Buddies (23 page)

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Dennis Savage roared. “Little Kiwi, take that foolish thing off that animal!”

“But he loves it so!” Little Kiwi protested.

My laughter made Dennis Savage yet more irate. “It comes off him, and I mean now—or he goes and you follow.”

“We
will
go!” cried Little Kiwi. “Come, Bauhaus!”

But Bauhaus was very intent just then on doing a corn dance on his behind with his toy
Doggie News
in his mouth. Little Kiwi, perforce fending for himself, marched to the front door. When he got there he stopped, thought it over, lurched into the bathroom, slammed the door closed, and clicked the lock.

“And I’m never coming out!” he cried.

“As J. Edgar Hoover once said,” I offered. “Okay, Mr. Smarty, you wanted a live-in boyfriend. Now what?”

“You might well look down on him,” Dennis Savage whispered. “Yes.” He nodded. His hands went out, palms up, like a rabbi’s when a Methodist asks why Jews go to church on the wrong day. “Yes. Because he’s not educated. He’s not particularly bright. His idea of gourmet food is you get fried chicken from a deli instead of in a TV dinner. But would you like to hear something personal from me? Would you?”

“Shoot.”

“He’s the sweetest damn thing I ever got close to. And the sooner you understand that, and share some of my joy, the more you’ll know about the world.”

“Love,” I replied, “sure makes folks talk funny.”

“You should hear me at night.” He was knocking softly on the door as I departed—wondering why I had never noticed that the bathroom doors in our building have locks on them.

*   *   *

Alone of our squad, Carlo seemed to accept Little Kiwi without surprise—but then the rest of us kept viewing Little Kiwi’s overgrown innocence in the context of our own watchful urbanity, whereas Carlo simply took him for a sexy child. He referred to him as “the kid himself.” It shows how broad some men’s views on sex can grow—beyond puberty, no age is inapposite, no place incorrect, no technique too radical. Everything is permissible because everyone consents.

Into this heady environment came one kid of my acquaintance not so much against his judgment as against mine: my houseboy Barry. Actually, he was more of an errand boy, as I wanted someone to run the street chores for me rather than disarrange the fastidiously coordinated office in which I not only work but live. A neighborhood kid not yet out of high school, and in a permanent state of quarrel with his parents, Barry had somehow or other taken up odd-jobbing along the Circuit at five bucks an hour. He was good at it, too, reliable and even imaginative at figuring out a substitute for a grocery item that wasn’t in stock anywhere. His personal life, however, lay in disorder. One never knew for certain where he was staying, whether he was still legally a student, or even what his last name was. (He seemed to have several.) It occurred to me, too, to wonder how he had first launched his career as kid servant to gay men, and I imagined a wise old queen version of Big Steve suavely alluring him with money and praise—who knows?—even love.

I heard of Barry from a friend who was using him as a maid two afternoons a week. His apartment had always looked like Calcutta. Suddenly it was orderly; it gleamed, a showplace. Pieces of furniture hitherto hidden under dirty clothes were revealed, to charm, and his windows, once as dark as stained glass, lapped up light.

“Did you move?” I asked.

Barry came out of the bedroom just then, brisk and ready.

“All clear,” he said.

We met—he had a soft handshake but a nice, slightly distracted smile—and my friend his employer recommended him to me. He was right, I realized: a cocktail dandy really ought to have someone running tackle for him at the grocery, bank, laundry, and so on (though, I must say, there’s nothing like a walk home from The Food Emporium at four o’clock in the morning with a cache of gourmet-counter apricot-strudel cookies in your bag to remind you that you are a New Yorker). I wondered if hiring Barry would spare me a New Yorker’s most onerous perquisite, shopping at Bloomingdale’s; but this was idle exercise. Barry and I struck a bargain right there on the site, and, after he left, my friend said, “Believe me, you won’t be sorry,” his voice grinding like a burlesque attraction.

In fact, Barry tended to bring out the campy-seducer tones in older men, which annoyed me. He seemed clearly to be a naturally unattainable straight kid who had berthed his way into a field that calls for tact and resourcefulness but no great intelligence or initiative. Yet, every so often, when he would trundle in as I labored at my desk, I caught allusions to passes made and, it sounded as if, not waved away. I began to ask myself if I was being encouraged to make a move on him. I thought back twelve years to Big Steve and his seductions; he would have loved Barry, who had the scrubbed prettiness and pregym slimness to coordinate with Big Steve’s protective tenderness.

Like anyone else, I enjoy taking advantage of those encounters that present themselves like ripe fruit, waiting to fall into hand should you but reach up to pluck. But this was 1985, and like almost anyone else I had become apprehensive of people who, like Barry, may for all I knew have been tanking up on bodily fluids. In fact, much as I liked Barry, I resented being tempted, and took to being elsewhere when he was expected. Finally one day he left a note for me: “Can I please talk to you about something?”

I stayed in for his next visit, and we talked. Rather, he rambled and I edited. He circled around a number of subjects at once, as if unwilling to confront his truths; I stopped listening to his words and tried catching the overtones. Suddenly he was saying, “… and Joe’s mother said I couldn’t stay over with him anymore, and she, like, told Alan’s mother and
she
said okay, the same goes for her. Now, it’s go back to my so-called parents or … or what? That’s what I was asking, maybe.”

“Maybe. Barry, exactly how old are you?”

“I forget.”

“You know the term, ‘jailbait’?”

“Look, that’s not the problem. Mr. Lavery says I can live with him and be his houseboy, like. I just wanted to ask you what that means. You know, all together.”

“It means you put out.”

“To him?”

“No, to Princess Di. Who else, but to him? And his friends. Not to mention the hustlers he’ll call in from time to time to enliven the action. Arnold Lavery is one of the shadiest characters in the east fifties—and that’s saying something.”

“His whole apartment is black.”

“Do you like him?”

“Sure.”

“You do?”

“He’s my best customer. He says he’s going to take me out to Fire Island when it’s summer. He’s even going to buy me…” He stopped. “Sure,” he said.

“Buy you what”

“Just some clothes, he said.”

I realized why Carlo could not share my disapproval of Big Steve’s aggressive tactics. There
are
kids who are going to find their way onto the scene one way or another; and Carlo, wiser than I, knew that those who don’t go Big Steve’s way fall into the hands of an Arnold Lavery. For all our collegiate professionals and dashing brunches, this is still the city where those two opposites, beauty and money, dangerously attract. I wondered if I ought to send Barry to Big Steve for salvation, but Big Steve couldn’t afford Barry. A kid without love or ambition doesn’t want either. He wants luxury, and to be wanted, and not to care about anything.

“Barry,” I said, “what is this talk about? Do you want me to speak against your moving in with Lavery, or to approve of it?”

“I don’t know. I like thought…” He rose and looked down at the floor. “What exactly does it mean to put out?”

“You know what it means—the works.”

He looked at me for a bit, then crossed the room and, without a word, left.

*   *   *

I tried to bring Carlo into the case, but he was too moody to help, and the little he had to say unnerved me. Like Barry, he was incoherent, but, unlike Barry, Carlo had a theme. “It’s over,” he kept saying. Then there’d be silence.

“What’s over?” I asked.

He patted my arm; he wanted to be nice. But he couldn’t phrase it properly and I wouldn’t understand if he did.

“Tell me what it is,” I urged.

He looked tired, as if he had lived through six or seven Hugh Whitkins inside of a month. In shorts and a T-shirt he seemed not sexy but sloppy, his hair going every which way, his face dark with stubble, his feet too big. We were in Big Steve’s tiny apartment, where Carlo was, as he has been on and off over the years, something between a lover and a guest.

“
What’s
over?” I demanded.

He said he was thinking of going back to South Dakota, and this was so absurd I could not address it. Carlo is the most metropolitan of gays, not in sophistication or wit but in strutting independence. I bet if an extraterrestrial, from a planet where the beings grow rather than carnally conceive their offspring, happened down to earth, and saw Carlo ambling along a summer street in his cords and striped polo shirt, grinning as he gave the world a once-over, the visitor would say, “Now I know what sex is, and sex is gay.”

I made some joke about Carlo blowing the state of South Dakota wide open.

“It’s the dishonor, I guess,” he said. “More than anything else.” He was looking out the window, and when he turned back to me he missed his footing and had to steady himself. He shivered as he tried to smile, and I realized he had been drinking, though he seldom does, and never in the daytime. “I haven’t been able to figure it out exactly,” he went on, “but that’s how it seems to feel. The dishonor.”

At least now he was talking.

“Because,” he said, “the ones who go on having sex will die. And the ones who don’t aren’t men anymore. They might as well be…” He sat back on the couch. “Oh, what might they be, after all this?”

“Queens.”

“Or dead,” he whispered. “They might as well be dead.”

All over town, men were having these talks. Some had actually quit the metropolis for small towns in Maine, Florida, Wisconsin. Some had gone to stay with their parents, who were startled but glad of the company. Others simply lit out and fled the stricken city, like Boccaccio’s
Decameron
crowd. But those Florentines at least took something of great value along: their company. I couldn’t imagine a gay man who had known Stonewall City living alone in the straight world.

“What’s South Dakota like for a gay?” I asked.

“It isn’t. There is no gay in South Dakota.”

“Then why go there?”

“It’s the only place I know, besides … these places. I want to think of getting along somehow. Your parents’ is where you go when you can’t go anywhere else. Isn’t it?”

“When you’re tired of gay life,” I offered, revising Dr. Johnson, “you’re tired of life.”

“That’s the nail on the ace, Bud. I
am
tired of life. This life, here. I’m a man. I can’t get along on bull sessions and … remembering. It’s like your hands are tied. I have to do what men do.”

“You told me once, ‘Friends is how you survive.’ Now you’re telling me you’re planning to live without them?”

He crossed to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of vodka, three-quarters empty. “I don’t even know where you’re supposed to keep these.” He took a short swig and came back to me. “Do you want a glass?”

“I don’t drink before dark,” I said.

“When your hands are tied it’s always dark.” He went on drinking. “Don’t tell the others. Especially the kid himself. He looks up to me, doesn’t he?”

“He looks up to all of us, one way or another. He’s like the local kid brother.”

A long swig this time. I thought back to the days when my brother Jim lived in New York and his friends would sit around assessing the mysteries of life and love, each with his own bottle.

“I know I’m hurting your feelings, Bud. But this brotherhood is going to be a dead dream soon, and I don’t want to see it die. I think he looks up to me most of all, anyway.”

His voice caught and he turned to me, crying. I started toward him. “No, get back,” he shouted, waving me off. “Not to soothe me. I’ve done this show already, I know how it works.” He went on, not wiping his eyes. “I can know what it’s like in South Dakota and I can’t know what it’s like here anymore. That’s the ticket, I truly believe. Big Steve was so mad at me last night, he made me sleep on the couch. He said I was a traitor and he wouldn’t let me in his bed. In South Dakota there are these truck stops. Then he came in here and he turned on that lamp over there and he stood over me for a while. I was awake. I could hear him there. I didn’t pretend I was asleep but it was dark so maybe he didn’t know I was awake. You nod at the truckers real gruff, and if they nod back you go outside to their rig there. See, and he knew and he said, ‘Get up, Carlo.’ He sounded angry and I thought he might lick me for a minute. Because, you know … but he didn’t touch me. They have everything in the back of their wheels. Towels, jelly, toke, cold beer. That’s the whole life for them. They can be real men to you or they can be nice. There is no way to tell aforehand.”

I’d never seen anyone cry like that, the tears roaring out of his eyes like those plastic-enclosed twenty-five cent globes of children’s chotchkes spilling out of a broken machine.

“Carlo,” I said.

“Shut up and please listen. This isn’t joking. So Big Steve … he told me he didn’t think it right that us two should be in separate rooms when we could be fucking. Because buddies like us were put on earth to take turns making each other happy. There are some things we tell each other, I recall. Some of the truckers have real long hair in the back because they’re hoping someone will shoot a remark and they can slam the shit out of them, and they don’t care where they are when they do it. They shouldn’t have it that long. He said, ‘Get up,’ like that. And I said we should use a rubber and after all these years he is not going to do that with me, he said. That isn’t buddies.”

He was gesturing about the apartment, showing me where all this happened, and still crying.

“Well, I said it’s taking precautions or nothing and that’s how it is going to be, and he said it’ll be how he wants it, and that’s all the way and a rubber is like washing your hands with mittens on and he doesn’t even have any and since he’s trying to be nice to someone who doesn’t deserve it and don’t let him lose his temper, and Jim Fetters, who you wouldn’t know because that was in tenth grade back there, he had gone out to a truck stop and he had this black eye all the next week and everyone said What happened? and he was just
white.
And don’t tie my hands, that’s all, because … because Big Steve and I had our troubles sometimes but he never hit me before. He just hauled off and hit me. But I don’t have a black eye. And he kept going back there, shut up, and he kept getting these black eyes. Because Big Steve hit my jaw. He’s my best friend, Bud. Even more than you. My best buddy. There are things we tell each other, and they started calling him Black Eye. He was proud of that. He even tied me up, he was so mad, and you can pray all you want to but that won’t change anything, long or short. And I couldn’t fight him back. I can, but I couldn’t. They get the preachers out to talk to you. I don’t see how they can tell, but they can. Preacher tells you, if you’re that hard up, he’ll do you right there, why not? They call you son. All of them. He tied me up. And I told him, Jesus, don’t tie my hands. Don’t tie me up. Maybe someone at the truck stop or a preacher but not you. Get back, this is not joking. Don’t tie me up, I said. And he could see I wasn’t joking. But he always had a weakness for that stuff…”