In Memory of Angel Clare (16 page)

“Only if you wanted to get something.” Michael shrugged.

“Nyaah. That’s okay. I only brought enough money to get into The World.”

“I said I’d buy.” Michael noticed James, then Arnie listening to him. “Hey,” he told everyone, “I got a big check from home today. What if I take us all out to dinner?”

Arnie frowned at Lloyd. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Sssssh,” went James. “Mi-chael,” he purred. “You serious?”

“Sure. I got money to burn tonight.”

“Well then,” James told the others. “Wouldn’t that be nice? It’s not every night one finds a sugar daddy in our midst.”

“Yeah,” said Michael, liking the idea. “Let me be the sugar daddy.”

“You coming with us to The World?” asked Arnie, sounding faintly guilty.

“Of course he’s coming. He wouldn’t be a sugar daddy unless he had us all night long.” James broke into peals of giggles.

It was perfect. He could stay out all night with these guys and never return to the apartment. “I’ll be the sugar daddy and the rest of you can be my tricks.” He hadn’t meant that to sound so nasty, but he was giddy now and could laugh at his accidental nastiness.

James struck a pose and swung the ropy belt of his sweater as if he were a hooker. “That’s me, all right. Just a cheap trick. Oh Uncle Mikey. Can’t I have just one more drinky?” He really got into the role. “Or I know. Let’s go downtown, eat there, maybe drop into Boybar, and then go to The World.”

“Sure. Why not?” said Michael. “That sound good to you, Lloyd?”

“I don’t care. Whatever you people want to do,” he grumbled. “But if we’re going, let’s quit fagging around and catch a cab or something.”

James quickly finished his drink and Arnie did like-wise. They all followed Lloyd out the door to the street, where he stood indifferently on the curb and let his friends signal for a cab, Arnie frantically waving one hand in the air like a student afraid the teacher wouldn’t call him, James holding his hand aloft with the weariness of a boy who always knew the answer. Their sweaters were lightly blown behind them by the breeze rattling through the trees. The cool air and new sounds around him made Michael more conscious of what was happening. He liked what he was doing; he liked the bit of power he gained in spending money on people he wanted nothing from in return. He tried to remember how much money he had on him. He couldn’t pull out his wallet and look, not in front of everyone.

A cab pulled over and the four of them piled into the back. “Make room for Daddy,” cried James, pushing his boyfriend against his boyfriend’s ex so Michael could sit beside him.

“Let’s stop at a Citibank on the way down,” said Michael. “So I can stock up and we can do anything we please.”

“Anything?” James snapped directions to the driver, then went into a nasal Long Island accent to tell Michael, “We can do Boy Scouts for you. We can do swim-team-and-the-coach. Priest and choirboys will cost ya extra though.” James’s voice was nasal to begin with, so he only sounded like himself without the veneer of cool.

The driver didn’t even glance at his rearview mirror.

The cab stopped outside a bank on lower Fifth Avenue and Michael went in alone. The room with cash machines was empty and as bright and barren as a public restroom. Michael used his card and five-letter code and pressed buttons until the machine gave him thirty dollars, his usual withdrawal. He realized that wouldn’t be enough and started all over again, using the code to enter his savings account, where most of his money was. He seemed to be drunk, because he found himself imagining all the layers of information and memory that must be shifting around beneath the green fluorescent screen while he waited for his money. The machine tsk-tsked for an incredibly long time counting it out behind the shiny cylinder. Then the cylinder began to rotate: Michael saw a stack of bills an inch thick. He grabbed the money and tried counting the tens and twenties, which were so new they seemed coated with clay. He had to read the screen to find out how much he had in his hand: “I have just given you $500.00.”

He hadn’t intended to take that much. Then he read what was left in his account: “$30,497.02.” Laurie was right; he’d been spending the interest and had barely touched the principal of what Clarence left him, even though it was just normal bank interest. Michael had deposited the check into his bank account and left it there, not wanting Laurie to invest it for him, not wanting to think about the money, never giving it much thought except when he withdrew the fat amount for his trip. Only when he was staring at the impossible figure on the screen and remembering where the money originated did he remember what his five-letter code meant: C-L-A-R-E. He had used the code so many times his fingers knew it as a sequence of positions on a keyboard, nothing more. How could he have forgotten?

He frightened himself. He had forgotten Clarence. He didn’t deserve to stay in Clarence’s apartment, and the women were right to throw him out. He looked at the thick stack of bills in his hand and wanted to feed it back into the machine. It was too late for that, so he hid it in his wallet for now, only the wallet wouldn’t close. It was like a steel spring with so much money in it.

He was startled by a furious drumming out front. He turned and saw James outside, pressing his body into the window and making faces like a polyp against the glass. Arnie stood beside him, doing anything James did. Lloyd sat in the cab, still idling at the curb.

Michael smiled and wagged his stiff wallet at them, then slipped the wallet upright into the inside front pocket of his jacket. He walked out the door. “Daddy’s loaded,” he announced.

“All for us?” James laughed and patted the thickness over Michael’s heart. “Oh Uncle Mike. Not
another
evening of champagne cocktails and caviar.”

“If you love Daddy you’ll drink every last bit,” said Michael in a low, worldly voice. What movie was that from? James’s silliness allowed Michael to be silly and he suddenly felt wonderful.

Lloyd watched coolly as they crowded back into the cab, but showed something like a smile for Michael.

James ordered the driver to take them toward Broadway and Houston. “We’ll know where we’re going when we get there.”

“Odeon?” Lloyd said listlessly.

“Don’t be jejeune. They wouldn’t let us in with you dressed like that.”

“How about that Thai place?” Arnie suggested.

“You’re really in a rut. Uncle Mike’s giving us a chance to try something extraordinary tonight. Aren’t you, Uncle Mike?”

“We’ve got money to burn,” Michael assured them. He remembered something about the money bothering him at the bank, but it seemed to have floated off. He really was drunk. Money to burn, he thought with satisfaction. What did he need it for anyway? What would happen if he spent it all? Not only what was on him but what was in the bank, interest, principal, everything. Well, for one thing, the women couldn’t so blithely expect him to find his own place. He wondered how one went about spending so much money at once. Maybe spending this five hundred dollars would show him if it were a real possibility or not. A large sum of money with no future and no past was intoxicating.

They arrived laughing and stifling laughs at a downtown building with two limos parked out front. Michael felt even Lloyd was laughing now, although whenever he remembered to look at Lloyd he found the guy as cool and solid as ever. A twenty from Michael got them into a series of rooms like the brothels Michael had seen in paintings in Paris, but maybe he thought that only because there was a table full of people speaking French. Everyone here kept glancing up and looking disappointed, as if they’d just missed seeing someone famous. They all seemed to have come here for a fabulous party, only nobody knew if they were too early, too late, or even at the right address.

Michael didn’t care, he had another gin and tonic in front of him, then a plate of roast beef and parsley, but those weren’t important to him either. His euphoria was much grander than the sum of its parts. He could walk through walls, he was so drunkenly happy. James nodded at a woman across the room and said, “Actress-slash-model,” which Michael found hysterical although he had no idea who the woman was. Arnie laughed, too, but laughed even harder when Michael got his attention with a stern look, then let out a loud belch. Lloyd, looking utterly at home here despite his white T-shirt, methodically ate a lobster.

The fashionably dressed woman who waited on them brought the bill and Michael paid it: just a little over two hundred dollars even with the tip. James was impressed, Arnie was embarrassed, and Lloyd didn’t look.

Out on the street, a man in a green plaid sports coat stood beside one of the limousines and read the
New York Post.
Michael walked right up to him, shouted, “Taxi!” and burst out laughing.

The man looked up. He had a youngish face and a little middle-age mustache. “You boys going somewhere? I got an hour to kill. Arriving in this vehicle will get you into any club you can name. You interested?”

“How much?” asked Michael, still laughing. When the man said forty, Michael pulled out his money and paid him. “Hey fellas! Look what I got!”

The man checked his watch and opened the door for them. Lloyd promptly climbed in, but James had to hustle Arnie through the door, holding him under one arm and laughing something at his ear.

“Hey.” The man wagged a finger at them. “I’m cool. But no monkey-business, hear?” He gently closed the door after Michael.

They sat sealed in a silent bubble of tinted glass and leather upholstery. All sank back and sighed, even Lloyd. The ticking of the dashboard clock made James and Arnie giggle. The man climbed into the front seat and asked where they were going.

“Boybar,” said Lloyd and told him where it was. “Wait until they see me pull up in this.”

They rolled through the street, everything altered by the tinted glass and smoothness of movement, as if they were floating through a dreamed city. All too soon, they dollied down a familiar street with sidewalks full of people, only it looked like an aquarium through the limo windows. People glanced and looked away, pretending not to notice the limousine.

“Can you pull up another foot?” said Lloyd. “So they can see me through the door when we get out.”

The man looked at the anonymous entrance to the bar and parked just so. He got out and professionally opened the door on Lloyd’s side. “Have fun, boys.”

Without the tinted glass, St. Mark’s Place looked shabby and grim, like a room lit by a naked light bulb. If the three bouncers inside the glass door to the Boybar were impressed or surprised by the limo out front, they didn’t show it. There was a five-dollar cover charge and Michael paid it for all of them. They went down the hall and stood in a bare space with a long crowded bar at one end.

“This place sucks scissors,” said James. “All that East Village attitude. We should’ve gotten that guy to take us straight to The World. But nooooo. Mr. Lower East Side had to play showdog for all his little Boybar buddies.”

Lloyd finished looking around for faces he knew. “You wanna go to The World, we’ll go to The World. I don’t care.”

Michael grinned and sang, “I don’t wanna set The World on fire—”

Something was wrong; nobody laughed.

Michael tried a little attitude. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going to The World.” He turned around and walked toward the door, immediately followed by the others. “Too Bridge-and-Tunnel,” he told the sullen bouncers as he strutted past.

The limousine was gone, of course. They had to walk over to Second Avenue to catch a cab, through street vendors, future and former junkies, and a pocket of heavy metal music. Arnie flagged down a cab, and this time Lloyd sat up front with the driver. Michael resumed humming his song, waiting for somebody to get it.

Another fare, another bill from his wallet, only the wallet remained as stiff and bulky as ever, even when Michael paid more money to a doorman or bouncer in the dark, rundown lobby of what once had been a theater. And he kept finding the smaller bills he received as change wadded up in his other pockets. His clothes seemed infested with money tonight.

Lloyd went off to check his leather jacket while Michael followed James and Arnie up a big staircase that looked like it had been left out in the rain. The red wall beside it was badly water-stained and a few scabs of gold gilt remained on the banister. There was music upstairs, pounding like a heart, a raw kind of disco except nobody called it disco anymore. Climbing stairs toward music immediately reminded Michael of the dances at Earl Hall, where he had finally entered and climbed a long banistered stairway toward a ballroom, and The Saint, where he climbed industrial stairs into a flashing, futuristic dome full of—

There was no dance at the top of these stairs. The enormous dance floor beneath the lofty ceiling was deserted. Music pounded from two speakers the size of refrigerators on the empty stage at the far end of the floor, but the twenty or so people here only stood around on the balcony overhead or at the bar in the back. The high ceiling looked badly scuffed, as if people had once danced up there.

“Oh damn. We’re too early,” James whined.

“Well, some of us have to work tomorrow,” said Arnie.

“I don’t have to be anywhere,” Michael said with a grin.

He was bouncing on the balls of his feet to the music. The beat of the music, the sight of so much open, empty space in front of him: he couldn’t stop himself. He stepped out on the floor, almost skipping to the music, and began to dance, lifting his knees and flailing his arms. People told him he danced like a spastic chicken, but he didn’t care, not tonight, not even when he glanced up at the balcony and saw a few people coldly looking down, watching a skinny kid in a dark suit, white shirt and no tie dancing alone on this great pale floor. It felt good to let go with his body, just as he’d been letting go with his money. He looked back at James and Arnie, wanting them to join him out here, dancing toward them and back out again, trying to draw them out on the floor.

They stayed where they were, barely glancing at Michael, pretending not to know him. It seemed money bought you the right to only so much silliness.