Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (16 page)

“You’re warped and jazzy, ’tis clear to see,” Miss Faye rejoined, erasing Peter’s resistance with a wave of her hand. “How you long to be shrewd by some rash Viking with a secret soft side. His surprising tenderness will rock you to the core, and ever after
you—as I—will dream of this enticing combo of kindness and slaughter, symbolized in the rigid prong that—”

“This is not a funny story about childhood,” Virgil pointed out, with a nervous glance at the kitchen, where Dennis Savage was making a racket banging platters around.

“Right,” I said, ready to drag out my tired old tale of breaking my mother’s antiques in defiance of oppression, or at least early bedtime. It was my personal Stonewall at the age of five. But Peter seemed to light up just then, perhaps feeling he should get over resenting Miss Faye and start making the gay scene. “I’ve got a story,” he said. “I could tell about Brokertoe.”

“Yes, let’s hear that,” said Virgil, looking happily expectant.

“Well, it’s . . . it’s just this old story,” said Peter, in the self-deprecating manner of an amateur who has taken the floor amid a host of pros. “It was a painting I made in school. Kindergarten, I guess. Well, yes, and you see Brokertoe was a robot. And the class voted it the—”

“How did she break her toe?” Miss Faye asked.

“Well, it was . . . it’s just a name. I called the robot Brokertoe because . . . well—”

“Isn’t someone hungry around here?” said Miss Faye. “Where’s the food?” She turned to Peter. “Go on with such a fascinating story, and try to include a footnote on why a pale, dim, square type like you has such big shoulders.”

Peter did that silent blinking thing. Then: “Well, so I took my prize painting home, feeling so proud and perky, and I called my family in, all five of them.” He smiled. “One brother, two sisters. And I unveiled my—”

“Erect penis,” Miss Faye filled in, “sending my sisters into paroxysms and my brother into a bitter tizzy.”

Peter was blinking again.

“It would be best not to interrupt the story,” Virgil suggested.

“Peter,” I said, as soothingly as possible. “Tell.”

“Oh, right, then!” he cried, suitably heartened. “It’s a terribly vital ghetto party and we’re all . . .”

“Out,” said Miss Faye, dryly.

“. . . living in a musical comedy, I was going to say. Anyway, I announced to them all there assembled that I wanted to see my picture on the wall next to the prize of my parents’ art collection, a Renaissance etching, of unknown authorship, depicting Hercules and Coccus.”

“Well, how big
was
his coccus?” Miss Faye cried—no, screamed. “Not bigger than yours, I fancy.
Hercules
—the heart flutters. But I go for the deep, silent sort, like you, with a coccus that juts to the side. Or shall it curve, I hope?”

Staring, Miss Faye kissed her lips at Peter so obscenely that he defensively got to his feet; and of course just then Cosgrove came out of the bedroom with the raccoon and threw it right at Peter’s head.

Let me explain. Last summer, at a street fair, Cosgrove was captivated by a risible novelty item, a simulation of a raccoon rummaging in a potato chip bag. All you see of the animal is its tail; but with the batteries in place the thing seems remarkably lifelike.

Obviously, Cosgrove had planted it in Dennis Savage’s apartment. When Cosgrove came out of the bedroom shouting “Help! The raccoon is loose!” and tossed it at Peter, a certain amount of hell broke out. Dennis Savage came roaring out of the kitchen, Cosgrove cried “Yipes!” and fled to the bathroom, and it took considerable wheedling and begging on both Virgil’s and my part to convince Peter to forgive it as a childish stunt.

In fact, once we explained that Cosgrove’s true target was Dennis Savage, Peter not only calmed down but became curious.

“You see,” he said, “the stories attract me precisely because of their sly undercurrent of dissatisfaction. At first, we see a group of men who enjoy their gayness to the fullest. Not only do they have no wish that they were straight, but . . . Oh, thanks, splendid”—as Dennis Savage passed out refills on the drinks and settled in for Making Peter Feel at Home. “Yes, they seem clearly to be having a more successful life
because
they’re gay. It’s quite inspiring. And yet.” Peter leaned closer to us to Make His Point. “It is the very
limitless nature of this paradise that provides extraordinary tensions—the sheer physical competition of who gets whom, the anxiety of losing power through aging—”

“Yes!” cried Miss Faye, who had sat quietly through all the excitement and was now absently petting the raccoon’s tail and mouthing up the ice from her drink with insidiously loud crunches. “We must learn to make the fashion sacrifice.”

Peter hesitated, then decided to pursue this line of inquiry. “Now, how do you mean that, Miss Faye?”

Preening, Miss Faye made little cooing noises, and I got worried. Old-guard drag queens like Miss Faye are essentially tempestuous, not socialized, and I feared she might be hoaxing him when she spoke, as now, with the delicacy of a schoolmarm trying to slide through the chapter on Reproduction in the sixth graders’ biology text.

“The drag queen, you see,” Miss Faye began, “was put on earth to symbolize the contradictions of the homosexual. Yes. Yes, true.” She’s so smiley, so considering. “We are women, yet we are men. We have sexual needs, yet we hide them in banter. Our dreams? Ecstatic. Yet our dialogue is trash. We revel in costume, to your despair—and how do you see us? As spoof. Who led the Stonewall revolution? Drag queens, look it up. Yet we are lowest in the Stonewall pecking order, despised by he-men and feared—yes, I dare to say it—by you university types.”

She seemed demure now, dainty, the princess of the Junior Prom; Peter was intrigued. He took up her thoughts, she expounded further, he quizzed her, and Dennis Savage was nearly beaming when he popped out to announce the imminent serving of dinner; so I slipped off to check on Cosgrove.

He was napping in the empty bathtub. I woke and scolded him. “You
promised
to behave,” I said.

“Yes, but I didn’t say how.”

“You’d better come back in now—but
don’t
do anything else.”

Everything was copacetic (as we used to put it in the 1970s) in the living room. “This is a nice, intellectual discussion,” Virgil
told me. As Dennis Savage presented the Balinese salad—even to Cosgrove, who kept his eyes down—Peter and Miss Faye were considering the aggressive nature of the queen’s performance.

“It seems,” said Peter, “so driven by a need to offend.”

“It is offense,” Miss Faye averred, wreathing herself in Glinda the Good wisdom, “carried to the artistic level.”

It was at this moment that Bauhaus chose to make his entrance. He came in dancing on his behind with his paws in the air, barking like a sergeant major on the parade ground and navigating the room in a circular pattern before vanishing back into the bedroom.

“Good heavens,” said Miss Faye. “Who’s that?”

“That’s just Bauhaus,” said Virgil.

“I thought it was Laird Cregar trying out for the next revival of
Porgy and Bess.”
To Peter she added, “As Porgy, the singing cripple, of course.”

Peter looked dubious, but came then the main course, Dennis Savage’s masterly steak-and-mushroom pie, as the conversation proceeded to the intense sexual bent of the queen’s patter.

“Some people are unnerved to hear the erotic life so blatantly explored” ran Peter’s theme.

“Ah, so,” Miss Faye replied, enigmatic as a perfume.

Then the buzzer sounded.

“Uh-oh,” said Virgil.

“Who’s this going to be,” Dennis Savage asked Cosgrove, “Blimpy von—”

“I’ll get it,” I said. It was Carlo, thank heaven, because nothing welcomes a newcomer like Peter into the gay world better than a friendly hunk. Carlo breezed in like the opening of a window after a cooling rain in a heat wave. Fresh and happy, lightly rough-housing the kids as they told him of the Historic Plaza Tours, Carlo reoriented the party’s structure from that of ships passing in the night into that of a regatta, with Carlo as some duke’s yacht. Cosgrove stopped scheming, Dennis Savage stopped worrying, and Peter waxed content, interested, wondering. As he shook Carlo’s hand, Peter looked like Shelley about to embark upon an ode.

Miss Faye, however, immediately degenerated into her natural state. “Who’s this cowboy?” she shouted. “Rope ’em,” she growled. Then, in pealing tones last heard when Una Merkel gloated under a parasol in some forgotten western, she laced out, “Why, I do decla-yuh if peace hasn’t come to Rainbow City since
you
cleayuhd the town, Sheriff Clint Kincaid.”

Carlo mimed tipping his Stetson to her.

“Now, what say you model some bathin’ attire, Sheriff?” Miss Faye went on, her voice tightening up a bit. “For our summer needs.”

“Don’t model anything,” said Dennis Savage.

“We’re gettin’ to that” was Miss Faye’s remark, as she took stage. Her subject, now, was How to Win Oscar, her character was Cloris (Leachman, it eventually developed), and her mode was Drag Queen on the Rampage. She was instructive, nevertheless, going into many a cul-de-sac of Oscar history. For instance, who would have dreamed that Faith Domergue was an Oscar hopeful when making
This Island Earth
, one of the most opulently cheesy sci-fi films ever—the one with Metaluna and the Interossiter and Rex Reason? Who would have dreamed that Faith had her dramatic coach, Ruth Roman, on the set at all times, urging her to throw everything into her screams of terror when an alien monster attacks and thus cop her Academy Award?

“Now it’s all quiet on the western front,” Miss Faye was telling us—dinner balanced on our knees, Dennis Savage and Virgil refilling the glasses, and all eyes nervously checking on Peter’s reaction. “The monster is coming. Will Faith be clawed, eaten? It’s such
delicious
. Ruth signals to Faith—indicate horror, flaunt profile, cringe. But Ruth is all actress, and she becomes
utterly
carried away by the enormous dramatic potential of the scene, and she starts playing Faith’s part even as she coaches. ‘Yes, the monster. [This was whispered.] It’s coming. Scream, Faith. Scream
more
. [This was a bit louder.] Its hideous acid breath, not unlike that of George “Gabby” Hayes!’ Then Ruth herself begins to shout, in pride and, strangely,
fear—for Ruth knows what waits us all at the Other End. ‘Scream, Faith!
Scream for Oscar!’ ”

“But surely,” Peter put in, “one couldn’t receive an Oscar nomination for a B movie fit only for the children’s matinee. And why is the dramatic coach screaming during the take?”

“The director immediately ordered Ruth off the set, bien sur. But Ruth stood proud, true,
thespian
. She knows what she was born to be. We all know it.”

Miss Faye looked at Carlo. “Some born to be so splendid that all who clap eyes upon fall instantly, permanently, hopelessly in love.”

Miss Faye looked at Cosgrove. “Some born to outfox the fascists, be ever sly, tape the sound of the world to new tones.”

“Miss Faye,” Cosgrove sighed, utterly entranced.

“And some born to stockpile the inner longing,” Miss Faye continued, turning—of course—to Peter. “Oh, scary needs. But needs find their release, do they not? Even degenerate subversive temptationesque fagolust needs. Wherein we divest the self of our smashing suit and tie and cobwebs to be shrewed by some bracing lunk in a tank top.”

Miss Faye drew near to Peter with coy little steps.

“Oh, we’ve seen him, stretching himself at the bus stop. Skin shows between his top and pants. He’s unaware. We gaze. Curly hair, strenuous upper torso, loose, surprising, open to suggestion. He’s not handsome, so he’ll be grateful for the attention. We stare, thinking of how it would feel to be legs high, sighing in the rhythm of delight like a woman.”

“Peter, how are you fixed for wine?” Dennis Savage called out; but Peter was riveted by Miss Faye.

“Shrewed and shrewed again, that’s my credo,” Miss Faye went on. “Craido,” she pronounced it. “So many start as tops.” Fastidious gestures. “I won’t, dear me, don’t
make
me take it. I shan’t be shrewed, Father O’Halloran, indeed I shan’t! I shall retain my manly innocence even unto death.”

She was inches away from Peter now, and almost whispered
in his ear, “ ‘In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.’ ” She smiled. “Who said that?”

Peter just stared at her.

“Who said, ‘I still believe that people are really good at heart’?”

“Who, Miss Faye?” asked Cosgrove.

“Make
him
ask me,” said Miss Faye, not taking her eyes off Peter.

“You better hell ask her, pal,” Carlo advised Peter. “She’s got you hooked.”

Dennis Savage was frantically sending me eye-faxes, so I looked at Carlo, and he yokeled up and took hold of Miss Faye—“Cowboy!” she breathed out, in her heaven—and set her down on the couch with him. There she was silent, though she did take the liberty of running her hands over him every so often in a kind of reverie. There was this lull, and Cosgrove trundled off to the bathroom.

Peter couldn’t not watch Miss Faye now, especially while she was fingering Carlo. I thought to myself, this was the wrong dinner party, but not only because of Miss Faye. The trouble with closet cases like Peter is, they don’t know what to make of a roomful of gays, because all their lives they’ve been used to playing the Big Lie: So what do they do when they suddenly can’t use it? All their lines and subject matter get blown away; they don’t know what to work with. Besides, without any warning, there’s all this skin around, muscle and cock. They’ve trained themselves not to notice. Now not only are they allowed to want it: They’re supposed to get it.