The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man (13 page)

Then, all of a sudden,
Jutter was back behind the bar at Mary’s as if nothing had happened. So that was nice. And one night, Jutter spent his first break chatting with Rick. And that was…
unbecredible
! How did those two even
know
each other?

Well
! The queens were blown
sky-high
! Did this summit meeting of the town’s favorite boy and my own personal Rick betoken some new helping of dish soon to be shared? Each of us sort of wandered by them to eavesdrop at various times, but then
of course
they would just happen to be in the middle of analyzing the films of Toffanetti, or whoever that is. You know—the Italian with the clowns? Right. At this crucial turn of events in the history of our lives, that’s what Rick and Jutter were fascinated by—the cinema of Toffanetti!

Then Alistair
Tessier got a brainstorm. (Allegedly.) It seems that when Mahantango Mary’s first opened, the proprietor found his way into some time capsule somewhere and took away a lifetime’s supply of those paper placemats from the 1950s with pictures of cocktails next to their recipes. There was always a pile of them on the bar, and they happened to be right where Jutter and Rick were talking. So Alistair said he always wanted to know about a drink called an Angel’s Tip, and this looked like his golden opportunity to find out all about this drink. See, he would hang around by the placemats with the apparent intention of showing Jutter how to make an Angel’s Tip by pointing to its recipe—because who would know how to make an Angel’s Tip otherwise? And, la, while he was waiting to get Jutter’s attention, Alistair could…you know. Listen in.

Well, of course, we were all so eager to find out what was going on between
Jutter and Rick and that we one and all renounced a golden chance to pass heartless remarks to Alistair on the subject of Angel’s Tips. And we shooed him off.

Away he went to spy.
Yes
! But, almost immediately, Jutter’s break was over, and he got back behind the bar with the cracked ice and tiny olives, leaving Alistair looking ridiculous with his placemats. At least Rick joined us, so we could pester him with questions. He told us little, because Jutter had secured a vow of confidence.
Of course
!

Worse than that, Rick started lecturing us on not judging the nature of other people’s relationships. Not because it’s unfair—because it’s impossible to know what any two people have. They couldn’t tell you themselves, Rick said. They say, He’s so hot. Or He makes me laugh, or We see the world in the same way.

“That’s cartoon love,” Rick told us. “Caption love.” (As Phil made low noises, with a sarcastic intention.) Rick said, “What if he’s so hot that the way he seizes you in bed centers you so that all else in life is sheer distraction? What if he makes you laugh so easily and happily that you feel liberated in flight with him? The stars
below
you! And what if the two of you see the world in such unity that you feel defended as never yet before? It’s marvelous and unearthly—yet it still doesn’t tell us much about love, does it? No one knows the truth about love. Most people never even learn the lies.”

Yes, he talks like that sometimes. And we were far enough along in the majesty of our goblets not to need to fight with him, and the evening wound down as the drinkers of soda pop and seltzer got ready to play designated driver.

One thing did happen before we all left: Jutter came over to say good night especially to Rick, and to thank him for listening. We queens instantly went on dish alert, and the two of them shook hands—porn stars don’t kiss except when working—and Rick said, “Good night, Arthur.”

“
Well
!” That boy was scarcely out of hearing before we all had to know.
Arthur
?

“What did you expect?” said Rick. “Did you think a Mr. and Mrs.
Flexx had a son they named Jutter?”

What’s the rest of it?” asked Phil.

“Driscoll. Arthur Driscoll.”

RICK:

And
Jutter insisted that I call him that. Arthur. It’s hard to separate him from his model name, though, because he had such impact as Jutter Flexx. Yes, he was a fine fellow and all that: but he was also photography. To treat him as mortal dwindled his myth. And how many of us can even claim one in the first place?

Some porn models love embodying a fantasy. It’s not just work for money; it’s ennoblement. But if
Jutter had once been keen to command a following, by the time he came to live
among
us he had truly come to live among us: as just a guy you know, with pals and pastimes. He says the reason he fought off all offers to cast him in what he called “action” videos is that he didn’t enjoy being a dreamboy after all.

“I’m only a sex model on the outside,” he once told me. “Inside, I’m just as confused and broke as everybody else. What about that
junkheap on wheels that I ride around in—when it runs? Is that part of the…the magic of…Yes, or that dump I live in, so small it’s hidden by two fir trees? Whose place is that? Rumpelstilskin’s? If I’m so lucky, how come I can’t get a decent night’s sleep?”

And I was like, Huh?

He nodded. “Insomnia. For years now. It takes forever for me to zonk out, and two hours later I’m stone-cold awake all over again. Then I’m dragging myself around all the next day.”

There was a pause, and then he said, “Arthur Driscoll,” as if that explained something. “Everyone thinks porn is empowering to you. They think…Yeah, but what ignorance, you know? Did porn empower Brad Wagner? He killed himself in prison because he was facing DNA proof on multiple counts of hetero rape.”

I just looked at him, waiting for clarification. Brad Wagner?

“You would know him as Tim Barnett,” he said.

“I don’t think I would know him at all, actually.”

“He was a nice guy, too. I used to meet him at parties, when he’d come out west to shoot a film.” Seeing my continued lack of comprehension, he underlined it: “Tim Barnett, the porn star? Classic Falcon type? Handsome and really built, with that light brown hair only Falcon models have. Everybody liked him. A sworn bottom, very into the sex of it all. Even a good actor, though he told me that in all his films he’d had but the one dialogue scene. He played a psychiatrist in love with his patient. That big blond boy Ty Fox. Did Tim Barnett have it all? That’s what they say about porn stars, don’t they? They’re the sweethearts of the world. Yeah…a sweetheart and a rapist. Have it all? He never got to forty!”

We were sitting in his car, outside my house. Jutter had given me a lift home, because he needed someone to talk to. I’m a good listener. Not everyone is, you know. To listen to a guy…really listen, now…you have to empty your head of all its content, all the intel about
you
, and let someone else pour his stuff inside. Some folks cannot bear leaving their private alternate universe even for a minute.

“You have a nice place,” he said suddenly, way off-topic. “I’ll bet you don’t have any trouble sleeping through the night.”

After a pause, I ventured to observe that Lyle is a bit like a porn star in that he has a public and a legend.

“Yes, Lyle.” He sighed. “Magical man. And so…worrying. And yet when I’m next to him in bed I get a full night’s sleep.” He chipped out a laugh. “Like that for irony? No insomnia with Lyle. I lie in bed with a man like him and I go right into
dreamyland and don’t come back till he wakes me the next morning. He roughs up my hair and says, ‘Come along, sleepyhead.’ Isn’t that a posting on your Facebook wall? And when he gets all ruthless on me and threatens me, he grabs my dick and of course it’s hard. I can’t help it, he’s so fucking
man
. And he’ll squeeze my hand around his dick, and he’s hard, too. ‘See that?’ he says. ‘We’re two of a kind and you
want
me running you.’”

After a moment, he asked me, “What’s it like to be just his friend, I wonder?”

And I answered, “It’s a lot easier than being his boy friend.”

JASON:

Well, let’s all say thank you to our ever so wonderfully enigmatic Rick and his share in the narrative, filled with more mysteries than when Scheherazade  threw Alfred Hitchcock his Sweet Sixteen party. But now it’s time to get to The Night Lyle and
Jutter Had It Out, for the queens have been singing this song to and fro in town ever since.

To be blunt: some five or six weeks after
Jutter and Lyle broke up—or, as some of us more precisely put it, after Jutter ran
screaming in terror
from Lyle’s menacing embrace—we were all in the bar, waiting for something to happen. Alistair Tessier was so enchanted by the drinks deconstructed on those idiotic placemats that he was sampling them, one a night. On the evening of which I speak, he was working on a Napoleon Tarantella (which sounds like a dance number from
The Bette Davis Show
). Jutter was quietly tending his half of the bar. A slow night for all.

Till Lyle
Hickock walked in.

Well
!

Call us queens if you will—and you
must
!—but, all the same, we are professionals, ready to execute our three sacred missions:

Watch.

Report.

Exaggerate.

Suddenly: “Freeze,” whispered Alistair, breathless as a spy. “Don’t any of us move till Lyle reaches the placemats.” Todd Rifflin was the first to take action. He went up to Lyle and started stretching his limbs to show off—in a see-through mesh top and fatigues, no less! You know the shtick—“I upped my weight setting at the gym and I think I might have pulled something.”

What a ham! Yet Lyle appeared to be buying it, reaching out an appreciative—yet strangely dispassionate—hand to inspect Todd’s abs while Todd treated Lyle to his patented “You like me, right?” smile. Oh, that
giddy
bundle of blond
confusions
! You know how Todd describes his orientation? “Bi-flexible,” he calls it. I
mean
, did you
ever
?

And poor
Jutter had to witness all this, sure that Lyle was just using Todd. Because every soul in the bar knew that our Lyle hadn’t come to Mary’s to admire that tempty-teasy showgirl Todd Rifflin. No, my friends. Lyle had come to
claim his boy
! And don’t think that Jutter didn’t know it, watching Lyle and Todd hitting it off and feeling like Ethel Merman bound and gagged as her understudy sneaks on in
Flower Drum Schlong
.

And then, as we played witness in the sheer joy of learning the history as it is made before our very eyes,
Jutter snapped at last. You could almost hear the very sound of it as he vaulted
right! over! the bar
! I mean, he leaped into the air past the little umbrellas and fruit slices and plastic swizzle sticks and landed with a thump on the floor just behind Lyle, as if to turn—no,
whirl
him around and cry, “Okay, just what is it that you may be up to hereabouts, my fine fellow?” Or whatever those he-men say when they’re all jammed up about love and jealousy.

Jutter’s
Leap
is how we refer to it now, in our fond nostalgia, and it led Phil Conroy to envision a gay Olympics, no less. But no, I mean a real gay Olympics, with gay events. Like, instead of the shot put, you’d compete in how far you could throw your cheating boy friend’s rare cast-album CDs out the apartment window. Or you’d go for the gold in Jutter’s Leap.

Meanwhile
. Lyle now turned to look at Jutter for the first time that evening, and of course Lyle’s expression was inscrutable. How do you think these smoldering demigods get legendary in the first place? The rest of us were completely spectating, naturally. Would Jutter make some sort of submissive gesture? Would Lyle caveman him out of the place? We were
breathless
and
rooted to the spot
.

And just then, good old Rick decided to butt in and change everything around.

RICK:

I didn’t change anything. But Lyle and Arthur needed a referee. Lyle would be sore, because despite his phlegmatic self-presentation he really does have a temper. The moment called for finesse.

Really, I just wanted to help.

JASON:

You
help? Who are you, the World Health Organization? Besides, when do we learn what your strangely unidentified role in all this is?

RICK:

We will, my sweet, but for the moment I have the continuity: and it turns out that Lyle and Arthur did not need any help, except in my spiriting off the clinging Todd. In fact, with Todd out of the way the two of them apparently got into one of those more or less neutral chats, a bit of
catchup in the lightest of tones. True, I had an inkling that they weren’t going to stay neutral once they were out of public view. But at least D-Day was not in the current rotation schedule. So I dragged Todd away, on his favorite pretext…