Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (29 page)

“Okay, okay.”

“Not yet.”

He stopped demonstrating, but still held my hand.

“I want you to see what it was,” he said. “I’m watching him and trying to figure this out. Who is this guy? Because now he’s going on about how she’s got the flops and he’s going to flip her onto
her back and donkey her . . . and I’m looking at him, right?, and it’s like an
alien
took over in him! He’s so laid-back before, even playing ball, just loping to first when he cracks a single instead of really running. You know, the grin-and-lazy type. But
now
he’s all lit up. Has the oh-yeah eyes and his hands just got real big and he’s sitting in a whole new way. Going over and over his secret words. Doing the donkey and, man, she flops tight, and right up her love chute.”

Letting my hand go, he said, “Well, by then I’m hypnotized. I want to see those eyes some more. I start encouraging him—you know, share in a few of my own pointers, trade bimbo stories with him. Because somehow I’ve got to get close to that . . . the thing in him that lights his eyes up. You know what I mean?”

“You wanted to touch the godhead.”

“Say what?”

“Wait a minute. Did you tell him that you like men?”

“Huh, no way, buddy. This guy only plays with his own kind. Anyway,
so
. I make it that he’s a real show-off, so I joke that we should do a threesome someday, really like to meet that Luna. He
jumps
at it.”

The food came, but Mike went right on.

“Says, ‘How about tonight?’ He’s got a date with Luna at nine and she loves surprises. And get this—with those eyes still like coals in a barbecue, he looks me over real slow, yeah, all of me, baby, and he puts his hands on my sides, pulls me close, and whispers in my ear, ‘I know she’d dig you extra special, Beautiful.’ Then he gets up, takes his turn at the plate, and hits a triple.”

“What am I hearing?” I asked. “Is this a closeted—”

“No, leave out the politics. Because guys like that, you can’t set categories. See, you and me, we control our sexuality, right? We decide who we’re going to go with, for whatever reason. With Jerry, I’d say his sexuality is controlling him. An opportunity comes up and he can’t say no. It isn’t Is he attracted to his partner—if it’s sex, he’s attracted. Like, that night, we’re at his place waiting for Luna to show, and halfway through the first drink he gets to grinning
and, boom!, he’s whipped it out and worked it up. Mister Boner, so proud of it he can’t wait for the action to start. Not that it’s so big or anything—just that it’s his and he likes it.

“So you can’t have one guy’s hard and the other guy’s dressed, and now we’re two naked guys standing around drinking that stinking booze of his—those straight guys never know what to drink, you know? Of course Luna’s going to be a no-show. You knew that already. He’s getting drunker by the minute, and I’m steeling myself up for getting fucked, because there is no way Jerry’s going to let me top him, no matter how stoned he is. Donkey-fucked, no less—but, I tell you, anything’s worth getting my mouth on his while his eyes are crackling like I told you.

“So he’s finally up to the rubbing-the-back-of-my-neck phase and his breath stinks and I keep feeding him cue lines that he misses till I say, ‘Maybe Luna wouldn’t have liked me, anyway.’
Payday
.

“He goes, ‘You kidding, guy? She would eat you raw with cherries.’ Got his hands on me now, taking a tour, and I say, ‘Boy, I sure would have liked watching you do the donkey.’ His eyes do that voodoo thing or, I don’t know, a pinball machine, and he’s halfway to it. I’m reeling him in like working from a script. I’m hustling him, is what it is—letting him think he’s getting something special out of me when
I’m
the one who’s getting.”

“And how was it?”

“The living end.”

That gave me pause: Kern’s very words.

“Fact, I liked it so much, I tried to set up another date with him. But first he wasn’t at the ball games, and second all I get is his phone machine, which he isn’t answering my messages, anyway. Finally I run into him playing ball in Prospect Park—like, is he avoiding me? I went up to him, and from word one he is not friendly, this Jerry of mine. Finally he goes, ‘Look, man, you’re a faggot.’ Neat and clean. ‘I don’t dislike faggots,’ he says. ‘But I don’t neither like them, now, would I?’ Both of us know I could deck him
with half trying, and he’s just . . . with a smile on his . . . The hell makes him think I’m going to take that from him?”

“You dropped him?”

“I dropped him, right there on the diamond. Thinks he’s so bitching?”

Mike’s left hand felt his right fist as if going over it again for the thousandth time, still outraged and not entirely reassured.

“He’s
so yeah? What, I don’t got twice his shoulders, I ask you? Cracked him flat, he’s down, I’m sayonara, and that’s all she wrote.”

“He didn’t understand you,” I said. “Straights cannot comprehend a Vic Astarchos.”

“Don’t you get it yet? It’s just Mike.”

“Okay, but there’s a Vic in Mike, isn’t there?”

“There’s a Mike in
Vic
’s how I see it. That’s all Vic is—pictures and Mike.
Pictures
. It keeps us going, huh? We see those shots and we . . . Hey.”

He got lively then, and dragged me back to his place to see one more photograph.

“This one’s special,” he said, retrieving it from inside a book he kept sitting on his bed. “See for yourself.”

It was a color shot of an unforgivably handsome young man in checked shorts standing on the deck of a house in—it had to be—the Pines. You recall what I said about gays and their discontented rumbles over type? The man in this photo was the bringer of peace to that war, for he transcended type with a slim construction that somehow bore a lot of muscle without losing its grace. Maybe it was the really quite full arms balanced by the chiseled but understated chest, maybe the alarming breadth of the thighs upheld by the sturdy waist. He was a manly boy, a cross of types.

“Harry,” said Mike. “Nice? Unh-unh. He’d break your heart for a quarter. Broke mine, many’s the day. Had me hating him and begging him at once. Hard time, this one.”

“He wasn’t Gareth?”

“There is no Gareth, probably. Guys who look like him, they don’t have his insides. The pictures keep fooling us, you know?”

“Is Harry still around?”

Staring at the photo, Mike didn’t answer immediately. Then: “Lives in Florida, mostly. Or L.A. He maps around a lot. He still calls, sometimes, says he’s in New York, how are you, oh I’ve got to catch a plane.”

He tried to smile.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have taken this out again,” he concluded, placing the photo back in the book. “Did everything I could—gym and all. Try to be nice, generous, hold them strong and loving when they need to feel skin. Treated them a little rough when they wanted it but wouldn’t admit they wanted it. What more can I do?”

He was crying.

“You tell me,” he went on, not caring that I saw. “What
more
can I fucking do, huh?”

He sat on the bed, wiping his eyes.

“Oh, yeah, I shouldn’t have pulled that out of the memory file. Friends’ll say, Forget him, he’s not worth it. The fuck do
they
know about it? If he’s worth it to me? He isn’t nice? Shit that, I’ll be nice for two. I’ll take up the slack.”

He was silent for a while.

“That letter,” I said. “To your parents. Did it get results?”

Mike slowly shook his head.

“You can’t go back to something,” he said. “Because you pulled too far away.”

We contemplated this.

“Those fucking pictures, man,” he said. “They tear you apart.”

Mike decided to move to California sometime in the late 1980s. When he called with the news, I reminded him that he still owed me, and now I wanted payback.

“You’re entitled,” he said. “What’ll it be?”

“I’d like one of your model photographs. A souvenir.”

“Got plenty of those. Come on down.”

Most of his stuff was packed up, but he had no trouble locating a carton of what you might call his press cuttings: countless doubles and triples of Vic Astarchos playing come-hither, soaping up in the shower, floating on pool rafts, beating off.

“Got some real heavy ones,” he said, rummaging around. “That famous photographer who . . . yeah, you’d better have your own lab to print up these babies, or they’d call the cops.”

He found an envelope and pulled out some eight-by-tens. “You man enough for this?” he asked with a wicked smile, handing them over without waiting for my reply.

It was Mike and someone else in darkness, both naked, Mike’s arms virtually holding his partner captive as they kissed. For the next shot, Mike was rubbing the other guy’s neck and shoulder muscles, loosening him up for something. Then Mike had him facedown on a bed, straddling him while binding his hands at the wrists. For the fourth shot, Mike had turned him on his back to stroke his hair with a look of strangely threatening tenderness.

“It’s Harry,” I said.

“Yeah. Told you I always turned my boy friends out.”

The next still found Mike gorging himself on Harry’s cock; the next after that showed Mike looming over Harry and opening up a pocket knife.

“Jeepers,” I said.

“Art studies, they call that,” Mike informed me.

In still number seven, Mike was lovingly pulling a pillowcase over Harry’s head, and for the finale Mike held Harry down with his left hand as his right bore the knife on high for, unmistakably, an ecstatic plunge into Harry’s heart.

“Well, for gosh sakes!”

“Had a feeling you wouldn’t go for those,” he said, chuckling as he packed them away.

“What did Harry think of all that, may I ask?”

“You kidding? The session got his cream so stirred up we had to go on and fuck right there in the studio. I didn’t trim that little
bastard easy, either. Stuck it to him wham-style. But he was just laughing. He liked to shout ‘hee-haw’ when he was about to cream. He’d go crazy.”

“Could we find a picture of the real Mike?” I said. “Just, like, how you appear to be?”

“You mean this?” as he whips out a faded snapshot.

“Who’s that?”

“Me. In high school.”

Boy, was he different then. Slim and smiling in some team uniform and brandishing a baseball bat. Some kid. Gareth?

“Okay, now here’s one you should like,” he said, diving into the pile as I deftly pocketed the shot, undetected. “Classic Vic Astarchos.”

That it was: the brooding Titan of note, standing around in just about nowhere, being himself.

“This’ll do,” I said.

You know, I didn’t realize how much I’d liked Mike till he was gone. I hid the stolen photo of the young Mike in a secret place for considered review at some future date and set the champion porn Mike on the mantel, where Kern and Carlo would, on their visits, pick up on it and favor us with a few words.

“That good old crazy Mike,” Carlo would say.

“The indomitable Vic” would be Kern’s salute.

He was neither crazy nor indomitable. He was a man, like all men; finer than many in the look of him but equal to all in the rough fashion of his clay and the sheer bloody nature of his coming into and going from this earth. When I first heard that he was dead, I thought it another of those rumors. But this one persisted, and was, at length, confirmed. Mike was over, of the usual reason, at the age of forty in San Francisco.

“You’re not going to start mooning about this, are you?” Dennis Savage asked when I told him the news. “You haven’t spoken to the guy in ten years.”

“He haunts me. He was special. He had something.”

“When,” he asked me, “are you going to learn that muscle and cock are not the mirror of the soul? You find these . . . these utterly themeless johnny-go-lightlies and you build them into Parsifals! Yet all they had going for them was a three-hours-a-day gym habit!
That’s all they are
, at long last. What do you think you’re on, some holy quest?”

“What would you call it?”

“Cruising.”

“Well, that’s what I call gay life. Only we’re cruising for more than hot dates. Something of value’s at stake. Affirmation, recognition. A warmth that tells us that we don’t have to score to connect.”

He thought this over, then said, “This is what it’s all about: Hearing that this unfortunate man has been struck down as he was about to approach middle age emphasizes the concept of youth. You don’t just want him alive again, you want him
young
. Because if he’s young,
you’re
young. You’re not sad for him. You’re sad for you. You’re mourning your loss of freedom.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Outside, it’s another lurid, humid Saturday in the New York summer. All sensible people, like me, are inside with the air-conditioning set to
IGLOO.
Only zanies and the homeless are on the streets, and that of course includes Virgil and our rudimentary little Cosgrove, who, as we speak, are combing the Upper West Side for respondents to their sex survey. Join them—fill your water bottle, take your ridiculously antique Raleigh three-speed that was trendy among eleven-year-olds thirty years ago, and work this off with a nice hard ride. Because, as I hope you recall, we have a video evening with my editor, Peter Keene, Esquire, at eight o’clock tonight, and I don’t want you crushing the proceedings with gloom.”