I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (9 page)

Our host started to get up, but Dennis Savage signaled him not to. “What don’t you want?” Dennis Savage asked evenly.

“I don’t know what to call it.” Little Kiwi wiped his eyes but they just got wet again.

“You know what it might be?” our host suggested. He lives quietly, has never had a lover, and isn’t used to Scenes. (I could visualize him asking, like Little Kiwi, “What are they
for?
”) “We raced home from tea-dancing and went right into the kitchen, so we never took that wonderful Fire Island time out on the deck to sip a cocktail and watch the sun go down.”

“That isn’t it,” I told him.

“Don’t be too sure,” he replied. Little Kiwi was still crying, head down, grabbing the sides of his chair, a sweet doubting no with hurt feelings and soft black hair. “Almost all my guests tell me how much they love just sitting out there in that silence with their friends. I would read Walt Whitman aloud to them, but I don’t dare, of course. Still, the atmosphere is so … well, so magical that—”

“Look,” I said, “I’ll tell you about the magic of the—”

“Little Kiwi,” said Dennis Savage dangerously. “Stop crying.”

“Oh dear,” said our host, “you don’t think it was the quiche, do you?”

“And this,” Dennis Savage went on, eyeing us two like Monstro the Whale, “is not the time to discuss the magic of the Island.
Do you mind?
”

Clearly it was time to leave them alone, though I must say our host handled it more suavely than I. “I love to go walking on the beach at night,” he began; I just grabbed a pear from the fruit selection and shouted “Amscray time!”

We took Bauhaus with us, and traipsed along the water’s edge dishing the day’s events. I told him about the two men we had seen making magic in the water and he laughed sadly. “Love in the fast lane, isn’t it?” he said. “You know, when the three of you arrived, I thought that little boy was a hustler.”

“Little Kiwi? Good grief, he’s from Cleveland or something.”

“Hustlers come from Cleveland.”

“Hustlers come from Queens.”

“Hustlers come
in
queens.”

Another of those elegant nights in the Pines.

Dennis Savage caught up with us after a bit, his cool recovered. As to what had troubled Little Kiwi, he would say nothing other than that the storm was over and the boy had gone to bed. Now it was time for the Lord Mayor of the Circuit to touch base with his cohorts. Our host begged to go along and I proposed to take Bauhaus home and make my fortieth attempt at
Middlemarch.

“Aye, ever improving himself,” said Dennis Savage as we started back. “How inspiring the variety of life in the Pines. Some to their books … others to hold court.”

“And still others to make a pilgrimage,” I added, “slinking through the trees toward love.”

“That,” replied Dennis Savage, “is your gay materialism speaking. It will be the ruin of you yet.”

*   *   *

If there’s a lightbulb in all of the Pines bigger than ten watts I’ve yet to see it. One comes here to be in stories, not read them. Holding
Middlemarch
about three inches from my nose, I had the sensation I was back in the days of the Inquisition, reading forbidden text by secret light. I gave it up, fixed myself a triple Scotch, and went out on the deck to listen to the ocean. There Little Kiwi joined me in running shorts and Dennis Savage’s old Hamilton College sweatshirt.

“I’m still embarrassed,” he said after quite some wait.

“Dennis Savage went visiting with our host.”

He sighed. “I guess I’ll have to try to be older, won’t I?”

“Now, that’s a Fire Island first. Everyone else here is trying to renovate.”

“I could have a secret dream and become. Like those party guests on the ferry that sank.”

“What would you become, do you think?”

“Virgil Brown.”

“Say what?”

He sat on the bench along the deck railing, facing the ocean. “Could I have a sip of your drink?” He tried it and shuddered. “I don’t like liquor. I like the sound of the ocean, though.”

“It’s restful, isn’t it?”

“That’s my name: Virgil Brown. You can call me that, if you like. Virgil Brown. Mister Brown. That Brown man. You know.”

“Okay.”

“Do you think Dennis Savage will call me that?”

“He will if you ask him to.”

We watched Bauhaus ooch along the deck planks on his stomach, growling.

“I like to listen to the waves,” he went on. “I’ve been to beaches before but I’ve never heard them sound like this.” Bauhaus whimpered and drooled. “Is our host sore at me?”

“On the contrary, I imagine he found it all very stimulating.”

“He thought it was the quiche.” Little Kiwi laughed very gently. “That was so … nice … of him. Wasn’t it?” Bauhaus rolled over on his back and posed with his legs in the air, a big dead roach.

“Are you cold?” I asked him. “I brought an extra sweater. It’s in my satchel.”

“Could I sit on your lap and put my arms around you?”

“Of course.”

“Grownups do this sometimes,” he said, settling in. “It isn’t only for kids.”

We listened to the ocean pound out its rhythm in the great empty dark of the place where all men are forms of lover because they hunger so, the gayest place on earth, all ours.

“This is the magic of the Island,” he said. He lay his head on my shoulder and closed his eyes, listening.

Three Infatuations

All gay is divided into three parts: looks, money, and wit, in that (descending) order, and my friend Carson had some of each—decent looks, tons of money, and competent wit. He’d get by. Perhaps he expected too much. He was always
casing
men—not cruising them as much as considering how they might figure in his plot. Let a waiter come to our table happy with menus, or a truck driver ask the time, or an actor cross a stage, and Carson would be wondering what he would be like to live with. Later, he would ask you where you thought the waiter went, or whom the trucker knew, or what the actor thought.

“I could buy all the men in the world, I expect,” he told me. “I could rent the Colt stable, one after the other, night of my nights. But
then
what happens? What is life without mystery?”

Let the rest of us buddy up with persons very much like ourselves, clone for clone; not Carson. He craved the ad, the rendezvous by graffito, the remote, posed photo. Yet all his archetypes ordered out of the catalogue kept turning into real people. There was the weightlifter Carson met in his gym, an agreeable, speechless hunk who fascinated Carson till the night he returned early from a family trip to find the weightlifter dancing around the room in a picture hat to Carol Channing records. Or there was the swimming champ from Rutgers who used to wake up screaming from unspeakable dreams (but he spoke of them); or the vocal coach with the wonderful beard who suffered temporary impotence every time he heard Leonie Rysanek mentioned. There was another weightlifter, a German who knew no English and was turning out great till Carson took him to Fire Island and he went crazy at the quality of the competition and wrecked the house they were staying in.

My favorite was Kurt, a trim dark kid Carson picked up on Christopher Street and took—and kept—home. Carson’s term for Kurt’s type, for reasons that I’m glad to say were kept obscure, was “sweet gypsy butt.” Yet, overnight, Kurt turned into what is generally termed a wife. Carson said Kurt was incredible in the lay, but, underneath Kurt’s “I will do anything and I’ll do it better than anyone and what’s more I’ll scream while we’re doing it” façade, this kid was against (1) good food, (2) whizz entertainment, (3) hot dancing, and, generally, (4) life. Carson had a tendency to stomach, so Kurt put him on a diet of what looked like hay, and went on to institute farm yard bedtimes and reveilles and refused to go anywhere that held more than eight people.

The night Kern Loften turned forty he threw a stupendous party, and Carson somehow sneaked away from Kurt, arrived early, and dug into his first real food in months. He ate like the Cowardly Lion, ravenously but with a fearful eye over his shoulder watching for Kurt. Remember, this was a kept boy, living with Carson rent-free, board taken care of, pocket money discreetly supplied. And listen to how he carried on with his master:

“What’s that in your mouth?” he cried, suddenly upon us and eyes blazing.

“Carrots,” said Carson, shooting cookie crumbs all over the place.

“What do you have behind your back?”

“The wall,” I whispered.

“You’ve got pastries and tarts there, haven’t you?”

“No,” Carson replied. “Celery sticks!”

“Why are they hiding from me?”

“They’re afraid you’ll gobble them up,” I told him. “They want to live.”

Kurt regarded me balefully. “I know about you,” he said—he always said this when one of Carson’s friends picked on him. God, was he cute; but what a bore. “We’re leaving
right
now!” he told Carson.

“
You’re
leaving. In many ways.” And he took his arm from behind him to reveal a bowl of M&Ms. We cheered as Kurt stormed out.

“Well,” Carson remarked. “That’s the end of him, isn’t it?” He meant it, too. When Carson froze on you—he did so, at times, on a whim—he stayed frozen. “Here we go again with the locksmith.”

“Poor Kurt,” said someone.

“They always have somewhere to go,” Carson noted. “With the usual check.”

We made a night of it, repairing to Carson’s apartment for dish therapy and silly acts. Carson celebrated his freedom in the kitchen, heaving out Kurt’s pita bread and bran. “Thank God,” he screamed, “I’ll never have to eat another dish of tofu!”

In the living room, he surveyed us gloomily. “On the other hand, here I am again: rich, young, and reasonably pretty with no one to pet me. What’s the use of money if it can’t buy love?”

We wondered.

“I’ve tried all the kinds, haven’t I?” he went on. “Man dudes, sweet gypsy butt, disco league”—here Kurt slammed in, eyed us with ire, and marched off to his last night in the local bed, as Carson wryly ignored the whole thing. “I even had a preppy once. The summer,” he sighed, “of ’74. So now what?”

It was time for Dennis Savage to theorize. “You’ve been buying the wrong kind of love,” said he. “You haven’t had hustlers; you’ve had gays who charged money. You need a real hustler, who knows his trade and works at it.”

Sensation in the room.

“What
is
a real hustler?” someone asked.

“That’s a good gay question,” says Dennis Savage. “What does a hustler have, besides expert love technique?”

“A hustler doesn’t have anything,” I offered. “A hustler lacks.”

“Yes!” Carson cried. “Yes!”

“All your protégés had things—hang-ups, rules, plans. A hustler is the essence of the thing, a poster made flesh.”

“What
doesn’t
a hustler have, exactly?” asked Dennis Savage.

“No background?” Carson suggested.

“No mind,” someone put in.

“No ambition,” said another.

“No interests!” said Dennis Savage, hoping to cap it. But I love to flunk him:

“A hustler,” I announced climactically, “has no opinions.”

There was silence; then Carson leaped up ecstatically. “Where do I find someone like that?”

*   *   *

As we know, I live on Fifty-third Street between Third and Second, Hustler Alley, and it was there, of course, that Carson would find one, if one could be found. I had doubts. The hustler, after all, is a platonic essence, and real-life humans are less concisely derived.

“I’m auditioning,” Carson blithely told me when we bumped into each other one summer evening, I with a bag of groceries and he with about nineteen eyes, all going at once, up street and down, to right and left, quick shots, double takes, and pans, swiveling to follow. It’s standard but it’s rude.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll catch something?” I asked him.

“I’m not actually doing them yet. We’re still in the interview stage. To screen out the ones with opinions.”

He winked and moved on; I’d never seen him so urbane. But then spending power tends to emphasize the suave in the wealthy.

I took to having the evening cocktail with Dennis Savage. His apartment, two floors above mine, fronts on Fifty-third, so we could sit at the window and watch Carson’s auditions. Actually, he seldom materialized. I gather he spent most of his time in the neighborhood’s several hustler bars. But we did see quite some parade: the most spectacular boys alongside the most atrocious, the latter as confident or druggy or disturbed as the former; hunks and skeletons; outfits and rags; slick buyers in vested suits and hopeless browsers with damp polyester underarms. You’d think the stage had but two character types, the beauty and the beast, and one topic, their encounter. But every viewing brought new themes, startling variations.

“Is it a microcosm?” I asked, playfully.

“No,” says Dennis Savage. “No, it has no texture. Here you see gay reduced to one element: porn. It will be amusing to see what Carson comes up with. Will he find the male who is made of nothing but sex? Think of it: an unconflicted gay!”

We thought of it.

“However,” he added, “I’ve never known Carson to finish anything he started
and
it takes him years not to do it. If he were the captain of the
Titanic
it would still be sinking.”

But Carson came through on this one. Jimmy was about twenty-four, tall, and handsome, with straight sandy hair, a roguish smile, hot slit eyes, and a classic kid’s frame opulently fleshed out. He had none of the gay things—no quickness, no points of reference, no curiosity. I doubted he had ever seen the inside of a gym or a cabaret. He was amiable and quiet. Carson had us all over for drinks, one by one, to show him off, to get him used to us, and to acclimatize him to gay society. And of course, like those characters in
The Wizard of Oz,
we all compared notes to learn if we had each met the same god. Oz, a figure entirely made of fantasy, appeared differently to each beholder; but Jimmy, no matter who saw him, was one thing: a lost boy.