You Can Say You Knew Me When (22 page)

“We’ve been married for most of my life. You don’t last that long without having a little something extra on the side.” His eyes were positively twinkling. “I live on the other side of the park, just off the Panhandle. Come with me.”

I shook my head. “Walt, me and my boyfriend—we just don’t—I mean, with other people.”

“Yes, but you were pedaling through the glen, weren’t you? Looking. Surely not for the likes of me, but nevertheless.”

No, not looking. Cruising.

He took his hand off my ass. “I’ll make you a cup of tea. I’ll tell you more stories like this. You seem interested.” With a tilt of his head he added, “Or I could blow you.”

His smile told me that I would go with him, that my resistance was silly, that he knew better. And yes, I was charmed. He had so much spunk in him. Ian would have classified Walt as a forefather by sheer virtue of longevity, history, freedom of spirit. Getting a blow job from this guy wouldn’t be simply sex. It would be an offering. A tribute. A concept Woody might even understand, I foolishly told myself.

I followed that confident smile back to the main drive. We lifted my bike into the trunk of his car, a big, twenty-year-old gas guzzler. He drove along the ocean, up past the Cliff House. The wind was whipping up the hair of tourists, who leaned against the concrete cliff-top wall, taking photos of each other, preserving for the future their postcard San Francisco.

He owned a three-story Victorian in the Western Addition, a neighborhood that at one time marked the city’s western edge but was now smack in its center. The light in his house was dim, the walls adorned like a nineteenth-century salon, with a grid of oil paintings, old lithographs, outdated maps, framed newspaper headlines from yesteryear. He led me into a parlor, where a burgundy couch on carved wooden legs faced a charred fireplace. The mantle held brass candelabras, a couple of clocks, china bowls laden with chocolates; the mirror was dappled with irregularities and streaks of wax. I stole a glance at our reflection: Walt, a gleam in his eye, watching me take it all in; me, looking awed but unsure, like Alice down the rabbit hole.

He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with two cans of Budweiser, and we sat on the couch, which looked plush but felt stiff and lumpy. He told me he’d owned this place since 1954, when he and his lover bought it with a one-thousand-dollar down payment.

“Is he here now? Your lover?”

“No, no. Carter is staying in Monterey for the weekend. He has a fellow he visits from time to time. They were hot and heavy once, twenty years ago, but now they mostly just reminisce.”

I downed a mouthful of beer. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you.”

“This neighborhood is full of us. We bought up the Victorians back in the fifties, when they were considered worthless eyesores. You’ll find plenty of old queens living behind these doors.”

He led me upstairs, pointing out the gaslight lamps, still in working order, at the top and bottom of the banister. On the second floor stood a wooden mannequin draped in an ornate bridal gown—“Worn by Joan Sutherland in
Il Trovatore,”
Walt boasted, and I acted impressed, though I was ignorant on this subject. Walt had worked for years in the props department of the San Francisco Opera, where much of this campy décor originated. Carter had been a travel agent, and they’d visited “every continent except the South Pole.” He looked up at the mounted head of a wild boar brought back from Africa, when shooting game on safari was still commonplace. “You killed that?” I asked. “Carter,” he replied with a sigh that could have indicated deference or disapproval. He slid up the lid of a rolltop desk crammed with playbills from local gay theater productions. On the wall above was a 1967 newspaper photo of Walt and a gang of friends the night they showed up in full flapper drag for the premiere of
Thoroughly Modern Millie
at the Alhambra Theater.

“I think the Alhambra just closed,” I said.

He nodded. “They’re turning it into a fitness club.”

“That’s terrible,” I moaned.

He merely shrugged. “We enjoyed it while we had it.”

He led me down a hallway past several closed doors to a small, sunlit bedroom, its walls covered in framed black-and-white snapshots. He pointed to one. “Here you go. This would have been before we moved in to this place. Carter’s on the right.”

Young Walt was lanky in a white T-shirt tucked into blue jeans. Carter was broader, with a lantern jaw and an athletic neck. Their arms circled each other’s waists. “What a couple of studs you were,” I said.

“Up here,” he said, tapping a finger against his temple, “I’m still a looker. Same dirty mind, same lusts. It’s only the package that’s failed me.”

I asked his full name and got a bit of biography. Walter van der Neuen. Born Dutch, moved to the States as a kid in the mid-1930s. He fought in World War Two for the US Navy and afterwards came to San Francisco, where he discovered gay bars, stumbled upon orgies in Golden Gate Park and, at a house party, met his beau, John Carter—known as Carter to everyone because there were several Johns among their friends. As a couple, they became the center of a social circle, an elderly version of which survived today. “Best thing I ever did was buy this house,” Walt told me, then corrected himself. “Second best. The first was marrying down with Carter.”

I scanned the pictures of him and Carter and their friends, young guys at picnics, in restaurants, around a dinner table with glasses raised, preserved in silver, forever young. Bright eyes, thick, slicked-back hair, skin flushed with activity and inexperience—I could have fallen for any one of them. My gaze landed on a raven-haired, pale-skinned boy who carried himself with a Montgomery Clift unease, brooding to the point of smoldering. “Okay, I found him,” I announced. “This one would have broken my heart.”

Walt nodded knowingly. “Yup. Norman Berry. Norman suffered very romantically. Always a drama with that one. He lived here for a while.”

“With you and Carter?”

“For about four or five years. A three-way affair at first, and later just friends. Very entangled friends. You had to take care of Norman. He was no good on his own. He drank a lot, and wrecked my car once, and got beaten up by the cops and roughed up by a trick. Carter never quite got over him.” He guided me to a particularly ravishing image of Norman and Carter, in swimsuits on a sandy riverbank, nuzzling their heads together. Norman offered a rare smile in this one. “You were sandwiched between these two?” I marveled.

“On a regular basis. Norman slept right in there.” He pointed through the connecting doorway to a room with a double bed, an antique wardrobe, its own washbasin. This room led to another, much the same in appearance—a corridor of hidden chambers. Walt said, “I’ve lost count of how many strays we took in over the years. If these walls could talk, they’d sing Puccini.”

I thought of my new recorder, cursed myself for not having it with me. But how could I have known where this day would lead me?

“Did you happen to know someone named Don Drebinski?” I asked.

He pressed his lips flat, furrowed his brows. “Rings a bell.”

“I’ve been trying to get information about him. He was a bar owner. Don’s Place?”

“Oh, that Don. The big Polack.”

A spike of hope-fueled adrenaline—“Can you tell me about him?”

“Bit of a tippler, as I recall. He was the type to buy you a round on the house just so he could have another himself. But he kept his regulars happy.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of him, would you?”

Walt scanned the wall, shaking his head. “We can ask Carter. He’s got stacks of albums in the basement. Carter might have known Don. Hell, he might have
had
Don.”

“This is my lucky day,” I gushed.

“You don’t say.” His eyes stroked me with approval, my enthusiasm clearly bringing him pleasure. I remembered his hand on my ass in the park, wondered whether, after this history lesson, I owed him something in return. Walt seemed heroic to me, brave; he’d created a dignified life at a time when it couldn’t have been easy. And if he wasn’t quite sexy to me now, he certainly would have been back then. Norman Berry may have been my instant favorite, but in picture after picture I found myself drawn to the tall guy with the confident smile at the edge of the frame. Walt had been the ringleader with the rooming house, the guy who watched over everyone, keeping track of personalities and affairs and the alliances that formed and dissolved—much like he was watching me now, so keenly that it seemed he could monitor my thoughts. I felt almost transparent, a filament, a sliver.

“This way,” Walt said, his hand on my lower back, guiding me into Norman Berry’s room. “There’s your boyfriend.” On the wall was a huge image of a naked Norman, an enlarged photograph, easily three feet tall and a foot wide, hand-tinted and glued to a knotty pine board. The wood was nicked and whittled along its edges and coated with varnish. What was the word for this particular kind of handicraft? Ah, yes:
decoupage
. It sounded French, but it was the tackiest Americana ever.

My eyes were wide with awe at the sight of Norman stepping out of a pair of trousers, one leg stuck among the folds of the material, the other bent at the knee and suspended above the floor. He was leaning forward, emphasizing his wiry frame. He had enough hair on his body at this young age to indicate he’d have much more of it later—his shoulders would flower like his forearms; the T pattern of curls on his chest and rigid abdomen would thicken, dense as his pubic bush. His cock was a short, plump sausage, raised up from hairy nuts, on its way to an erection.

As was mine.

Walt moved in front of me and began busying himself at my fly. I looked down at his hands, wrinkled and age spotted but still dexterous, ably getting my belt undone, my zipper lowered. As my pants slid over my butt and down my thighs, I thought, Well, here we go. My cock popped out and bobbed in front of him. “Good job,” Walt said, a paternal approval in his voice, as if I’d brought home something I’d built in wood shop.

With one hand he freed his own cock, which was uncut and surprisingly large; the foreskin dangled loosely, battered from age, the skin weathered
.
With some exertion, he lowered himself to one knee, and plunged my cock into his mouth. It felt good. A mouth on your dick always feels good. I closed my eyes, lost in the sensation, but opened them again quickly. This was worth watching. The oddness of looking down on the top of his head, where his ruddy scalp was visible through a thinning snow-white patch; at his old man’s face, his thin lips concealing, then revealing my cock. He kept his shirt on, but I could see a crescent of his abdomen droop over his wiry, gray pubic hair. He tugged on his own slowly stiffening cock, the foreskin drawing back to reveal the sensitive cap. I could smell him for the first time, not unclean, just aged. For some reason what came to mind was the backseat of a car, when you’re a kid and you’ve fallen asleep on a long ride home and your nose is right up against the vinyl; a memory of driving home from Nana and Papa’s apartment. Weird. All of it weird.
He’s seventy and he’s giving me head.

On the wall, Norman, undressing for the ages, stared with his seductive, Monty Clift eyes.

Walt was sucking with gusto, his face reddening. Was he over-exerting himself, heading toward cardiac arrest, the blow job to end all blow jobs? I was ready to suggest that he stop, that we take a break, a
breather
, as it were (his breath was truly sounding strained), when I noticed that all around me—on the dresser and the end table and the wall to either side—were more pictures of Norman Berry. Norman in a dozen sexy poses: shirtless, in a swimsuit, in a sweat-stained T-shirt. The room was a fucking tribute to Norman Berry’s beauty and intensity, his damaged, needy, boyish soul. He’d been gone for years, but Walt and Carter, who’d been his lovers and caretakers and the prime recipients of his troublemaking appeal, had enshrined him here. Walt had brought me to this room, out of all the rooms in this big house, to participate in a lineage of desire extending back half a century.

I was fixating on one photo, Norman in a bar, Carter next to him on a stool, behind them, dimly lit, a slightly older, stocky bartender who, I decided, was Don Drebinski.
The big Polack. Carter might have had him.
Carter and Don and Norman and Walt—everywhere I looked were men preserved in silver, in amber, all of them somehow connected to me, to me through Teddy Garner, and somewhere in the midst of this was Walt slipping a spit-soaked finger up inside me, finding my prostate, pressing.
Tap, tap, tap
was all it took. I pulled back and tilted sideways, letting loose onto the carpet. He wrapped his hand where his mouth had been and extended my agitation, the endorphin rush stretching past its time-bound limits. Eyes closed, I might have been suspended in the air, floating in varnish like Norman Berry.

Walt was looking up in admiration, coughing a little and licking his lips. “Sorry about the rug,” I said. He shook his head, looking pretty winded. “Are you okay?” I asked, which might have been a youthful faux pas, a blow to his vanity. Still, he didn’t seem to mind when I helped him to his feet. His joints cracked as I sat him on the bed. He put his hand on my forehead and very tenderly wiped sweat from my brow.

“What about you?” I asked.

He flapped his hand. “I don’t think you have that much time.”

“I want to,” I said.

He scrutinized me, for sincerity, I suppose, then reached into a drawer from which he pulled a cylinder of lube. He slathered my hand with the stuff, and then guided my hand to his cock, establishing a particular rhythm. He closed his eyes, and his face took on a contentment that made it almost childlike. The lines around his eyes smoothed out, his wet lips loosened and quivered, his breath deepened. I watched him relax into a different state, one that allowed him to take instead of give. It was the most remarkable face I’d ever watched on its way to an orgasm. I talked dirty and praised him—“That felt so good, Walt, you’re the best cocksucker ever, you’re a fucking master, I hope one day I’m as good as you”—caressing his ego along with his skin. From somewhere in the house a clock chimed, reminding me of the minutes passing as I stood above him, methodical, incantatory, studious. At last his body stiffened and moaned, until he was nearly keening from the depths of his throat, erupting with a vulnerable cry.