I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (5 page)

“Volcanic thighs?”
I howled. “And dare I ask where the lava comes out?”

Slowly he turned. He regarded me. He was stern. “You know, you should take care where you go. Fag-bashing incidents have been reported in this area.”

“Such as where?”

“Such as in this apartment in about three seconds.”

“I dream of Nick,” Mac had written, and now showed us his little pad. “I think it’s always Nick.”

“Another good boy goes wrong,” said Dennis Savage. “Is that why you left Racine? To meet Nicks?”

Mac gazed at the photograph. “He’s such a beautiful dude,” I sounded, watching Mac’s face.

“Will you shut up?” Dennis Savage roared.

“It wasn’t me.”

*   *   *

Porn models are surprisingly easy to meet—as if their photos were meant as credentials for work. Despite Dennis Savage’s reservations, I helped Mac make contact with Nick. This was 1976, when dubious encounters were quaint adventure rather than mortal peril; so let the harmless fantasy come true for a night. Very little trouble yielded Nick’s telephone number, and I made the call for Mac and set up an appointment. Nick sounded as one might have expected, trashy and agreeable. No, you wouldn’t kick him out of bed—but you wouldn’t want your brother to marry him. He wasn’t in the least thrown to hear that his date couldn’t talk.

“You should see some of the things I get with,” he said. “Once I went to a meet and this guy had no legs.” He laughed. “So whattaya think of that?”

Instinct warned me to arrange Mac’s date for as soon as possible; I did not picture Nick keeping a terribly precise engagement book.

“How about now?” he asked.

It was a Saturday afternoon and Mac was game, so we cinched it—but it worried me that he didn’t want me to stay and set things up with Nick, not to mention check him out for weapons. I never heard of Mac’s taking an adventure alone. But he was adamant. “This fantasy I must not share,” he wrote. The urgency was unnerving.

Worse yet, Mac refused to tell how the date had gone. That he had had a wonderful time was unmissable; the grin was showing about twenty-five more teeth and the nod came a hair more slowly now, as if Mac had grown younger and wiser at once. Bits of dish would slide out of him perchance: Nick had spent the weekend at Mac’s that first time; Nick lived in a hole in darkest Brooklyn; Nick was seeing Mac regularly at bargain rates; Nick was very pleasant under the mean-streets facade.

Suddenly Nick moved in with Mac.

Dennis Savage, when he heard, was shocked silent for a good two minutes, an ideal condition for him. Our Mac—so he had become, for to befriend him was to own him—consorting with sex-show debris? When Dennis Savage regained his voice, he went into a ten-minute tirade reproaching me for encouraging Mac in this vile stunt, for having the sensitivity of Mickey Spillane, and for living. How was I to know that a date with a hustler would yield romance? Whoever heard of the fantasy coming true? I had always thought hustlers were the ultimate tricks, guaranteed for one time only, impersonal and beyond reach. Would not fantasy begin to dissolve at the touch of real life? Why else is “the morning after” as terrible a term in gay as “no exit” is in hell?

Yet Mac’s fantasy held. I saw it in the way he spoke of Nick and to him—and Nick, fascinated by the gestures of hand and face that made words for the rest of us, would stare in smug wonder and cry, “Go for it, sport! Go for it!”

Mac did, all the way. It was dinners with Nick, cinema and hamburgers with Nick, Monopoly with Nick—the first American I’ve known, by the way, who couldn’t play the game. You don’t realize how broad our range of kind is here in the magic city till you meet someone who doesn’t know what Monopoly is. I’ve played it with Ph.Ds and little kids, with the birthright wealthy and users of food stamps, with actors and construction workers, with competitors and nerds. Some had mastered it—to the point that they virtually knew where they would land when they were shaking the dice—and some learned by playing, and some were frankly not apt. But everyone knew what it was. Nick had never heard of it—could not, moreover, pick it up no matter how carefully we explained it. My friend Carlo, who likes just about everyone and has a superb ability to forgive hot men their little misdemeanors, walked home with me after this Monopoly game and, in a lull, pensively regarded the traffic and said, “Tell me, who was that extremely terrible boy?”

Mac’s coterie shook their prickles at me for bringing Nick into his life, and, believe me, I did not rejoice. But the man was happy. No, he had always been happy; now he was cocky, getting around more by himself, doing what he wanted to on spunk, not on the assistance of his chorus of Rolfs. I found myself sounding, again and again, “I am glad,” for him. I hear tell of a chemistry bonding the socioeconomically energetic with the intellectually needy: yet what lies below Baltic Avenue?

I learned what at one of Mac’s dinners. He was held up at the office again, and the other guests, respectably employed, could be reached at their places of business and told to come along later. But I had been out mooching around in the streets, viewing the town for adaptable incidents, and so arrived for the party before I should have: when Nick was alone.

*   *   *

“This fantasy I must not share” ran through my mind that evening, as the Theme of Alberich’s Curse runs through
Der Ring des Nibelungen.
And there before me was a kind of Alberich, the dark lord, wearing nothing but navy blue corduroy pants held up by suspenders. Just as Nick was ignorant of this nation’s essential board game, so was he a gracelessly unknowing host. He offered nothing, not even a chair. He said nothing, not even about Mac being held up. He seemed to regard me as if I were a movie: he paid complete attention without doing anything himself.

I went into the kitchen and poured myself some wine. When I came out, he was where he had been, spread out on the sofa, idly shifting a suspender arm from the curve of his left pectoral to the nipple and back again.

“So whattaya say?” he finally uttered.

What does one say to the kind of man who looks naked in pants? “How does it feel” was what I came up with, “to switch from free-lancing to a steady position?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t miss the scene?” Living as I did along Hustler Alley on East Fifty-third Street, I had seen the dire fascination that brought certain of Nick’s colleagues back to the neighborhood night after night, some restively pushing the agenda early of a Saturday or dully clinging to the illusion as the sun came up on Sunday. Passing by with my groceries or my playbill, I had the impression that they had nothing but this for life, that the success of a paying rendezvous was less important than the simple fact of membership in the club of hot.

“Miss the scene?” Nick repeated. “I miss it like my last case of crabs.”

“Ah.”

“Miss the scene?” He laughed. “I could tell you about that. I could
tell
about the
scene!
” He laughed again. “You know what they are?”

“Who?”

“They’re garbage is what. They’d rob blind cripples.”

“Don’t you have to stay in touch with your clients?”

“My what?”

“Your regulars. The johns.”

“Oh.
Wallets.
”

“That’s what you call them?”

“That’s what they are. Money. Talking money. Asshole money. Fat, drooling money, and hair all over it like stupid. What do I want with them now? I got a deal here. I can sleep late. No hassle. I can do like … anything. And then Mac comes home and makes me feel good. Little Mac. He makes those cute things with his hands. He cooks dinner. All I have to do is lay him nice and easy. Sometimes they like it when you hurt them, you know? But Little Mac likes it lullaby-style.”

“He makes you feel good?”

“You bet. Like when he smiles if you put your arm around him. He feels nice. You know, he’s pretty. A pretty little nice boy. You know that kind? I like to feel him up. Tickle him, you know? Watch him shake. That’s real dandy. I make him dance. Did he ever dance for you? Real pretty, when they dance. So pretty. He’s not like a wallet and he’s not like dig. You know?”

“Dig?”

“Dig is what I am. A wallet pays a dig, right?” He toyed with his suspender again. “Oh, what’s he like, now? He’s like a brother I had once. Kid brother. I made him dance, too. But like who could tickle a wallet, you know?”

“Dig is what you are.”

“He should go pro. Let me turn him out. We could make two hundred a night, easy. These East Side wallets, they’ve got these videos? Pay you anything to make tape for them. They like tell you this story and then you do it. Acting. Maybe I’ll be an actor, right? But the best thing I do is dance video. That’s my hottest.” He sat up.

“Dance video?”

“Mac’d be good at that, too. I like to dance. I like to fuck and dance. You got video? You want to make some tape, now? Bargain rates, ’cause you’re a friend. We’ll make one together, you know? Anything you want. Anything.”

I looked at him. It was quite a long moment.

“What’s with those shades, anyway? You doing something bad?”

He took hold of my glasses at the bridge and pulled them off. “Uh-oh.” He replaced them. “No video. Gotcha.” He laughed. “The man doesn’t dance. The man does
not
choose to dance.”

“Not with the likes of you.”

He stopped laughing. “You got the eyes of a cop.”

*   *   *

I’ve witnessed various liaisons with hustlers over the years, the street kind as well as the call-boy elite, on a dating and live-in basis; each has ended differently. One hustler drifts out of reach like a balloon in the park, another dwindles into a sexless chum, one vanishes, another gets pushy about money or moves on into his host’s coterie or turns lawless and ends in jail. I even know of one—I’ll get to him some pages hence—who was thrown out by a man who couldn’t live with perfection. Nick adds another trope to the catalogue: the fuck machine plugged into a good gig, he simply hung on. Mac’s friends fretted and his visiting brothers scowled, but something like a year went by and everyone but Mac was still waiting for Nick to clear out. Dennis Savage thumbed his black book to tatters manifesting Italian accountants, and dinners were duly arranged. But it was the dark lord whom the accountants loved, not the mute boy. Like it or not, Nick was hot.

So it stayed Mac and Nick, though no one ever tied them verbally, out of fear of giving their duet legitimacy. I think most gays respect the mating of twins, not the sharing of fantasy. Mac had offended custom, and this sin above all bills its dues. And Mac paid, when somebody with money beckoned to Nick.

It hit suddenly, at another dinner—perhaps my thousandth in New York, and never have I been given enough to eat—and Dennis Savage and I arrived to find Nick throwing clothes into a backpack as Mac followed him around frantically signaling.

“I know when it’s time,” Nick philosophized for our benefit. “It’s time for L.A. Because I hate this fucking snow, and bartenders, and niggers on bicycles—”

Mac grabbed my arms, pointed to Nick, then hugged himself, watching me with huge asking eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I told him.

“This guy saw me in Studio, right? He dropped his glasses on the dance floor and who picks them up?”

“A wallet,” I said.

“No, he’s okay. I’m going back with him. On a
plane!
”

Mac moved to Nick, indicating their faces, their hearts, trying to smile. Nick turned away, muttering, “Sure, sure,” but Mac took his hand and touched it to Nick’s forehead.

Nick jerked his hand away. “Make him stop that stuff.”

“After what he’s done for you, my friend,” said Dennis Savage, “the least you should—”

“Hey,” said Nick, his arms as wide as his smile, slurring the word out the way grown-ups do when talking to children, “I earned it, didn’t I?” He patted Mac’s head and headed for the door. “Stay loose, boys,” he called out. “And remember our motto: ‘Don’t screw anything made of wood.’” He laughed and pulled open the door as Mac ran up, pencil dashing across the top leaf of a pad. He tore it off and handed it to Nick.

“Give it to the next guy,” said Nick. He crumpled the note, let it fall, and closed the door behind him.

Mac stayed where he was, facing the door, shaking his head. Finally he turned, touched his eyes, indicated us, and militantly brushed his palm across the air.

“I don’t want you to see me cry,” I sounded.

“We’ve seen you smile so much,” said Dennis Savage. “I don’t think a little crying would hurt.”

Mac shook his head, holding back the tears. We didn’t move, and he shook his head again.

I took the pad and pencil from him, and wrote, “Would you like a quarter?”

He read it, reclaimed the kit, and wrote, “It hurts to be nice.”

I furiously shook my head.

He nodded grimly.

Dennis Savage held him very, very gently from behind, as if afraid of being pushed away. “Come on and cry,” he urged. He had picked up the crumpled note, and put it in Mac’s hand and closed his fist around it.

Mac looked at me.

“What?” I said.

He handed me the note. I opened it. It read, “My aunt died today.”

“Mac,” I said, “why did you write this?”

That was when he began to cry.

*   *   *

Mac went home for the funeral, returned to New York, and, bare weeks after, went back to Wisconsin on a long vacation. Letters poured out, somewhat less ebullient than usual; or perhaps as ebullient, but about unusual things—the nightingales at his window or losing to his nephew at chess. He would sneak back to the city, not calling any of us—Mac, the most intent comrade of all. How dare the little bastard, I thought, spotting him in the D’Agostino midway between our apartments. He’s supposed to be in Racine! At least he had the sense of style to be embarrassed, which made it worse. I followed him to the checkout line, and sounded for him to the clerk: he had forgotten to take his pad. This is like forgetting to wear your shoes in a blizzard.

The Racine trips grew longer, but Mac continued to write. However, the letters grew shorter.