The Best Little Boy in the World (29 page)

At the restaurant, I thought I noticed him noticing the same busboy I was noticing as my herring and his vichyssoise were delivered. What a pleasant coincidence, I thought, as I made up my mind to try to spill a spoonful of vichyssoise into his well-tailored lap without even moving from my seat—through a modified psycho kinesis, I guess you'd say: "Esquire, you know pursuant to the herein-before stated allegation that you are 'my lawyer,'" I said in my most awful lawyer humor so he would expect nothing out of the ordinary, "I think you should be cognizant of the kinds of matters you might have to defend me against. So I think it behooves me"—the timing was important here so I paused long enough in the count down for him to dip his spoon into the soup—"to tell you"—head was bending a little and spoon emerging with its payload—"that I am"—eyes beginning to widen as mission control prepared for docking of the silver soup shuttle—"gay."
Contact!

Damn. I could see the spoon rattle around a little as it began to enter his mouth, but surface tension, which if I remember my high school chemistry and my "PSSC physics" increases with viscosity and so is stronger in vichyssoise than in water, kept any from spilling.

"You are?" he asked, upon swallowing. He sounded disapproving.

"I am." Maybe I was wrong about Esquire, though as far as I was concerned, he could know I was gay in any case.

"Why are you telling
me?"
He wasn't saying much, but—and maybe I was just imagining this—it seemed as though tiny changes in his facial expression, especially around the eyes, were taking place much faster than usual, as though his legal mind were rushing through all the alternatives and contingencies.

"Well, I thought as my lawyer you should know. That's all. No big thing, just file it away somewhere in your head so when I get busted for dancing with a plainclothesman I won't have to waste my one-phone-call dime giving you the background."

He must have decided I wasn't trying to trap him. "All right then," he said, "would you like to go to a party with me after dinner?" He still wasn't smiling, and I could tell he was worried and upset that I had apparently assumed he was gay. What was wrong with his cover? Could others tell? Was it too much aftershave, or what?

"A party? What do you mean?" I asked, thinking it would be only considerate to let him make his revelation to me. He told me he was gay, also, but wondered whether I could tell. I said that I am always suspicious of guys his age who were so good-looking and living alone—but that's not why I had told him I was gay. A party? Sure, let's go.

As I got to know Esquire, I realized that we are a lot alike. He is an independent, aggressive, private kind of individual. He has had one two-year lover relationship, and has done "things" from time to time, but hasn't the temperament to settle down with anyone. Perhaps he will later, as he finds himself less able to meet attractive people night after night, but for now it is hard for him to be satisfied with one person. There are a lot of super kids who are attracted by forty-three-year-olds like Esquire. In fact, that kind of young man often doesn't like people his own age or younger. I fear nature failed to put this particular phenomenon in balance—more people prefer younger people than prefer older people—but I will, like Esquire, make friends with as many young guys as I can when I'm older.

To provide a more stable social base than nightly tricks, Esquire has had a couple of things going for him: A group of close gay friends he has known since his first years out, almost twenty-five years ago. The three guys he shares the house with on Fire Island—one in advertising, one a banker, one who hasn't done much of anything since the inheritance—are probably a family of sorts, and he has other close friends who are as eager for his company as he is for theirs, even though there is no lasting sexual bond. And he had his career. He became a partner of his firm in record time and did more than a creditable job. That was satisfying to him. He liked the people he worked with and the respect he commanded. Only one of his colleagues knew he was gay. The others, if they suspected, never mentioned it.

Of course, Esquire built his career at a time of less "liberation." I will not pretend to be heterosexual the way he has. I will not marry for convenience or refuse to give gay friends my number at work. I will not have a secretary who, after I find I like and trust her, does not know I am gay. Or a boss. Not to make a big thing of it, as I've said—but I don't want my boss to keep trying to fix me up with his friends' daughters. And I don't want to live in fear that one day someone will call the office and leave a message about how I contracted syphilis from him and better get some shots right away. My present secretary could handle that message discreetly, because she knows me.

Esquire had, of course, never told his parents he was gay. In fact, he told me that once at a large cocktail party in their home his parents and a circle of friends were selling him on this beautiful, sensitive, wonderful girl he just had to meet (it was before he married, of course)—and in the midst of all the gracious adjectives that were being heaped on this young girl, whoever she was, Esquire asked loudly, "Sure, sure—but does she fuck?"

From then on, apparently, his mother was careful to skirt any issue, particularly in public, that might set off her all-too-healthy heterosexual son.

Esquire has lived well as a lawyer and, for all intents and purposes, a bachelor. His marriage had provided a convenient "cover" for both partners. Their understanding was that neither would contribute to the support of the other. They had never really lived together, even before they announced their separation. She had her own apartment with her girlfriend across town. All the same, they liked each other quite a bit and found it no chore to give the annual cocktail party and to show up for monthly dinners with the folks. Esquire filed a joint tax return, which saved them both money. His wife was willing to lie low during the month of August—sometimes she went out to the island, too—so it wouldn't look as though they were separated until it was supposed to look that way. Before their separation they had to pretend to be on better, more intimate terms than they actually were; after the separation they had to pretend to be on less friendly terms than they actually were. She was an actress, so pretending came easy. And you know that good lawyers can argue either side of an issue with equal persuasiveness.

In sixteen years as a lawyer in New York Esquire maintained more than a comfortable standard of living, while contributing generously to his various alumni funds, causes, and campaigns (he is a director of one charity and a trustee of his old private school). He "retired" last year. Yes, in the midst of a brilliant career and all that, he quit. In those sixteen years, with no life insurance bills to pay, no pediatricians, orthodontists, or gynecologists to pay, no Little Red School House tuition or Camp Winnipesaukee fee, Esquire had saved enough money to support him modestly for the rest of his life. That had been his goal, to have the freedom to do anything he wanted, and now he has it. He plans to spend a couple of years going around the world, and then he will see what he feels like doing. Paint? Teach? Manage a ski resort? Work for the government? Go back to law? Start his own business? Open a gay bar? Politics? Learn photography and make a film? Write a travel guide? Go back to school to learn Chinese? Read stories to blind children?

I might shoot for the same goal of financial independence and feel a special pleasure knowing I could quit work and go off at any time—but I'm not sure I would actually quit. It's conceivable, but it seems too risky to give up all your routines and most of your grounding and social relationships and strike out on your own, alone. I imagine Esquire will either find himself living a far "fuller life" than he did in that three-piece suit and New York beehive apartment or else a life fraught with identity crises and depression. He probably knows what he is doing, but I think I would have a plan, subject to change, of where I would be in two years. I find it nice and secure to know where I'm going.

Yet isn't it fantastic? The American dream, indeed the human dream—to have the self-made independence to fulfill your potential as a human being? To read and write and create? To be fully, or almost, master of your own fate? The anticipation of a life like that is probably more stimulating than the life itself. But such a future has at least the potential to be every bit as stimulating, I should think, as a traditional happy family life would be, two hours of commuting to the law firm each day until retirement at sixty-five.

Esquire took me to some of the bars and to the baths that Charlie, the bashful model, was too conservative to frequent. Look at Esquire in his bell-bottom jeans, stoned on some $35 shit only New York attorneys can afford, dancing his head off with that lanky boy in the middle of the floor. This is the Tamburlaine, in the East Forties, a popular mixed dance bar, mostly gay, until it burned down, or was bombed some say, because it clashed with the quiet residential neighborhood. All types in this place. Esquire, who is flinging his NYAC-sun-room-tanned body in all directions in homage to the Rolling Stones tonight, will be earning $75 an hour tomorrow morning counseling IBM on the subtleties of antitrust precedents. His lanky friend came to New York from Dallas to earn $75 an hour modeling, when there is work. Right now there is none: Fresh faces are needed for the pages of the Sunday
Times Magazine—
always fresh faces—so he settles for $1.05 an hour plus tips at Daly's. When you look like this lad and you work on New York's East Side, you get outrageous tips (some of the clientele can't resist), and tips are mostly "tax-free." Esquire might try to keep up with him and take him home tonight, but it would be a little awkward with me sleeping on the couch in the living room—and there is that meeting with the client at ten tomorrow. They will have dinner tomorrow night, instead.

Gay life in New York is so different from gay life in Boston. The bars are different. There are more of them, and they change faster. If you go to Sporters a couple of nights a week, you are bound to see many of your friends. If there is someone you want to meet, sooner or later a friend will introduce you, or you will find yourself standing next to him, both of you knowing that it is time to say hello because you both have been smiling a little the past few times you've seen each other there. There
are
some neighborhood bars in New York that have their regulars, but the game is played to a faster pace. With so many bars going at any time people hop around. In for a look—nobody here—out to another. And the bars go until four, so the crowded time extends much later—not from eleven to one on weekends as in Boston, but from eleven to two or three, seven days a week. What are the chances that you will ever see that boy again who just passed by? What are the chances one of your friends knows him and can introduce you? The two of you may never bump into each other again. So you had better go up and say hello if you have any interest—and for his part, he had better not be too hard to get if he wants to be gotten.

So in New York, it is accepted practice for the guy standing next to you to stick out his hand, cold from the sweat of his beer bottle, and say "Hi. What's your name?"—sometimes even without telling you his first. You would never do that in Boston unless you had just come up from New York for the weekend and didn't know any better. Hell, if you didn't know any better, you might even be wearing your New York faggot Guccis and some kind of expensive shirt unbuttoned down to your solar plexus, exposing your New York faggot Puerto Rico tan. We are simpler folk in Boston, and more reserved.

Relationships tend to last longer in Boston than New York. In either city it takes a while to get on a last-name basis—getting to know you as you, not as a sex object that needs no name, has no connections with the outside world. But once you do, you are likely to stay in touch longer in Boston. There are fewer temptations to spin you dizzy on to other people, more barriers to loose living, more inhibitions, more conservatism.

Esquire took me to the Barn, which has since been closed down after someone's thing was cut off with a switchblade in the pitch-dark "back room," or so the story goes. The police are down on back rooms these days. How did Esquire ever
find
the Barn? It was in a warehouse district near the Village, where the streets have names instead of numbers and run randomly so as to confound all but the veteran cabbies and truck drivers. The building has no sign. There is no advertising, no number in the phone book. The area is completely deserted late at night, except for the people like us walking between the Village bars, so there are few people on the street to ask directions of. You go in a scarred unmarked metal door to a service elevator and wait for the huge car to come down. The elevator boy is unmistakable confirmation that this is the place, and when the door opens upstairs, you are in the midst of hundreds of people, drinking and dancing, on a gigantic, largely unpartitioned warehouse floor. What's the rest of the building used for? Who knows? Who is the landlord? It's not hard to guess. How did all these people find it? Word of mouth. It's "in." There's a back room, and the place is always jammed. Half the appeal is that it's so hard to find.

Christopher's End is (was?) at the end of Christopher Street and easier to find. They featured nude go-go boys and erotic slide shows on the wall. Uncle Edna's is a hustlers' bar up around the theater district. The Eagle's Nest is one of the leather bars way over by the piers on the lower West Side. Well, near the trucks. Do you want to go to the trucks? "Hi, Mom. I'd like you to meet my new friend, Raunch. I met him in one of the trailers on the waterfront." Is it possible that I am writing these things?

How about the Y, if you don't go in for trucks? The YMCA is like an international budget hotel chain for homosexuals. (That word still has a sleazy, furtive, immoral connotation for you, doesn't it? It's one thing for your daughter to draw a hard hat's admiring stare, but God forbid your son should be looked up and down by a homosexual at the Y, right?) New York's West Side Y is the medallion in the chain. The Y is also a chain of budget health clubs for young married guys who still enjoy a good ball game to keep in shape, a shower, maybe a rubdown, and a little locker-room banter. Not all these jocks are as near ten on the scale as they would have you think, though they would surely flatten you to prove that they were. Just the way the Pope can excommunicate you to prove that abortion is evil.