Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Ned smiled and put his head back.

  “The shower shoes? Hmmmm?” said Mister Lark.

  “Just that after the gym,” said Ned as we rattled north, “I’d go to the baths! I’d walk home from McBurney after being surrounded by these Puerto Ricans, down Sixth Avenue, and then veer over to Man’s Country on Fifteenth Street to see who was standing in line,” he said. “Or I’d go in and stand there till the urge went away. But the urge seldom went away,” he said in a quiet voice. “I was in love with the two Cubans who worked the window. It was so cheap in those days, you could go in for three dollars. Three dollars! Movies cost five. And a night at Man’s Country was infinitely more thrilling than any movie could possibly be. I think Man’s Country killed Louis.”

  “What?” said Mister Lark as we stopped at a light on Thirty-fourth Street.

  “He had a pass,” said Ned. “He was a friend of the owner, and Louis could go there any hour of the day or night—it was only a block from his apartment—and check in. And get a room, unless they were sold out. They were never sold out. For some reason Man’s Country never caught on—which is why I liked it. The Fire Island crowd, the circuit queens all went to the St. Marks. Man’s Country was utterly off the beaten path. No one I knew went there. Except Louis. We loved it! I used to see him there, standing naked in the doorway of his room. When he saw me coming, he’d put one arm up and another on his hip, and kind of lounge in the doorway—like Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” He laughed. “One night Spruill saw him like that, and said: ‘You’d better put that thing away, or people are going to throw peanuts at it.’ ”

  “Put what away?” said Mister Lark.

  “His dick,” said Ned. “He had a gargantuan penis! That’s what killed Louis—he came into his penis.”

  “Came into his penis!” said Mister Lark as we drove through Herald Square.

  “You know the French saying,” said Ned. “A woman comes into her beauty. Well, Louis came into his penis.”

  “But,” Mister Lark spluttered, “he always had his penis! He didn’t inherit it in midlife!”

  “But he did,” said Ned in a calm, reasonable voice. “I mean, of course his penis was always there between his legs, but it might just as well have not been. When we met him in the Pines in 1971, he was always in drag—of one kind or another. I remember one night Louis was coming up the stairs of the Sandpiper in one of his bizarre getups—torn fatigues, lame tank top, and a towel, I think—and the man next to me said, ‘Who is that?’ And the person next to him replied: ‘Some Jewish queen from outer space.’ Remember? Louis used to stand outside the Sandpiper in a big red ball gown with black beads, black fan and a fake camellia in his snood, and curtsy to boys he adored. He was like a child. And he had, at that time, not the slightest inkling that he had a penis! I mean it was there, but he never used it. And then, toward the end of the seventies—he realized the … value of what he had.”

  “What value?” said Mister Lark.

  “Why, everything,” Ned said, “in the little world we were living in. That penal colony! The whole point, as it were. The central symbol. The Eucharist. What everyone, on some level, was looking for, what everyone would not pause in their search until they found.”

  “You mean the great, the distinguished thing,” said Mister Lark.

  “Yes,” said Ned.

  “Surely you exaggerate.”

  “I don’t,” said Ned. “A homosexual is his penis. A homosexual cemetery should have just three things on the gravestone: name, date, and dimensions of dick.”

  “You’ve grown bitter in Ohio!” said Mister Lark.

  “There’s nothing else to do,” he smiled.

  “And you’ve forgotten about the meeting of two minds and souls, the escape from loneliness, or what it really is. What Plato called it—the desire to be born in beauty.”

  “Oh, Richard,” said Ned. “How many homosexuals even get to, much less operate on that level? Most of them are looking for a good firm cantaloupe. They find a dick they like, pitch their tents, and unharness the camels.”

  “Oh!” said Mister Lark. “And you’re the great romantic!”

  “You can be romantic, and still face facts,” said Ned.

  “I thought you couldn’t,” said Mister Lark.

  “And the facts are these,” said Ned. “Louis came into his penis. And when he did, he began having sex—because now all those famous models he used to faint over were now lying in the bathtub in the Strap waiting to be pissed on! If the penis was right! And his was. So in the middle of the night, if he couldn’t sleep, or in the middle of the afternoon, if he had an hour between appointments, he would drop into Man’s Country. It was like a harem he could drop in on. A harem. That’s what it was. A family. A home. A men’s club. A place of refuge. And what a place of refuge! Two things in life are as exciting to me now as the first time I experienced them—”

  “The ocean, and autumn nights,” said Mister Lark.

  “Taking off in an airplane, and hearing the door of a bathhouse close behind me,” said Ned.

  “Oh dear,” said Mister Lark.

  “And Louis felt the same,” said Ned, “though he didn’t carry the guilt I did. He had that wonderful gift—the ability to enjoy life. Which is why he had so many friends.”

  We came to a stop in dense traffic south of Columbus Circle. Ned looked out the window. “Do you think there’s a car show at the Coliseum?” he said. “Or a health food fair? Or a convention of mind-control seminars? Should we just take the first right, and forget about going through the park?” But we could not even have done that at the moment: fenders, taillights, grilles enclosed us on all sides—we were trapped. “Something’s going on,” said Ned. Mister Lark leaned forward. “Que está el problema?” Mister Lark said to Julio.

  “Qué es el problema,” said Ned. Mister Lark turned and looked at him. “Spanish has two verbs for being,” Ned said. “Está is impermanent, es is permanent.”

  “Ah,” said Mister Lark.

  “Qué es el problema,” Julio said with a smile, and a nod, as he glanced at us in the rearview mirror, his large dark eyes glowing in the radiance of the reflected headlights bouncing off the taxi in front of us.

  “Cómo está Usted? Qué es el problema?” murmured Ned.

  “Cómo está Usted? Qué es el problema?” said Mister Lark. He covered his eyes with his hands. “Stuck in traffic?” he said. “Do facial isometrics, plan a party menu, learn to use the Spanish verbs es and esta. Not a moment wasted in the life of a modem American maintaining a balance among all the elements of his split identity. Oh, darlings! When did the world become a microwave oven?” He uncovered his face, rolled down the window, and yelled: “Precious! Excuse me, sir? Hello! Darling! Cupcake! Pudding Face! Yes, I just wanted to know—has the water main burst up there? Is Mrs. Onassis going to the Opera?” Mister Lark held his head out the window to hear what a man on the sidewalk was saying to him. “There’s been an accident,” he said, coming back inside, “on the night of Louis’s funeral.”

  “Let’s get out,” Ned said, “and get another cab on Fifth.”

  “No!” Mister Lark leaned toward us. “You’ll never find another one like this, believe me! His voice is like a waterfall in a rain forest. He’s got a soul.”

  “Richard, they all have souls,” said Ned, still hanging on to the strap. “The question is, do they have immune systems?”

  Mister Lark spluttered.

  “The question is do we,” said Ned. “And the answer is no.”

  “Do you think you’re infected?” said Mister Lark.

  “I’m sure of it,” said Ned.

  “But you haven’t taken the test!”

  “I don’t have to,” said Ned. “If An not infected, no one is. I was living at the baths.”

  “But you just looked,” said Mister Lark.

  “Sometimes I looked,” said Ned. “Sometimes I touched.”

  “But—”

  “You
were at the theater,” said Ned. “The opera, the reading. The rest of us were much lower on the ladder of love.”

  “You’re turning bitter, aren’t you,” said Mister Lark. “You’ve been watching television, and shopping in supermarkets, and they’ve taken their toll. You’re going to repent, like Saint Augustine, and turn against the past!”

  “You’re safe,” said Ned. “Because I think of you as not having sex.”

  “This is hardly the time, or place, for exposes,” said Mister Lark.

  “I’m serious,” said Ned. “You have the most precious gift of all! Your health. Your peace of mind. Your body, uninvaded. You are Sicily before the Normans. America before the white man. Mexico before the Spanish. Hawaii before the missionaries. You’re intact. You’re virgin. You’re on fire.” The taxi lurched. “You’re even moving,” he said as Julio, speaking rapidly in Spanish and honking the horn, suddenly floored the accelerator, sped round a car he saw, in passing, was broken down, flew past the police barricades, and on up Central Park West. “Thank God I’m not in labor,” said Ned, lighting a cigarette. Mister Lark leaned forward to speak to Julio, then stopped, sat back and turned to us. “Would you say Louis es or esta dead?”

  “Está,” said Ned. “Está muerto.”

  “But why?” said Mister Lark. “Surely his deadness is not an impermanent condition. He is dead forever.”

  “Not if you believe the psychic in the Beresford I used to see,” said Ned, as the doormen and canopies and lighted facades of apartment buildings went by, “who told me I’m going to be a pediatrician in Bombay in my next life.”

  “You don’t believe such nonsense,” said Mister Lark.

  “No, I don’t,” said Ned. “I believe Louis is dead, and we’ll never see him again.”

  “So do I,” said Mister Lark with a sigh, as he looked out at the buildings going by. “And at the same time I can’t believe it. Quite. As I find it hard to believe your theory about his getting sick. In fact, I find it hard to believe anything about this nightmare except one fact—”

  “What’s that?” said Ned.

  “The wrong people are dying,” he said, turning to us as we veered into the park.

  “The wrong people?”

  “You know how Louis always used to say the wrong people are having babies? Well, now the wrong people are dying. The germophobes, the anal-retentives, the small and mean and cold and ungenerous are going to survive. The ones like Louis, who loved life, will not. Because life’s chief pleasure … is sex. And sex is what killed them.”

  “Africa is what killed them,” said Ned. “Africa killed Louis. We are infected with a disease that got started in the garbage dump of a slum in Zaire.”

  He looked out the window at the skyline of Central Park South blazing through the dark trees. “And that’s why it seems so awful,” said Ned, “so out of proportion to what we were doing.”

  “And what was that?” said Mister Lark.

  “Enjoying life,” said Ned, “liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

  “Which you found twice!” said Mister Lark.

  “Yes,” said Ned. “Snookums, and Shithead.” We went beneath a bridge and saw, when we emerged, the new wing of the Metropolitan Museum and the Temple of Dendur glowing pale cinnamon in its bath of golden light. “It looks just like an airplane hangar!” said Mister Lark. “I always expect to see the Spirit of St. Louis hanging there. Eyes left!” he said as we turned south on Fifth Avenue and the lighted facade of another apartment building loomed in the darkness. “Mrs. Onassis!”

  “Have you ever seen her?” said Ned.

  “Once, at the opera,” said Mister Lark. “Her head is enormous. It just floated down the aisle in the glare of flashbulbs, like a spaceship.” The taxi turned left off Fifth Avenue. “I have terrible news for you, Ned, about He Who Gets Slapped.”

  “What?” Ned said in an alarmed voice.

  “On no, not that,” said Mister Lark. He crossed himself. “You know how many happy days and nights we have spent in his flat, you know what teen tramps we have been there, what conversations, what pasta, what journeys downtown have all begun under his roof, when downtown was divine decadence and not dreadful death,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Ned.

  “Arc you wearing a disposable incontinent brief?”

  “Of course.”

  “The Whitney Museum purchased Curtis’ building, and is evicting the tenants! They are going to tear it down to build an extension, an addition by Michael Graves that gives new meaning to the word ‘silly,’ ” he said as the cab pulled up to the comer of Seventy-fifth Street and Madison Avenue. The driver turned to us with a smile. “Bravo, Julio!” said Mister Lark. “I would follow you across the Andes! In fact, if some evening you get off work and do not feel quite like going home, stop by. I have so many questions about Ecuador.” He took a card from his wallet and handed it to Julio. Ned leaned forward to read the meter, paid Julio, and got out after me; Mister Lark stayed in the taxi to talk with Julio, as we waited beneath the portal of the Whitney Museum, which was still lighted within. Across the street, a showroom with mannequins in the windows was a brilliant cube of light.

  “Have you ever seen a woman in a Givenchy?” said Ned.

  Our host rounded the corner in a black chesterfield with the collar turned up, a paper bag in his arms, fluttered his hand in the air, and said: “Hi, where’s Richard?”

  “Still in the cab,” I said.

  “And here’s my baby!” he said, embracing Ned.

  “Happy to be back?” said Curtis.

  “Very!” said Ned. “And to see you!”

  Curtis went to the door of his building—a glass pane in the

  door already shattered, graffiti on the wall beneath the mailbox—looked back and said: “Don’t wait for La Gioconda! Come in and have a drink!”

  “I can’t believe they’re going to tear this down!” Ned said as we went up the worn, shabby, carpeted stairs to the third floor. “It’s ten years of our lives!”

  “Twenty of mine,” said Curtis.

  “And what about the bookstore next door?”

  “It’s all going,” said Curtis as he unlocked the door. “The Huns! Evicting us all,” he said, “and everybody sick, or sick with fear. God, these are hideous times!” he said, hanging up his coat in the hall as we went past him into a white room with vases of irises and votive candles. “These be real bad times,” he said. Ned turned around and took it in: the books that covered one wall from floor to ceiling, the clay horses on the mantelpiece, the long tiled table at which he’d sat so many evenings, the tall bookcase whose titles my eyes had played over often without being able to determine a theme among them, save the eclectic chaos of twentieth-century culture.

  “The thing now is to gain weight,” said Curtis, pointing to a platter of bread, cheese and roast beef on the table. “You’re supposed to look healthy, and healthy is fat. I was with Louis and Spruill one day in an elevator in the D&D Building, when Louis was looking very gaunt. And a friend we all knew got on, saw Louis, and said, ‘How are you?’ And Louis said: ‘I have cancer.’ Which really shut the friend up—he got off at the next floor just to recover from the shock. When he left, Spruill turned to Louis and said: ‘Don’t tell them you have cancer. Tell them you’ve been swimming laps!’ ” Ned and Curtis laughed. “Can you imagine?” Curtis smiled. “So how does the city look?”

  “Gorgeous,” said Ned. “Driving across the park tonight was as thrilling as the first time I did it.”

  “With Louis throwing up out the window,” said Curtis. “Wasn’t that it? The night we met you at Marty Rowan’s party?”

  “How’s Spruill?”

  “Livid.”

  “He’s being evicted too?”

  “The whole building. The whole past is going up in smoke!”

  “And Spruill?”

  “He’s going to the south of France with Martion Lafarge. To sulk.”

  Ned smiled. “Actually
it’s because he’s even more terrified than we are,” said Curtis. “He won’t go to the funerals of his friends because he’s afraid the germs are floating in the air.” Ned sighed. He looked around the room as if he could not believe he was there. “I miss you all so much,” he said. “My most important relationship now is with my Chevrolet.”

  “A Chevrolet can’t give you AIDS,” said Curtis.

  “No,” said Ned, “and it can’t talk to you when you’re driving home alone from the bars. Actually, my most important relationship is with the car radio,” he said.

  “How’s your father?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  There was a silence. Curtis lighted a cigarette. I went into the front room to see it again. It looked as if it had not been used in some time. On the mantelpiece were photographs, one of Louis in a ship captain’s uniform, and another of him in a pale blue gown on the boardwalk on Fire Island. The windows were open an inch or two, and the room was chilly; a cold film of air stole over the sills. It was March—that strange, dead time in the city, when the season is not one thing or the other—when the nights lack the clarity of deepest winter, when cabs are warm and doorways magical. The apple trees in the park were not yet in bloom, or bodies shorn of their layers of clothes, or the buses running to Jones Beach. It was just March: when people were tired of winter, and everything they’d been doing; when life stands empty, like the squash courts at the gym, a month ago impossible to get on, and now brightly lighted, doors ajar. That odd time of desuetude and mud, bad complexions and soot, trash and litter blowing in the wind, and the whole town—as at the end of August—not quite functioning, for the same reason one cannot pedal a bike between gears. It was, in all its exhaustion and bleak mood and griminess a perfect time to consign Louis to the shades. “Would you tell me if you had it?” Curtis was saying when I returned to the other room.

  “I—don’t know,” said Ned.

  “You don’t, do you?”

  “Not at the moment,” said Ned. “But I’m sure it’s in me. along with the one thousand other things swimming in my blood. My sister says I was naive. Not to be more careful, suspicious, mistrustful.”