Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (9 page)

But deftly, deftly. “You know,” I said, “I think the plot slips up a bit here, with the intrusion of these subsidiary—”

“Down, Rover,” he said. “You’re not finessing me out of my rightful rebuttal.”

At least I was able to devastate his confidence in the semicolon, pour boiling oil upon his tender ablatives. He was groaning soon.

“Please,” he begged. “Please.”

“The price of education,” I observed, “is to see ourselves as we are seen,” as my pencil marked away. I even found a spelling error.

“What’s the latest on Bert and Scott?” he asked, to throw me off my game.

“Why don’t you write them into your story?” I replied, chiding a tautology and relishing a failure to follow through with the subject-verb agreement on
neither-nor
constructions.

“I’ll leave them to you,” he said. “You always love the direst tales. I know how you’ll end it, too—Bert finally hypnotizes the love of his life and finds it a shallow thing after all in this world of vanities. Right?”

“Too pat. It needs a twist.”

“Speaking of twists, how are you and Cosgrove doing?”

I had to think about that one, and put down the pencil. “Well, he knows that Virgil is the side of the bread with the butter on it. But he has to eat the other side, too, doesn’t he?”

Then Carlo came in with the latest on Bert and Scott. Carlo always knows these things; he keeps up with what’s left of the Life. Like: Bert wore a mesh jock to the Black and Red Party.
Nothing
but a mesh jock. (Dennis Savage said, “Are they still holding Black and Red Parties?”) Or like: Bert and Scott had their hands in each other’s pants during the last twenty minutes of
Labyrinth of Passion
. Rick Conradi was one row behind them and saw the whole thing. (Dennis Savage said, “Why can’t
we
go out to the movies instead of having them in?”) And even: Bert and Scott are starting to look alike. Scott just bought a motorcycle jacket and cut his hair down to but
nothing
. (Dennis Savage said, “Maybe I should get a new haircut,” to which I replied, “What hair?,” only trying to be symmetrical in this screwball comedy sort of way; but you know how huffy he gets.)

Anyway, the latest was that Bert had moved in with Scott, and Carlo thought there was something wrong with that but he couldn’t figure out what. Dennis Savage said, “No, it’s true love after all these
years.” And they were looking at me because they knew I didn’t buy the story as it stood.

“It needs a twist,” I insisted.

Then the door opened and in poured the rest of us: Virgil and Cosgrove, grinning with their banjos and the Saddam Hussein of dogs, Bauhaus.

Dennis Savage said, “Just what I need, the Von Suppé Glockenspiel Terrorists.”

“Here comes movie night!” Cosgrove gloated.

“What’s the selection for us, pal?” Carlo asked.

“The Widow Keebler.”

“No, Cosgrove,” said Virgil.
“Lady Keaton.”

Carlo and I glanced at Dennis Savage.

“Mrs. Soffel,”
he said. “And if it’s movie night, why do I see those five-string dishpans?”

“Well, first it’s the Von Sondheim Koto Ensemble of Manhattan Isle,” Virgil explained, “with their tasty new medley from
Company.”

So that’s what we did that night. It’s funny how life went on like that around here. It missed the appeal of the unexpected—the dangerous, even—that life had at times in the 1970s. But I can’t say it was ever boring. It must be a little like those intricate three-geisha massages they perform in certain Japanese bordellos. By the end, you’re utterly exhausted, yet you didn’t precisely
do
anything. It kind of got done to you.

Maybe we
should
have been getting out more. My friends were grumbling that anytime they phoned, day or night, I always answered, so instead of being able to tape a message and rush on with their day, they had to blow half an hour chatting with me. And Carlo observed that whenever he dropped in,
somebody
was around.

We were all around when he dragged Bert in from the gym. I mean
dragged:
Carlo had hauled Bert all the way across town to make him tell us something—and Carlo was angry, a rare state for him.

“Go on now and tell them,” he growled at Bert, pretty much throwing him onto the couch.

Well, you can kidnap Bert, especially if you had been, like Carlo, a brief era before, the most apparent man in gay New York. Status has its privilege. But you can’t make Bert blow his suave.

“A cold one?” he asked me, resettling himself on the couch as heftily as possible, the cowboy at tea. “Yeah, thank you. Saint Pauli Girl, if you’ve got it.”

“Beer?” I said, suddenly realizing that this was my apartment and I was the host. “All I have is water, coffee, and Absolut. That’s all I drink.”

“We’ve got Hershey’s chocolate Super Shake upstairs,” said Virgil. “And grapefruit juice.”

“Just tell them!”
Carlo shouted. “Who cares what you drink?”

The rest of us stood there, amazed.

“Yes,” said Bert. “Well.” He’s letting it out slowly, smiling as at some private joke, enjoying the attention. “You know, Scott was always such an aggressive kind of guy. What Scott wanted was what Scott got.” He laughed. “Well, that’s cool. That’s what sex is for, right? You’d be strolling the avenue on a fine spring day, you and Scott. Cruising the avenue. And something cute passes by, and that’s the last you see of Scott on that fine spring day.”

He paused, nodding at us all, his hands extended, as if to ask, Look, aren’t we all the same human under all our dodges and façades? Who are we to judge, right?

“So now it’s years later and the story is, Who’s cute and what does Scott want
today?
What does Scott want?”

He grinned.

“Scott wants me.”

He nodded some more.

“Would I let an old buddy down?”

He pointed rhetorically.

“ ‘What do you like to do?’ Remember that question? ‘What do you like to do?’ You have to get what you need. Now, Scott used to need to top his boys. He basically liked them leaning over, braced
against the wall, legs wide, a good fast pump. Back in San they call that a creamdown.”

“I’m not wild about this,” said Cosgrove.

“But now it seems that our Scott here likes to be creamed himself. Any style you want. And that’s fine with me, because what I like to do is screw my boys coco-style, when they’re on their back and you start on them standing and then get yourself onto the bed and really sizzle them up with your arms around them, slow-stroking them to the sky. You know how beautiful it is to hear a really sexy guy moaning with hot while your cock works him to and fro?”

“Listen to this,” Dennis Savage murmured, really alarmed.

“What Scott wants, I shall have to give him. That was always the case with me and Scott. Always. And Scott wanted to spend a fine spring day on his back, going all the way, none of that paranoid safe-sex stuff, over and over and more and again. In between, he took rest breaks to slurp on my joint. You know, to catch his breath. And finally we were lying there all brained out, our bodies slick and our sticks running with cum. After all those terrible aching years of wanting him and wanting him, right up there so close and never, never, never, never, never being allowed to feel that warmth. Well, almost never. Not . . .
really.”

Here was a flash of the old Bert, the man who needed instead of the man who had.

“Now I’d felt it. Can you
imagine?
Lying next to him in the darkness, listening to him breathe, knowing what it was like at long last. Leaning over him and watching him smile. I’ve seen plenty of those smiles. But never on him. He was smiling for me today. Scott smiled with
love
for
me
. So he reached up to touch me, and I told him I have AIDS.”

Glance around the room at such a moment; see what your friends are like. Carlo, calm now, looked like Jean Valjean near the end of
Les Misérables
. Virgil was staggered, trying to figure out why this would happen. Dennis Savage put his hand on my shoulder, which meant, I think, If you want to toss this thing out of your
apartment, let me help. Cosgrove simply took up his koto and diddled out “The Music of the Night.”

“I told him I have AIDS,” Bert repeated, “because when I have something, I need to share it with my buddy Scott. He always shared with me, didn’t he? I’m talking about years and years of sharing, such terribly
painful
years of that Scott-style sharing, such love-is-punishment sharing and
slavery
sharing, and sharing
hurts
. It
hurts
, dudes!” He turned to me.
“You
know this, right?”

I said, and this is quotation, “‘Oh, ’tis an earth defiled, whereon we live.’ ”

“What Scott put me through with his sharing you will never know, with your gang here in your fun-filled apartments. You think books and music saves you? You think they make you special, or is it invulnerable you are? Well, Scott is not invulnerable, so I told him I have AIDS, and now Scott has what Scott wanted.”

“You said your say,” Carlo told him. “Get the fuck out of my friend’s house.”

Now Bert, suddenly, was affable and assured, reconstructed again. Bert, the clone of death. He got up and went to the door, smiling—but Virgil followed him and said, “You told him that. But is it
true
?”

“Don’t spoil the story, sweetheart,” Bert replied. And off he went.

Exhalations and exclamations ensued. Had we been old biddies, we might have gone in on one great gust of
Well!
Then we put it behind us. We’re home. Dennis Savage returned to studying his new story. Virgil remarked on how angry Carlo had been, and Carlo, who had turned on the television to catch up on
Monday Night Football
, laughed and gave Virgil a pat on the rump. Then the koto kids demonstrated how to get to Carnegie Hall (“Prectice! Prectice!,” as the old joke runs), and I decided to get some retyping done. It sounds noisy—hell, it
is
noisy—but I can work through it.

When Dennis Savage brought me his latest emendations, he was in a good mood.

“‘I was pretty,’ ” he sang as my pencil flew. “ ‘I was happy.’ ”

“I love Cosgrove,” I sang.

He thought that over and gave it a soigné but sympathetic nod. Surprise. You never thought that I was going to admit it, did you?

That’s the twist.

We froat.

“Ask him yourself,” I said. “He’s coming up for a coffee date in about ten minutes.”

“Well, haven’t you noticed? I swear, he can turn any conversation over to his favorite—indeed, dare I suggest?,
only
—topic within three exchanges,
without a single non sequitur
. How does he do it?”

Roy is one of the new young gay guys who are starting to take over our building. When Dennis Savage and (shortly after) I moved in, sometime before the Spanish-American War, the entire apartment house was straight but for us and the closeted old grouch in 11-1. But during the last few years a striking number of gays have joined us, including a few lookers and one out-and-out hunk who seems to have sparked fantasies in Virgil and Cosgrove. He has become known to them as Presto.

“Then there’s Roy’s wistful little pal,” Dennis Savage went on. “So polite, so yearning, so resigned. He’s like a scream of agony too well brought up to let itself be heard.”

“Well, Nicky’s got a case on Roy,” I said, getting out the cheese-and-crackers tray.

“A
case?
Like Israel had on Eichmann. He’s up to his ears in the love of his life, and Roy doesn’t notice and couldn’t care less.”

“What happened to all the cheeses I bought?” I called out from the fridge. “There was a Brie, a Gruyère, and a Stilton.”

“I ate the little pie one,” Cosgrove answered from the living room. “And Bauhaus was starting in on the Stilton.”

“Who invited Bauhaus down here?” I asked Dennis Savage while examining what was left of the Stilton. “He’s
your
dog.”

“You’re not going to offer that to Roy, are you?” asked Dennis Savage. “God knows where those jaws have been.”

“I’ll just trim off the—”

“Nicky,” said Dennis Savage, shaking his head. “If there was ever someone
born
to doom and gloom.” He followed me and the cheese tray into the living room. “He reminds me of that pathetic little drudge in
Les Mis
, what’s-her-name, who dies in the rain.”

“Funette,” Cosgrove put in.

“Yes, Funette. And such an
apt
name, because in fact she . . .” No, that didn’t seem right, did it? “Funette?”

“I think you mean Eponine,” I said.

“Of
course
, Eponine!” Dennis Savage whirled on Cosgrove, who was reviewing his CD collection. “So who’s Funette supposed to be?”