Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Sharon just sort of looks at Jason for a long while, her face thick, almost like thick paints have congealed to form her textured skin, like in the paintings of Italian women in religious poses on thick old canvases on which layer after layer was applied for some purpose. Then the ickiness seems to undo, as unexpectedly as it was roused up.

  SHARON: There’s no predicting you. You’re like a cat. When you’re in you wanna be out, and when you’re out you wanna be in.

  JASON: Come on. How often do I get to sleep outside that hot house?

  Jason and Sharon and Russ crowd into the truck. Down and around some different roads. A little night animal crosses in headlights. A larger night animal, maybe a bear, or moose, is up along one bend. Then they get nearer the built up section. Most house lights are out. Little motorboats parked in the harbor are making slapping sounds from water rocking. Jason and Sharon are singing a song:

  Billy Billy Bunting

  Went out for to go hunting

  He shot a deer he shot a bear

  And then he went off grunting.

  These were obviously words they made up themselves. Russ could tell, or thought he could, by the way they laughed at all the parts. They might as well have been two woodsy critters for all he understood of the meaning of their twitter. And yet their song did remind him of one his grandmother used to sing to him in Nanticoke, rocking him in a chair. Maybe one of his earliest memories. A song about a baby falling out of a tree in which somehow, maybe by the wind, he was being rocked. And then there was a similar song about Puss N Boots in a boat sailing through the starry sky. All these lyrics, and the rhythm of that great old moving chair, interrupted flat by the smell of a rabbit his uncle had shot, steaming on his grandmother’s dining room table, came back. Lots of ogling faces of relatives.

  RUSS: (Stopping his memories, and their giggling) Not many stars out tonight. Not what I’m used to up here.

  JASON: (Leaning over to smack him once on thigh) That’s because, because we’re in the busy part of town, with street lights, street lamps.

  Russ: (Sarcastic) Coulda’ fooled me.

  Sharon gets his joke and laughs a little, then kisses Russ on his soft cheek.

  SHARON: That’s one for tonight. From me.

  The truck stops. Jason and Sharon squeeze each other, though without any lingering or passion. Russ gets down to let Sharon out. She is into her black doorway rectangle very soon.

  Jason and Russ head back out to Russ’s cottage. Lots of flacks on the way of lit-up stones. Then there.

  They go inside. Russ lights a kerosene lamp over an open-out couch. Jason steps out of his overalls which he lets fall on the floor. He shivers and gets between prickly flannel blankets. Leans up on a folded-over arm in Russ’s direction.

  JASON: I’m glad you walked up Russ. Even if you did get me mad before. Except I forget why now. Ha! D’you remember?

  Russ is sitting in an armchair. He has a kerosene lamp by him, too.

  Russ: (Hollow) I don’t know what to call it.

  JASON: Will you get me up?

  Russ: Sure. I don’t sleep much anyway. That’s one of the funny things about me. I get by on two or three hours sleep. And that half the time I take in the morning. … You look a little to me now like the lead singer in Modern English.

  JASON: (Flattered) Yeah? I like their music. But I don’t know what they look like.

  RUSS: I went to a concert of theirs in Philadelphia last month. In an auditorium.

  For a bit, the two of them just let the various night noises get louder and louder in the contained room. Russ’s heart is percussive again. A black cloud passes through Jason, though.

  JASON: I think Sharon is real wife material. Don’t you? I mean I didn’t think about it before, I mean before the baby, but even without the baby, I could see her being steady. She seems smarter in some ways than me.

  RUSS: (Almost wishing he had Jason’s kind of problems, instead of his own) But you must have a doctor who you told?

  JASON: Why?

  RUSS: Jealous I guess. (Rubbing his own chest) I guess I like being the only other one.

  JASON: You’re one lonesome dude. You don’t have a wife do you?

  RUSS: No. But I’m close to this woman who’s a social worker and a psychotherapist in my town. She’s not …

  JASON: (Sensing a no-fun problem subject, stretching his arm up to the ceiling) Could you help me with this light here?

  RUSS: Don’t move a muscle.

  JASON: Hah.

  Russ is already over there where he douses Jason’s lamp and comes back to sit down again. Jason is rolling his tongue inside one side of his cheek.

  JASON: You could be from Mars for all I know. Getting me here for some brain secretions. This could be a lab.

  Jason draws his leg up to make a tent in his bed, scratches the underside of his leg. Russ doesn’t move.

  JASON: Maybe you’ll end up coming back to be best man…. And, if we two became friendly, like me and Bill and Teddy—not that you’d be in that group—I mean you’re a special case….

  RUSS: (Feeling young again) I’ll answer your question, Jason.

  JASON: You don’t even know what it is yet Rufus…. My question is … what kind of friends would we be? (At which Jason lies back down flat on his back, letting his head sink easily into the pillow)>

  Russ is left face-to-face with his own head reflected on the wall over Jason’s lumpy body. He stands up, agitated, as if about to address a speech to his shadow. It is his turn to be just another ingredient in the big swirling soup which has now involved him in the uncontrollable spills and whirls.

  RUSS: (Almost shrill, and overcompensating) All right. This is nineteen-eighty-something. And to answer your question I am definitely a “wild card.” OK? And so I guess if we’re going to be friends, we’re going to be the kind of friends who know what’s up with the other, really up. And if I could make you I’d love it. And if you’d rather not I’d love that exactly as much. So there you are. (Spreading his arms and hands out in a wide, exotic gesture, like a fortune teller lady in a storefront spreading out her plastic tarot deck) The secrets of the universe.

  JASON: (Sits right up in bed, his eyes lit with charges) Yeah. That’s it man. I wondered when you were gonna talk to me. You think I had all summer? … I knew something was up.

  RUSS: (In a tough snarl) How?

  JASON: (Speed talking) There was this painter, Robert Nyack, who has this house here. And he used to bring a hustler up every year. And then he and the hustler—and this guy was dumb, with tattoos and, you know, curly blond hair—they had a big fight. A lot of big fights. And Nyack threw him out. So this guy, the hustler, started screwing all the girls on the island. And then he was threatening to kill Nyack. He broke in a couple times and bruised … and he took him back and … anyway, it got so hairy the island council voted to ban the hustler from the island, and the ferry operators got instructions not to let him back on. Now I can tell you’re not planning that, you’re too … shy … but I like people who are different… . I’m outgrowing my others … or …

  RUSS: (Generously) This is too good to be true.

  JASON: (Crooked smile) That doesn’t mean I want to get into dry dog humping, fellas. (Catches Russ about to go shrill again) Or vice versa. (Russ subsides; Jason leans back against the wall.) You’re gonna have to hold all that back. The rest of me, like a friend, you’ve got.

  RUSS: I don’t know if I can take the suspense.

  JASON: (Stage laugh) I like that OK. You’re honest. Now that you’re honest we can hang out more together.

  RUSS: I can’t believe we’re having this talk.

  JASON: There you go again. (Jason exhales and crashes back down flat on mattress.)

  Russ goes out on the wood terrace. All the insects are string instruments. There is a nebula of stars whooshing through the sky gathering littler lights in its sweep. Russ stumbles down the steps and out a bit toward a dark rumpled shirt of surrounding woodsy hill
s. He looks down at the bay, pricked by reflections of steaming high-up stars. Remembers that the season here for falling stars begins soon. And then the unusual excitement subsides. Russ heads back to wait for morning.

  Jason is swallowing noisily, an indication of active sleep.

  Russ hums to himself. He is reading a nature book, actually written for young children, about the living habits of rabbits. For a while the pace of this short-enough book is steady. Then, quickly, with every page, the lightness outside goes up a notch. Up, up, up.

  Russ comes over with a cup of coffee and nudges Jason with it. Jason gets up noiselessly, but is obviously not even close to compos mentis.

  JASON: (Sitting cross-legged; gravel-voiced) What did you put in it to sweeten it?

  RUSS: Maple syrup. People do that in the South, I read, to sweeten, they use maple syrup in coffee. And the tenants left some here on a shelf. Last year’s tenants. Did you know who they were?

  Jason gets up to collect his last night’s overalls off the motionless rocking chair. Russ had picked them off the floor and folded them over its back when he returned from his walk.

  JASON: (Shaking his head) You read a lot. Do you read that much where you’re from? Or is it because you don’t have a TV here?

  Goes over and slaps Russ twice on his shoulder.

  JASON: The lobsters are waiting for me.

  RUSS: (Playing girl) Lucky lobsters.

  JASON: Cut the comedy. Listen. You can come for supper some night at my Mom’s and watch it. There’s all that news now on the Nuclear Reactor Plant to be built in Maine. I may not vote for it in the referendum.

  RUSS: (Sadly) I forgot all about the news, practically. I mean I remind myself more of a grandmother, sitting all night in this chair, reading a book.

  JASON: (A broad, black silhouette standing framed in the sunny doorway; his voice from beyond) That’s one thing we have in common. So far. There’s no denying. We both come from family life.

  Russ scrunches his forehead. Then walks Jason out to the truck. He sees now that the truck is painted aquamarine, not dark blue. As the motor starts up, Russ touches his hand down for good-bye on the hood over the vibrating motor, the front of the truck. Then he feels the truck moving out from under his palm. Stands drenched in the morning wet.

  Jason’s mind is already on the road. But he senses, in no words, as he takes the curve, that last night he had matured in a way which had made him more marriageable.

  At eight in the morning, when most people in Nanticoke are starting to have warm scrambled eggs and last night’s pie (often eaten for breakfast in that part of the world), Russ is fast asleep on an Indian rug, squarely in the center of his inverted V-shaped bungalow. It is a pyramid for the common man. His arms and hands tucked up under his chin.

  FRIENDS AT EVENING

  Andrew Holleran

  I SAW MISTER LARK AT THE STANFORD HOTEL last night—which, at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-second Street, is not a place history has noticed any more than the people who walk by. One block north is the Chelsea Hotel, whose rooms have housed, and still do, writers and musicians, poets and designers. But the Stanford Hotel has none of the reflected glory of the arts, or even of its seemingly English, substantial, semi-aristocratic name—whatever it once was, it is now, to be perfectly frank, a welfare hotel. And like those big old establishments in Atlantic City whose names conjured up the great country houses of England—the Marlborough-Blenheim, for instance—but whose windows looked down on a wooden boardwalk, brown beach and umber surf, the Stanford Hotel surveys a very un-English scene: black and Hispanic women on the stoop watching their children skip rope, play hopscotch, do back flips, as if in the dirt road of a small Southern town or a village in the mountains above San Juan. In summer the entire hotel seems to be on the sidewalk, but even in winter, no matter what the weather, there are always a few people out—certainly children, doing flips and skipping rope while waiting for their parents to come out of the bar on the comer called Soul Heaven. The music at Soul Heaven is on tape, and the tapes are so good that when I walk past the bar I stop—no matter what the weather; and even in a blizzard you can hear the music—to listen to a few songs.

  Last night on my way to meet Mister Lark for Louis’ funeral, it happened that Gladys Knight was singing the theme from “Claudine” (“Make Yours a Happy Home”) and I had to ask myself where else on earth but this bar would I have been able to hear this song; one of my favorites a decade ago, one Louis and I used to dance to. A very light snowfall was trying to begin, but it was so feeble it resembled chips of paint falling from an apartment ceiling, and the children were skipping rope as if it were an August night. The song has just that unpretentious mix of happiness and sadness that one listens for in vain in so much contemporary music, and I was feeling very sentimental when who should come up with a little grocery bag in hand, the kind they give you for one small item, but Mister Lark.

  “Mother of God, you’re on time,” he said in a murmur which melded his words together in one continuous stream—a sound that baffled me for years till I realized it was the sound the priest makes giving you absolution on the other side of the grille. “How few people one can even count on for that fundamental courtesy!” he said. “So small, yet so enormous! A real index of character! I do not want to be late for the service. He Who Gets Slapped expects us to pick him up on Madison Avenue. He’ll pay for the cab downtown.” He grabbed my arm. “Do you remember this song?” I said.

  “Remember it?” he said. “It is the story of my life!” And we stood there listening for a moment; until, just as Gladys Knight was starting the final chorus, the pay phone on the comer rang. Mister Lark reached right out and picked it up, as if it were his own. (Perhaps it was. I was so accustomed to Mister Lark’s phoning me from subway stations and street corners, I assumed he had no phone of his own.) He listened for a moment and then said, “No I am not horny. I am, in fact, on my way to a funeral … I know perfectly well which window you’re in, and I have no intention of looking up … I find penis size irrelevant, I do not talk dirty on the phone. I think that is for people who have never quite grown up!” he said, and put the receiver down with a clatter.

  A small group of children gathered round and were staring up at Mister Lark. “Hello Charles, hello Antoinette, hello Delores, hello Paul,” he said. “How are you this evening? Aren’t you supposed to be doing your homework?” He set his paper bag on the metal platform beside the telephone, reached into the pocket of his coat, pulled out a little book whose cover had been ripped off, and began to leaf through it. “Louis’s phone book,” he murmured. “His brother and I ripped it in half, to divide the job of notifying people about the funeral tonight. I have a few more people to get a hold of,” he murmured, and then, after putting a coin in, dialed a number he read in the book. He turned and smiled at the children, who continued to stare. It was just as well—“Make Yours a Happy Home” was succeeded by David Ruffin singing “Love Is What You Need,” another song I hadn’t heard in a long time. Mister Lark, however, began to frown, deeper and deeper, and finally he looked at me and said: “Do you suppose there is some equivalent of methadone for people who cannot stay off the phone? Could we set up toy telephone clinics for people who cannot bring themselves to hang up? There is, after all, such a thing as consideration for others. The telephone does not exist to be abused,” he said. (I waited to see what he would do: Mister Lark was the only person I knew who told the operator it was an emergency if someone’s line was busy. Then, after the operator had broken in to say, “I’m sorry, I’ve an emergency,” and the person interrupted felt his heart go into his throat at the imminence of bad news, he would hear the murmurous incantation of “My dear boy I’m so sorry, but I had to tell you not to meet me at eight o’clock at the fountain, but inside Alice Tully Hall. All right?”) He sighed as he leafed through the little book, the phone cradled between his chin and shoulder, and finally stamped his foot. “That’s it!” he said. “I’ve done my best!”
And he threw the telephone down onto the metal prongs. I waited for him to dial the operator and declare an emergency, but instead he sighed, put the book back in his pocket, and picked up the paper bag. “Avanti,” he said, and held out a hand with his pinky extended, a little hook I was to grasp, and be pulled along in the wake of his big black overcoat, past the children with wide eyes and pigtails and, around the comer, the middle-aged women in dresses the color of Kool-Aid and nylon bomber jackets, and their male companions in straw hats and old pea coats, who, with their bottles of beer in hand, gave the whole block a theatrical, artificial air; as if it were merely a theater set for Porgy and Bess. Mister Lark turned to me in the garish fluorescent light of the small tiled lobby and said: “Forgive me if I make you walk. But I would no more go in that elevator than I would go to a party given by Bobby Durwood.” On the last few words his voice got louder, his enunciation sharper, in the tone of abused tenants everywhere, and the bare beginnings of the half-snicker, half-snort Mister Lark used in place of a laugh were aborted in the face of the immediate task: ascending the narrow stairs on which people sat rolling joints and listening to portable radios in little clouds of bright fluorescent light on each tiled landing, till we arrived at the top, dim floor and Mister Lark, panting, filmed with sweat, unlocked the gray metal door to his apartment. There was someone inside already: a man whose face was vaguely familiar. “Do you know Ned Stouffer?” said Mister Lark as the man smiled and held out his hand; he’d been standing at the window with his hands on the windowsill looking out when the door swung open.

  “I think we have met,” said Ned, “at Curtis’s New Year’s Eve party. How are you,” he said, and shook my hand.

  “Ned is just back in town for Louis’s funeral,” said Mister Lark. “I’m sorry he had to come back for such an awful reason,” he said, his voice low, murmurous, gloomy. Then he grasped his friend’s hands. “But I’m so glad to see him again!” He reached down and picked up a magazine on the table and held it out to us. It was called Black Woman, White Stud. “Have you seen this?” he said. “The ‘portfolio’ of the woman who lived here before me with her eight-year-old son. I can’t bring myself to throw it away. Oh God. Look at him now,” he said. We turned and saw across the amber radiance of the streetlight outside the window a naked white man standing in his window masturbating. “Can you imagine?” said Mister Lark. “And I’m over here, reading Montaigne! Of course,” he said as the man turned around and put his buttocks to the glass, “it might make a difference if he were twenty-nine, good-looking, and Brazilian. But with that ass! Wouldn’t yon bide it from everyone”? Tell me, what would you like to drink?” He held out an arm to the refrigerator. “I’ve got apple juice, tap water, and puree of beets. Unless you’d like tea,” he said. Ned took apple juice and I took tea, and we sat down on the Styrofoam cushion which occupied what might be called a windowseat overlooking the skip-rope and games of the children on Twenty-second Street.