Buddies (28 page)

“That’s when they’re done on one side, so you turn them over.” He put down the cup, dark again, murky, as if fog masked our table. “He had the smoothest skin. If you knew where to touch him, he’d do anything. Anything. He howled when I laid him. Howled like a dog. God, he was beautiful.”

“Now that you’ve had the appetizer,” said the waitress, ambling up with a coffeepot, “how about some real food?”

I took the check.

“Bill let them use him up,” he went on. “He fell in with a fashion crowd. Those parties where straight couples are selling drugs in the bathroom? He was going to be this one’s houseboy, and then that one’s. You know that street? They kept passing him from hand to hand, just another hot kid. And he’d let them, that was the stupid part. Some nights he was so drugged he didn’t know where he’d been, come staggering home to me. Got so I had to beat him up. It was the only way to straighten him out, scare him. It would work, too. After, he’d crawl into my lap and say he’d be good and I’d tenderize him. I bet he loved that most of all, even more than laying. We’d just sit there, listening to each other breathe. And I thought, If only there was some
job
I could find, something to do that didn’t connect with all those parties and the money, the phone ringing … and someone asks for you by your code name, and you’re broke … so what else are you supposed to do?”

“What happened to Bill?” A Barry, I thought. A kid and a clone.

“Those fashion guys ripped him up. Filled him with junk. Said to him, ‘You’re a star.’ See, they were trying to break us up because I was telling him what to do. I was with Lorenzo Fell then. You know him?”

“Of him.”

“The ugliest mcgoon between Ocean Beach and Albania, I used to call him. Treated me like a servant, him and his pals. ‘Clark’ll do the honors, of course,’ he’d say to some horror, and I’d have to take it to bed. Why do ugly men always have ugly friends?”

“They don’t.”

“You don’t know shit. Who do you know?”

“I have to give you references?”

“Rich, I mean.”

“Kern Loften.”

“Yeah, I remember him.”

“Nice fellow.”

“Listen, anyone starts nice,” he tells me. “Then comes life, and watch. Money changes them. Careers. Power.”

“Looks?”

“How can looks change you? Looks are what you are. Looks are what change.”

“You can’t change your looks, surely.”

“What’s a gym for, then? Mustaches and beards? Clothes?” Don’t you know
anything?
his tone said. Aren’t you gay?

“Anyway, they were pulling Bill away from me. Lorenzo was in on it, the whole gang of them…”

The waitress and her coffeepot. “It’s a little late to start a new elephant,” she tells Clark as she pours, “but the chef might save you some of the moose if you feel like dessert.”

Clark looks at her.

“That’s a joke, honey,” she says, taking off.

“Don’t you ever laugh anymore?” I asked him. Smile for me.

“They made it so we could never be together. They were telling him the Coast, movies. Not porn, real ones.”

Movies with
will.

“We had to meet in secret. And all I could say was, ‘Who were you with?’ I didn’t mind it for myself, because I know how to lay a mcgoon without getting dirty. But he was just a kid. Didn’t know how to protect himself.”

“How does one protect oneself with a mcgoon?”

“You pretend they’re going to fall into an acid bath the day after. Maybe you’re going to push them.”

I forked off a bit of his pie and he pushed it to me.

“Finish it. I had some money saved, and I told Bill, ‘Let’s ditch these guys and set up shop. You know, porn, catering, hustling. I don’t know, maybe all at once. Cook the food, serve it, then lay the host. It happens, doesn’t it?”

Yes.

“But they got to him. Made him afraid. He had it going and he thought he’d lose it if they dropped him. They were going to take him to Europe after September. So like when I heard that, I just freaked. It was so heavy in my mind, I couldn’t … I didn’t hack it out right. He told me he’d never go away. When I was tenderizing him, sure. And I saw him cry so I thought it was all right. But then they’d get ahold of him, and he’d change his mind. Every minute at Lorenzo’s, I’d worry what Bill was up to, what they were doing to him. And this one evening, we were hanging around the deck, and one of Lorenzo’s toads sort of squirmed into position and said, ‘Won’t someone rub my back?’ and Lorenzo pointed at me, like I had to. This fucking
toad!
And then one of those junky kids that always hung around Lorenzo came out and said, ‘We’re out of briquettes,’ looking at me as if it was my fault. It’s my job to get them, okay, but not to count them or something! They were all looking at me like I was … I don’t know…”

“Someone they couldn’t forgive for being beautiful.”

A deep breath. “I left, and went to find Bill. I thought, You know, that’s it. Fuck their briquettes. Listen.
Listen,
Jesus, he was gone! They’d just picked him up and took him away!”

“Where?”

“Where? Someplace Europe, where. Who
cares
where? They got him, slid him out from under me, just about. Figure it, how I felt. But, listen, Lorenzo had this crystal ball in his house. Something special, like there’s no others but that one? Handmade, or something. Had it in the center of the living room, and you had to be all this careful when you got near it. They held seances, telling the future. Lorenzo would dress up and do this cackly voice and say what would happen to you. You could always tell who was in favor with him from the fortune he told. He thought that glass ball was the hottest thing on the walk.”

“Hotter than you?”

“Man, Lorenzo didn’t know what hot was. He was even afraid to be laid. Wasn’t even a
man!
All he did was suck and tips.”

“Tips?”

“Nipple stuff. Ugly guys are so—”

“And you broke the crystal?”

He looked back on it. “Yes.” Nodded. A story. Something happens, changes your life. “Into a thousand million pieces. Right in front of them. Shithead dufos. I picked it up, and I aimed it at Lorenzo’s head, and I …
threw … that … mother.
And, man, they screeched like butchered cats. So I took them and smashed their fucking skulls together and I wrecked the whole place—furniture, clothes, even the walls, man, the whole
place!
The place, The
Pines
! And, the whole time—figure it—they were lying around sobbing in these …
positions,
like it was a
movie!
And I took the cash and split. They couldn’t call the police, because I controlled some very heavy input on Lorenzo’s Colombian connections, you taste? But they did something I couldn’t fight back on—I didn’t even know about it at first. This Dr. Conover, who runs the VD mill on Lexington? He’s one of the gang. They got him to spread the rumor that I had AIDS. You should have seen how suddenly it all went away. It
all!
Friends were like strangers, and strangers … weren’t there. Guys that used to stand around talking to me on the street, hoping I would say, ‘So let’s score’? Nothing. Didn’t see me. Didn’t hear me when I shouted their names. Your word is out, see? Suddenly everyone was a phone tape with no tape in it. And that’s like suddenly you are unemployed. No prospects. No contacts. And that is the end of your career.”

“Why didn’t you try another town? San Francisco?”

“They give it away there, man. I’m an employee, so what do you want? A whore. Do you know what a whore is? A man without will, I swear.”

He was about forty-two now, and still amazing. No doubt everything would catch up with him; already his eyes were as troubled as a prophet’s. There was but one Clark Ellis, but many stories like his, of men dwindled from dish mythology into unemployment checks and evictions and fizzled jobs and injudicious hustling and death by drugs of pleasure. Smile for me, No. 1.

“Everyone can’t have heard a rumor started by a single clique,” I said. “It’s such a big city. Couldn’t you—”

“No. Stop.” He held up his hand. “Just listen to me, okay?” His hand was shaking. “Because it’s … it’s more than that.” He set his hand flat on the table, laid the other atop it. “The AIDS thing was just … it was to scare off the fancy-pants crowd. The mcgoons and the money. That’s the part you see—on the ferry or in the Saint or at a big theme party. That’s the part you know. That’s your gay life. But there’s more than that part. Stuff that doesn’t come out all the time. It’s there just the same, and it’s connected to the fancy part. You don’t know about it, maybe, and your friends don’t. But it’s powerful. It knows about you.”

Whatever it was, it sounded like Santa Claus; and he saw me fighting a smile and glumly nodded.

“Listen to something else. The same thing, but it’s different. Listen. The world. You got your high-school football team and your college, and then some job and
GQ
clothes and your plastic, and you think that’s the whole world. Everybody’s world, okay, right? So someone didn’t make the football team. Some got better jobs or more plastic or a dishwasher in the kitchen. So it’s still the same world, isn’t it? Don’t look serious, just answer!”

“You haven’t asked a question.”

“Is that what you think the whole world is?” he almost shouted.

We both looked up guiltily at some movement in the room: the waitress again, with the coffee. “Now, now,” she lightly warned, pouring. “He’s probably upset,” she murmured to me, “because he didn’t get enough to eat.”

She had cut into our momentum, and there was silence for a bit. “I played football in high school,” he finally said. “Quarterback. Really the hero. There wasn’t a girl in the whole school I couldn’t have, including the teachers. And there was this guy on the team. Your strong silent guy sort. Never said a word to anyone. Good athlete, though. Good man. Good grades, even. He was … you’d say anything to him, he’d just nod. Last game of the season, there was a rumor that the cheerleaders were going to lie down for us, win or lose. Maybe it wasn’t that big a deal, because they weren’t exactly the singing nuns before that, but it had a quality. Like a pact, I guess. Something special for the team. It was like a party within a party, like it starts in one house and then a few of us get the signal and go somewhere else, with no parents or horny sophomores around. So we make our exit, and drive over to the duck pond. Real spread out there, dark, and it’s got all these little hills and trees. Good place for the kind of thing. You can’t tell who’s doing what. And the guy I told you about, I saw him go off by himself and I followed him. We talked for a while. I mean, I talked and he nodded. He was really nervous. So I said, ‘Come on, let’s take a drive,’ and we did that, and we parked somewhere, and nobody’s saying nothing. Sitting there, fine. He’s looking straight ahead, as if there was something to find in front of us, which there wasn’t, and I’m kind of aimed at him. And suddenly he puts his hand on my thigh. He’s straight back against the car seat like he’s trying to smooth his way right through it. And then he looks at me, and I told him to go ahead. I should have known all along. He was so tense, I whispered to him to take it easy. So then I started to open up his pants, but he bolted out of the car and ran into the trees and yakked his guts out. Never saw anyone barf like that. Now he’s probably a doctor with a big house and four kids somewhere in the Sunbelt and he never thinks about anything.” He shook his head. “Now, why did I tell you about that?”

He looked sad and confused. I wondered if Bill Post had ever seen him so.

“Was it like that for you?” he asked. “Back then? First time?”

“Well … nobody threw up.”

“Why the hell not? It’s always like that. It’s supposed to be.”

I thought of Carlo and the man with the little bowl of warm water, and the excitement Carlo knew then that he could never retrieve.

“Why did you tell me that?” I asked.

“It was … about something. About the whole world. Things you don’t see that are in the world.”

Stuff that doesn’t come out all the time.

“I wanted to tell you what happened to me,” he pleaded. “To show you that there’s more going on than you know about. That’s why it happens. It wasn’t just Bill or Lorenzo or telling everybody I had AIDS. Sure, you start on the squad and you go to the parties, and I guess in a way Fire Island and all that is more of the same. Making a different squad and going to other parties, but the same deal about who’s allowed and who isn’t. Who gets in. But look. When you start to slip, you fall into some really gruesome deals. I mean, some guys I know started dealing and they got so into the honey they took it and took it till they exploded. Or some guys got into shady porn. Or those waiter gigs where like all the guests are so friendly and they’re all giving you stuff and you don’t know what the hell it all is till you wake up three weeks from last Tuesday with half your head watted out, wondering how many people touched you and where.” He took a deep breath. “Or you can report for a video date and take your chances.” He gazed at me, the broken impresario of hot. The whole opera’s gone bust and Rigoletto ran off with the scenery. “You know about those?”

“They tape you … in sport.”

“You can even join a service for it. Unlisted numbers and so on. I mean, you could pick someone off the street if you wanted, but some of these people are into such kinky scenes that they need guys who, you know, perform the specialities. And that’s how you go down, brother, let me whisper it to you. Because once you turn pro at this kind of thing, it isn’t just Lorenzo Fell and his pansy sidekicks. It’s the bottom rung of all the money you don’t see. All the people who’ve done everything before they get to you, so, like, what’s left to jolly them? But they’ll figure something out, won’t they? And that’s what you’ll do. Because you need the bread. Because it’s there, you, in the dark rooms and all those eyes watching you. Maybe you can’t even see them, but they see you all right. You hear them. Jesus, you can hear them
looking
at you, that’s how heavy. Or a guy alone with a hundred whips and then this monster comes out of a door smiling at you like you’re a piece of Danish and he’s hungry. Or wives holding the camera, want to catch you porking their husbands. Video dates. Dark rooms and faces in a circle, that’s what it is. And maybe anyone might do a spell in that world—but what if you’re stuck there forever? Why didn’t you get something better for yourself, huh? Why are you here? Why is this you?”