How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle (27 page)

“The way I was taught is, somebody else’s emergency comes first.”

Tom-Tom sat still absorbing this. Then: “What’s an Automat?”

“A firm called Horn and Hardart had chains all over the Northeast. They were cafeterias but also a kind of home-cooked fast-food outlet. You put change into receivers in the wall and a little window would open for you to take out your selection. A sandwich, or dessert. Your frank-and-beans crock. You see them in old movies.”

“Those black-and-white classics you like? Do people help the old woman in such films as those?”

“Quite often. There was a social contract in America that has been gradually leached out by forces I do not comprehend.”

“It’s wonderful that you believe in something, at least. The Emergency Dollar, I mean. That you and Ken still do that.”

“Don’t you believe in something, Tom-Tom?”

“Yes, but I don’t know what it is. Ken says you’re good to talk to because you write stories, so you know how things will come out. Do you ever surprise people by using them in your books?”

While I prepared a weaselly evasion, he suddenly went on, “Because it’s very helpful to me when Red and I go to the listening room. So far, I can’t do any more than skin-eat him, or he lets me shop him when he stays over to avoid the subway all the way back to…” Here Tom-Tom simply waved his hand, thus suggesting some distant arrondissement of Brooklyn. “And he has to pretend to be asleep. Then when he comes, it’s like Rambo’s machine gun.”

Getting up to furnish us with seconds, Tom-Tom got pensive. “Red’s no trophy in the Jim Streeter way, I admit. Some of my gang hold it against him that he’s short, because he’s this kind of dopey top, so he should tower over me. Full or half portion?”

“Half, please.”

Spooning it all out, Tom-Tom said, “He could never be one of us, but there’s something about him I really like. It’s partly because his feelings get so hurt a lot and you want to protect him, and it’s partly because his upper torso gets so wide over that tiny waist. But I believe I love him somehow. I
love
him, cousin Bud.”

As he set the plates down, I said, “Tom-Tom, you are one of the finest young fellows I know. You’re extremely handsome, you’ve got a shockingly rich head of hair in the most amazing shades of light and dark brown, and you have one of the three or four biggest torsos in Chelsea. And I’ve grown very fond of you. But I’m not your cousin.”

“Ken calls you that,” he replied, joining me at the table.

“Ken
is
my cousin, Tom-Tom. His mother and my mother are sisters.”

“Oh. I thought it was a new game we were playing, like carrying the football.”

“Here’s what’s funny, Tom-Tom: two gay men are having dinner, and there’s no gourmet chow or smart wine, no sharp dressing, no décor comme il faut. No anything but simple and uninflected. Yet the two of us are stereotypes. I’m the old-fashioned show-biz buff with The Knowledge, and you’re the Chelsea muscleboy—and I hope that doesn’t offend you.”

“No, I like being a Chelsea Boy.”

Making a little hot dog in Tom-Tom’s manner, I asked, “What happens when you become old enough to be a Chelsea
man,
though?”

“There aren’t any, haven’t you noticed? Davey-Boy says they send a car around at a certain age and pack you off somewhere.”

“The way they dispose of the villain in
The Mummy?
”

“Oh no, it’s quite peaceful. Davey-Boy says wherever possible they let you go with your best friend.”

“Where do they take you?”

He started pasting a biscuit with lime preserves. “I think Iowa,” he said.

*   *   *

M
EANWHILE, BACK ON
E
AST
Fifty-third, there was trouble about Cosgrove’s New Year’s catering gig.

“I finally get hold of this guy,” Carlo told me, “and that was not easy. They don’t make it easy’s the first thing to know about someone like this. I told him the usual things you’d say. ‘We have a business to run.’ Or ‘If we bend the rules for one client…’ You know. And all I get is these complications. If it was just me, I’d truly chuck it. Guy’s a professional arguer.”

“Just lose him, then,” said Ken. He and I had been going over a report he’d had to write up for one of his jobs, for a firm in New Jersey. He wanted a grammar and punctuation check.

“The kid himself is running this outfit,” Carlo replied. “Only he can…”

Carlo trailed off as Cosgrove and Fleabiscuit came crashing in with the news that they’d passed someone asking for money on Lexington Avenue. “He looked so sad,” Cosgrove told us. “Sitting on the sidewalk, kind of keeled over, crying and even talking. He was talking to the world, saying Why? He’s a young guy, and sort of nice, and everything’s gone wrong for him. But he didn’t have a sign like the others do. He isn’t organized, and he’s so leaning over that no one can pass money to him, and … I can’t just give him
that,
can I?”

Because Ken and I had pulled out our emergency dollars.

I said, “Get a twenty out of my wallet. But it sounds as though money isn’t really the problem.”

“Yes, because why is he crying so badly like that?” Cosgrove asked, crossing over to the dish where I keep my money, keys, and ChapStick. “He says, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ He doesn’t care who sees any more. What do you call that?”

“He’s broken,” said Carlo.

Cosgrove looked at us as he stuffed the bill into his pocket. “But how does that happen to him?” he asked. “And everybody just walking past.”

“Go,” I said; and off he went, Fleabiscuit hard by his side with a worried look.

There was a pause. Then Ken said, “Why do you people have what you want if I can’t find it?”

“That’s the most imposing non sequitur,” I replied, “since Julia Roberts married Lyle Lovett. And who says we have what we want?”

“You know what I mean,” he said. I didn’t, and he noticed, but as he started to explain, Dennis Savage came in, and Carlo had to share the vexing news about Cosgrove’s New Year’s job.

“Guy now says he’s adding two vegans besides his dinner for six,” Carlo told us. “And why should he pay for them, ’cause they’ll just eat anything. But that’s not true, for starters. Those vegetarians do not please easy.
And
can we walk his dog, because he’ll be so busy hosting? And does the fee include birthday cake, ’cause one of the guests … See how he works it?” Carlo shook his head. “And the big fun is, he still hasn’t sent the advance. What are we supposed to do, pay for his party ourselves?”

“Yes but,” I pointed out. “If Cosgrove doesn’t make his own business decisions, he’ll never enjoy having a business. So far, all he’s enjoyed is picking out a pocket agenda notebook with a pencil that fits into tiny leather straps. He’s always taking a note or two, and this gives him a certain enabling power.”

“So far, so good,” said Ken.

“Yeah, he sure won’t feel enabled come New Year’s Eve,” said Carlo. “He’s got too soft a heart for the cheats who come floating right in when you offer a service to the public.”

To Ken I said, “We have what we want? I find that so strangely disturbing.”

“But doesn’t it look that way?” he countered. “Everything fits together here.”

“That’s probably because we’re hiding everything.”

Then we had to tell Dennis Savage about Cosgrove’s errand of mercy on Lexington Avenue.

“There’s a lot of misery around, isn’t there?” said Dennis Savage. “Why get so upset today?”

“Seems this guy’s young and cute,” said Carlo, “so that breaks the rules. If it can happen to him, who couldn’t it happen to? Maybe to Cosgrove, if he’d had someone else’s luck.” Very, very quietly, he added, “On the street and friendless.” He was almost chanting now: “Why is it happening to me?”

Cosgrove and Fleabiscuit returned, deflated. After he put the twenty back in my wallet, he came over to us, and Dennis Savage impulsively riffled Cosgrove’s hair. It was a bagatelle of a gesture, but Ken must have read it more weightily, because he asked if Dennis Savage got Cosgrove for birthday sex.

Carlo chuckled, and Ken explained this Chelsea custom to Dennis Savage.

“When is your birthday, in fact?” Ken asked him.

“This afternoon,” Dennis Savage replied, with an outrageous simulation of candor.

“Sneak! Sneak!” I cried. “It’s April twenty-seventh.”

Carlo decided to mooch a nap at Dennis Savage’s, and they went upstairs as Cosgrove and Fleabiscuit—and who was the more morose of the pair?—headed for the bedroom.

“What happened about that guy on the street?” I asked their backs.

“He was gone,” said Cosgrove, passing out of view himself.

*   *   *

B
Y THEN IT WAS
December, and the Christmas cards started coming in. I display them amid the new CDs laid out for listening and the old CDs pulled for further enlightenment. I love the unique cards—the Rodgers and Hammerstein office may send a
Pal Joey
set design, Allan Mason Smith another of his scenic photographs, my longtime pal Clint Bocock an erotic study with his latest boy friend. Hetero acquaintances send family shots, complete with golden retriever. Is he Kendall? Joker?

Christmas also leads up to my New Year’s party, which I’ve been attending since college. Matthew’s the host, and Matthew’s in opera, so there’s a musical theme. It’s fancy, with waiters filling your champagne glass, and soprano Sheri Greenawald and I center the fun with a concert of Broadway curiosities in a kind of camp espressivo.

The concert was inaugurated years ago, when Carol Neblett and some crazed loon improvised the second act of
Tosca,
with the man singing Tosca and Neblett Scarpia. I liked it, but Matthew said it was “tactless.” He suggested that Sheri and I preempt any further action by espontaneos with a clearly demarcated vocal set—everything from Victor Herbert to Stephen Sondheim, some of it with scurrilous new lyrics or blended into intricate medleys in which themes from one number slip into another, and aided on occasion by my puppet friend, Barkis the Impedient Dinosaur. Devoted to raucous commentary and sabotage, Barkis will demand a kiss from Sheri in the middle of a jazzing DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson salute. There’s a sing-along for the whole party, to Fanny Brice’s “If You Want the Rainbow (You Must Have the Rain).” And there’s the annual encore, “Meine Lippen, Sie Küssen So Heiss,” from Lehár’s
Guiditta,
to my English translation. In the years when Sheri was unavailable, Barbara Daniels, Lauren Flanigan, and Susan Graham stepped in.

It’s the only time in the year that I get to make music in public, so the holidays become for me even more of an event. As New Year’s approaches, I gad about like everyone else, wondering why some people claim to hate this time of year. Aren’t there a lot of amusing things to do, like concocting a medley out of the Walt Disney
Snow White
score, or at least picking out crazy presents? I was at home resting up when Davey-Boy came buzzing by again. Cosgrove decided to take notes for possible use in his next porn story, so as I ran around doing an Emergency Tidy-up Cosgrove commanded Fleabiscuit to fetch Cosgrove’s notebook-and-pencil. Fleabiscuit yipped obediently and ran into the bedroom.

“I could make some sly observations about Davey-Boy,” Cosgrove explained. “He’s canned heat.”

Fleabiscuit ran back in to deposit a small rubber ball at Cosgrove’s feet.

“No, Fleabiscuit. Fetch master’s
notebook.
”

Fleabiscuit yipped and ran into the bedroom, returning with his Shrek squeeze toy.

“No, Fleabiscuit—”

The door. Davey-Boy marched in with those shoulders of his, saying, “Don’t play music, and I don’t want that stupid water. I know what goes on here.”

I reintroduced Davey-Boy and Cosgrove as Fleabiscuit came running in with his plastic windup Mickey Mouse.

“No, Fleabiscuit—”

“You,” Davey-Boy told me, “sit down right now. I have something important to discuss with you. It’s a very nice apartment, with extremely books. You couldn’t read all these in a hundred years. I respect you, but if you play with me I’m going to get edgy.”

He said this while taking off his dress coat, and—I swear, boys and girls—he was shirtless as he threw it onto the Fleabiscuit shoelace couch. That same canine worthy came running back in at the same moment with an old steak bone. Cosgrove got but halfway through the word “no” when Davey-Boy turned his cool eye upon them, and master and faithful companion slunk off.

“Ever so handsome Davey-Boy with the tightest physique in Chelsea,” I said. “To what do I owe?”

“You will please help me some more.”

“You enter like Captain Ahab and continue like Oliver Twist.”

“That’s just my way, because I know you like me.”

I said nothing.

“Right?” he went on, sitting on his outflung coat.

“Everybody likes you.”

“I poured out my feelings to Tom-Tom, and he said to come to you for the true analysis.”

“You’re the gang’s theoretician, though. You lecture on The One. If you can’t solve it … This is, I presume, about a Streeter named desire?”

“Yeah, I’m jealous. I never minded the clowns and wastrels our wonderful Ken will deceive me with, because they’re no more than deceptions. Jim Streeter’s different. He’s real.”

“This will sound flip and bourgeois, but isn’t your bare back against the couch uncomfortable?”

“It’s never uncomfortable showing skin.”

“Good, that’s settled. Is Jim Streeter The One?”

“Yes, but not for Ken. I don’t care if that’s arrogant.”

“It’s arrogant but correct. You and Ken are born partners.”

Some might be seen to ease up at hearing that concept. Some might even smile. Davey-Boy’s expression did not change.

“What’s your proof?” he asked.

“Some of it occurs in confidences I can’t betray. Some of it I’ve picked up as I watch and listen, because after the first twenty stories or so you’re out of invention and have to steal from life. And some of it’s because Ken has exceedingly good taste and you are the most attractive man on his beat.”

Davey-Boy cannot be flattered. He’s just absorbing the information.