Everybody Loves You (8 page)

Time for a little talk.

“Carlo,” I said, in the murmur of late-night Pines for the dishing of persons but inches away, “do you think Tom is straight?”

“He surely is. But he's nice, for a gringo.”

“You don't find an interior contradiction in a Pines-loving, massage-giving, former porn-posing man who doesn't date women and doesn't know men?”

Carlo shrugged. “There's contradictions all over the place. Who's
not
a contradiction, when you look close enough?”

“You aren't. I'm not.”

He grinned. “Ain't we got fun?”

“Did you ever run into Tom along the Circuit?”

“Sure. He's been around about as long as any of us.”

“Well, did you ever try to set something up?”

He shook his head. “You look at a guy like that and you think, Hey, that's damn hot cake, now how about a slice? But wait a bit here. Never saw a man could talk to you for so long without knowing you're there. His quarter's twenty cents short, right? A smart guy would not want to take that on.”

“He doesn't really seem dangerous, though, does he? I mean, he's strangely vacant, all right, but—”

“No, I catch that story. I truly do. See a tough guy like that who's kind of wounded and trying to be likable, and you think, I bet there's some real tender inside him, if only I could reach it. What a lover he'd make then, right? Is that the story? Some guys really go for that. So I'll tell you—don't go messing around looking for tender in Tom Adverse to strike that vein in there. Like what I told you before about the rough and smooth—you ain't going to hit gold. You'll bust a volcano.”

In slow motion, whispering, he imitated an eruption; and went to bed.

Taping had energized me too much to consider sleeping. I took a walk along the beach, did some reading, and made myself a sandwich. I was halfway through it when Lionel came down. Besides dating idiots, he also mystifies his friends by wearing very questionable outfits. At the moment, he had on a white karate gi over an elaborate jockstrap of hempen webbing, the kind of thing you normally only encountered in the fashion layouts in
After Dark.
Lionel was also, at the moment, very shaken.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

He held out a hand: wait, let me collect my thoughts, choose my words. He kept pacing and looking upstairs.

“Lovers' tiff?” I asked.

“No, I … I don't know how to express this. You'll … will you promise to take me seriously?”

A thought struck me. “You saw a ghost, right?”

He stared at me.

“When Tom was the only one who saw it,” I went on, “I dismissed it as Tom in a Mood. When Carlo joined in, I must admit, it was disquieting. But what the hell, what the hell. Now I
know
it's a joke! So call the pranksters downstairs and let's do a little giggling and pushing while—”

“Please don't humor me,” he said. “This is not a joke and I'm not giggling. I saw something … phenomenological.”

Now I stared at him.

“Surely not,” I said.

He took another look upstairs, then sat on the couch. “I saw something,” he insisted.

“Was it like a lot of little candles? Did it sound like—”

“It was silent. A sort of metaplasmic laser beam with shapes inside it … bumpy and … spinning…”

I know Lionel well enough to tell when he's joking around. He wasn't.

“You realize,” I reminded him, “that ghosts do not exist. You realize that.”

He nodded.

“I mean, there's no Santa Claus, no Shroud of Turin, and no ghosts. Right?”

He nodded.

“So—”

Bert came down the stairs so quickly he virtually leaped into Lionel's lap.

“Oooh,” Bert gasped. “Like
tot-tal-ly
haunted!”

But, for the unquiet heart and brain

A use in measured language lies;

The sad mechanic exercise,

Like dull narcotics numbing pain.

—Alfred Tennyson,
In Memoriam, 1850

Lionel and Bert refused to go back upstairs that night, so I stayed with them, talking till all three of us fell asleep. The rest of the house was up early, and they found us strewn about the living room like dummies in the set of a war movie. So there was giggling and poking till Lionel spilled his story. Then Carlo chimed in with
his
sighting; and now the ghost became the house topic.

Dennis Savage, like me a fervent unbeliever, scoffed. But Little Kiwi immediately organized himself and Bauhaus into the Ghost Patrol and went around the house all day wearing a clove of garlic, a cross, and his Polaroid. He even made up business cards to hand out. “Remember our motto,” he'd add:

Ghost Patrol will come and so

All the ghosts just have to go.

“You can start in my room,” Lionel told him.

“Anyone who believes in this rubbish,” Dennis Savage announced from the kitchen, “gets no breakfast.”

“Carlo,” said Little Kiwi, “did you really see a ghost?”

“Well, I truly hell saw something.”

The weather had cleared nicely, and from overhead came the noises of Tom Adverse, hammering and whistling as he patched the leaky roof.

“Rillly,” observed Bert. “Why don't you get The Twisted Macho Man to like măybê for exam-mple scare it a–
way?
”

“Tom?” I said. “He's sort of a ghost himself.”

“Oooh,
bark
me into the ca-
loset.
”

“Don't worry,” said Little Kiwi, adjusting his garlic. “The Ghost Patrol will exterminate this house. Remember our motto—”

“If you don't stop that,” Dennis Savage began; but Little Kiwi put a finger on Dennis Savage's lips and made him blush.

“I play him,” Little Kiwi told us, “like a stereo.”

After breakfast, while Lionel considered completing the weekend in some quieter establishment and Dennis Savage accused him of giving way to bad dreams and California brain meltdown (“Oooh, gag me,” said Bert), I went outside to check up on Tom.

“How're we doing?” I called up to Tom, happily ensconced on high amid the symbols of his calling, the affable eructations of the toolbox.

“Almost done here. I'm taking it easy awhile.”

“How'd you get up there without a ladder?”

“Climbed up,” he said, holding out a hand to me.

If he can, I can, I told myself, pushing off the front-deck railing to join him.

“It's great up here,” he told me. “You can see clear to five counties.” He laughed. Another thing about Tom is that while he has a sense of humor, it's invariably the wrong one. I think he tells those atrocious racist jokes not because he believes they're funny but because he wants to see how you'll react to his having made you listen to them. Denounce his morals and he'll go Uh-huh. But if you sell out a little and forgive him with a doubting smile as you shake your head, he'll put a hand on your shoulder or chest very lightly, one of those almost meaninglessly nuanced demonstrations straights make with each other.

I think they're all starved for fun.

“Just let me finish up here,” Tom said, taking a swallow of the beer he chugs while he's working, “and you'll be dry for life.”

“You know, the rest of the house has been seeing what you saw. The ghost. It's … uncanny. I've known people who believed in ghosts, but I never knew anyone who claimed to have seen one.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tom?”

“Yeah?” Smearing the tar, casing out a shingle, lining it up.

“What do you think we should do about this? I mean, some of us apparently aren't comfortable sharing quarters with … Well, if it were mice we could trap them. But what do we do with a visitation?”

He nods. Nails in his mouth. Hammer. One side, other side, step by step. Start a thing. Finish it.

“Tom?”

He lays in the last shingle, dumps the can of nails into the toolbox, toys with the hammer.

“I know who it is,” he tells me. Why not? He doesn't care what I think. “Visiting at night here? I used to know him.”

“Hey!” Little Kiwi called up to us from the poison ivy and tundra that holds the Island together between foundations. “Have you seen any ghouls around here? Bauhaus and I are the Ghost Patrol.”

“Hey, Little,” Tom called down. The notion of a fully grown (if boyish) man named Little Kiwi was more than he could accept. At first, Tom called Little Kiwi nothing, then compromised on the first half of his name, solo. No one, including Little Kiwi, seemed to notice. “Hey, come on up here with us.”

“There's no stairs.”

“Chunk up on the fence there and we'll pull you along.”

“Hey, this is great,” Little Kiwi ventured after Tom had helped him up. “The Ghost Patrol can really do a lookout up here.”

“You can see clear to five counties,” said Tom.

Little Kiwi laughed.

“Who wants a slug?” Tom asked. His term for beer.

So we all sat on the roof and slugged beer.

“Tom,” said Little Kiwi, “did you see the ghost?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I take your picture?”

“No, I don't want my picture taken anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I guess I took too many when I was young. I'm all pictured up by now.”

“I want to get a photo of the ghost. What does it look like?”

Tom went into his secret hell, but he stayed with the theme. “He's a very sad guy. Very nice guy and very sad. Good-looking. It was hard to know what to do with him because his feelings always got hurt very easily.”

“Whose feelings?” Little Kiwi asked.

Yes, whose? Tom could have been describing himself.

“His name was Champ McQuest, and this was something like 1972. Maybe 1973. Champ McQuest.”

Little Kiwi, not following the computation, looked at me.

“He's recalling an old friend,” I said.

“He was so sad,” said Tom, “that no one could cheer him up. I gave him a massage for free once, to make him happy.” Tom shook his head. “Not even that.”

“Then what happened?” asked Little Kiwi.

“He died out on drugs. That stuff's so mean. He just got out of control with it.”

“That happened a lot then,” I put in.

Tom nodded. “Everything was an experiment. Because you didn't know what the end was. But it was the nicest guys who got wrecked the worst. You remember that, Little. The
tough
guys are still standing when the dust clears.”

“I'm afraid to be tough.”

“Champ had a lot of friends. Everybody loved him. But no one could figure out what was hurting him. Now he's trying to tell us something. A message from the past.”

“What?” I said. “You think that's—”

“I know it.” He looked at us, one after the other. “I knew him close and I know he's what's been coming around at nights here.”

“Why would he tell
us
anything?” I reasoned. “He's trying to get to you, isn't he? Maybe there's something the two of you didn't finish … Jesus, look at me talking as if there really were a—”

“What are you three hayseeds doing up there?” Dennis Savage called. “Half the house is in a state of panic, I don't know where our next dinner is coming from, and you're on the roof guzzling beer. And Little Kiwi, I told you to lose that garbage around your neck.”

“Come up and make me,” said Little Kiwi, aiming and snapping his camera.

“Little's getting tough,” said Tom.

“I'll make you but plenty when you come down! And stop taking those pictures!”

“In one minute,” said Little Kiwi, “this candid photograph will be developed, and then I'll send it to the Curiosity Section of the
New York Times.
”

“The world's nuts,” said Dennis Savage, stomping off. “But come dinnertime, let no one complain to me because there's nothing to eat.”

“There have to be ghosts,” Little Kiwi mused, “or there couldn't be Ghost Patrol.”

“What is Champ McQuest trying to say to you, Tom?” I asked.

Tom was quiet for a bit. Then: “He was a very sad guy.”

They're out there whether you like it or not.

—A crank on a local television news show, Philadelphia, 1977

Wise old queens know everything, and it was to a wise old queen that I took The Problem late that afternoon. Not that I fancied asking him how one exorcises a ghost. But this man had been all over the scene for a good thirty years; he was
old
gay, older than clones and discos and politics. He was not a Circuit rider, but a considerable fortune put him at the very helm of the New York section of Stonewall while protecting his crony ties with the Big Boys at City Hall. He gave some of the greatest parties ever given, yet—and this is considered questionable—he was never to be glimpsed in the center of his dos, prancing and quipping, but far to the edge, talking to a friend or silent and watching. Some men know everyone; this man would have thought them parvenus. This man knew everyone he felt like knowing. There was a good chance that he had known Champ McQuest.

He is not a showy man. He prances and quips in private, for his personal pleasure. His Pines house is far to the east, on the ocean along the most chic strip of the choice quartier: but this is no palazzo. He doesn't even have a pool—he uses the Atlantic Ocean. He lives simply, easily, securely. When he throws a party he goes for it; when he lives he just lives.

He was one of my first clients in my party-tape era, eventually my best one, because his tape commissions turned into a sly challenge match. Not realizing how varied, extensive, and bizarre my record collection is, he kept asking for more and yet more recondite compounds. “Intimate, Brahmsian, a lot ‘cello,” he'd say, or “Honky-tonk, Sophie Tucker and ragtime—make it all sound like a battered upright piano with a broken middle C.” I never failed him, and finally he asked me not only to tape a soiree but attend it, perhaps hoping that I'd at least insult the dress code or fake the politesse. I did neither, and we became friends. I relate all this to underline how necessary it is to understand your associates, for only then can you be sure what you can ask of them, and what they can give you.