Everybody Loves You (23 page)

The left-out gay writers who have to publish in porn slicks or local newspapers of occult circulation try to cheer themselves up by hating what they think of as the Pines School of Fiction: all about good-looking men finding themselves, so to say. And yes, I can see why tales of men getting men threaten them, because they don't get anything. (A homophobe hates what he is.) However, the primary theme of my particular Pines fiction has been friendship. Not sex: a kind of eroticized affection. Not cruisers: buddies. Men such as Cliff, Guillermo, Luke, Stephen, and Greg. This is where, I swear to you; and knowing of such men and their sense of fraternity must be even more threatening to the left-outs than a simple Pines travelogue, because good friendship is harder to find than good sex. And you can live without sex, but you can't live without friends.

And this: I've known men who made wonderful lovers but terrible friends. But I never met a wonderful friend who couldn't also be a wonderful lover.

I tell what is.

*   *   *

So it's the last weekend before Labor Day, big dinner promising, and I'm staying at Colin's for a change of company while Dennis Savage enjoys a last chance to entertain some deserving city-bound friends. It's Saturday, and I still can't get the hang of Colin's coffee-brewing machine. Or anyone's. At home, I make it cup by cup, fresh-ground, hand-poured water, the works. On Thursday here, I didn't put enough water in. On Friday I didn't put any coffee in—and Colin, viewing this pot of hot water and intent on soothing anxious guests, observed, “That'll be very handy for tea,” which no one in the house drinks. Today I must have pushed the wrong button—everything that Colin owns has eighty buttons, a timer, and a musical attachment that plays, for instance, “Nessun dorma”—because the machine uttered atrocious noises, shuddered, then was still: and
nothing
came out.

Colin appears, sees me glaring at his coffee machine, and says, “You know, I can always get a new machine.”

He is what is softly known as “well off.” I try to redeem myself by vacuuming the living room for the big dinner tonight, but Colin has to explain how the vacuum works.

“You never used a vacuum before?” he asks, incredulous. Think of the dinner parties I must have given, with more dust than
The Grapes of Wrath.
“Didn't your maid ever cancel on you?”

“What maid?”

He passes over this lurid confession in a soigné manner, and, to the barking of his malamute and Akita, Luke and Guillermo arrive. (Actually, the Akita, Nijinska, does most of the barking. The malamute, Dame Margot, barks here and there out of formality, but, fed up with Nijinska's commotions, often growls at or even nips the Akita, as if to say, Enough is enough. We call her Miss Manners.) Luke is playful; Guillermo, off sure turf, is wary. Colin is festive and impeccable. Now Stephen breezes up from the beach, signaling more barking from Nijinska and some heavy chiding of Nijinska by Dame Margot.

The gang's almost all here. Ensconced in the living room with notebook and pen, I simply wave at everyone and pass up the usual convening chat by the pool. Anyway, I know (and dislike) what they're talking about: reincarnation. I suppose that belief in an afterlife makes it easier for them to bear a world in which important people are missing. Important to us. This is the last weekend before Labor Day, nearly the end of the summer, but it feels much more final than that, like the end of an age.

Of course, the summer doesn't end all at once for everybody. Colin comes out whenever he wants, because he owns his house, and even some renters take leases that last till Columbus Day. There's always someone left after everyone else has gone. But the essence of a Pines summer—the Rhine music, so to say, if gay life were
Der Ring des Nibelungen
—is the bonding of the crew as a whole, the circles of friends intermingling, corroborating the theory of erotic platonism, even if only by a hello as merry strangers pass on the boardwalk. The summer needs everybody, to claim this place for us, not just porn stars and houseboys but opera impresarios and airline pilots.

Cliff suddenly plops down next to me. He has crept through the house and, tousling my hair, too roughly as always, nods toward the voices down at the pool and says, “The Human Typewriter furtively delineating. Round up the usual suspects.”

“Hey, Cliff.”

“So many breeders on the walks. Why do they have to go where we are? Why don't we make it uncomfortable for them, like they do for us?”

“Did you hear about Big Steve? He goes out after dark and when he meets straights, he throws them off the walk. Almost all his old boyfriends are ill or dead, and he's so angry he—”

“Good man. Give it to them back.”

“I talked him out of it. It's good therapy, but he'll get into police trouble.”

Cliff nodded. “Still. Get some action going, maybe, and Big Steve would be prime soldier stuff. That boy must be the biggest thing in New York, huh? I was always a little afraid of him.”

“You're not afraid of anything,” I told him.

Given pause, he quietly regarded me.

“The Human Typewriter,” I went on, “sees and knows.” On my fingers, I ticked off the storyteller's four essentials: “Experience, observation, retention, imagination.”

He shook his head, half-smiling.

“The day you're afraid of something,” I concluded, “will be the end of the world.”

He nodded again, his mind speeding through agendas—emotional, cultural, sociological. “Get some action going,” he murmured. “Do some fight, some taking. Even it up.” He turned to me, his eyes keen as searchlights. “They talk about boycotts. What if we boycotted the closet? We all know a few sneaks.” His term for closet gays. “Across the country, right?, everyone writes letters to parents, bosses, friends. Reveal those suckers. Push them out. What are the breeders going to do, ace, fire twenty million men? Disown twenty million sons? Make them see us, ace. Make them know.”

“Pretty heavy artillery.”

“What are they waiting for?” he asked. “How can they stand living like that, sneaks? Do they think they're going to be spared the roundups because they're such good liars? What you are is what you see.”

“That's just it—what you are is what
they
see. The sneaks will be spared. They
will.
Because it isn't homosexuals the straights hate. It's gays. They don't mind if you have a secret. They don't have to deal with secrets. Secrets aren't there. It's that hammering home of the truth that enrages them, the
exploding
of the secrets.”

“So why? Tell me why.”

“Apparently their whole civilization stands or falls on the fucking of women.”

“Jewcatchers,” he says. “That's what the closet creeps are. In Berlin in the 1940s, because some Jews were still hiding out, the Nazis had platoons of Jews temporarily free of the Hitler death camp. Why?”

He points a finger at me, warning, showing, this is the world. A little history for me here.

“This is why: they stroll through Berlin looking for old friends, for non-Aryan faces. And they follow them home and alert the SS. Because the Nazis can't rest as long as a single Jew is still alive. The
hatred,
ace! It's as if nothing matters to them as much as this one thing, this murderous hatred of … what? Of
what?
Of people who are very different from them and almost exactly like them. Can you comprehend this hatred? Can you understand a Jewcatcher?”

“We'd be Jewcatchers if we blew the whistle on all the closet gays, wouldn't we?”

“Roy Cohn, ace. There was the king of Jewcatchers. A gay man, listen to me. Yet he helps McCarthy root through the government for gays to hound.” Hating what you are. “Aside from countless other crimes.” He closes his eyes. Being Cliff is hard. It's endless. “Ace, the greed of these people. The implacable hunger to destroy what they can't own. The unlimited debauchery of the closet, the breeders' conspiracy of silence, the … this Gulag guardhouse of fat-cat ghouls. But he died gay, didn't he, that Cohn bastard?”

He wants me to see the history, comprehend the grid of patterns. In cafés, discos, bars, I would spot this athlete of ideas lecturing to boys who just wanted to party for their lives. Do you see it, you must read, let's consider, get off the drugs, stop dancing. If he couldn't talk you around, he'd reform you with love, and if that didn't work, he'd get mad and beat you up. It worked with everyone but Greg.

“What do you think Roy Cohn will be in the next life?” I ask. I'm joking, but even Cliff has been toying with the possibility that dead souls return. He is not remotely convinced, but some of his friends are, for they need something to believe in besides Cliff—he is somewhat beyond love, beyond touch and sentiment and kidding around. He can be unforgiving, like the Old Testament God; and asks too much of them, like the New One. He mustn't be loved, only feared and admired. Greg once told me that life with Cliff was like being found innocent at a show trial.

Colin comes in to ask about lunch. He fends off Cliff's controversies with a disquisition upon the versatility of the Cuisinart. I don't know what his politics are; but he doesn't like anger in any cause. I got in trouble with him some years ago for blowing up at dinner.

Colin proceeds into the kitchen and Guillermo comes in to change his outfit and make his standard lunch, an arcane preparation of Bumblebee solid white in water. Guillermo changes his clothes every time he does something: there's one kind of Speedos for sunning, another for beach parade, one fashion of tank top for napping, another for tea. Luke and Stephen amble in, and after a moment's hesitation, Guillermo decides to fix his lunch in the running shorts he bought at a boutique in the harbor on the way here.

“I think they will match the blue T,” he says, heading upstairs to change.

“When the going gets tough,” Luke remarks, “the tough go shopping.”

Cliff, encased in thought, is an age away, assembling analytical contributions: Socrates, the Taiping Rebellion, pink triangles.

Now Stephen joins us, completing the set; and dead Greg comes with him, for their affair was the longest and deepest transaction in this circle, the sexiest of the romances. Stephen sits, listening to Luke and me trade opera quips, then says, “Everything just goes right on.”

We turn to him, Cliff with the grip of a hunter at point.

“I mean,” Stephen explains, “just because someone dies, that doesn't … the whole world doesn't keel over. Nobody stops doing anything. We pick up where we were, same difference. So we go to the funeral and we stay alive.”

Luke cleared his throat opera-style, a lengthy, grinding rasp like the windup before the pitch. Some high notes coming up.

“We stay alive,” Stephen repeated. “Sure. No matter how many of us die, nothing is going to change. Well, so rip out a few pages in your address book, that's all. So what? And you know what they're saying? They're saying the ones who get sick had the best sex. That's what they're saying.”

“Leave it to The Pines,” I sigh, “to come up with plague prestige.”

“Sex doesn't give you AIDS,” said Cliff. “Breeders give you AIDS.”

*   *   *

Went the day well? After lunch, Cliff and Stephen returned to their houses, Luke and Guillermo sunned at the pool—Guillermo turning at precisely regular intervals—and Colin and I went to the harbor to assemble the dinner. The guest of honor owns an art gallery in Soho,
the
art gallery in Soho, really; he also owns Soho. He and Colin are not close friends, not playfellows, confidants, comrades, God forbid buddies of a shared Stonewall mission, the chosen people without a God. We chose ourselves. Yes: so why is Colin going to such trouble over this party? We ransack the grocery, denude the liquor store of choice wine; there will be Tabasco chicken wings in sour-cream–bleu-cheese sauce for cocktails, the thinnest veal cutlet the world has ever seen with tortellini in a prosciutto sauce, plus condiments in fetching little crocks and two astonishing desserts. This is world without end, but what world? This is metropolitan life: only gays would take it along to the beach. Colin and I even sock in a little container of nasturtiums, a flower you can eat. It goes on one of the desserts.

There are a lot of straights about, I notice, as we regroup with our bags at the harbor. Are they going to take The Pines away from us if we don't Big Steve them down? I look at the gays standing there with us, chatting, meeting the ferry, heading for the grocery. A lot of muscle there; but what do they do when some mainland straight kid mutters “faggot” as he passes? What's muscle for?

Who was it who said, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice”? Oscar Wilde? Eric Blore? Richard Locke?

Another dream: I am lying wounded in the middle of Third Avenue, and a troop of straight doctors, thin-lipped and as savorless as dishwater, line up to cut me open and rip out my vital organs. As I scream for help, they brandish their accessories—scalpels, clamps, catheters, bedpans. The first one kneels. It is George Will. Following a drawing in a textbook, he drags an electric can opener down my torso from neck to waist.

The house is silent when we return, but for momentary elation from the dogs. Luke and Guillermo are off visiting.

“I don't know why I'm doing this,” says Colin as we unload, referring to if not answering the question I myself have raised. “Every time I give a dinner, somebody loses his temper.” He describes the last three parties, all superbly planned fiestas and all, in the end, drunken brawls. The trouble with Pines dinners is, they start so damn late. What do you expect at a ten o'clock starting time but maniacs and bums, pugnacious on booze and frantic with hunger?

We unload. Colin starts cooking and I walk the dogs along the beach, the Akita straining on her leash to attack every dog we see. The wind has come up and almost everybody has gone inside. I run the dogs along the water's edge. I worry. A lot of that lately. At the access to Colin's beach walkway—
PRIVATE, DO NOT ENTER
—I turn and survey the view. I have seen amazing things here over the years; I am postulant, celebrant, town scribe. I told what was. If Stonewall were a sentence, this summer is punctuation. Comma, semicolon, period? Maybe it is world
with
end.