Everybody Loves You (5 page)

“He's
your
guest, boyo.”

“But he's after my bones!”

“So tell him to get lost.”

He groaned. “You don't know these political types. They think it's homophobic to say no.”

“Yeah. To
them.
”

“I'll be your best friend,” he pleaded, tautologically.

“Tell you what. I'll go down to my place and get my antique Hindu beheading sword. Out I go. You tell him I'm your jealous lover, and when I come back I'll charge him and he'll run out.”

“What if he doesn't?” He grabbed my arm. “No, do it. It'll be fun, anyway.”

I keep this curved sword, a present from my dad, hanging on my wall. It is carved in intaglio, long, dull, and mean. Sometimes I answer the door with it, held at the ready, and so I reentered Dennis Savage's apartment; but the activist had gone. Too bad. I was looking forward to playing the bravo.

“Boy, did he race out of here,” Dennis Savage told me as I hunted down a last glass of wine. “I told him you're the most notorious S in the East Fifties.”

“Did he believe you?” I asked, sipping and thrilled. “Maybe I should investigate the scene.”

“I can see you getting into S & M. First, you'd assemble collateral reading matter, from Dante to William Burroughs. Then you'd make lists: The Ideology of S & M. The Iconography of S & M. The Ontology of S & M, above all, surely.”

“Don't call me Shirley.”

“Footnotes, anyone?”

I fondle the sword. “I believe I'll cut off your lips.”

“Listen, there are only three questions to ask before getting into S & M, only three. One: How would I look in leather? Two: Am I willing to keep late hours—because, you know, S & M gives no matinees. Three: Am I the goon or the milquetoast?”

“I suspect you are a
trompe l'oeil
troll.”

“That's all S & M is, really: costume, schedule, role. Is it compulsion? Liberation? Romance? No. What is it? Presentation.”

“What isn't?” I ask.

“And you know why? Because there is no S & M. Everyone's an M. Everyone wants to be loved.
Possessed.
See? That is the dream of this presentation—‘Take me away from all this. Take me out of myself! Rebear me into life!'”

“So there
is
an S in S & M, then—the bearer.”

“Can you name?” he says, so wily. “Can you, now: a
genuine S
in the
world?
”

We have to rank out this cynic. Mind, race!

“Well?” he goes, so wry, so Ivy League.

I'm crazed. I can focus on nothing. I am back in seventh grade, when Mr. Van Santvoord swooped down on me crying, “Who kills Hamlet?” and I couldn't even recall who wrote it.

“Not a single name?” Dennis Savage taunts.

Yes, wait! “Mitch O'Connell.”

“Mitch O'Connell is a sweetheart! He wouldn't squash a bug. And here I thought you would cite me some angry avatar…”

“S & M isn't about anger.”

He waves this nonsense away. “Mitch is a lover, not a fighter. He dreams of April and tulips and scented encounters sealed with a puppy's kiss. Where do you get S & M in that?”

“S & M has love in it.”

“Oh, sure. There's nothing as tender as a tit clamp. And cock weights are charity, loyalty. Yes! Yes!” he cries, like Fats Waller. “Push your beau down the stairs—it's true romance! Run him through the meat grinder—it's love, it's love!”

“In San Francisco, they would say that you sound like an old biddy who thinks there are fairies at the bottom of her garden.”

“I happen to know that in your
whole life
you spent exactly ten days in San Francisco—most of them in record stores. So don't tell
me!
”

Well, it is true that no one would take Mitch O'Connell for an S at first acquaintance. He could perhaps play the role in some movie: dark, intense, taciturn. At times, he smoldered. But a collegiate spring in his ambitions typed him among the bourgeoisie, and the man was a flagrant romantic. He had It, but It wasn't easy to pin down, for he carried himself a bit off-kilter, as if he were trying to be blond, carefree, and gregarious. Still, he had
vast
shoulders and the boldest eyes ever seen, virtually navy blue. People kept looking at him; but he never looked back.

What did he want and what would he get? Well, you'll see.

But how did he find it? Through a natural mastery of S & M techniques.

And I don't mean as an M.

*   *   *

This will take us back to The Pines, summer of '73, when I rented a room for four weeks with, among others, Mitch O'Connell. The others came out only on weekends; I was temporarily permanent. Also in The Pines that month was my friend J. D. (for John David—he's a southerner, and you know those boys take their middle names everywhere they go). J. D. and I would sit on a bench in the harbor making fierce and facetious commentary as the boats pulled in. Friday afternoon was our gala, as the great and near-great collected, including our respective housemates, who would greet us with city dish before trooping off to organize dinner, eat, nap, and dance. Those were the days, weren't they?

On this certain evening I wish to tell of, Mitch O'Connell arrived with an uncharacteristic aplomb. He was standing on the top deck of the ferry glowing, grinning, swaggering without having to move. He wore black running shorts and a gondolier's shirt and it seemed the whole boat was wondering who he was.

So were J. D. and I. “Is that Mitch O'Connell?” he asked. “He looks ten years younger or something!”

“He could be a movie star.”

“He's dashing!”

“He's high as a kite on the—”

“He must be in love,” J. D. whispered, and promptly clamped a fist in his mouth, amazed at the bitter beauty that stirs a sullen world. Bitter: for not all postulants are taken into the order.

“He is in love,” I said, surprised that I hadn't realized it before. “He's in love with Bill Apgar.”

“That little Californian boy?” J. D. drummed on his thighs in excitement. He loves a good story, as long as there's plenty of sex in it and a happy ending. “Lots of flash and no reality whatsoever,” he once told me, describing the Perfect Party. But that's the way he likes everything. “Bill Apgar,” he now observed, “is just right for Mitch O'Connell. He's
just right!
”

“Will you please stop hitting my arm?”

“Oh, think of them at beach parade tomorrow! Mitch's hulking, tempest-tossed dark ways next to the bright-eyed blondie boy! I
thoroughly approve
of this story!”

“If you hit me once more—”

“Look!”

At Mitch O'Connell, he meant, as Mitch disembarked. He gave us a frisky salute as he passed but did not stop to talk.

“Did you
see
that?” J. D. whispered, so loudly that some of the arriving passengers turned to stare at us. “Did you see how he
walked?
He was …
striding!
”

He was moving like the protagonist of the kind of stories J. D. likes, like a man on a date with the love of his life. Now everything fell into place. Bill Apgar was also one of my housemates, and what I had taken for weekend blather and roughhouse I suddenly saw as the outline of a heavy flirtation. As Mitch vanished down the boardwalk, I told J. D. of their pensive stares across the breakfast table, of their moonlit walks, of how, when you came upon them talking in the living room, you felt as if you were barging in on the second act of a thriller. I told how Mitch called Bill “Billy” (no one else did), as if staking a claim on him; and how Bill reveled in the nickname. It
was
love. But something was missing—the happy ending, perhaps even the sex. Mitch's eyes glared at times; Bill's wavered. They had moved from the flirtation stage not into forthright romance but some densely ambivalent mystery.

Two boats later, Bill himself arrived. Though he was still in his early twenties, he had just sold a screenplay for an unholy fortune, and his weekdays were consumed with the doing of lunches and the taking of meetings. He stopped to chat with us, flushed and exhausted by success; I helpfully hummed “The Lady's in Love With You,” but no one got it. Mitch was not mentioned.

“Do you think?” J. D. asked as Bill ambled off. “Are they really and truly…”

“Lovers?”

J. D. screamed.

“Oddly enough,” I said, “I doubt they've as much as kissed.”

“Is it
possible?
”

“Bill is afraid.”

“Of what?”

Trying to verbalize an answer, I paused, and J. D. pummeled my arm again.

“Hey!”

“Of what?” J. D. repeated. “Of being fucked?”

“Maybe of being loved.”

J. D. liked that at first; then it frightened him and he ran away. The story was getting too good: too much reality whatsoever.

Of course the setting itself, The Pines, only intensifies the passions of story, of any story. And The Pines, in the 1973 of no-fault sexuality, always tried to be as unreal, as fantastic, as possible. The heavy drug intake dulled the perspective, but the scenery, natural and human, beguiled and stimulated; and the recklessly appetitive prowling blew wide the vistas of Stonewall. How many thousands of men rode the ferry in those days believing, like Mitch O'Connell perhaps, that this would be the weekend that changed their lives?

It was nearly twilight. I lurked around the harbor some, pestered two housemates in the Pines Pantry till they asked me to go away, and finally passed on to the house, where I found Mitch and Billy wildly smooching on the couch like two frat brothers after a hell night.

*   *   *

Bill tried to leap up as I came in—he had had plenty of warning, given the noisy Pines decks—but Mitch held him fast. Stuck for a lead, I broke into a vocal of “The Lonely Goatherd” with creative dance steps. Bill struggled out of Mitch's grasp and put the dining table between them.

“I have nowhere to go,” I told them. “My sidekick deserted me, my housemates threw me out of the grocery, and I'll lose my reputation if I'm found on the beach after sundown.”

Mitch was moody, Bill all for company. He made me a Bloody Mary. He got out the cheese and crackers. He talked Hollywood and status games. He said they all play roles out there. Mitch said nothing. After a few minutes of this, I left: no place to go was better than that place just then. But Bill came running out after me.

“Please stay,” he said.

“I'm not wanted.”

“I want you. Anyway, this isn't the right moment for Mitch and me to be alone.”

“Are you mad? Are you
wild?
You two had
Butterfield 8
working when I came in. What do you want, witnesses?”

He looked away. “No, yes, I … I just … did
you
ever…”

“Did I what?”

He took a deep breath. “It's overwhelming me. Why does it have to happen so fast?”

“He likes you. If you like him, say yes. If you don't, say no.”

“Oh, it's that simple?”

“So far.”

“You old grads of the Movement think the whole world boils down to whom you're going to sleep with tonight, don't you? Your whole revolution is nothing but sex. What about the other things in life?”

“They're all there. Our whole revolution is more comprehensive than you've been told. Whom have you been listening to? Some activist?”

He just looked at me.

“Activists don't make the revolution,” I told him. “We do.
Chacun à son gout.
”

“Would you please come back in there and tell that to Mitch?”

“You're a nice kid. I wish you success in love, a great career, and a fast metabolism. But when it comes to kids, I prefer to seduce and abandon, not give courtship counseling. So huh?”

He thought, nodded, and started back inside.

I grabbed his arm. “I'm sorry. But don't call me old. And let me tell you something. No one can help you out in something like this. It's your story; you write it. Besides … generally it
is
simply a question of you like him or you don't. Yes or no.”

Just then the rest of the house came rollicking down the boardwalk with the weekend provisions and we all repaired inside for a Fire Island cocktails, cooking, and dinner session, rich with subtext. After a while, Mitch stopped sulking and opened up some; by the third round of vodka he was giddy, making grimly robust jokes and sticking very, very close to Bill. I wondered how much of this was getting through to the others. They were not a particularly observant bunch, but let's face it, this was theatre. Still, much of gay life is theatre. Much of life, period.

Bill's performance seemed somewhat undirected. He was sort of unhappily amiable, possibly dreading the hour when the rest of us would go dancing and he would be left alone with Mitch for Act Three.

But two things happened. First, Bill got up during dessert, said he had to go visiting, and left. Second, Mitch went into his room without a word. And he was
mad.

By then, everyone knew something about it. Everyone looked at everyone else and wondered. But The Life goes on, and what everyone mainly did was get into dancing uniform. It was plain that year: the basic white T-shirt and your second-best jeans. An early entrance into the dance hall was also favored that summer, at least by my housemates, serious dancers rather than event-attenders, who tend to arrive very late and thus Make an Entrance.

So off we went, clump after clump of us sneakering along the firm sand near the waterline in the midnight darkness, sure of ourselves, confident of our freedom. Why not? It looked easy then. Every so often, however, it felt hard to live up to the demands of that avidly bewitching style. It felt less like freedom, more like a mission. That night, I impulsively turned back on the verge of the Grove; The Life was too much with me. My housemates scarcely noticed, for I had been dragging behind them. Oh, perhaps for quite some time, in all—more than even I knew. Another tune I could most appropriately have broken into was “There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This.”