Everybody Loves You (11 page)

“The Disappearing Coin!” Little Kiwi announced one evening, flourishing the oval yellow tray with the secret compartment. I was a whiz at this in my youth: one deposits a coin in the tray, covers it, deftly pulls a lever that whisks the coin slot to the side and a second slot, empty, in its place, and presto! the coin has seemed to vanish. Reverse the action, and the coin reappears.

“If some gentleman in the audience would provide a sovereign,” La Dolce Pita requested, with an opulent wave of his hand. “Never you mind,” he went on, in the administrative croon of the hopelessly tenth-rate performer, “for though the coin will truly disappear, La Dolce Pita the Magnificent will restore it with a murmur of the magic code.”

There was a lot doing at Dennis Savage's that late autumn day, for he had received another round-robin letter from his Hamilton alumni group. The men whom Dennis Savage had been close to in his college days had doggedly stayed in touch all these years, though all but he had married and most were raising kids and many had moved to distant quarters of the map. The wives took turns garnering everyone's news by phone and then sent out a kind of homemade newspaper to all the gang every six months or so, with news stories, burlesque gossip columns, photos, and even editorials on the state of the nation from a post-yuppie platform.

I found all this rather touching, even if it tested one's patience to have to attend to Dennis Savage's moony nostalgia for the days when he was embosomed in the tersely supportive confraternity of the collegiate male. He would cite names that had no meaning to me beyond the haze of data generally attached to the whole four years—the road trips with Henry Christian, Budge Lewis, and Pete Hedstrom; the two-man volleyball with Jojo Baker; the bull sessions with Cal Colson and Warren Acker—and mainly, the sheer ground-zero miracle of knowing, trading confidences with, and having a violently secret crush on Chad Jeffers, Dennis Savage's best friend. Now, this name stood out. This name had meaning. One had only to breathe these three blessed syllables to provoke from Dennis Savage a litany of such plangent, mesmerized eyewash that he'd come off like a Cherry Grove queen returning from a day in The Pines to throw himself across his bed with a terminal case of Houseboy Attitude Breakdown.

Ah, these scars of our college days, the mark they leave on the gay soul! The beauty! The purity! One never quite recovers. For of course the world after college is unbeautiful, impure. I myself regarded college as an idiotic detour on my way to here, but I could share Dennis Savage's enthusiasm. It was always a big event when one of these alumni newsletters arrived, and Dennis Savage and I were far more involved in digesting the latest one than in taking in La Dolce Pita's performance.

“Just a simple coin, such as may be found in any fine gentleman's pocket.”

“It says here,” I noted, “that Warren and Janey Acker just had their sixth child.”

“Three boys and three girls,” Dennis Savage rejoined. “One gender after the other.”

“So neat, so sure, so Hamilton.”

“Any coin will do, but a quarter works best.”

“Did you see about Pete Hedstrom living in San Francisco? Is that a message, do you suppose?”

“Never,” said Dennis Savage. “That's his hometown.”

“Everything is magic, if you only know. The coin is there, the coin is gone, the coin is there.”

“Is Budge Lewis's real name Budge? Or is it short for one of those fancy WASP surname-first names like—”

“Roses From the South” suddenly cut off and we looked across the room to find Little Kiwi at the stereo, holding up the playing arm and glaring at us.

“Look, can I please have a quarter?” he cried.

Bauhaus growled.

Digging into his pocket, Dennis Savage muttered, “What do I get for a quarter?” and Little Kiwi went on with his act as Dennis Savage handed me a letter.

“Wait till you see this,” he said.

“You view the coin. I cover it. Now the magic code word …
Robitussin.
” As I read the letter, Little Kiwi fiddled with the lever. “And presto!”

“Bravo!” said Dennis Savage, and I clapped mechanically, the two of us too intent on the letter, handwritten by Mary Beth (Mrs. Henry) Christian, to look up.

“Oh,
no!
” Little Kiwi wailed. “It still doesn't work.” The coin had not disappeared. Better yet, Little Kiwi promptly dropped the tray, and about two dollars' worth of nickels and dimes fell out. “So
that's
where they went!” he said. “They don't make these tricks right.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “an alumni reunion!”

Dennis Savage nodded. “The Colsons just moved to New York. It's a housewarming party, obviously, but apparently everyone's going to be there.”

“Everyone?”

“That's what Mary Beth says.”

“Including Chad Jeffers?”

“Now La Dolce Pita the Magnificent, assisted by Ferdinand, will present the notorious card stunt known to an elite few as The Bashful Deuce. Notice the colorful way I shuffle the deck to assure complete honesty.”

The cards flew all over the room.

There was silence for a bit, then I said, “
Including
Chad Jeffers?” and Little Kiwi said, “Oh, gee,” and Dennis Savage said, “You know, I haven't seen him in over fifteen years.”

“Seen who?” asked Little Kiwi, picking up the cards.

“Maybe it's a cute idea to have an eighteenth anniversary reunion party instead of a twentieth,” Dennis Savage went on. “Maybe they should have done something like this long before. Maybe every so often I think of the way things were back then and all. And I miss that life. No maybe about it. I traded it all for the Eagle and the Saint and the Pines and the meat rack and the Everard and the backroom bars and a few other things I haven't dared mention to you—”

“If you mean that orgy in Burke Fuller's loft when a Colt model took a bath in motor oil and you licked him dry, Lionel told me all about it.”

“—and I've never been sorry,” he continued, closing his eyes briefly in a kind of visual scream but holding to his rhythm. “I've never been sorry for that trade. They were straight and I wasn't, and the wisest thing I ever did was to admit that and get on with my real life instead of trying to live like them.”

“So?”

“So why should I go to their party? The lone bachelor amid the marrieds and the dates. I'd feel like a fool. I'd look like a…”

“A queer?” I asked.

Little Kiwi was looking at us from the floor, attending, taking in this new thing.

“Don't you want to see them again?” I said.

“Oh, yes. You don't know how much. I suppose in a way I've been hoping that something like this would come up. But now that it has, I'm afraid of it. Aren't I?” He shifted position on the couch. In the avid stillness of the listening room this seemed almost violent, and Bauhaus growled. “That's how it feels, anyway. Like fear.”

“Fear of what?”

“I have no idea. But it's there.” He shrugged. “It would be great to go, though, wouldn't it? And yes, I imagine Chad Jeffers will be there. Boston's not that far away, and he was always a real gung ho about alumni stuff. If he goes to every homecoming, he'll certainly come to this. Clapping the guys on the back. Dredging up the old sagas. All that. Oh, he'll be there. He's so good at this kind of thing.”

There was that look again, and that mooing tone, and Dennis Savage was going into his nostalgia trance.

“And then someone will tell one of those dumb old jokes again, and Chad will smile and his eyes will crinkle up.”

“What is crinkle?” asked Little Kiwi.

“Oh … it's this odd face he gets sometimes when he's really happy. It was the most devastating thing, and I'll bet you he isn't aware of it even now. It happens when he smiles. His eyes narrow and the edges get squishy, as if they had been made by a cookie cutter. It's very boyish, and he's such a … a manly guy that the combination of … well, you just…”

“Quietly dream of him for eighteen years?” I said.

He slowly shook his head. “These crushes we get on our straight friends have to be laid aside when we come into Stonewall. It's like having tantrums when you're eight or pimples when you're fifteen. You outgrow it.”

Like my toys.

“This all sounds very sensible,” I said. “If you ask me, you have a very adult take on this and there's no reason why you shouldn't go to the party.”

“Little Kiwi,” said Dennis Savage, “what are you doing?”

Little Kiwi was staring at us, grinning and squinting at the same time. It made him look like a jack-o'-lantern.

“I'm trying to crinkle like Chad Jeffers.”

“It's not something you can put on,” I told him. “Your features have to do it naturally.”

“In the world of magic,” he told me, “everything is possible. There is always a trick you can do.”

“Actually, he had a lot of boyish qualities,” Dennis Savage went on. “He'd look like a Cub Scout if you taught him something. He used to come to my room to listen to
Tosca,
and he'd get so serious and happy about it, you know, when I'd explain what was happening on stage. He really liked that. He liked to learn. I think that was the bond between us, in fact.”

“That boring old Leinsdorf recording of
Tosca
was your bond? Maybe if you'd played Callas for him you could have gotten him into bed.”

“I didn't want to get him into bed. One didn't think of those things then. This was an enchanted time, the vale of innocence. We weren't trying to plunder each other, don't you see that? We were all in love, but it wasn't erotic love. It was some sort of ideal love, very trusting and delicate.”

I glanced at Little Kiwi and he said, “Get her.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” said Dennis Savage. “Can't you imagine anything but cruising and dancing? Is that all there is?”

“I'm just trying to imagine you teaching somebody.”

“I
am
a teacher, as you well know, you festive pigpen! What do you think I do all day while you're out boulevarding around the town?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Don't ‘Oh, yes' me, you tank-town swell!”

“So are you going to this reunion shindig or not?”

“You just
bet
I'm going!”

“Can we come, too?” asked Little Kiwi.

Startled in the midst of his offended reverie, Dennis Savage surveyed us: me in jeans and a spaghetti-stained T-shirt, Little Kiwi in his bath-towel cape; and let us not omit quaint Bauhaus, just then dancing around the room on his behind to ease an itch.

“Well,” said Dennis Savage, “that … would be complicated.”

“A Stonewall loyalist would take his buddies,” I observed.

“And I want to see the eyes of Chad Jeffers,” Little Kiwi put in, “when they crinkle. I might be able to use that in my magic act.”

“Yes, well … we have to consider whether we would all be comfortable in the admittedly narrow environment of a—”

“You're ashamed of us,” I said.

“It's very difficult to be a stranger at a party like this. It's hard to break in.”

“Not if you're connected,” I told him. “Introduce us around, set us up right, and presto—”

“The magic is made!” said Little Kiwi. “Everything is magic.”

“Everything is friendship,” I corrected.

“Everything is straights,” Dennis Savage reminded me, “at a party like this one. Do you really want to try to reenter that world, you, even for a night? Really?”

“I do,” said Little Kiwi. “I'll knock them over with my tricks.”

Dennis Savage winced, but he pressed on, certain that reason would discourage us. “It's a closed society,” he explained. “I see it as a memory open only to those who were there originally. With all those code words and legends and nicknames, you know.”

“Nicknames, huh? What's yours?”

“The Boffer.”

Jolted, I said nothing. Little Kiwi asked, “What does that mean?”

“You can't go to this party,” Dennis Savage almost pleaded. “I'm afraid to go myself. I just don't think I can handle—”

“The Boffer,” I said. “Well, now, The Boffer.”

“Just to be there again is trouble enough, surely, but—”

“It's an honorable name,” I said.

“What does it mean,” Little Kiwi asked, “if you're The Boffer?”

“It means he goes on road trips,” I said, “and he calls the Mount Holyoke girls ‘Hokes' and gives pointers to the freshmen. It means he teaches Chad Jeffers how to boff a sweet young thing, and how to know about boffing, and how to be a boffer. It's sacred brotherhood stuff. It's the boffing science on the theme of the virgin Hoke. It's fucking.”

Little Kiwi's mouth was open, and Dennis Savage said to me, “And you still want to go to this party?”

“More than ever. And I know why you don't want us there—may I? You're afraid Chad Jeffers will figure out that you're … light in your loafers … is that the expression he'd—”

“Blackmail,” Dennis Savage said, his tone pure outraged innocence but his eyes cloudy with ambivalence. “This is blackmail.”

“Everyone will be there with his wife, right? His true partner. Does it not behoove a Stonewaller to bring
his
partners? His lover and best friend? That's what we have for families and that's what you should bring.”

“You should bring your magician,” Little Kiwi put in, “to regale the guests with the Chamber of Disguise where I put objects into this little house and they vanish.”

“I remember that one,” I said. “There's a mirror inside that conceals the back half of the chamber. You put objects in
behind
it and they seem to disappear.”