Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (40 page)

Cosgrove was singing: “ ‘So Puppy was the one’ . . . No. ‘If Puppy could be there’ . . . Wait . . .”

Dennis Savage put a hand over his eyes. “Talk about
dumb?
Anyway, about Saturday—”

“You’re going and that’s it.”

“Didn’t I
say
I’m going?”

Carlo had suddenly got worried about Cosgrove, and planned for us to spend a Saturday at an amusement park in New Jersey. “We have to cheer that Cosgrove up,” Carlo said.

“ ‘Puppy had to play . . .’ ” Cosgrove sang, in the bedroom.

“What is he
doing?”
asked Dennis Savage.

“He’s creating ‘The Ballad of Puppy,’ just as Virgil created so many golden oldies of our past. Do you recall ‘The Ballad of Fauntleroy’? Or—”

“Well, I don’t want to hear about him, okay? I just want to clear it with the family that Billy can come with us.”

“Of course he can.”

“I don’t want anyone giving him a hard time, either. He’s been very shy about fitting into . . . the scene here.”

“I’ve noticed how shy he is. I mean, Madonna is shy. Howard Stern is shy. But Billy’s shyer.”

Dennis Savage smiled sadly. “Yet I’ll be patient. Because you don’t know him. All you see is street trash.”

“What do you see, Snow White?”

“Right this moment I see the Wicked Queen.”

“‘Puppy wants a friend’ . . . Yes,” Cosgrove sang as he composed. “‘His troubles seemed at end . . .’ ”

“Just go easy on Billy,” Dennis Savage went on. “He’ll work in nicely here if you guys just give him a chance.”

“Well, he didn’t exactly extend himself in making a first impression, did he? That obnoxious know-it-all smirk—”

“Don’t you see how naked he felt? All of you looking him over, judging him. Naturally, he needed to put on . . . what?”

“A negligee?”

“Bravado
, I was going to say! Jesus. Just stop
looking
at him, will you? Stop scoring his points, and let him be. He’s worthy in ways you don’t yet know.”

“Fine. I will. Fine.”

A pause, and Dennis Savage listens to silence in the bedroom. “What’s he doing now?”

I shrugged, but then we heard Cosgrove break into a vamp suggestive of lurid bongo drums and reckless woodblocks, a back-alley
Création du Monde
.

“What on earth
is
that?” Dennis Savage asked.

“That’s Cosgrove’s Nintendo song.”

Out of the darkness
Gameboy creeps,

Cosgrove began, but Dennis Savage leaped up, saying, “Oh, that’s it for me.”

“If only you listened,” I told him, “you might hear things.”

“What, ‘Puppy had to play’?”

“You’re missing the point. Who’s Puppy?”

“Who else around here ‘had to play’? He’s singing about himself.”

“ ‘So Puppy
ran away’?”

Finally catching on, Dennis Savage froze.

“You speak so lightly,” he finally said, “of something so close and tense?”

“I’m trying to show you how adequately Cosgrove describes the human comedy. His art is cruel but just. He could teach you, if you stopped treating him as a punk and listened.”

“Oh, and what would he teach? Do I dare imagine? How to dance a lurid coranto around the fairy ring, perhaps, as thug pandas and man-eating bunny rabbits clap the measure?”

“Ridiculous. We only ask macrobiotic bunny rabbits.”

Gameboy, Gameboy, where will you go?
What do you see
Deep in Gameboy’s eyes?

“I’m walking,” Dennis Savage said, heading for the door. “I’m asking for consideration and I’m leaving the room. Be nice to Billy.”

“Be nice to Cosgrove.”

I was alone, then Gameboy came out.

“Can I play some more?” he asked.

“Fuck it—let’s get Zelda on.”

Our Saturday in New Jersey was a test of some kind: people who don’t entirely belong together in a place no one believes in. Imagine a benignly fumbling gay tour guide (Carlo), a testy gay Dido (Dennis Savage), his gay Aeneas replacement (Billy), the gay Gameboy (Cosgrove), and me (gay), set down among straight families and dating couples and the usual mischievous strays. It felt queer; know what I’m saying?

Yet Carlo was going to make us jolly if it killed us. “Look at all the rides you can go on,” he kept saying. Every now and then a group of teenage boys would pass and Carlo would get pensive. Then he’d be egging us on again.

We came to the bumper cars, and Dennis Savage grew fond.

“Oh, remember this?” he asked me.

“Pure violence,” I said.

“No, it’s . . . to work off your frustrations. An energy container.”

He looked happily at the children riding around and crashing into one another, squealing and shrieking.

Dennis Savage sighed. “They should settle territorial disputes and religious controversies like this. No more war: just diplomats in bumper cars. Think of Khomeini and Salman Rushdie tooling around in there, and Rushdie wins, and the fatwa is canceled.”

“That’s great,” said Carlo. “Then we burn Khomeini alive.”

The five of us stood watching as the ride ended and the kids hopped out of the cars.

“Well, I’m going to take a little trip around the ring,” said Dennis Savage, and he paid up and took his place in a bumper car.

Cosgrove, Billy, and I watched him patiently waiting for the power to turn on as kids of all kinds rampaged in and took their places. Carlo was staring at a shifty-looking blond boy who grinned and shot Carlo with a water pistol. Carlo grinned, too, as the youth vanished into the throng.

“You can see that Dennis Savage is the one, true grown-up around here,” Carlo told me.

“I don’t think of him like this,” said Billy. “Doing bumper cars. Do you like them, Cosgrove?”

Carlo smiled. He’s glad when anyone is nice to Cosgrove.

“I don’t see the point of all that bumping,” said Cosgrove. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

“No, it’s just fun.”

Dennis Savage waved at us.

“Everyone gets bumped,” Billy went on, “and they have a good time.”

Cosgrove, looking at the bumper cars, suddenly cried, “I’m going on that,” and he pulled out his wallet, grabbed a ticket, and rushed into the ring.

“That kid is so rad,” said Billy. “Look at him sitting in the little ride-a-car thing.”

We looked; and Cosgrove did seem unusual. I mean, unusual even for Cosgrove. Impatiently working the steering wheel, loudly singing the Shark Theme from
Jaws
, and banging his feet on the car floor, he looked like . . . well, like someone about to lead that coranto around the fairy ring with the pandas.

“Something’s going to happen,” said Carlo, who always knows.

Then the electricity pumped in and the cars shuddered into motion. Cosgrove screamed,
“Get out of my way I’m going to kill him!”
and he tore after Dennis Savage, still singing
Jaws
as he maneuvered among his fellow players to smash into Dennis Savage’s car.

“What are you
doing?”
Dennis Savage shouted, looking over his shoulder as he tried to steer away.

Billy was bemused.

Cosgrove rammed Dennis Savage again and again, screaming and singing and even gesturing at the overhead sparks as if they were friends of his.

Carlo was frowning and Billy just watching as the ride went on, the other drivers spinning out of Cosgrove’s way as he sallied forth.

“I’m going to bump him off!”
Cosgrove cried as he bore down on Dennis Savage.

Gslamm!

“Get him off me!” Dennis Savage called out. “Make him—”

Tchbyoing!

“Cosgrove,” I called out.
“Stop!”

But Cosgrove was singing the
Jaws
music and cascading all over Dennis Savage once again.

“They can’t get hurt,” Billy pointed out.

“Except their feelings,” said Carlo.

“Gangway!”

“Somebody stop him!”

Schmathrumm!

“You
lunatic!”

“Now I’ll get even! You threw me out! You made me cry and be alone! You wouldn’t let Virgil take me to love!”

“A lot of good that did us,” Dennis Savage reasoned, desperately driving out of Cosgrove’s way, “since now he’s—”

Dadasplong!

“Get that murderous zany out of this—”

“Cosgrove, you now will
cut it out!”
Carlo called out, and that is a call that Cosgrove must heed.

“I was only playing,” said Cosgrove, slowing down.

“Stop
playing.”

Cosgrove did. Another minute or so ran by, of nothing: kids laughing, the odd crash, the sparks, a few faces quizzing the participants in the drama.

Dennis Savage and Cosgrove came out of the bumpadrome, or whatever it is, rather sedately.

“That lurid little—” Dennis Savage began.

“Some fun he turned out to be,” said Cosgrove.

“Listen,” I began, but Carlo went right to Cosgrove and held him extra tight. But what he said was “You have to stop doing this.”

“Except I’m the one who got assaulted,” said Dennis Savage. “I had contemplated moseying around the circus minimus in a thoughtful nostalgia. Oh, but how wrong I was! Just as I was wrong to think that a first-class face and a lot of gym would get me through the 1970s. Or that I could skate through the rest of natural time on a profound and boundless love for the most handsome young lad in Stonewall. Everything I believed was wrong,
wrong
. Now here I am, sliding off the end of the big spoon. And who supports me? No one. There’s a demon at my back singing strange music—”

“Jaws,”
said Billy. “Yeah.”

“What is?”

“The music the little kid was singing. That’s
Jaws
, the movie. Get it?”

“As opposed,” said Dennis Savage,
just
keeping his poise, “to
Jaws
the musical?
Jaws
the underpants?”

“I want to go on the bumper cars again,” said Cosgrove.

Carlo said, “There are other rides for you.”

“I don’t want children’s rides. I’m twenty-two.”

“He’s a dead horror,” Dennis Savage muttered. So that was our Great Adventure. Disaster: because everyone’s feelings were stale.

As Billy explained it, “Nothing’s forever. Get it?”

I was painting. I’d ordered a new black leather couch from Bloomingdale’s—no, you’re wrong; it had been reduced down to nothing, which tells us that it’s not the name of the store but simply what day you happen into it that matters—and I had the old one carted off, and I moved a few things around. Suddenly I had an almost nice living room. It had always looked like a record store. Now it looked like a record store with a black leather couch.

Anyway, having changed the layout, I had to paint over newly exposed bits of wall. Cosgrove was out running errands. Dennis Savage was writing. And Billy came down to talk.

“I’ve been in and out of these places,” Billy was saying. “Don’t ask how many. And there I am, and this guy’ll be, like, ‘Oh, Billy.’ You know, during it. And, like, ‘This is incredible. Oh, Billy.’ Like sighing. The way chicks do, right? Or they’ll whistle real high like an alarm. Because I know I’ve got the Big Thing, and that’s what the deal’s about. Surely now, I wouldn’t bluff you. I’m Billy Boy, and they know me. At the clubs. On the street, even. Those glitter parties, too and all that. ‘Hey, there’s Billy Boy.’ Do my act or something. Sure. That’s cool.”

I was behind the armchair—also new, also black leather—catching up the wainscoting on the new look.

“Cos says you’re real nice to him,” Billy said.

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, so I kept it loose. “I take care of him,” I said.

“So you like the slendy type, huh? Some guys like heftos. A real heaviness. Eyes that . . . you know, can really look at you. They’re an armful, really fuctious. I don’t mind knowing about them, I can tell you.”

Painting.

“Everybody leaves you, though, sooner or later, don’t they? That’s what I keep noticing.”

“Everybody—”

“Leaves you. Nothing’s forever. There’s always some new thing in your life. Some glitter party to check out. Who knows who you could meet there? Going home after that, see? A little . . . you do me, I do you. I mean, it’s
okay
if they’re fuctious. You can really get off. But aren’t you always thinking of someone else? Someone you really liked before? Do you find that? Is that what happened to you, too? Because I notice you stopped painting.

“See, I know this guy,” he went on, right on. “Of the lawyer type, or something associated with that—with those cases you carry along with you? Everywhere they go, they open up the case, and there’s what they need. Folders and printouts. A
fax
kind of guy. Stripes on his suits and excellent shoulders from the gym and a beautiful ass like nothing else on earth. And if you stare at him long enough, you could tell his asshole is tingling and he knows what you know. All this in a striped suit and the briefcase, and this, like, really
handsome guy
kind of thing. Oh, you like this, right?”