Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (27 page)

“Who are you, then?”

I shrugged. “Somebody.”

Vic nodded. “Well, somebody did me a turn for the better today. Just want you to know I appreciate it.”

He said this looking right at me, and it wasn’t easy holding that gaze. Then, abruptly, he rose, saying, “They had me up all night squeezing those drops, and then at eight promptly morning they start in with the dippy Bette Midler records. So how about a nap for me, say?”

“Let’s give him Reed’s room,” said Carlo, as we started upstairs. Reed owns the house, so though all the rooms are the same size, Reed has the View: absolute ocean to the south and total bay to the north.

“Man alive,” said Mike, encountering the black-tiled bathroom with the sunken tub. “Who’s the guy thinks this stuff up?”

“There’s more of the same,” said Carlo, “in his other houses. Ready? New York, Paris, St. Moritz, Maine somewhere, and Mexico City.”

“What is he, the Great Houdini?”

“No, rich.”

“Cripes.”

Vic got serious. He told Carlo, “Rip, you’re the man,” and thrust his hand out so broadly that when Carlo’s palm met it, one heard a kind of Hiroshima snap.

Vic didn’t take my hand. He fixed me with a look and said, “I’ll get even with you, baby.”

Huh?

Carlo, seeing my confusion, said, “Be nice, Mike,” and Vic grabbed my hand and told me, “I owe you one, and we both know it. Because those guys were kind of a little cold to me. Bump into you, you say, Join us, no questions asked. So you’re saving me, and if I tell it in front of Rip here, that is a sacred trust. You ever want the bill paid, you advise me pronto, okay?”

“How far can I go?” I asked.

He said, “I still don’t get fucked”; and Carlo almost broke his leg falling down laughing at that one—no, don’t assume you know what that means, because I don’t tell everything. Anyway, Carlo and I went downstairs to figure out what to do for dinner, traded fifty suggestions, and ended up heading for the Pantry to get the fixings for the inevitable spaghetti carbonara.

Some three hours later, Carlo and I finished off the dishes, poured the coffee, settled on the music (the old Angel
La Bohème
with Maria Callas; accept no substitutes), and readied the game, Chinese checkers, in Carlo’s adaptation, in which each player mans three armies and the right to move is governed by the old once-twice-three-shoot duel of fingers. Good shooting luck had given him the freedom of the board. He was advancing every turn; I was paralyzed.

“So,” he said. “How’d you meet Mike?”

“From the size of your smirk, I assume you’ve figured it out.”

On the third floor the shower went on, and we both instinctively looked up. “Mike’s awake,” he said.

We matched hands, I finally won, and I brought up my forward men, frantically trying to devise triple-jumps over his stragglers.

“I’ll never make it,” I said. “The game’s just started and I’ve already lost. What’s the skill to this?”

“You’re good at other things,” he told me, bringing his armies home after winning the shoot. “Everybody’s good at something, I truly believe. The trick is to find what you’re good at.”

“But how come you keep winning when we shoot fingers? Is it dumb luck, or am I being outwitted?”

“That depends on do you believe in dumb luck.”

“Yo, down in the valley!” came Vic’s voice overhead. “Did I miss the whole fucking dinner?”

He was standing on the balcony, toweling off from his shower.

“We saved you stuff,” Carlo called out. “Including a joint.”

“Man, that’ll be my appetizer,” Vic replied, pulling on his Speedos. “Light it up and let’s do it.”

“I will say that is one solid guy,” Carlo told me as Vic negotiated the stairs. “One of the few you would keep going back to. The night I met him, it took me the damn
longest
time to get him to let me screw him. And that’s so pleasing to me, when they don’t want to give it up to you, but they do. Especially Mike. Because he’s so
man.”

“So what’s the food?” said our guest, arriving.

I said, “Spaghetti—which I will now heat up—salad, and blueberries and Grand Marnier over raspberry sherbet.”

“Sounds like an Italian bar mitzvah. We going to do the bunny hop later?”

“The what?” Carlo asked, as he passed the lit joint to Vic.

Organizing the dinner, I said, “Vic, do you want to start on the salad or wait till the spaghetti’s hot?”

“Call me Mike and pass the salad bowl. Yeah. So what’s the music?”

“Bud likes opera,” said Carlo.

Vic turned to me, about to say something, maybe make a joke. If Bette Midler is dippy, what’s Maria Callas? But he just smiled and said, “Sounds good, pal.”

We got him fed and high, and he leaned back and laughed and said, “So who do I have to fuck to get to live like you guys?”

“Live how?” I asked.

“Shit, this great house is how. I got the hots for it. That shower is, man, like—”

“The owner’s an old friend,” said Carlo, “so he lets me use the place. Bud’s my guest. That’s all.”

We had the dimmers down, candles, and we were up to Mimi’s death scene, sitting on the floor and passing another joint, listening to the music.

“This is so great,” Vic observed, at length. “Have this bad experience, run into my man here by merest chance, and next thing you know it’s this excellent party. Candles, I see, like we’re waiting
for Liberace. It’s a . . . a kind of satisfying thing, like, because I can’t figure out how they could just shove me out of there, you know? Thought I had the edge.”

La Bohème
dropped its curtain as Rodolpho sobbed out “Mimi!” on high G sharp.

“Somebody croak?” Vic asked.

“Hey, Mike,” said Carlo, moving closer to him. “What was your first time like?”

“He means today, Vic,” I joked, “not in your whole life.”

“Hey,” he said, touching my arm. “Call me Mike, okay?”

We were smoking again, still on the floor, but now pulled back from the Chinese checkerboard and the dishes, leaning against the furniture in the blackness barely tempered, now, by the denatured light of the guttering candles. Carlo and I had left the windows open, and the frosty Pines night was upon us. The shirtless Vic shivered now and again.

He said, “My first time fucking was with my cousin Harvey. He was twelve and I was fourteen, but he was the one who started it. Like, what did I know?, and this kid’s got muscleman porn and a tube of Vaseline. The make-out king of Rego Park.”

Inhaling the joint, he then passed it to Carlo and said, “Anyway, how’s that matter, where you
started?
What
I’d
ask? It’s when did you feel you had the
power?
You know? The first time you realized you could have any guy in the room. Yeah, and it took me some years at the gym, but they were
serious
years, with some great moments, like you see the separations come into your back in the mirror. Your chest ridges out so fine. These fucking abs. My first time? Okay. I went to the West Village on a Sunday afternoon. It was summer, and guys were flooding the streets leading to the piers. Real hot day, so everyone’s like out of uniform and going, This is
me!
One’s got that wideboy V. One’s in those crispy little shorts so his cock’s slipping out to say hello. One’s a blond. Everybody’s got something today, see that?

“Well, I cruised my way through the whole pack, and what I saw was, none of them were up to my level. And they knew it, too.
I could have any of those guys. I could have all of them—line them up and suck the insides out of the first one, kiss the mouth off the second one, pump the ass off the third one. Yeah, the high-school dropout who my parents said I’d never be anything. But this was my world, and look who’s the center of it. Me.”

Here he looked quizzically at us, wanting help on a mystery.

“Me,” he repeated. “So who’ll tell me why they were giving me the bum’s rush today? If I’m so great, I mean.”

“There’s always a cuter guy, somehow,” Carlo said. “I’ve been noticing. No matter how you have it stacked. There’s always someone new who they could love even more.”

“There’s a place we can all see,” Vic replied, “where it’s always someone else who gets into it. No matter how we try, we can’t get there. What is that place? You know, Rip?”

Carlo reached over and pulled Vic into his lap. He was going to pet Vic and soothe him, and Vic seemed like a little boy then, perhaps one who had come to some bewildering grief and was being allowed to stay up past his bedtime as a consolation. Vic was a six-footer, yet he folded himself into Carlo’s grip as if he always had to be consoled, walked to school, guided in the preparation of fruit-juice ice pops. Carlo stroked Vic’s hair, and Vic sighed and slept.

“This guy is so beautiful,” Carlo told me, after quite a long time. “You know I have my list based on look, personality, and intelligence, and this boy scores in my favorite half dozen or so. He’s what I will always love, and that is a guy who pulls ’em right down and he’s already hard and going to.”

“Mystos 10,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“It means that a lot of guys could have a crush on Vic.”

Carlo thought that over, and nodded, but he said, “No.”

“No?”

“It means,” he corrected, running a finger along the crust of muscle in Vic’s stomach, “It is not your dumb luck and we are not
outwitted. We know what it is, and this boy is good at it, even though his feelings can be hurt when they throw him out of a place. Dibs on him tonight.”

“He’s all yours,” I said, not conceding: reporting.

I do not blush to admit that I hired Vic a few more times after that: when my bank account swelled, when I craved a treat, when I damn well felt like it. You might term it a central course of instruction in my sentimental education, for unlike many gay men, Vic would do just about anything—
just about
—and there were a few practices I’d never tried, at least not with a partner who made it his business to root me on with growly endearments and asides on tactics.

Kern, who had similarly kept in contact with Vic, thoroughly approved. But Dennis Savage expressed alarm.

“You’re keeping the sex safe, aren’t you?” he asked—warned—me.

“If it’s safe, it isn’t sex. You mean, are we keeping the sex
safer
, and of course we are.”

“For all you know, that guy could be going with fifty clients a week. Do you realize what a network of poison you’re biting into every time he walks into your apartment?”

Fair enough. And, yes, I was worried about that. One method of damage control was to pretend that I had suddenly become an aficionado of the homoerotic shower for two, my hidden agenda being to clean off whomever he’d been with before he got to me. I believe Vic saw through the stunt, but he played the sport and went along with me. Besides, showers are fun.

Look, how is any of us to turn down intimacy with what most impells us—to touch, as Kern put it, the godhead? I don’t know what straight men want, but certainly gay men need to get close to the spasm of life, whether in images or experientially; through fucking, blowing, or masturbation; with partners acceptable, encouraging, or guaranteed. It is
literally
the living end, no? Combine
the choice act with the ultimate partner, and you have something like the absolute ground zero of Stonewall.

So I told Dennis Savage, “I’ll never have sex for free again,” and I was only partly joking.

Anyway, one afternoon Vic called, not to hustle me but because he had a problem with a letter he had to write.

“This’ll got to be impressive, see?” he said. “I don’t want the people who read it to think I don’t know where the commas are and like that. Spelling and nouns? Perfect score. I want this like a letter Teacher puts on the blackboard.”

I said, “Come on over.”

He had printed his rough draft in block letters on red-tinted store stationery.

“Don’t read it,” he told me. “Just correct it.”

“I can’t correct it without reading it.”

“Well, this is private, man.”

It began “Dear Parents” and seemed clearly to be an attempt to heal an estrangement between Vic and his folks.

“Pretend I’m a doctor,” I suggested. “I’ll see everything but it won’t count.”

“Yeah?” he asked, doubtfully.

“I can already tell you, you wrote this all wrong. It should start ‘Dear Mom and Dad.’ The whole thing’s too formal. It’s all in the passive voice.”

“Okay, Mister Published, you going to fix it for me?”

“Tell me what you want to say.”

Reluctantly, even shamefully, he did tell me: He and his parents hadn’t spoken in some years, and this was his . . . well, plea to them to—as we finally decided to phrase it—“reopen the dialogue.”

“Could we put a famous saying in there?” he asked me. “Something from the Bible, or the classy poets?”

“How about Lord Byron?” I said, going for the book and quoting:

Oh thou, Parnassus! whom I now survey,
Not in the frenzy of a dreamer’s eye,
Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,
But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!