Everybody Loves You (24 page)

Amazing things. You mean, the poignantly restitutive sight of a talismanic hunk with heebie-jeebie tits and junk of death tersely encountering an elegiacal youth of bracing attributes? No, I mean a flea circus.
Yes,
I mean: of course, I mean. But I've been trying to tell you about something else in story after story; is it taking? I've been trying to tell you that a man-to-man system that doesn't fear sex creates the ultimate in man-to-man friendships. This is what I mean by penetration.

No,
this
is what I mean:

About ten years ago, I took a share in a muscle house, as The Pines terms it: seven tremendous men, a fair passel of free weights, and me. My lease gave me weekdays only, so I seldom saw anyone until August, when everybody started taking vacations. Used to treating me as a sort of flesh-and-blood nonperson, like Oakland without a
there
there, two of my housemates came back from the beach assuming they had the house to themselves. In fact, I had been there all day, away when they were around and vice versa, and now I was in the bathroom shaving while they were in their bedroom changing clothes, with nothing to separate us but what the construction business calls a party wall. Thus I overheard—virtually was drawn into—the end of a long conversation between two men who, it appeared, had had a lot of sex but little personal contact. Not lovers, fuckers. But listen, as I did, to how easily sex slides into friendship.

(I wonder if the heightened sense of comraderie that suffuses The Pines derives from the pervasive lack of privacy. No, that's absurd.)

The two boyfriends in the bedroom were not, from the sound of them, equals on any level. One was older, tougher, smarter; the other, one of those young, know-nothing charmers that the gay world can't seem to get enough of. The youngster was speaking of the family farm in Iowa that he might return to. He said the city was “a hard place,” that he didn't know what he was doing “here.”

The older man told the boy what indeed he was doing, why
here
existed in the first place, and I heard what amounted to a commentary on, a crusade for, and the national anthem of gay life all at once. Standing at the sink, razor in hand, half here and half there, I stared at the mirror as the man went on with his exhortation. He said he would help the boy with his rent, help him get a job, help him.
Help him,
the italics are mine. And the boy said, “Why would you do that for me?” And the man said, “What do you think I've been stuffing your ass for? For the fun of it? What do you think we've been doing?”

“I … I don't know what there is,” the boy replied. “I guess I didn't hear the choices.”

There was a long pause, then the man said, “It's because I like you. That's what the choice is.”

Another pause; and I heard the pair of them head downstairs. A bit later I came out, too, and found them in the kitchen making salami-and-cheese sandwiches. They were much as I had pictured them, the boy clean-cut trash with a delicate mouth and the man a Viking with self-reproaching eyes. They smiled at me, and the boy said, “I'm Greg and this is … this is my friend, Cliff.”

*   *   *

Watching Colin prepare the dinner, I wondered why someone—Colin, I, anyone—would go to this trouble just because somebody owned the hottest gallery in Vanity Fair. Well, who knows what else we have in our here, what inducements and loyalties a Cliff would find hard to respect?

I kept us supplied with Finlandia on the rocks, savored with cuttings from the special lemon-lime hybrids Colin has flown in from northern California, whence he derives. Lifestyles of the rich and famous. Step by step, the menu comes alive, the hour grows apace, the Finlandia flows … and by dinnertime I'm a bit hazy on data. Even a Human Typewriter occasionally jams.

I do remember the arrival of the art gallery owner, an enraged schmuck with a suave facade, sweeping in with entourage of aged-queen sidekick and pleasant young boyfriend. The two older men were already so wet they could have been served in glasses.

I remember Luke and Guillermo walking in straight from tea, Cliff and Stephen following a minute later.

I remember the art gallery guy putting down everything within reach, including Guillermo—something about “Well, if you like meat on the hoof”—and his hand waving, waving.

I remember going into the kitchen and telling Stephen, “These people are dreadful.”

I think I remember Cliff looking more pensive than usual, as if he were in caucus with the querulous presences of history, propelling him on to sanctions, rebuttals, orations. Anything, Cliff, but compromise. I remember tensions rising during cocktails; I remember the sour-cream-bleu-cheese sauce. And I remember the art gallery guy, at the dinner table, going into a eulogy of Roy Cohn, how misunderstood he was, how fair and smart and delightful.

I was in the kitchen. I glanced at Colin, obliviously ladling out tortellini. I heard a skirmish, gasps, a clatter. Looking around the corner into the dining room, I saw Cliff strangling the art gallery guy.

Strangling him.

I don't remember what everyone else was doing, name by name. I expect some were clearly upset, some went on with what they were doing, and a very few sought to do something about it—as with AIDS, as we do, as we all, as it is. I believe Stephen got to Cliff and smoothed him off: held him and talked to him and made him stop. Cliffed him, you might say. How many times Cliff had got his friends out of trouble like that. There was a lot of yelling then, and Colin materialized, looking stunned with a platter of the most incredibly thin-sliced veal cutlets, and a certain amount of walking out and door slamming followed. The dogs picked up on the tension, and when I tried to calm the Akita she bucked her head and snapped at me, sending me reeling. Stephen said, “You're bleeding,” and I went down to the bathroom to find a cut near my eye.

I'm hazy on the details thereafter. I recall staying up to listen to CDs of
Die Frau Ohne Schatten
with Stephen and the art gallery guy's boyfriend. Everyone else had left or gone to bed.

I do remember saying, “We never served the nasturtiums,” as I saw Stephen and the boyfriend to the door; then I bundled up to taste some night air before I hit the hay.

*   *   *

The wind was rolling furiously in, great black waves beating the beach, the clouds so rocky they thudded. I was cold in a sweater and sweatshirt; it might have been winter. I was shaking, and I kept thinking, At least it wasn't me.

I sat down at the edge of Colin's steps and waited for The Midnight Rambler, a stranger who, on weekends, uses Colin's walk instead of the public right-of-way, blithely strolling along the decking, sometimes closing an open door, latching the front gate behind him, and marching off into The Pines, somehow never arousing the dogs.

Maybe he'll try it tonight. It's so dark he won't see me, and if he's straight, I, like Big Steve, will toss him off the deck. This is private property. This is Inside.

Now Nijinska barks, and someone does come along, but behind me, from Inside: Cliff. He sits and puts an arm around my shoulder. He grips me, he Cliffs.

“How's your eye?” he asks.

“Okay. I can feel a bump there.”

He samples it.

“You're going to have a black eye,” he says. “We'll do some ice on it.”

“I don't want to do ice on it.”

His mustache tickles my ear: “What are you going to tell people when they ask where you got that bruise? ‘An Akita punched my lights out'?”

He shoves me a little because I won't laugh.

“Who're you mad at, ace?” he asks.

“Not you.”

“Take it easy,” he says, “and you'll live longer. Came back to apologize to Colin, and the whole house is dead here.” Then he says, “Listen to the wind. When I was a kid, I thought wind was the voice of God. So many nights sitting like this, or on the deck of someone's bedroom, huh? I'd listen for the messages. Accusations. Warnings. Best wishes on a memorable occasion. I don't understand the right language, though, sure. Back when All This got started, I would listen really careful, because I thought … well, there ought to be some interpretation in it, you know?
Purport.
Maybe no purport a gay man wanted to hear. Nothing we'd like, right? But something to know. Something that I could hear most clear here in this place. Something in the wind out there, ace.”

“Go on,” I said, for he had stopped.

He patted my head. “I will,” he replied. But he was silent.

We listened to the wind.

“I will,” he repeated.

I don't understand the right language, either.

“It was bad enough at first,” he finally went on, “because it was so obvious that there was a plague on and no one was doing anything about it. And there we are trying to figure out what the victims have in common, to know who's going to get it next. It's from drugs, it's poppers, it's from rimming, it's in the quiche, it's attitude. Maybe it's in the wind. Then it's got half the guys you know, so how come you're healthy?”

He found a rock in the sand below the walk and pitched it into the black night.

“Neat scheme, wasn't it?” he said. “Infect a few faggots and let their baths and bars and beds do the rest. Excellent mischief, huh? By the time they realize what's happening, they'll all be poisoned, the whole degenerate Stonewall gang of them. Then we pull out the deterrent vaccine and say, ‘Oh, look what we just found. Too bad about the queers, but now those perverts are going to be buried up good and tight, sir, yes
sir!
Won't be no Stonewall trouble around here again, sir, no
sir!
'”

Another rock flies in the dark, this one all the way to the water.

“I used to think it was who's going to get it and who isn't,” he told me. “Now I think it's who dies first and who dies later.”

Just like the
Ring:
everyone is dispensed with. “Good weather,” I said, “for
Götterdämmerung.
”

He pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head, surveyed me, nodded. He likes it when his friends turn into little kids who need soothing. Greg was more a kid at thirty than most ten-year-olds are.

“What should we do?” he said. “We ought to leave something behind. We were going to change the world and all we're doing is leaving it.”

“Why don't you write down how you feel?” I asked.

“That's your cure for everything, isn't it? Getting published?”

“If we all write about what we did, and how we felt, who we were … we
will
leave something behind. They can't kill books. Even the Nazis couldn't.”

“Can a book change the world?” he asked. “Change a guy's life, now?”

I threw a rock at the wind, me.

“What changes lives?” he asked. “I tried to change Greg, you know. Listen to this—I was going to make him a better man. Get him off the stuff, make him believe he had things he could do.”

I pulled the hood off my head.

“Do you ever change a life?” he wondered, putting up my hood again.

Two rocks, one each.

“Do you remember,” he asks, “that beautiful black muscleboy that Carson Jennings brought here? Way back in … must have been 1975 or nearly so. Just picked him up off the street and out he comes here. What was his name, remember? Very sweet man, never opened his mouth. Incredible bod, real big stuff. If you went over there when Carson was in the city, that boy would come over to you and just start making love. He'd be cleaning the pool or something, and he'd see you and smile and just give it to you. Never said a word the whole time. Very thoughtful, any way you liked it.”

“His name,” I said, “was Roy Deevers.”

“He remembers! Good man.”

“The reason he never spoke was, when he did, everyone laughed at him.”

“How would you know this?”

“He told me. Can I take my hood down?”

“No. So the boy was doing a happy summer on the beach, and sooner or later Carson would close up the house and dump him back on Forty-second Street or wherever he came from. This is changing a life, watch. Because there are halfway houses, right? Community setups? There's placement, sociology, education, all this. Easy to do if you're connected. That's how it works, being connected. Too bad I'm connected with just what I need, but it's in San Francisco. Friend of mine runs a halfway house there. Ran it, I mean.” He pauses. “And he changed plenty of lives, I know that. So all we need is the money to get this boy out to San.”

“And you can't get it from Carson, because he doesn't want you interfering with his summer-houseboy routine.”

“Stet.” Let it stand, meaning That's correct. Publishing term.

“I taught you that,” I said.

“Everyone teaches and everyone learns. That's friendship, ace.”

The Pines-hating leftouts must be screaming by now, because the thing they can't abide is to hear that the love they couldn't get in touch with actually exists.

Scream, you fuckers.

“Changing a life,” Cliff went on. “Everyone chipped in five bucks and I got the black kid on a flight as a standby and I took him to my friend's place and I told him to stop screwing everyone he met.”

Rocks. Wind. Death by catastrophe as the world looks on.

“How'd he do?” I asked.

“Terrific. I changed a life. He got on to painting apartments. Union and everything. He lived out good.”

“Stet.”

“Did you ever go over there? To Carson's? For a date with that kid?”

“No. Just dinner.”

“Why not?”

“Because that parade of horny Carsonians was racist and exploitative.”

“What are you, ace, a saint?”

“In some ways.”

“That boy was filled with love. Sharing it with everyone was his way of communicating.”