.

“Are you a cousin, too, Tom?” Red asked. “There’s plenty of cousins around.”

Tom-Tom looked quizzically at me.

“A cousin of Ken’s, he means,” I explained. “No, Red,
Tom-Tom”
—a gentle emphasis for nomenclature correction—“is Ken’s friend.”

“My friend is Vince,” said Red. “And is he a kidder! Says how a rooster’s different from a faggot? ’Cause one says, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo’ and the other says, ‘Any cock’ll do.’”

Silence.

“Okay,” says Red. “I’ll leave out that joke when I do the Comedy Club.”

“You’re very handsome, Red,” said Tom-Tom.

“What, and me so goofy?”

Tom-Tom looked over at me again, as the phone rang. We let the tape take it, and heard the silence of someone who means to lurk and threaten. Soon enough, Stanley spoke, very angrily: “You better call me, you insincere bastard.” Then he lurked some more, and then he hung up.

“Dude,” said Red.

Tom-Tom now asked Red if he was Ken’s new friend from Brooklyn. Red said he was. Then Red asked me if I’d read all the books in the apartment. He rose as if to examine them from up close, but managed to get into a pose-and-flex session, showing off. I began to realize that Red was another of those men who are insecure socially but comfortable—eagerly confident, even—as a physical entity. It’s how he keeps from worrying.

“I see you work out, Red,” said Tom-Tom.

Red approached Tom-Tom. Silent and smiling, he offered Tom-Tom his right biceps to admire, tightening it up as Tom-Tom gave it a squeeze.

“Now you, cute dude,” said Red.

Tom-Tom isn’t used to this. Like all the Kens, he’s very built, but his physique isn’t something he does anything with. It’s armor. Tom-Tom dutifully flexed his right biceps for Red, but without the flashy narcissism that Red affects when he exhibits. Red poses like someone who’s been studying the pros. Tom-Tom poses like someone who would rather be the mustard boy at the preparation of a sandwich brunch.

Even so, Tom-Tom was game. “Have you tried this look?” he asked Red, pushing the short sleeves of Red’s T-shirt up to the shoulders. First one. Then the other. It had the deliberate slo-mo effect of the stripping scene in Dennis Savage’s porn film; I was seized with the feeling that I was watching a new reality show called
Fetish.

“Great look, cute dude,” said Red, in a completely happy mood. “What if I answered the door like this and a chick was there? Would she know how I feel about her?”

Tom-Tom was getting the rhythm of Red, and this time he didn’t look at me before responding. Tom-Tom said, “She would dream of you day and night.”

Red was so glad to hear it that he turned to me and gestured at Tom-Tom with an “Isn’t he nifty?” pointing of the index finger. Then he got almost mysteriously thoughtful as he rubbed his palm against his left arm just where the skin met the sleeve. He seemed to be actualizing a fantasy of some kind; Tom-Tom was hypnotized. How much, he must have been thinking, can one get away with now?

“It shows the real man,” Red said, as if to himself. Then he smiled at Tom-Tom. “What’s this look called, Tom?”

Think fast, Tom-Tom. “Bud, what’s it called?” he asked me, the little sneak.

Red looked at me again. Tom-Tom was staring at Red.

“That’s the Valentine’s Day Superdate Look” was all I could muster.

“This girl at the gym where I work?” said Red. “She’s always saying she’d like to come over, but when I mention a day she’s suddenly busy. Could she be teasing me? ’Cause I got a case of the fucks for her.”

“Would you two please sit down?” I said. “All that standing and touching and confiding is making me anxious.”

They broke it up and parked themselves, Red on the “shoelace” couch, where Fleabiscuit was patiently awaiting a customer.

“Some of the girls today are very sinful in how they talk,” said Red, addressing a new paragraph to Tom-Tom. “I was telling our host before how some of them like to haul out those strap-ons on a guy. One said to me … well, not to me but to my buddy, Vince Choclo? She said, ‘I want to feel your tightness and see how you come.’ I mean,
dude.
”

Tom-Tom just sat there, falling in love; and I got tired of being the butler in a drawing-room comedy, so I grabbed a lead role by taking Red up on that line of conversation, and we batted it around for a while. He got so into expressing his viewpoint—really, into the novel experience of being listened to—that he followed me into the kitchen on the sparkling-water refills trip. And Tom-Tom followed
Red,
and three bodies rather fill my little kitchen. Yet there was no sense of anyone’s feeling crowded or needing to defend his patch. Even Red went with it, eager to talk sex with men who wouldn’t keep challenging him the way his day-to-day chums probably do. As I outlined in the first piece in this volume, there’s no feud like two straight men who think they’re friends.

Now Red left the kitchen with a “Be right back” and headed into the bathroom: which I was hoping would happen.

“Tom-Tom,” I said as he followed me and the seltzer into the living room, “you are, I trust, aware that Red is Ken’s friend first?”

He shook his head. “Ken said No more sign-up sheets. It’s every man for himself.”

“You’re going to risk your best friendship over some—”

“Do you
see
that guy? He’s Fuck Daddy Supreme! And Ken told me that they aren’t dating in the true sense. So how would I be cheating if they only have lunches? The thing is, Is Red straight or what?”

“He’s … what.”

Tom-Tom looked crafty, a face I’d never seen on him before. “I’m going to test and see, just watch.”

“How, Tom-Tom?”

He put a finger to his lips. “J’ai mon plan,” he said. He knows that he’s at his cutest when he speaks French.

As soon as Red came back, Tom-Tom told him about Davey-Boy’s plan to get into pornmaking, without defining the kind of porn it was.

“Davey-Boy?” echoed Red, burping after a swallow of seltzer bubbles. “Who’s that, some gunslinger?”

“He’s my closest pal after Ken. He wants us each to concept a porn story and then film it as the star.”

“Oh, man,” said Red. “Can I get in on that?” To me, he added, “And don’t tell Vince, okay? Because he always horns right in. Here’s the deal—it’s in my gym, where I’m helping Jennifer with her program. You don’t know her, but she’s got a pair of bamboulas … and …
and
her tops never reach her shorts, right, so there’s always a real nice view there. This lady is a beautiful piece of real estate, and I’m just playing along real cool when, whaddaya say, her top gets caught on something, and the two lovely friends pop out so near my face that I can’t help it if I suck from one to the other so deep and slow. Mmm, so tasty.”

Pausing, he looked up as if at a screen, to check the footage. Then: “So she loses her balance and accidentally pulls on the string of my Wilsons and they fall to the floor. Out comes Thumper, and I say, ‘Okay, give me ten.’ That means ten minutes of blowjob.”