Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle (42 page)

“All the monsters are outside,” said Cosgrove, helping Billy hunt through the pile of tapes.

“Why can’t we keep those things in some kind of order?” I said.

“That wouldn’t help,” said Billy, “because halfway through them, like, Pee-wee Herman is suddenly there, or cartoons come on.”

“Monsters say everything about you is wrong,” Cosgrove observed.

“Here it is.”

“Monsters say,
‘What are you doing?’ ”

“All right, now,” I said, “just put it on and let me get some work done.”

Billy fiddled with the machine, and the tape rode into play.

“Alien,”
Billy announced. He put an arm around Cosgrove’s shoulder. “See, Cos? All the monsters are make-believe in a movie.”

“Not all of them,” said Cosgrove.

“I was just wondering,” said Billy. “If Virgil came back, you know, and he was going to move in with the boss . . . I mean, what happens to Billy?”

He and Cosgrove were staring at the screen, watching
Alien
heave its vast, stupendously slow outer space into view. So whom was he talking to?

“Everything’s up in the air,” Billy said, still watching the movie.

Cosgrove leaned his head against Billy, and Billy put his arms around Cosgrove; and now they were ignoring the movie and just sitting like that, holding each other.

“We’re the two,” Billy murmured.

Dennis Savage said, “It’s fiction.”

“I’ll say it is. And look at this title. ‘Knowing When to Leave.’ It’s so sharp, so clipped. It’s so—”

“There are such people, you know.”

“You’re not one of them.”

“I
said
it’s—”

“Fiction, but why write first fiction about somebody else? This isn’t you.”

He uncrossed and recrossed his legs. “I’m saying,” he said, “does the story work or doesn’t it?”

“It lacks despair.”

We have these reading sessions. Whenever I finish a story—and now that Dennis Savage is writing, too, whenever
he
finishes a story—the other guy reads the text aloud to the author. It’s professional and useful. You hear the dialogue as dialogue, catch word repetitions the eye missed, listen to the story breathing. These are sacred times; one waits till Cosgrove is out running his errands and turns off the phone. One must not be disturbed.

I hope you noticed that I now have an answering machine. I was New York’s holdout, but after a decade or so it ceased to be picturesque and became irritating, even to me. And, I admit, having a screening system is an advantage, and makes me think fondly upon the space helmet I got for Christmas when I was nine: You can see out; they can’t see in. Cosgrove adores this screening feature, though for some reason he thinks you’re supposed to freeze during the operation, as if to move a step would blow your cover, tell “them” who you really are.

Messages are essential, he believes. If you don’t get them, you don’t matter. So, to buoy him up, Carlo and I took to phoning in miscellaneous
advices and queries in arcane voices. That fooled him for about three days. Now Cosgrove leaves his own messages, dallying at a pay phone to check in as Lord Pembroke Wintermonk with a message for a certain Cosgrove Replevin, Esquire.

“This story,” Dennis Savage was saying, “is about a man who doesn’t know what he needs.”

“No. It’s about a man who thinks he can get away with everything.”

“Look who’s talking.”

Cosgrove burst in, crying, “Quick! Let’s check the phone machine to see if there are messages!”

Dennis Savage said, “Doubtless there are one or two from that fabled gadabouttown, Sir Percival Ravenbat, or however that goes.”

“Lord Pembroke Wintermonk,” Cosgrove corrected, savoring it as he put the machine into action.

“We’re not done,” I protested as Dennis Savage tried to pry “Knowing When to Leave” out of my hands.

“Oh, I bet we are, for now.”

The first message was from my dentist’s office, asking how come I hadn’t made an appointment to have my broken filling redrilled. This is called Knowing When Not To Arrive. The second message was from Lord Pembroke, inviting Cosgrove to a weekend on the island of Samedi (I don’t know where he gets this stuff; could he be reading?) next July, as Cosgrove clasped his hands together at his throat like a diva ready for her high note.

“I may be free then,” Cosgrove told us.

The third message was from Lionel, who’s got I
Lombardi
on his Met subscription; and which recording and background book should he buy to Prepare? The fourth message was from Virgil, and ran, “Please listen. I’m running away and I’m going to come there now. Last night he punish-fucked me for no reason at all, and Bauhaus is dead, because of Cash. He took my money away.”

He was sobbing. This was real.

“Please be there. It’s just through the Park and I’ll be quick. Please can I come back? Please, did I do the . . . the wrong thing?
But don’t be mean to me. I have been punish-fucked enough.”

We heard the beep; message completed.

Then there was this pause.

“Punish-fucked?” I said.

Cosgrove was so stunned by the message that he had to pull himself together—I mean literally, wrapping his arms around his chest and hiking up his socks and smoothing down his hair.

“Now you see what has happened,” he was saying. “The rough ways of Cash and his friends.”

“Which friends are these?” I asked.

“One’s named Gordon, and there’s a leather guy known as Whambo. He isn’t even gay, mostly. And someone’s Rex.”

I glanced at Dennis Savage, who was calmly sorting through his papers, quite unavailable.

“Gordon Markey,” I noted. “And Rex Don. Jesus, the seventies are . . .”

Dennis Savage was examining a typo.

“Earth calling Dennis Savage.”

“Yes, I hear,” he said. “Gordon and Rex. Didn’t they have some scene with britches and haymows where Daddy directs his boys in disciplinary games . . . ?” He sighed. “Who would have supposed they’re still doing those things?”

“Especially to one of us.”

Dennis Savage shrugged, perusing his text. “If sex bliss is what he needs, he must pay the penalty.”

“Look who’s talking.”

Dennis Savage looked at me. “Sex bliss?
Moi?”

“Or what is Billy for?”

Cosgrove came nearer. “He was going to take me to
Creep-lies 2.”

“Gremlins
, first of all,” said Dennis Savage, neatening everything up, as always. “And Billy may, at first regard, appear to be an erotic icon. But you know how it
goes on?
It goes on as something warm to grasp at night. Go ahead and take away my membership card in the South of Fourteenth Street Jackoff Gemeinschaft, if you
must. But there it is. All I ask for is a good guy, you know?”

“So of course you wrote a story about someone who becomes promiscuous because he’s terrified of hooking up with a—”

“He is
not
—”

“Besides, you already know good guys,” I insisted. “You know plenty.”

Then Billy ambled in.

“Now, Billy,” Cosgrove began, “here are two very important things. First, will you take me to
Gremlies 2
, and second, we have to rescue Virgil any minute now.”

“Rescue him?” Dennis Savage echoed.

“Somehow I’m always in the wrong place,” said Billy. “Waking up after a cute little nap, and where is everybody? Down here, shooting the breeze, that’s surely true. So you’re going to be coming down, catching the action. Then you slip into the John for a fast piss-up. Come out and, whoa!, everybody’s back upstairs again eating the boss’s fancy meat loaf. I don’t get my timing right around here.”

“There’s a two o’clock show,” Cosgrove went on, “but we can’t go yet because Virgil’s coming over to be rescued.”

“Rescued?” said Dennis Savage. “No one has to rescue him. If he wants to come home, he can, anytime. Just not to my house.”

Cosgrove said, “You wear five-day derodeant pads, and this is the sixth day.”

“That is so stupid,” Dennis Savage rumbled.

“Easy,” I said, as Billy, on an agenda of his own, wandered off somewhere.

It went on like that for a while, till Virgil burst in, his gala return, his first time in the house since he had hooked up with Cash. Our Virgil, weeping.

“I ran all the way,” he cried. “Mostly.”

Dennis Savage ran, too. He walked out of the room without a word—though he
did
hang around till Virgil showed up, you notice—as Cosgrove and Virgil embraced and whimpered.

“Don’t answer the buzzer,” Virgil begged me, one eye on Dennis
Savage as he split. “Don’t let anyone in at all. You don’t know what this is. And I will say that you cannot imagine what he’ll do.”

“Virgil escaped with the clothes on his back,” Cosgrove pointed out.

“I still have some stuff upstairs.”

“Are you back to stay?” I asked. “Because there’ve been some changes heareabouts.”

Virgil did something strange then: He put out his arms and wandered around in a circle with his eyes closed. I get it: sleepwalking. And Cosgrove performed a touch of boogie, like a devotee at a rock concert when the band performs its hit single.

“What changes?” asked Virgil, coming to rest.

“You’re a bad little boy, you know,” I said. “You’re a piece of trash, in fact.”

“I’m back,” said Virgil. “I made a mistake and I want to come home now.”

“That sounds so simple to do,” I said.

“This is the start of the new segment of my life.”

“Yes!” Cosgrove agreed.

“From now on, I will be known as James Fenimore Castaway.”

“Oh!” said Cosgrove. “And I could be Hopalong Castaway.” His look darkled. “Or perhaps Lord Pembroke Winter—”

“You’re not anything,” I told Virgil. “You’re not even a homeboy here. You got yourself written out of the stories.”

Virgil began to cry, and the buzzer rang.

“Please,” he begged. “It’s Cash and his friends. Please don’t let them.”

“This is ridiculous,” I said, answering the summons. “We’re not going to—Yes, hello?”

It was Steve the doorman, announcing a messenger. I told him to keep the package for me. When I turned back to the room, Cosgrove and Virgil were holding each other, lightly swaying to the rhythm of Virgil’s snuffling.

“All right, you two. Break it up, and let’s deal the cards. First,” I asked Virgil, “who the hell are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said. Because one day you were this affectionate young man whom I loved, and the day after that you were all serious and self-important and throwing poor Cosgrove around till—”

“He
never!”
Cosgrove cried.

“Yes, he did, all right. He dumped you like—”

“I am
James Fenimore Castaway
! And if you think—”

“And
I
am Hopalong—”

“Both of you
shut up
and
eat
it for
breakfast!
And I am
not
calling anyone James Fenimore Castaway!”

“A simple Mister J. Fenimore will suffice.”

“Let me ask you something. Were you planning to just march upstairs and move in again?”

Virgil—all right, J. (which is as much as I can manage)—turned a few colors. “I know there’s someone else up there,” he said. “And . . . changed feelings of a somewhat kind.”

“Would you buy me a puppy?” Cosgrove suddenly asked me.

“Now?”

He shrugged. “Or a little later.”

“No.”

“Please!”

“Speaking of that,” I asked J., “where’s Bauhaus?”

“He died. It was so sad. Cash kept saying he would throw him right out the window, but in the whole truth of fact he just let him run loose in the street and I know it was deliberately. Because Bauhaus really never quite knew what a car was.”

“He was run over? Bauhaus?”

J. nodded.

“Bauhaus is dead,” I said, taking it in.

“Did he go squush?” Cosgrove asked fearfully.

J. nodded.

Cosgrove exhaled audibly in horror.

J. nodded.

“Although I never really liked him,” Cosgrove went on. “He was a little grotesque in certain ways.”

“He was a stray,” J. reminded us. “And we took him in and tried to be kind to him.”

Cosgrove, a stray himself, got very quiet.

“Anyway, I’m back. I missed everybody, whether you believe that or not, and I had a very strange time, which I will someday tell of.”