Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  On his return to New York with the Met, Benjamin was shocked at how old Robert looked and acted. Robert felt the distance from Benjamin but thought that it came from being apart for months. Benjamin, determined to “live, live, live,” wanted everything changed. He announced to Babs, “Red is out. Psychedelic purple would be wild. I want to get all the furniture reupholstered.”

  Hey, I wonder if Benjamin ever dropped acid. Man, that might of cleared up whatever the hell was going with him about his looks. It sounds like too big of a deal. He was still pretty cool for an old gay man on his own. I bet if he’d dropped acid, he would have melted away all that shit. I know that the first time I dropped acid, I saw how fake everything was. I got to the core. I felt in tune with the universe. And sexually, I felt like a horse. I have this animal inside. Butts are horses, butts. Those muscles! I see these guys in their tight trunks and they’re stallions. I want to ride them!

  Benjamin was offered drugs by one of his tricks. He never dared try them, afraid of losing control. Like I said, he was expending an enormous amount of energy on his blocked head. Robert was in the hospital undergoing chemotherapy and offered pills to Benjamin, but he refused, saying the only pill he could tolerate was Valium.

  In 1972, Robert died. Benjamin was with him at the hospital. He remembered watching his mother die. He held Babs’s hand and tried not to care what anyone would think if they saw him. When he was going through Robert’s papers, he found the “musical” Babs had been writing, tied with a ribbon and accompanied with a note, “For you to read, Cooky, it’s finished.”

  The play was set on Wall Street and was called Summer Stock. A stockbroker falls in love with a struggling actress and so on. It was not original. It was not very funny. It did not “make mincemeat out of all the cliches we work on,” as Babs had claimed to Benjamin. They both had become dressers for Broadway shows. Anyway, the play was not finished and had never been read. It never played anywhere but in Robert’s head, but what a glorious run it had there. There were constant rewrites and sex changes and new songs. As Robert had aged, all the characters had aged, and the styles changed as his own wardrobe was updated. It closed when he died. It had a brief revival as Benjamin read it. There was a character in the play that wore a toupee, but Benjamin did not see himself in it. And now the play is on a shelf in Benjamin’s house under his stack of Playbills, and Brian, who will inherit the house and its contents, will never read the entire draft. He’ll be curious, after this, to read it, but he’ll be easily bored.

  I inherit Benjamin’s house!

  Benjamin bought the house with money Robert willed to him. He was out in Rockaway at his confessor’s hair shop. This man was the only person Benjamin patronized. There, in the sanctuary of the shop, Benjamin could complain of the itch he felt, or the discomfort of the new adhesive he’d tried. He always felt cleansed after a visit to the specialist in Rockaway, and one day, on his way to the train, he passed a real estate office that displayed beach bungalow photographs in its window.

  The landowner star rises off the coast of Long Island.

  The bungalow Benjamin bought was built on a sandy soil. He loved the roses that climbed over trellises throughout the yard, and along the whitewashed clapboard siding. It seemed to him to be a lot like an English cottage. The real estate agent wisely left Benjamin alone in the house as he talked with the sellers on the front porch. Benjamin imagined all of his purple furniture and his paintings in the rooms. He imagined fresh cut roses on the tables. He asked about television reception after a plane crossed overhead, landing at JFK airport. And the decision was settled as he stood at the kitchen sink and thought, “I’ll have to make a concentrated effort at collecting vases. I’ll need so many.”

  Benjamin moved from Manhattan with Felicia, the Siamese cat he had given to Robert. His few friends had discouraged the move, telling him that he would be spending all of his time commuting. And, during a particularly deep sodomizing by Cal, one of Benjamin’s regular tricks, he doubted whether Cal would be willing to take the train way out to Rockaway, and he thought he would have to pay extra, and possibly let the tricks sleep over, and he worried what the neighbors would think, and then he squealed as Cal shot his load and his mind went blank.

  Cal always thought he was “nailing it to whitey” when he worked on Benjamin. He told Benjamin, “I don’t know, man, that’s way the ways out. I’d have to charge more.”

  Despite the long commute to Broadway and the late hour when he returned, Benjamin would usually wake at seven and put on the big teakettle he had received from Queen Mary’s widow. She had remained in touch with Benjamin over the years, and she wrote a note that accompanied the kettle: “He would have wanted you to have this. I’m sure you remember how particular he was about his tea. Remember him fondly. He always referred to you as his young ‘darling.’ ” Benjamin would watch the “Today” show, then “Phil Donahue,” and then game shows and drink tea the entire morning. During the warmer months, the roses and the garden and the stray cats would win out over television, at least for part of the day.

  He rarely went to the beach. When a friend could be persuaded to make the trek out to Rockaway, they would want to see the beach, and he would walk with them if coaxed, but he would wear a hat, claiming the sun hurt his skin, “I have the fair skin of British aristocracy.” And he rarely went to the queen bars that he and Babs had always frequented. Only on matinee days, when he had time to kill between shows, did he go to a bar, or he would go to a porno book store. He had sex less because of the higher prices.

  Brian’s uncle, Salvatore Malventano, next door was not at all friendly to Benjamin. He sensed that “that Quinn character is a real oddball, real fairy acting.” And his suspicions were confirmed when one morning he saw Benjamin kiss a black boy in the doorway, behind the screen. Salvatore spread the word about his queer neighbor, hoping to run him out of the neighborhood, but most of the people he talked with didn’t believe homosexuals could own a house or would want to live outside of Greenwich Village. “You’re a bigot, Sal,” one neighbor said, and “Leave the old man alone, he’s harmless,” another said.

  Salvatore Malventano also had a queer spirit. That was why Benjamin’s existence was so disturbing to him. He had fought that spirit his whole life, and with the assistance of the Church he was able to suppress his desires to the death. His “toupee” was his entire being. He was completely unaware of the value of life. He had tried to have sexual relations with an “easy” girl back when he was seventeen, and he failed. He considered the seminary, but he was attracted to the young priests. His block was completely in place by the age of nineteen. He could have been a fag-basher or worse, if he hadn’t found certain strange releases for his frustration. He never married. He became a transit worker. And he once baby-sat for his nephew Brian, when the boy was two. In a heady stupor, having had a fifth of gin, he set Brian in a chair and stripped down in front of the boy, and let the boy play with his genitals. The man shot cum into Brian’s milk bottle and tried to force the boy to drink it.

  The cum was too thick to come through the nipple. And suddenly Salvatore returned to his senses and grabbed the bottle from the boy, throwing it against the wall. His guilt made him leave Brian his house in his will. Salvatore was electrocuted on the third rail of the BMT subway line in 1982.

  My uncle never did that to me. I mean, wouldn’t I remember something that kinky, especially from old straitlaced Sal? And he was no fag-basher either. He never got pissed at me for being gay. I mean, I came right out and told him when I was sixteen and he kept asking me about what pussies I’d eaten and what girls I’d gone all the way with, and I said, “Hold on to yourself, Uncle Sal, but this guy here is gay, and proud of it.” I had just been at a meeting in the Village with another guy from high school who turned me on to this support group in the city, and I went there and I was like, freed, seeing all these other guys who had the same feelings I did. Anyway, Uncle Sal never acted like he hated me. He didn’t seem que
er either. He seemed sexless. Hell, he left me his house, so he must have favored me above the other relatives. He was closer to me than my parents. They were, and still are, “full of shame.” “Shame on you,” they said to me. I said, “Adios.”

  In 1979, Benjamin became the dresser for the Che Guevara character in Evita on Broadway. It was his last regular show. He had developed the reputation among the stagehands and actors of being a cook. One matinee day, he brought in the makings for a stew, “the way the British do it,” and a slow cooker. In the past, he had provided plum puddings, biscuits, and sometimes cakes for a cast member’s birthday. At the Hadassah Thrift Store on Beach Boulevard, he had found a bargain: an electric Crockpot for one dollar. As it happened that day, Che needed a button sewn on, and another dresser was out sick, and Benjamin completely forgot to check on the stew. The frayed cord of the Crockpot began to smoke and then ignited a nearby towel and it set off the alarms and sprinkler system under the stage during the “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” song. When Benjamin was confronted by the stage manager, he tried to blame the Hadassah for selling faulty merchandise, but the man was already filling out the forms for Benjamin to take to the union for his severance pay. “You’re a danger to the theater,” the stage manager said, knowing he would now have to answer to the higher-ups who would probably fire him for letting any cooking go on in the first place.

  I remember him telling me about that Crockpot. He said he was not about to bring in an expensive new one because it might be stolen while he was busy with costume changes. I asked him who would want to steal a hot pan of stew during a Broadway show and so what if they did, and he said, “Well, dearie, you never know with all the weirdos out there. And when that witch at the Hadassah wouldn’t give me my dollar back, I told them I’d never shop there again.”

  He was that way, though. Indignant. He told me that TV shows like “The Joker’s Wild” and “Tic Tac Dough” were rigged and crooked and unfair.

  “Brian, dearie,” he explained, “they pick the people and tell them the answers. I know because when I was in L.A. once, I went to their open call for contestants, and they said I didn’t pass the test! I told them that I knew every bloody answer to every question, but thinking about it later that night as I helped fit that fat bitch into her Carmen, I realized that they knew that I would win all the money. The test was to pick the idiots for their shows!”

  I said something about television being all fake, and I remember he said, “Not in the Golden Age when I was working!” And then he told me about the early days in Toronto and all the funny mistakes that happened like …

  We are coming to the end of this story. We have already covered Benjamin’s Toronto days, Brian.

  Okay. Okay. After Evita, Benjamin subbed for other dressers, but found himself more and more content to stay in Rockaway and watch television, and tend his garden, and when Brian moved in next door in 1983, he rarely made the trip into the city. He considered Brian his friend, and in a way, his son. He enjoyed embellishing stories of his past and telling Brian these stories on his porch on cool summer nights. For sex, he bought a video-cassette player and ordered porno tapes. He was not lonely. He was content. He spoke to the cat, Felicia, and he spoke to his friends on the phone about which new shows would fail or succeed. He was really only lonely when he was with a group of people. Then he saw how comfortable they seemed with each other, and he felt awkward and shy. He would see himself outside their circle (due to his block). If he was invited to a cast party, he would go, wearing his cleanest hairpiece and dousing himself with cologne, imagining the most magical of meetings that he believed possible (similar to winning a sweepstakes), but when he arrived, he clammed up. He felt he was acting cordial or interested in what was being said, but all the time there, he was wondering what people were thinking about him, and if they thought he was handsome and polite, and he would drink, trying to loosen up, but the more he drank the more his block soaked up. Everyone seemed to be acting happy. He felt they were all phonies. He usually found himself in the corner at a party drunk and thinking about the long trip home and the TV movie he was missing. Everyone became an outsider to him but Brian by 1984. By then he refused the few invitations he received, and he was content to talk on the porch and watch television and video.

  Sometimes Benjamin seemed to be senile to me. I would be up in my bedroom doing my special form of yoga. I would strip down and stretch and twist and concentrate on my third eye (the pisshole in my dickhead), and out the window I’d see Benjamin stumbling on his patio carrying a pie pan tin full of mushy brown stuff for the stray cats in the neighborhood, and he would be wearing these skimpy paisley bikini briefs, and his big gut was hanging over the paisleys like a balloon. He made a squeaky whistling sound and in baby talk he would call, “Pussy! Mommy! (Mommy was the mother of most of the strays on the street) Pussy! Mommy!” Then he seemed to wander about making his way to the fence where my dog, Weiner, was barking and whining for a treat, and Benjamin would set a bone down and yell, “Down, Weiner! Be patient! Down!” And beyond his little square of yard, I could see the other boxed-in squares, on down to the boardwalk, and beyond that, the Atlantic Ocean. Benjamin looked so small and feeble there in his square compared to all the rest of the world, and it looked like the ocean was about to lap him up. I pulled my bamboo blind down and went back to my dickhead meditation, or I should say I tried to, but outside I kept hearing “Pussy! Mommy!” and his whistling and cooing. I just couldn’t get into it with him out there.

  Brian has served me well. He has satisfied me with his receptive fingers. Now, at last, we have reached the scene at Rodeo.

  Rodeo is the name of Brian’s favorite bar on Christopher Street in the West Village. Benjamin once lived above the place when it was a restaurant. Brian went there at least three nights a week, and sometimes in the day. He met three different lovers there. He thought it was his lucky home away from home. Benjamin had asked him about the place, remembering when he had lived there.

  “It’s got a great jukebox,” Brian said, “and it’s a good place to just hang out. You know, check out who’s there and have a beer and maybe check in the john if you just want to get off.”

  Benjamin fed Weiner daily, and when Brian had not been around in four days, Benjamin began to worry. Weiner whined at the fence till Benjamin finally brought him into the house, terrorizing the cat, Felicia. And finally, Benjamin decided to go into Manhattan to find Brian. He had to return his friend’s That’s Entertainment Two video-cassette anyway, and he figured that Rodeo would be a good place to find Brian. He would ask if he’d been in and if anyone knew his whereabouts. He took the tape to his friend’s apartment. Then Benjamin walked through Chelsea and he spotted an all day breakfast special for 99 cents, so he had what was to be his last meal, and his last bargain. Two eggs over easy, home fries, toast, and tea. He walked from Chelsea to the Village, passing many young men that looked like Brian. He found the bar. He looked up to his old apartment window.

  That was where he first wore a toupee. It seemed like a snap of the fingers had passed since then, and then he felt as if he had never lived there, that he was someone else in a different life. He thought, outside the door to Rodeo, “I used to get fucked by Sir Queen Mary,” and he thought with added dignity, “And I was in television in the Golden Age.”

  All of these thoughts were used to bolster himself before he entered the bar where he knew he would be shunned. He too had been that way, when he was young. In his head, he still shunned the old. He remembered hating Robert’s age. He knew that even though he was 68, minus ten or fifteen years for his hair, he was still about to enter a place where age is not only hidden but found repulsive. But it was the only place he knew to find Brian. As he pulled open the door, the few people at the bar turned to see who had arrived. They immediately turned away seeing the old man. “Just dust,” one stud said. Benjamin said to himself, “I was the lover of Sir Queen Mary, who all of you now worship and whose film retrospectives you
all now attend at the Museum of Modem Art.” He remembered the Queen’s words about being a part of his inner sanctum, as if that were enough to live for, and Benjamin thought that he should possibly write an expose of Sir Queen Mary’s “real” life. He stood in the dark corner by the wall. The bartender, Art, came over.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  Benjamin jumped, and wanted to thank the man for speaking kindly to him, but he blurted out, “Brian Malventano. I’m looking for him. His dog Weiner. He’s my neighbor. Has he been here? His dog, you see, and he’s not been home …”

  “Sure, sure,” Art said, misunderstanding and turning to the bar announcing, “Has anyone seen a lost dog around here?” then back to Benjamin, “What kind of dog was …”

  Benjamin stopped him, “No, no, no. I have the dog. The dog is at my house! I’m looking for Brian. Brian Malventano.”

  Art understood. “Forget it,” he said to the bar which had been unresponsive anyway. “Nah, pal, I don’t know any … Brian, oh, Rockaway Brian you mean?” Art acted a little more familiar with Benjamin then. “Yeah, yeah, he should be in. No guarantee, but he usually comes in later. He was here last night with this hot number.”