Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  The stage manager invited Benjamin to stay in Toronto, saying that a temporary separation might help. When Benjamin announced to the Queen that he would not continue with the tour of Macbeth and he wanted a separation, the actor feigned hurt and anger, but Benjamin could read through his act, and could see relief written on his face.

  Six months later, Benjamin returned to London, having decided to settle down in Toronto. He packed his trunks. Queen Mary had returned triumphant from the tour, and did not have another young man living in the house as Benjamin had expected. The actor was unusually subtle, Benjamin thought, in his plea for reconciliation.

  Benjamin said, “You’ve acquired a certain believability and sincerity since your film acting has developed. I almost believe you.”

  The Queen said, “You will realize, my darling, that you will never be as comfortable as you have been with me. Hasn’t Toronto taught you anything? What can that fool in Canada offer you?”

  “Nothing,” Benjamin said. “We are only rooming together. I am not his lover, and before it’s too late, I want to try to establish my own career, for myself. I’ve always been someone else’s patsy.”

  “Patsy!” the Queen gasped, losing his film nuance and becoming theatrically demonstrative. “Your career is with me! You are something with me! You have earned a prominent place in my biography if fame is what you’re looking for, and don’t scoff! You’ll be back. With your tail between your legs. All the Marys in Canada cannot compare to me and you know it!”

  Then the actor’s voice lowered and he climbed atop the coffee table and looked down and almost whispered, “And darling, how dare you think that I am not aware of my many many moods. Of course you don’t understand, of course you get hurt. I am an artiste!” His voice enlarged and now echoed, “And you say I have boys everywhere! Well? Well? So bloody what! And you say that I never say I love you? Well look around, darling. I say I love you by letting you live here. By letting you into my inner sanctum!”

  Benjamin closed the trunks. He closed his feelings for the actor and told himself that the histrionics were merely ridiculous and further confirmation of the end. He was no longer the giddy girl he’d been when he and the Queen of British theater had danced drunken about the house during those first years. He now had a life in Canada. He was studying acting. He had studied speech. He did not tell the Queen that he had auditioned and been hired at a new little television station in Toronto, and that he was to be the weatherman. He knew the Queen would ridicule that. Television was a fad. He kissed the Queen goodbye and had the servants help him with his trunks.

  “How dare you steal from me!” Queen Mary screamed as the door closed.

  What I know about Benjamin is that he never talked about wanting to be an actor, but I guess I believe it’s true if I wrote it. I believe and then I think that this is all inspiration and I’m just gifted, then I feel so tired and I conk out like in a trance, and then I come to and I’ve ejaculated in my underwear and I read this stuff and it’s just so weird, and it’s even weirder that Vera told me that I went off with that guy Scotty at the beach and gave him a blow job under the boardwalk, and I came back to the blanket and told her about it. I don’t remember that. This is the first time ever that I don’t remember doing it, unless Vera’s lying. Hell, I want to be into sex. Maybe I’m cracking up like in the movies. Maybe I’m a murderer too. Maybe I’ve fucked Vera. God. I need to turn on every white light in my house.

  I have control over my young man. I might add that Scotty was not so hot. Once Brian came, I was bored and Brian finished Scotty off by hand. Sperm is nectar for us queer spirits, and I have Brian by his delectable Italian balls. I remember when Red, Benjamin’s spirit, and I were in Rome. Caligula was possessed by a queer purple spirit and a powerful electrical green spirit, and it was bizarre, but that’s another story.

  The weather star over Toronto. The pinnacle of achievement for Benjamin.

  Although he thought he was on the first rung of a ladder, he had reached his peak. Television was primitive. There were only a few thousand sets within the signal of Benjamin’s station, but he was recognized on the street.

  “Aren’t you the weatherman?” people would ask.

  He loved that. He did miss the opulence of his life with the Queen, but drinking seemed to take the edge off his regrets. In 1951, at the age of thirty-four, Benjamin rented his first apartment. He had a steady income, a degree of notoriety, and he was working in the warmth of the bright studio lights. He was distant from the other people at the station; most of them were also in radio. He didn’t feel included in their world, and he didn’t want them to know of his secret world. He knew he would be fired. He did keep three very secretive friendships with three queens he’d met through his old roommate. They called him Mary Weathergirl. When they would get together after a week of pent-up lust and sham, they would get drunk and silly and sashay about whoever’s house they were in, and “let loose” purging their hidden lives in screeching camp, mimicking the people they mutually knew, but could never know.

  Benjamin moved to New York after being fired from the weatherman’s job in 1953. He was a drinker, a heavy drinker. He had, after all, Red, Teddy Purnhagen’s spirit, and although he preferred highballs to whiskey from a flask on a slippery deck with leg muscles spent from orgasm, Benjamin had begun to mix screwdrivers in a thermos and drink at the station.

  One day he received a warning from the management that he had been monitored slurring his words and swaying during the noon broadcast. He was told that it should not happen again. Benjamin wanted to explain how monotonous the wait between shows was, and why he was so careless, but there was no way he could be honest and blame it on Queen Mary. No one would believe him.

  What happened was, Queen Mary was in town playing Othello, and he and Benjamin had had a few dates, drinking each other under the table. The actor ridiculed Benjamin’s silly occupation and accused him of wasting his life.

  “You were something when you were with me. You were there on stage with me in every performance, and now look at you. Didn’t I warn you? Didn’t I tell you? You didn’t know how good you had it, did you, darling?”

  Benjamin mixed more drinks in the Queen’s suite, and tried to explain that his job was only the first step, that television was the theater of the future, but he was interrupted by the drunken voice that could “hush a thousand cries.”

  “To where? Where can you go? You don’t know the first thing about weather. I can see your eyes reading on camera, darling. Why you don’t know if the sun or the moon is out! You never knew if it was raining or foggy. Be serious. Really. Where do you plan to go? Newsman? How droll! And you’re not getting any younger. Your hair is thinning. I could tell when you stood at that shaky weather map. They must have a light spot shining directly down on you. It’s unflattering. There’s a shine. Powder might help, darling, but why don’t you give up and come tour with me.”

  Benjamin felt his hairline. He was drunk out of reason. He admitted that he had noticed some hairs in his brush. He admitted that the excitement was limited and more and more people from radio were coming into the station taking new positions.

  The next day, during the evening news broadcast, he knocked the map over and blurted out in disgust that the weather was once again going to be “bloody wet!” and he was fired. He went to the Queen’s suite and accused him of deliberately getting him drunk in order to undermine his burgeoning career in television, and he told the actor that there was no way in hell that he would tour with Othello.

  “I’m leaving Toronto and moving down to the States, to New York,” he said.

  In New York, Benjamin was hired to play Cooky the Clown on the local children’s program, “Flying High with Captain Windy.” He wore a rubber hat that made him look bald, and a yellow suit with a polka dot tie that hung to the floor. He was hit with pies, squirted with water, did pratfalls over his tie, and directed guest children down the slide. Essentially his job was to keep the children
in front of the camera.

  A dim clown star over Manhattan for Benjamin Quinn.

  Benjamin was definitely balding. He claimed that wearing the rubber bald cap under the hot lights as Cooky the Clown was what was causing him to lose his hair. He no longer felt like the handsome youth or the dapper man, and the “somebody” he had set out to be was an unrecognizable sidekick to an egomaniac named Captain Windy. Benjamin read of a hair specialist in Rockaway, Queens, and he took the train there and bought his first toupee.

  “You look like a twenty-year-old!” the specialist exclaimed.

  And so Benjamin moved from his apartment in Gramercy Park, to a new place in Greenwich Village. The people in his old building would know he was wearing a hairpiece, but the neighbors in his new area would think he was young. And in 1957, beatniks and artists and queers were welcome in Greenwich Village. Benjamin took an apartment above the restaurant that would one day be the bar called Rodeo. He never really liked the apartment. He claimed that the smells from the restaurant below bothered him, and he found that keeping something baking in his oven disguised the greasy smells from downstairs. But the real reason he never felt comfortable in the apartment was that his spirit knew of the Rodeo Bar to be, and knew that Benjamin would die there, and Benjamin sensed a gray doom whenever he was at home for long. He took to bars. He was an alcoholic, and with his new habit of baking, he was also getting fat.

  “Captain Windy” went off the air in 1958 and Benjamin quit television for good, telling a friend, “The Golden Age is over, it’s all ratings now.” And that same friend found Benjamin a job as a supernumerary with the Metropolitan Opera.

  At the Met, he met a dresser named Robert Winters. Robert was 57, sixteen years older than Benjamin. Robert had white hair and worn pink skin. He was meticulous and very proper. Benjamin was flattered by Robert’s attentions, and he knew that as his lover, he would always be younger. Benjamin believed that Robert was deceived by the toupee he wore. Robert, on the other hand, never mentioned the hairpiece because he knew how vain Benjamin was. And he liked it. Benjamin proposed they live together at Robert’s apartment on the Upper East Side. Benjamin never wanted to return to that strange apartment on Christopher Street.

  When one of his three queen friends from Toronto visited, Benjamin explained, “I was so tired of living alone. I need to be with someone. He’s so much older than me, and so set in his ways, but we keep each other cheered up.”

  And during a visit from an old friend from London, he said, “Oh, it’s not like it was with the Queen, you know how wild that time was, but Babs is kind and cultured.” Babs was Benjamin’s pet name for Robert, and Cooky was Robert’s pet name for Benjamin. He continued, “Babs is sweet to me. I’m content for once in my life.”

  Both Babs and Cooky would wear silk dressing gowns around their apartment, and Babs convinced Cooky to attend a few drag balls. Benjamin never admitted to Robert just how much he loved wearing those full wigs. And Benjamin redecorated the apartment, wanting to make his mark, making it as red as possible. Sexually, they had very little together. Benjamin saw Robert buy a trick in a bar one night and was shocked. He swore he’d never stoop to such humiliation. But seeing the satisfaction on Babs’s face soon convinced him to try it. He found that once he was the buyer, he could be selective, and, in turn, he found himself realizing just what his tastes in men were. And Benjamin prided himself on being an expert shopper. He found bargains at auctions, and attended closeout sales in order to get the most for his money. And so, he soon found out what kind of trick he wanted to hire for an evening. He found that he liked “Big colored bangers.”

  Babs made him promise to never bring a colored trick home to their apartment, fearing that they might be robbed or tied up or murdered, “If not by your trick, then by our neighbors, Cooky. This is uptown, Park Avenue, not Harlem or the village.”

  Benjamin became a dresser like Robert in 1965. There were times when he would reflect on his life and feel that he had never applied himself toward success. But he still had hope. He played sweepstakes. He entered contests that came in the mail. He always had the feeling that one day he would be the big winner, something that would thrust him into the spotlight, like it had been in Toronto. He thought that if he could write down some of his clever and funny ideas, he could write a hilarious musical. Babs had been working on a “musical” for years. That was the other thing, aside from the toupee, that Babs never talked about with Benjamin. He never let Cooky read it.

  “Please,” Benjamin asked. “What are you afraid of? If it’s so funny, let me in on the joke.”

  “No,” Robert said. “It’s not finished. It’s my art. I will know when it’s ready to be read.”

  Benjamin decided that collecting antiques and cooking were his arts. He planned elegant dinners that reminded him of his days at Queen Mary’s house in London. He would have guests up to the apartment and they would rave about the decor and whether they meant it or not, they always told Benjamin and Robert that their apartment was “out of House and Garden.”

  Benjamin would modestly shrug and claim, “Oh, I just put it all together, with no rhyme or reason. It’s just a talent I have for color and fabric, and everything was a bargain. That settee was only two hundred at Sotheby’s auction.” Thus, he was able to point out his shopping expertise along with his keen design eye.

  As a dresser with the Met, Benjamin traveled to Los Angeles. Queen Mary was in Hollywood doing a film. He was not starring, but he talked as if he did have the pivotal role as he and Benjamin dined.

  “I haven’t had as many offers, but my new agent insists that I be seen. There’s a new generation that, as hard as you may find this to believe, might not know my name. He’s talking commercials for television, but I said, ‘Never!’ ”

  Benjamin started to say, “There just aren’t as many roles for older—” but Queen Mary grasped his hand across the table and interrupted.

  “Don’t say it. Don’t you dare. I am still an honored actor (he’d been knighted in 1964) and I can bring a touch of class to any dismal B movie, and by the way darling, that rug looks ridiculous.”

  Benjamin blushed, then hissed and felt his heart sharply stab in his chest. He hissed again, insinuating the Queen was just being catty, and he said as clear voiced as he could, “No one knows, not even my lover. They all think it’s real.”

  “Yes, darling, believe what you must, but the truth is, no one has the nerve to tell you. Darling, it doesn’t look natural.”

  Benjamin faked a laugh. “You wouldn’t know ‘natural’ if it came up and wagged itself in front of your face. And you couldn’t see anything anyway without your specs.”

  The actor patted Benjamin’s hand and said in a motherly manner, “Darling, trust me on this.”

  That was the last time Benjamin spoke with the Queen. The Queen died later that year of heart failure. The director of the film was interviewed concerning completion of the picture without the celebrated actor, and he said, “He will be greatly missed, but he had completed his part in the film, it was not big, but it was pivotal.”

  But that final talk with the Queen in Los Angeles triggered Benjamin’s vanity block and fixed his vanity star, and set in motion his eventual end. The year was 1967. Benjamin was about to turn fifty, which is somewhat late for a vanity star, but in this case that was when the block was finally assembled. Benjamin returned to his hotel room, leaving the Queen at the table with the check forever. He swore as he rode the elevator that he would never see the Queen again. He was furious over such catty remarks that had been made about his hair. Certainly Robert would have said something, he thought. He remembered the years at Aunt Ev’s when he would take the blame for something he hadn’t done. He remembered the pent-up noise that would ring in his ears as he screamed into his pillow. He fell into his bed at the hotel room. He felt the pressure in his skull, and he felt the pulse of his veins against the tape on his head. He wanted to rip the wig from his skin and throw it out the wind
ow. He knew that he had been trying to be something other than himself, a younger, happier, sexier, richer person than he was. He went to the mirror. He stood for a moment, looking. He lifted the hairpiece slightly, and then the noise in his head stopped. It was quiet. The block, a block of compressed tears and mucus, dried with fifty years of screams, absorbed the din, calmed his heart, and padded his mind. He straightened the toupee. He looked fine. He looked closer to thirty than fifty, he thought. He held his stomach in and moved a few feet back from the mirror. From there, he was quite the “turn on,” he thought. He found his hand mirror to see the reflection of the back of his head in the dresser glass. Then he made a quick turn to catch his image in a complete look of surprise. He turned the lights on and off. He made lewd and lecherous looks, and he shook his hair in a free-spirited manner. It still looked real. The Queen was old and jealous. The mirror would never lie, he decided.

  The vanity star over Los Angeles.

  Most vanity stars appear when inner aches and outer lines and sags appear. When youth is noticed and envied, and you’re not within it. In L.A., Benjamin had the opportunity to confront himself, to age with honesty, gracefully. The hairpiece was merely the catalyst. The point is, he completely stopped hearing his heart, he stopped hearing Red. All spirits come through the heart. He stopped loving himself, if only a sliver, and chose to be blind and deaf. The energy used to keep up the facade could have been spent on health, but instead, his muscles soon degenerated, he needed glasses (which he never wore in public), and his heart developed a murmur. The vanity block had not happened overnight. He’d been wearing the toupee for ten years. But his confrontation with himself in the mirror was the last straw. From then on, in his heart, he would feel superficial. He would always know that what someone was seeing in him might be the fake part. His smile, his eyes, his waistline, no part of him would be genuine to his conscious mind, there would always be costumes and roles. Block after block would assemble till it formed a tomb, and Benjamin’s queer red spirit would have to hack deathblows to escape.