Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (34 page)

Carlo gave that an ironic chuckle.

“I mean,” I went on, “in the sense that Dennis Savage and Cosgrove are Virgil’s castoffs, and you’ve had some history with Cash. I’m the neutral party.”

“Don’t be too neutral,” he told me, pulling Cosgrove closer. “This hurts.”

I’ve been to dinner for all sorts of reasons other than pleasure, but I really grumbled about this one. First of all, Carlo and Cosgrove regarded me as The Man in Charge of Getting Virgil Back, and
nothing would dissuade them. They even horned in on how I should dress. Anything I chose they rejected. “That looks too hungry,” said Carlo; or “Isn’t that a flashy style?” Cosgrove worried.

Carlo wanted me in cords and a white T-shirt, his go-everywhere ensemble since he’d hit New York, but outside it was the coldest day of the year.

“Hey!” Carlo cried. “You’ll wear your school coat on top, with the crest!”

“That blazer is from ninth grade,” I protested. “I can’t get into it anymore. Cosgrove wears it now.”

“I spilled just a little tiny bit of Coke inside the pocket,” said Cosgrove. “But it’s good as new.”

“This is ridiculous,” I told them, but they were already bundling me into my overcoat. “It’s too dressy. And I need a sweater.”

“Cash won’t be impressed by a sweater,” said Carlo, winding a scarf around my neck. “He likes his men tough and plain.”

“Like Little Kiwi?”

“That proves they’re wrong for each other,” he said, pushing me out the door. “Be firm with Cash and extra nice to Virgil.”

“And don’t come back without him!” Cosgrove added; but I said, “Wait,” because Dennis Savage had just stepped out of the elevator and was regarding us wryly. Someone was with him: Billy, the new houseboy.

“Going calling?” Dennis Savage asked me. “Anyone I know?”

“Perfect stranger, if you ask me.”

Dennis Savage introduced Billy to us all at once. He was taller than we thought from his picture and, if possible, even hotter, with nervy, cool facial expressions and fast-operator tones, so turned-on by his own sexuality that he could do a marathon with Jeff Stryker and it would still be masturbation. The ideal ice boy, Mystos 10.

“How come he’s dressed so ritzy?” Billy asked Dennis Savage, of me, as we shook hands. “Is he richer than you?”

Carlo instinctively put a hand on Cosgrove’s shoulder, but Cosgrove pushed forward wonderingly and helplessly. “I’m Cosgrove,” he said. “Will you please be my new friend?”

“Who’s the faggot?” said Billy.

“I don’t like that talk,” said Carlo.

“Hey
, big guy, like it’s . . . Come on, it’s no offense. I’ll be everyone’s new friend, watch. I’m moving in with the moneyman here. There’s plenty of time to get acquainted.” He patted Cosgrove’s head. “Sure I’m your friend. You call me Billy, get it?”

“Please be nice.”

Billy snickered. “I’m the nicest. Watch.”

“Oh, they’ll be watching,” said Dennis Savage, as I signaled the elevator. The door opened immediately.

“Yeah, Billy the wonder boy, they call me. In and out, slow and deep. Get it?”

“The moneyman, huh?” I said to Dennis Savage.

He smiled. “All things can be worked out.”

“Yeah,” said Billy.

I got into the elevator.

One flaw in life in New York is The Cab Ride from Hell, which you get approximately every fortieth trip—a speed demon barreling wildly through the streets, a cokehead drifting across the lane markings, a smoker with no visible driver license. I got a combination of all three on my ride to dinner with Virgil and Cash, but it was so cold I was reluctant to get out. After we took the Seventy-ninth Street Park transverse in seven seconds, however, I erupted from the cab and started walking to the address, on Eighty-fifth Street near Columbus. But one long block of Arctic weather and I stopped to hail another cab.

They were all occupied, the few that were out. It must have been the coldest day of the century. The ice caps were expanding, glaciers had advanced as far as Darien, and the population had been evacuated. Only a few stragglers were left, like the man heading
toward me, a rakish hat pulled down over his eyes, his hands in his pockets, a well-dressed man checking the street in search of rescue, like me. Soon a cab would come and we would fight for it, every man for himself, New York—style.

He saw me, stopped, then came up, perhaps to suggest we share it—which sometimes happens, even in New York—when he pulled off his hat with a broad smile and treated me to the stupendous handshake that has passed into legend on Sutton Place.

Bill Upton.

“What are you doing here?” I said. “This is the West Side.”

“I just had late brunch and I forgot my gloves and it’s the end of the world.”

“I’ve got to get to Eighty-fifth Street.”

“I’ll drop you, if we can—”

“No, you take it.”

“Don’t be absurd,” he replied, looking down Columbus Avenue for a sign of life.

“Everything’s going wrong,” I said. “Some lose gloves and some lose friends, and I probably shouldn’t say that to you, but you don’t know what’s been happening to me. And to my . . . my people. I don’t do flawless as automatically as you do, but I usually try to be fair. Not impartial, maybe, but generous.”

I was moving too fast, blurting things out, making allusions to taboo material, his and mine, that I myself didn’t catch till I had uttered them. I tried to slow down and catch up the reins, but there are times when the things that absolutely must not be said are the things you have to say. Even violence has feelings, boys and girls.

So I brought up his latest party and how badly I had, once again, behaved. I ran through the action with tactless exactness, as if I had only heard tell of it and were rehearsing a column, recounting the doings of strangers. Ice, sheets of it, engulfing my life. Or
fire
. Ice boys and fire boys: Who will you be?

Ah, but here came a cab, and I hailed it. I thought of a
debonair smile and put it on, as I said, in conclusion, “He still feels no remorse whatsoever.”

I gulped as I said it. I lost it, kids—I almost sobbed.

And my stalwart, endlessly forgiving friend reached out a large hand and stroked my hair.

Years later, we reckoned that my father, a building contractor, had got into trouble with the Boys (as they’re known in the building trade) and sent us off while he renegotiated. Friends ask, “Surely not to
Italy?”
But the Mafia is empowered only in the western half of Sicily. Venice is as safe as Nairobi.

“Take only essentials,” my mother warned. “Leave all hope behind.” My father, already fluent in Italian because of his war experiences, bought a Berlitz hear-it-repeat-it record course for family use, but nobody went near it except me. As a born record buff, I officially collected the discs (meaning I took physical possession of them and, when anyone asked, denied all knowledge of their whereabouts). I also used them, not realizing that Berlitz “Italian” was in fact the Tuscan dialect of the area around Florence. Venetians spoke their own dialect, different enough to be impenetrable to the outlander sporting tourist Berlitz. I still remember crowds of locals gathered in the cafés to watch television of an evening, the Venetians howling with derision at the Roman, Tuscan, or Milanese inflections they heard.

There are no intercontinental flights to Venice because of the tidy dimensions of Marco Polo Airport. We landed in Rome, took the Rapido up the boot, and had pretty much the same experience that Katharine Hepburn has in the movie
Summertime
, surging out of the railroad station to see, with one’s uncompromising personal take, the last thing one was ready to believe: The city is really built on water!

We took the vaporetto—the city bus—down the Grand Canal to the Salute stop, just one short of San Marco, at the round Baroque
church that has been a symbol of Venice for over three hundred years. My father (who was to settle us in, then fly home) sped on to handle the business side of our arrival while the rest of us straggled along with the luggage. As we neared the address, my father, who had doubled back to meet us, warned my mother that she would not be pleased. We had taken the house by description only; the building we presently pulled up in front of was a lugubrious pile of Wailing Wall stone.

But when we passed through the street door, we found ourselves in a little courtyard giving directly onto a beautiful garden. And the garden led, around a turn, to a trim, fresh two-story villa. These were to be our house and garden for the next fourteen months, and their proximity to the decayed façade that had so jarred us typifies the Venetian scene: the slum opening up upon the green world, the outrageous juxtaposition. Venice, after all, was the police-state democracy, the city that once had countless sumptuary laws but eleven thousand six hundred fifty-four prostitutes, the least anti-Semitic state in the Catholic world yet the inventor of the ghetto, an impregnable power in the fifteenth century and a joke by the seventeenth.

The very new shoved up against the very old
is
Venice, I was to learn; a teenager from one neighborhood may harbor, against the folk of another neighborhood, grievances dating back a thousand years. We had a teenager in our courtyard, one Zulian, and he did not bear a grudge against anyone. He was fifteen, two years older than I, a crucial difference among adolescents, who traditionally honeycomb only with their immediate coevals. But Zulian and I clicked instantly, partly because my family had a TV set but mainly because he was fascinated with the U.S. and I was the only one of my brothers who could converse with him—in bits and pieces, true, and with him constantly redirecting my tongue from Berlitz, improving, for instance, “Ella è sua moglie” (when I was explaining who a certain Mrs. O’Toole was) to “La xe so mujer.” It sounded like Spanish to me. But that was Venetian.

I’m not going to pretend that this was some idle good-neighbor
policy. I was in the stewing-hormones stage, and he was an Aristotelian compound of a very telling type, all eyes and hands. When he wanted to get serious, he held you like a pickpocket. He was my first love, but so was Venice and its men in general. Italian life prepared me for the essential fact of gay culture: Beautiful males get away with everything.

Zulian was my point of contact with that philosophy. I saw how frustrated his mother would get when berating him for some infraction, because she and he both knew she was already forgiving him unconditionally even as she chastised. That’s mother love in Italy, a no-win combat. I’ve seen them weep in helpless fury. In other places, “Boys will be boys” is an excuse. In Italy, it is a religion.

Boys will be Zulian was my religion. As the months passed, we grew closer, as he graduated me from Zulio, his all-purpose nickname, to Zuli, for friends only, then to Zuleto, as his family called him. We played calcio (soccer) in the street. We kept each other company on his messenger routes, an after-school job that took him into offices with a mysteriously fly-by-night air where people looked up startled and guilty when we entered. Zuleto was magic, Zuleto was cool, and Zuleto was a map: Tagging along on his deliveries, I got the city down cold.

Zuleto was a language lab as well: He taught me Venetian. I was flailing till I found a grammar in a pawnshop that specialized in used books and suddenly realized how consistently Venetian simply scaled down Tuscan in both syntax and spelling. That freed Zuleto and me actually to enjoy halting conversations, especially about sex. I learned an entire subvocabulary that the Berlitz discs had blandly omitted, including twenty-six synonyms for “chiavere” (“to key”: to fuck).

I was so stupid that I thought I had a chance. Well, why not, when the guy can’t say ciao without feeling you up and giving you a kiss? When the words for “I like you” are the same as for “I love you”? Italian boys flirt with everyone; it’s partly why the country
is so wonderful, but it’s mainly why the country is so confusing.

For the warm months, my family took a cabana at the
Death in Venice
hotel on the Lido, and my mother, brothers, and I went there every day. There was a lot of skin—a lot of men wearing very little—and coming from the ascetic American culture of the early 1960s, I was taking in a lot of information, particularly from the Swedish body gods who changed in the inexpensive by-the-day cabanas at the rear of the beach. I don’t mean that I actually spoke to them. I mean I was lurking and watching and figuring out how the entire world worked philosophically and ontologically—what gay culture, I later learned, terms “cruising.”

Back in town, as we passed through the courtyard, Zuleto would come running down to pull me away from the others to narrate some exploit. A fight, an encounter, a possible new job. We would walk along the Zattere, the long straightaway overlooking the huge Giudecca Canal, and I would pretend to listen while drinking him in and thinking, All I want in the world is to touch this . . . well, “unbelievably beautiful boy” is how we put it now. There were no such terms in those days, no modes for romantic expression of any kind. Not for a thirteen-year-old American gay kid who was still a good decade ahead of his first Parade.