Everybody Loves You (6 page)

I, too, dreaded having to play a scene with Mitch, and I paused outside our house, though all the lights were out. I virtually crept up our walk, scuttled into my room, and eased onto my bed, my head spinning from the predinner drinking. I lay there, pondering, organizing, making lists in my head.

Then it happened.

*   *   *

Footsteps on the deck. Lights on. Something's moving. Pause. More movement from somewhere deep in the house. Then:

“I'm glad you're here.” Bill.

“And I'm glad you're here.” Mitch.

“Are … are you sore at me?”

“No.” Thoughtful. “No, Billy, I'm not sore at you.”

“You sound … Aren't you cold without a shirt?”

Indefinable noises.

“Why are you putting a chair against the door?” Bill.

“So you can't get away.”

Silence. I should say something, no? I could stir, or cough. I could sing the rest of “The Lonely Goatherd,” perhaps launch into “An Ordinary Couple.” But I never liked that one.

“Please don't be hard with me, Mitch. It's not what you think. I had to—”

“What do I think?”

“I wanted to go over it in my mind. See—”

“What do I think, Billy?”

“Can we talk about it? I didn't go visiting. I took a walk. Now I … I came back to tell you something. Don't be hard, now, okay?”

“Too late. You came back too late. I've been doing some thinking, too. Come here, Billy.”

“Okay, except you … you look … hard…”

“There's a good reason for that.”

“What … what are you going to do? Just tell me, okay?”

“I'm going to beat you up.”

Nothing. Then Bill: “Any special reason why?”

“Did you hear me say ‘come here' to you?”

I imagined J. D. asking, “What were they
wearing?
” and I ached to look, but I didn't dare move. Would you rush the stage to interfere with the actors' business?

“Mitch, you have every right to be sore, but if you just listen to— No, Mitch, wait!”

At a horse race you can leap and yell. Watching television you can make remarks. If the dam bursts you can run. I had to sit there motionless through these excruciating silences, eyeless in Babylon.

“Please listen to me!”

“You have this coming, so just take it nice and easy. You're such a cute little kid, aren't you? So beatable, now. So right.” Scraping noises. Something heavy. Was Mitch moving the table? “Nothing you can do about it, Billy. Come here to me now.”

“Mitch!”

“Billy…”

A chair went over.

“Oh, Mitch, please—

“Here we go now, Billy.”

“Stop using my name! You … you said you wanted to be my friend!”

The table again.

“Just let me get my hands on you and I'll show you what a friend I can be.”

That's what Bill's been afraid of all along, I thought. But this was not the ideal time for a psychoanalytic reading of the case. Bill was sobbing. “Why are you hurting my feelings?” he wailed. Because you hurt his, I noted silently. “I wanted you to like me. Don't … not like this, Mitch, please!”

Oh? Some other way would be acceptable? He's tormenting you and you're loving it; so whom do I root for?

Bill spoke again, suddenly calm: “You don't have to move any more furniture. I'm going to come over to you and I'll … you can do what you want to me. I just wish you'd hear me out first. Then if you want to hurt me, you can. I can't stop you, anyway. You can wait a few minutes. Okay, Mitch? Okay?”

Silence. Was Bill “coming over”? Who in this scene is the bearer into life?

“You peeked, didn't you?” said Dennis Savage, when I told him the tale. “This is where you peeked.”

Peeked? I was afraid to breathe. I was also consumed with admiration for this couple's instincts for S & M stylistics. No training, no arrangements, no practice. Just get in there and do it. Now Bill was whispering to Mitch. Damn! Key dish forever lost. Clearly, he
was
afraid of something, and Mitch demanded that he not be for the sake of romance—and if that isn't S & M, I don't know what is. In the gay utopia, when we couple by assignment, we'll be at the mercy of the activists. But for now we can always get locked in a room with Mitch O'Connell.

“I'll do anything you want.”

Which of them said that? I was so rapt in thought that I didn't hear this till it was an echo in the air, and I could no longer place the voice.

“
Now
you peeked,” says Dennis Savage.

“No. I lay doggo, guilty, thrilled.
Who
will do anything? Only a gay. Wives won't swallow; husbands won't spank. But a gay who Won't loses love. What difference who actually said it? We all say it, or hope to. Bill was sobbing again; his sobs filled the house. Enough. Out I came, sweater in hand.

They were standing in the middle of the room, swaying in each other's arms, heart to heart. I doubt they were even aware that I passed them. I walked onto the black beach and fretted.

*   *   *

“That's your idea of S & M?” Dennis Savage asks. “Two cream puffs kissing?”

“On one hand,” I tell him, “I'm concerned about your health. On the other hand, how do I know this antique Hindu beheading sword works till I chop-test it on your neck?”

“Now, that's S & M,” he avers. “There it is: talk. Just talk.”

“You think Mitch wouldn't have given Bill a beating if the kid didn't know how to handle him?”

We'll never know. Walking along the water's edge that night, I thought that everything I'd heard of S & M paled before the confrontation of Mitch and Bill. It was the
measured
nature of their text that got me, the calculation of anger and fear and need, the ritually repeated “Billy” and the maneuvering of roles, each an aggressor and a victim at once. But then that's one of the things that makes gay romance unique:
two
bearers, in place of straight's bearer and receiver. Perhaps it was the incongruity of Mitch's attack that most impressed me, the dense love mixed into the violence. Or maybe it was because I couldn't
see
it; maybe S & M is never as good as it sounds.

Out on the sand that night, reviewing the event, I decided that I knew nothing of S & M. But I know hot dish when I have it. I ran off to J. D.'s house to share it. His mates were advocates of the late entrance and were still engaged in working out a fastidious improvisation of costume. J. D. was all set to go, in a cowboy's shirt, a fisherman's sweater, and a painter's pants. “Who are you?” I would have said, but before I had a chance to, he cried, “What were they
wearing?
” Costume, schedule, role.

“Jeans,” I told him. “Bill was in one of those washed-out Lacostes he always wears. Mitch had—”

“And were they…”

“What?”

“For the first time? The last time?”

“This could be the start of something big.”

Waiting for his housemates to assemble and depart, he was getting in a last-minute munch. The two of us looked up to admire them as they came out of their rooms, plumed and painted like Regency rakes.

“I'm going to dance for my life tonight,” said one of them.

J. D. ate some peanut butter off a knife. “What if Mitch had … done it?” he said.

“Done what?” asked another housemate, adjusting his cap in a mirror; he was going as an American sailor.

“Beaten up his boyfriend,” I said.

“Making up is hard to do,” the sailor replied; the thought seemed to come easy to him.

“What happens to them now?” J. D. asked.

“Plenty of sex, I expect, and a happy ending.”

Ecstatically floored, he was silent.

“All right,” one of his housemates called out, “let's
get
there!”

“Let's
show
them!”

“We're going to
do this thing!
”

I couldn't go back to my house, so I decided I'd better go dancing after all. As we walked, J. D. was silent at first; then he hit me for more details of Mitch and … Billy.

“When you came out … who was…?”

“Both.”

He sucked in his breath. “And was it…?”

“To die,” I told him. “To
die.
”

“But after you left … do you really think they…?”

I shrugged. “It was the moment, wasn't it?”

“Don't you wish?” he murmured. Then he turned to the ocean and screamed at the top of his lungs, “Don't you
wish?
”

I speak fluent gay, but I swear sometimes I haven't the vaguest idea what we're saying to each other.

The Ghost of Champ McQuest

Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers

After such years of change and suffering!

—
Emily Brontë, “Remembrance,” 1846

Dennis savage groaned when I told him I had invited Tom Adverse for a midweek overnighter at our Pines house.

“That dreary lump!”

“He'll repair the decking for us and blot up the leaks in the roof. And I'll bet he can fix the upstairs john so we don't have to jiggle it every—”

“He has the eyes…” Dennis Savage begins wearily, his head all a-shake,
must
he explain,
why
will I never see reason? “The eyes,” he repeats, “of those psychotic hustlers who keep tuning out and going blank on you because as long as they hold you at a distance you don't really seem human. So they don't have to feel conflicted when they pull out the knife to kill the faggot.”

“Tom isn't dangerous around gays. He only gets into fights with straight men. And women, sometimes. I mean—”

“Where do you find them?”

“You introduced me to him. You said he gives a great massage.”

That stops him. Ah, he remembers, nods. “A great massage, yes. Except for the jokes he tells over your shoulder. ‘How many niggers does it take to start a Cadillac?'”

“He's got a racist, reactionary, and intolerant streak that is extremely unappealing, I admit. But what else would he be? He comes from a small town in North Carolina, goes right into the Marines after high school, survives Vietnam, supports himself by oddjobbing from hustling to housepainting, and spends his off hours failing to understand women and fending off their jealous boyfriends in bars. You must admit, it's a fascinating tale. He can't enjoy what he should have and he doesn't want anything else. He's all puzzled up.”

“He's a vicious loon,” says Dennis Savage.

“No. He's a big, sexy, kind man who's had a lot of bad breaks.
And
he's the only straight anyone ever met who had such a bad time in his world that he only feels comfortable in ours. If there were such a thing as homophilia, he'd get a medal for it. Don't you agree?”

“He's a lurid baboon,” says Dennis Savage.

“Come on, he's a good guy.”

“A
good guy?
He's so wacko, they're thinking of changing the word ‘crazy' to his name!”

“They were getting up a list of the five most intolerant people in the history of the world. They had Hitler, Savonarola, Nero, Pope George Ringo I—and in fifth place, it was a toss-up between Caligula and you.”

“He's a demented bore,” says Dennis Savage.

*   *   *

More precisely, Tom Adverse was the Cherry Grove Carpenter, for those of you who con the folklore back into the early 1970s. Hammering and sawing away on roofs and decks in direly cut-off jeans, Tom Adverse was not only an amenity of the gay part of Fire Island but a regular stop on the newcomer's tour. Day-trippers to The Pines couldn't call their visit official till they had marched over the sands to scan the Cherry Grove Carpenter.

And scan they must, for Tom was truly a sight, devastating at first glance and mesmerizing on reconnaissance. Still, he can't have been enjoying himself. He posed for mail-order porn, yet he was reportedly unavailable. He did give massages, in those same carpenter's cutoffs, yet they were just that: massages. He had the winged shoulders, louche navel, and ruthless nipples of the absolute dreamboy, yet he had no attitude, no fire, no certainty of self. He palled around with quick, fierce gays, yet to most questions he gave dead eyes and said, tonelessly, “Uh-huh.” There were a lot of things he didn't like to talk about. He preferred to play tambourine while the gay boys danced. The whole place drank him in; he didn't seem to notice. Then he tried porn posing, strictly for the money: but look at his eyes in those pictures. They're sad. The only sad eyes I've ever seen in porn, a sorry hot.

So what did he love? Carpentry. Painting. Making and repairing. He felt alive in such work, placed, needed. Posing in the nude was giving too much away, at that to strangers who would plunder him of something he didn't know he had. Building and fixing was good work, doing oneself proud. And his rural right-wing style wasn't all racist jokes and Rambo politics. Once I was talking to him at the Pines ferry when a vastly noted New York fashion designer vastly noted Tom and approached with an offer. Normally this very wealthy and influential personage had only to ring out his name for men of all sizes to fall in with his schemes. Tom just looked at him.

“I know who you are,” he said calmly. “You get young kids out here who don't know any better and you give them drugs to warp their heads around. Then you mess them up with sex stuff. So you can get away from me before I teach you one good lesson.”

The fashion designer could indeed get away, and very immediately did.

Never till remember rest you will I.

—
allegedly recorded during a “spiritual visitation,” Denver, 1962.