Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (12 page)

So I said, “I resent this derogatory nuance that has been creeping in on that word lately.
Intense
, as if that were the nth of bad style. As if we’re not supposed to cultivate passions anymore.”

“You think Roy treats me like sludge, don’t you?” said Nicky.

Okay. I like directness. “He does seem to take you for granted.”

Nicky nodded. “I embarrass him. Because I’ve never figured out the, like, dress codes. I’m in black sneakers, everyone else is in white. I still wear Lacoste shirts. Or the I-put-too-much-honey-in-my-tea kind of thing. Roy’s all concerned about how people are judging him, always. And I . . .” He shrugged. “I gave up a long time ago. But here’s what you don’t know. He’s very nice to me when we’re alone. He gets all roughhouse with me, like frat brothers or something. He’s affectionate. We take naps together, listening to music. We’re dressed at the time, like schoolboys in a Victorian story. That’s what I love.”

Nicky was staring at me, as if expecting a question.

“Of course I have a crush on him,” he finally said, filling in for me. “But Roy wants a boy friend his gang can all respect. See, they have categories of—”

“Please don’t say any more,” I told him.

“Yes, there
are
certain categories of hotness which tell what people want in life.” He leaned forward. “Don’t you think everyone really knows what category they’re in? Or do some guys try to fool themselves up somehow?”

“Gosh, I’m late for habañera class,” I said, rising; and Nicky got up, too, but he kept on talking: “Now, me, I know what category I’m in. But what I mean to tell you is, Roy is all inclined to promote me to a higher category as long as no one else is around to see. And what I mean to
ask
you is—”

Just then Cosgrove came in, and he and I got very involved in discussing Cosgrove’s Tetris scores, and the significance of sound wrist coordination in the mastering of Tetris, and the overall history of Tetris from the age of Nebuchadnezzar to our own times. And by then Dennis Savage and Virgil and Roy had joined us. So off we went.

Now, Folly City may be many different things to different people. But it reminded me of that moment in
A Christmas Carol
when the ghost shows you a terrible vision of what you will become. In fact, once we had climbed the stairs, paid our way through the turnstile, and edged through a dank hall into the long, narrow “lounge” where mirthless aficionados schemed and lurked, Cosgrove took one look, vastly feared, and made a run for it. I had to pull him back up the front stairs by the belt of his pants.

There’s something odd here. When you mention Folly City, no one says, “Who?” The place is
very
known. Yet where was our generation? Why was the operating concept that of degenerate age woefully fastening upon youthful beauty?

“And now,” came the announcement over the speaker system, “let’s welcome our next handsome dancer, Pietro.”

We duly entered the auditorium, and out stepped a man of about twenty-three, trim and confident, throwing himself around to Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Krisco Kisses.” He got down to a vest and a jockstrap. Then he walked off through the backdrop of dark Mylar strips. The deejay put on “Dancing with Myself,” and after a bit of a wait the same performer reentered, naked, with his dick turned on to full. There was applause, and some of the rows of seats began to shake.

“Those guys are beating off!” Dennis Savage hissed to me.

“Where are the kids?”

“They’re in the back row, holding a Tetris championship.”

“In this darkness?”

“Cosgrove brought that lighting thing that fits over the top. You could put them in the Black Hole of Calcutta, and they’d play Tetris. Where’s Roy?”

“In the lounge. Where’s Nicky?”

“With the kids.”

“Now,” said the announcer, “let’s welcome Theobald.”

The men hanging out in the lounge came to life at this; to a man, they hastened into the auditorium. I took a break in the lounge; Cosgrove wandered in after me to say, “This place is horrible.”

“Did you see the Tetris machine?” I asked.

It was the full-size arcade version, of course, with colors and music well beyond Gameboy technology. It’s a friendly machine, so eager to be played that it runs through a sample game as you stand there; and Cosgrove drew near. But how could you make contact with this great hulking monster of a Tetris? Why are the falling shapes so different from the ones in the Gameboy version? Even the music is alien, vicious. This Tetris was unsafe, and Cosgrove declined to play.

“Well, you seem to be new here,” said some old guy.

Cosgrove, grim and tight-lipped, replied, “‘I tell you, that thing upstairs is not my daughter!’ ”

The old guy mulled this over and decided to drift away—wise move—just as thunderous applause broke out in the auditorium.

“Theobald must be quite some package,” I told Cosgrove, who said, “When can we—” I’m sure that “leave?” would have been the rest of it, but just then Roy came running out, grabbing us and saying,
“Theobald
is the one!” and “What a
panther!”
and “Did you see the
whopper
on him? It must be . . . hmmm, not
quite
Red October. But surely a major bazooka! Now, how do I arrange for . . . well . . .”

“Stand there, by the telephone,” I said. “He’ll come through that door and voilà.”

“Please don’t French at me now, what do I—”

“Pounce.”

“What’s he excited about?” Cosgrove asked. “It’s just people.”

“Theobald!” Roy cooed, inching up, as the dancer entered the lounge looking wet, warm, and debauched.

“Hey, folks,” said Virgil, joining us with the Gameboy. “I broke a hundred thousand. Nicky didn’t do so well.”

In fact, Nicky was doing quite badly, coming in to look on miserably as Roy negotiated with the amenable Theobald.

“He isn’t really going to take him home, is he?” Nicky asked me. “Wasn’t this whole deal some joke or other? Some silly nonsense?”

“Not to Roy.”

The two of us watched as Roy spoke with Theobald. Lucky Roy to have snapped him up, for other gentlemen were crowding around, their eyes on Theobald, ready to leap the second that his present conversation showed signs of evaporating.

“Why did he bring me along if this is what it was?” Nicky asked me. “Should I have to know about this?”

“This place has the worst potato chips,” said Cosgrove, passing by with a napkinful and a glass of punch.

“I told you not to touch the refreshments,” I reminded him. “Who knows where whose hands have been around here?”

“Bartering for that guy!” Nicky went on. “As if nobody had any feelings.”

“Hey, Cosgrove,” Virgil called out. “They just set out the bread sticks!”

“Save some for me!” cried Cosgrove, avoiding my outthrust arm as he charged through the lounge.

“I don’t mind what he does, but why when I’m right
there?”
Nicky pleaded. “Why, to
torture
me?”

An employee came in bearing the refilled punch bowl, and Cosgrove asked if he was planning to bring out any chocolate-covered macaroons. “It’s my favorite dessert,” Cosgrove explained.

“That’s my third favorite,” said Virgil. “My second favorite
is lime Frozfruit and my all-time is tiramisù, which is probably not available here, I would imagine.”

“You got that right,” said the guy, as Dennis Savage came into the lounge, noting it all in a single look. Roy’s presentations to Theobald appeared to have reached the bottom line: The two were head to head, whispering the intimate details that marry love and money on the fringes of the gay world. Theobald nodded thoughtfully, Roy made a gesture, and away they went without a glance behind them.

Nicky dropped onto the banquette that lines a wall of the lounge, distraught, beaten, the lover who dared not speak his name—an archetype as basic to gay life as any Theobald in full bloom. Dennis Savage and I flanked him, trying to soothe his pain, reason through it, and, perhaps, find some hope in it somewhere.

“I’m okay,” Nicky kept saying. “It’s not as if he signed a contract with me.”

Munching a bread stick, Virgil came up and said, “If he’s mean to you, just throw him away like tomorrow’s sawdust.”

“Theobald,” Nicky mused. “Turns it on, turns it off.” He shrugged. “Well, that’s the style. They make sex the way a musician makes music.”

“This ridiculous
collecting
mania of the randy gay male,” Dennis Savage said.

Now Cosgrove horned in, with a new idea: “Why don’t
you
take someone home, too, Nicky?”

“Oh, never,” said Nicky. “This revolting trash.”

“I don’t mean Ragmop. Take home one of the dancers.”

“You can’t buy love, Cosgrove.”

“But what if you can’t
have
love? At least you can buy some nice company and not give way to secret tears that all can see.”

“Oh, was I so . . . I’m sorry for all embarrassing you.”

“Not at all,” I said.

“Only a few people saw,” said Virgil.

“And would you please,” Dennis Savage asked me, “tell that thing to stop calling me Ragmop?”

“He’s not a thing,” said Virgil.

“Well, I’m not Ragmop.”

“I’m not a thing,” Cosgrove mused, “but somehow you are Ragmop.”

Which got a giggle out of Nicky, at any rate.

“Let’s get this boy home,” I said.

“No, I . . . Can I come with you guys? Please?”

One could hardly have said no. Back on our own turf, as we piled into the elevator, a virile voice called out, “Hold that, please,” and Presto joined us, with a stalwart grin.

“Could you push fourteen?” he asked.

Virgil and Cosgrove were very subdued, taking turns gazing up at their mystery love. Presto was not unamused by the attention; he held up his fingers to put donkey ears on the pair. Just then, Nicky burst into tears.

We all tried to comfort him as Virgil told Presto, “We’re rehearsing a play.”

“Looks like a real Greek tragedy” was Presto’s opinion.

“No,
Close Encounters of the Third World,”
said Cosgrove, master of the
fallacia consequentis
.

Well, we took Nicky to Dennis Savage’s and calmed him down with a V-8. We said all the useless cheer-up things. We pointed out Bauhaus, who appeared at the bathroom door with one of his “Oh, them” looks, raced into the living room, dropped a little treasure upon the carpet, and sauntered into the kitchen. We cast aspersions upon Theobald, though most of us don’t even know what he looks like. Then Roy came in to brag.

Oh, that Theobald! So wicked, so eager, his whopper flopping hard and ready out of his pants. His power, his readiness to do!

“This is an entirely different class of people,” Roy told us. “They’re not like, you know, the guys you meet in bars, guys you could have gone to high school with. They’re . . . sex people. There’s something inside them, like a motor. I see it now—these dancers and porn stars and so on, they’re not doing it because you and I aren’t available. It’s because they’re so hot that fucking is their vocation.
Of course, I made sure we took the precautions. But can you imagine telling this . . .
monolithic
guy that you want to get pleasure-fucked, and he doesn’t say, But do I like you?, or, Is it Thursday? No, he just sets you right up on the bed and proceeds to slide his big, fat, cream-filled joint right up your—”

Virgil, Cosgrove, Nicky, and Bauhaus dashed into the bathroom; the sound of the running shower directly followed.

“I blew it again,” said Roy. “Speech is not free here.”

I said, “The problem is that, in actuating a fantasy, you’re threatening everybody’s sense of stability. We all dream of encounters with the holy Lucifers of the sensual world, okay. But that’s all they are. Dreams. Didn’t you notice that all the men in the audience tonight were dreary old losers?”

“We
aren’t, are we? I’m not even thirty yet.”

“But where were our coevals? I’ll tell you. They’re out seeking some more earthly version of the dream in socially reputable places. Because the only fit partner for Lucifer is another Lucifer. Anyone less total must feel inadequate. Threatened. Humiliated. Tell your friends where you went tonight and what you got. Tell them about Theobald. You think they’ll be glad and plan their own trip to Folly City? On the contrary, they’ll—”

“Good Lord!” cried Roy at something behind me; Dennis Savage and I turned to look. It was Nicky, nude and erect, walking in like a strip dancer launching his second number. And—I swear to God and all Her angels—he had a raging bazooka. Maybe even a bazooka plus.

“What’s . . . what’s going on?” asked Roy, as Nicky planted himself before his friend.

“Here’s what you like, right?” said Nicky. “This gadget? You don’t care about people, you just want a thing! Fine, now somebody put on Frankie Goes to Hollywood and I’ll prance for you!”

“Has he been drinking?” Roy asked.

“He was swigging the V-8 like a man possessed,” I said.

“Nicky,” said Roy, as Dennis Savage went into the bedroom
for something, “our friends will become alienated if you carry on like this.”