Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  “Mi casa es su casa,” said Mister Lark, his voice swelling with the pride of a host whose friends are finally under his roof. “In the words of the Supremes—someday we’ll be together! At the Stanford Hotel. I’d like to say Eugene O’Neill wrote Mourning Becomes Electra here, but I’d be lying if I did. In fact, though every street in Manhattan but this was once the playground of the Astors, nothing ever happened here. I’m in famous company —just round the corner from the Chelsea, which I’m told is so social these days poor Chris Potter takes a room at the Y,” he snicker-snorted, “when he wants to get some writing done. Otherwise it’s up and down the halls in a frenzy of gossip. Only the other day my friend Nicky Nolledo was in the lobby when one of the guests who’d just died was carried past on a stretcher, and the man at the desk looked up and said: ‘Checking out?’ ”

  He snicker-snorted and said: “I just thought I’d share that with you, since I have no cakes and cookies to serve, not even an Entenmann’s!” (The paper bag he’d brought back from the store contained, I saw now, a product whose blue-and-white box promised the safe home removal of ear wax.) He raised his teacup and said to us: “I am reminded of a line from the perhaps overrated, but occasionally divine, Walt Whitman, which I shall use to toast you. ‘It is enough to be with friends at evening,’ ” he said. We smiled. “Although,” he added, putting his cup down, “the occasion that brings us here tonight, that is, the one we are going to, is not one Whitman would have imagined. Poor Louis! Lying in what I’m sure will be a closed coffin, considering how he looked the last time I went to the hospital.”

  “How did he die?” said Ned, frowning. “I mean, what was the final thing that did it?”

  “The final thing, indeed,” said Mister Lark. “I’m not sure, exactly. An intestinal infection, I believe. There was also blindness and herpes of the brain. Ron Pratt died of a tuberculosis formerly found in birds. Peter Ord of CMV running riot in his veins. As to what in Louis’s case—the heart just stopped beating. What made the heart stop beating I can’t say. I saw on television last night a gazelle brought down by lions on the Serengeti—the claws, the teeth, the weight of two lions, and still the gazelle almost escaped! That’s what it’s like to kill a man. The virus has to work itself into a perfect rage, a swarm, an irresistible tide that pours through the broken gates before anything so big, so vital, so complex as a man can be killed. And then,” he laughed, “what does the virus do? Dies, because the thing it’s been feeding on is dead. Foolish, isn’t it? A parasite is more sensible—it knows when to stop. It even establishes a relationship. But I find it hard to find a place in God’s plan for the virus.”

  “I still can’t believe it,” said Ned, looking down at the floor. “I feel so bad I didn’t visit him more.”

  “But you had to leave town!” said Mister Lark. “How is your father? Hmmmm?”

  “Well,” he said, “a stroke takes a long time to recover from. And of course you never know if there won’t be another stroke. But we send him to physical therapy and—just live from day to day, I guess. Were you with Louis at the end?”

  “I was just going up to the hospital,” said Mister Lark. “It was last Saturday morning. I had a few errands to run uptown —I planned to be there at ten. But I called first from the bookstore. A nurse answered the phone, said he’d died. And would I come up and please collect his things? They don’t wait, you know, they get the room ready for the next patient! The private duty nurse on the night shift called Louis’s brother at three in the morning to say Louis was dead, and she could not find her check! Can you imagine? Moving right along! The heartlessness of people is incredible! When I got there, everything he owned was in a plastic bag. His room was like the church door Luther nailed his theses to. Plastered with big crosses, skull and bones. Poison. Stay out. Do not enter without gloves and mask. You’d have thought someone was making plutonium inside. But no,” he said, “it was just darling Louis, looking more and more each day like the world’s oldest man.”

  “Was he very skinny?” said Ned.

  “Yes. One day he asked me to hand him the towel at the foot of his bed. And he lay it across his forehead. And I thought: What is he doing that for? And he said: ‘Don’t you think I look like Mother Theresa?’ ”

  “Making a joke about it!” said Ned.

  “Yes,” said Mister Lark.

  “And did he?” said Ned.

  “Look like Mother Theresa?” said Mister Lark. “Exactly.” A cockroach scuttled out onto the rug between us. Ned reached out with his foot and stepped on it. “We are to the gods as flies to wanton boys,” Mister Lark intoned. “God just reached out with His foot and stepped on Louis. Only he didn’t die right away.”

  “Is his family here?”

  “Yes,” said Mister Lark. “They flew up from Georgia. His brother lived with him the last three months, you know. An angel. Odd, isn’t it, how at the end, the family takes you back? How many men have gone back home when they got sick.”

  “And how many men have been cared for by their friends,” said Ned. “Like you. I’m sure there’ll be a terrific turnout tonight.”

  “Well, he knew so many people,” said Mister Lark, “from so many milieus! He was always at the newest nightclub, in the newest pants, doing the newest dance! Sometimes I think he died just because he did everything first—”

  “That’s a funny way to look at it,” said Ned.

  “Funny ha-ha, or funny peculiar?” said Mister Lark, as he opened a jar, scooped some cream out, and began to apply it to his face in small, ever-widening circles.

  “Somewhere in between,” said Ned.

  “I suppose it is. But when I am lying awake at night, I think of it that way, sometimes. I think of it so many ways. My mind swarms with metaphor.” His hands made tiny circles till his face was entirely green. He plucked a tissue from a box of Kleenex and began to remove it all in short, deft strokes.

  “Do you think it’s going to stop?” said Ned.

  “No,” said Mister Lark. “I think we’re all going to die.”

  There was a silence; we could hear the throb of the bass of whatever song was playing in the bar below beating against the night. A few snowflakes began to meander down past the streetlight when I turned to look behind us; the man across the street was now lying before his window with his legs thrown up into the air, and an index finger circling his asshole.

  “Do you really,” said Ned in a soft voice.

  “Yes,” said Mister Lark. “Think of how many people we know who are already dead. Don’t you make lists? Lists of people dead, lists of people living you worry about, lists of people you don’t worry about, lists of people who would tell you if they got it, lists of people who wouldn’t,” he said as he wiped his face with a tissue. “Lists of people you’d tell if you got it, lists of people you wouldn’t. Lists of people you’d care for if they got sick, lists of people you think would care for you, lists of places you’d like to be when you get it, lists of methods of suicide in case you do.” He sighed. “Dreadful lists!”

  “But what about this list,” said Ned. “Of people whose lovers have died of it, but who are perfectly all right themselves!”

  “That list we recite several times each day,” said Mister Lark. “That list is our only hope. Five men in New York who are perfectly intact, even though their entire household has died. Who will always wonder, like the survivors of any catastrophe, why was I spared?”

  “So you think nothing will ever, ever be the same?” said

  Ned.

  “Nothing,” said Mister Lark, screwing the cap on his jar of face cream. “We’re all going, in sequence, at different times. And will the last person please turn out the lights?”

  “I agree,” said Ned.

  “And that’s why,” said Mister Lark as he stood up, “each moment is so precious! Each friend who’s still alive! Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon the table.”

 
; He bent down and picked up the dead roach with a napkin.

  “I feel bad killing that cockroach,” Ned said. “It’s the same thing.”

  “I know,” said Mister Lark.

  Louis’s phone book fell out of his pocket with a thud; he picked it up in his other hand, and straightened up. “Did I tell you who’s in Louis’s phone book?” he said, tossing the napkin and the roach into a wastebasket. “His brother and I ripped it in half to call people about the funeral.” He opened the book up and began to read: “Mary Tyler Moore.”

  “Mary Tyler Moore!”

  “Walter Cronkite.”

  “Walter Cronkite!”

  “Lena Horne.”

  Ned smiled.

  “Halston,” Mister Lark said. “Dan Rather. Lauren Bacall. Jeff Aquilon. Roy Cohn. Liz Smith.” He looked up. “He used them when he was arranging the fashion show for muscular dystrophy. But he put them in his book. Do you see? He wanted Mary Tyler Moore in his phone book.”

  “That’s so Louis,” said Ned as he shook his head. “And what are the rest?”

  “A lot of Spanish names,” said Mister Lark, “of no particular importance.”

  “Not in official circles,” said Ned.

  “Shall we go?” said Mister Lark. “It’s almost six o’clock.” He looked at us. “We must make a stop uptown first. You know, He Who Gets Slapped is waiting.”

  “I’m so excited,” Ned smiled as he stood up.

  “No more than He Who Gets Slapped,” said Mister Lark. “When I told him you were back, be began to sing on the telephone.” We took our cups to the heaped sink—miraculous flies, even in the dead of winter, droned over the sticky patina on the dishes—put on our coats, and went out into the hall.

  Mister Lark wrapped a long scarf around his neck so that it hung down his overcoat on either side, like the stole a priest wears to hear confession. “You never really know in the Stanford Hotel,” he said as he went down the narrow, vomit-colored hall whose fluttering fluorescent light gave the place a nervous aspect, “if anything will be left when you get back. Imagine a methadone addict operating a hot plate! I always expect to see the towering inferno when I come up out of the IRT. So I follow the advice given in the Times to people traveling to countries on the verge of revolution,” he said. “I take my valuables with me.” And he pulled out of his pocket his wallet, first edition of Hart Crane, and Louis’s phone book.

  “How are you, good evening, bon soir, buenas noches, auf wiedersehen” Mister Lark smiled and nodded to the people sitting on the stairs as we descended the five flights to the lobby, which was now filled with excited men shouting in Spanish. Mister Lark kissed the tips of his fingers and fluttered them in the direction of the crowd. “Don’t wait up!” Ned said, stepped down the three cement stairs onto the sidewalk, turned and waited for us. Even though it was snowing on this late March night, the stoop and walls of the hotel were lined with its tenants taking the air. “Hello Lulu,” Mister Lark said with a smile, as one of the women in a pea coat waved at him. “Hello Stan, hello Bertha Mae.” He turned and said in a lower voice as we walked to the comer: “Don’t you think these people look exactly like the inhabitants of a small town in the Mississippi delta?”

  “I’m sure they are,” said Ned. “And they just got on the bus one day.”

  “Well,” said Mister Lark, “they may be destitute, but they’ve got the two things that count—rhythm and a complete immune system! Taxi?” he said, turning when we reached the comer. “Or the IRT?”

  “Taxi,” said Ned. “My treat.”

  “You are,” said Mister Lark, “a breath of fresh air.”

  Ned raised his arm and turned south, as Mister Lark cried “Get a Checker, get a Checker!” Minutes later we got into one, in a faint cloud of snowflakes, and began driving uptown. The streets were still so warm the snow was melting the moment it touched the asphalt. “Do you miss the city?” I said to Ned. “God! Yes,” he said. “Terribly. Right now, it’s just one big cemetery, but it still gets me so excited. When the plane started to descend, my stomach tightened and I began to shake.”

  “No!”

  “And when I got off, I wanted to kneel down and kiss the tarmac, like the Pope. I didn’t know how I was going to get into town from Newark. I was so impatient!”

  “Next time,” said Mister Lark, “you should have a helicopter lower you onto your apartment building. I never leave,” he said.

  “I used to walk this street every night on my way to the gym,” Ned said.

  “The McBurney Y?” said Mister Lark.

  “Yes,” said Ned. “It started to get yuppie by the time I left New York, it was filled with women in leotards doing yoga, and men taking karate, but when I first joined, it was a backwater. Dim and dingy, Puerto Rican boxers, sex in the air! You know?”

  “I do indeed,” Mister Lark murmured as we sped uptown; he was so frugal with what little money he had, taxis were one of the things he seldom allowed himself, no matter how sorely tempted; even though, he said, the IRT was something no man over thirty should go into unless in search of sex; and that was now out of the question. A taxi so enchanted him we might as well have been going uptown in the sleigh Ludwig of Bavaria used on snowy nights when he was bored and depressed, two things Mister Lark never was. He turned to us with a starstruck expression on his face, dazzled by the lights, the rushing, cold damp wind beside the window he’d left open at the top. “Boxers often do, you know,” said Mister Lark. “Boxers never do,” said Ned, “and never are. Just as homosexuals never wore rubber thongs into the shower, never boxed, and never played basketball.”

  “I knew one,” said Mister Lark, “who did all three! Then he had his teeth filed down, and tipped with silver, and moved to Vermont to paint.”

  “Rick Satterwaite!” said Ned.

  “Yes,” said Mister Lark.

  “He was divine,” said Ned.

  “But spaced out,” said Mister Lark. “Though moving to Vermont when he did seems in retrospect, very sensible. His blood, no doubt, is pure as cows’ milk!” He looked at Ned. “I used to see you at McBurney very late, on Saturday.”

  “That was my favorite time!” said Ned. “The last half hour in the locker room on a Saturday—there was something poetic about it.”

  “Now it’s quite bustling, and busy, and renovated,” said Mister Lark, “and some new director has increased the membership, and refurbished the weight and locker rooms, and it’s full of copy editors learning self-defense. I don’t know where I’ll go when my membership runs out. Do you think there are still seedy gyms in Brooklyn? With old-fashioned swimming pools? The McBurney pool is—”

  “A foot bath,” said Ned. “I used to wait an hour to get a lane. But the things I saw in it! I’ve showered beside creatures who could have—” He struggled for words.

  “Persuaded the gods to come down from Olympus for an afternoon,” said Mister Lark.

  “Exactly!”

  “But now the gods no longer seem interested in us as lovers,” said Mister Lark. “Driver! Driver!” he said through the opening in the scratched plastic screen between the front and backseats. “Let us out on the next comer! There’s been a change of plans!” The driver came to an abrupt halt, Mister Lark said to Ned, “I’ll explain in a moment,” and got out, while Ned paid the fare.

  In a moment we were all on the cold, wet, and windy sidewalk across from the Fashion Institute of Technology. “Why did you do that?” asked Ned.

  “There are two reasons to change taxis,” said Mister Lark, his fine hair blowing about his head in the wind. “The first one I learned when I was taking drugs in the East Village—the feeling someone is following you. Now I think that’s why people take drugs! To feel someone is following them. In my case, someone was. Because I wrote a somewhat nasty review of a novel by a man whose name I won’t mention here. I knew I had crossed off our relationship with the article—I was young, and drunk on language—even though it was the truth. But he actually began to
follow me everywhere. You remember Warhol was shot by that crazy woman around that time? I had a job with Saturday Review, I was taking cabs then. I used to change taxis five times in twenty blocks. Which introduced me to the second reason for changing cabs,” he said as Ned held up his arm and shouted “Taxi!” at the one approaching. “And that,” he said as it stopped before us, “is the driver.” We piled into the backseat; this time there was no plastic panel between us and the front seat; the driver turned and smiled at us with big dark eyes, strong white teeth, in a pale olive face. “Julio,” said Mister Lark, glancing at the information on the visor, “how do you do. And where are you from originally?”

  “Ecuador,” said the driver with a smile.

  “Ah,” said Mister Lark, “the kingdom of the Incas! Would you take us, proud descendant of Atahualpa, to the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street? Go through the park, please.” He turned to us, and murmured: “The park is so lovely at night in this kind of weather. Gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights!” He put his hand between his teeth and bit it to repress the urge to shriek. “Now you were saying, dear boy, about the McBurney Y. Hmmmmm?”