Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Later: I’m looking at the card David gave me at the checkout window. It says, “21st St. Baths, 3244 21st St., San Francisco.” It shows a drunken-looking street sign, cartooned, just above. One arm loops crazily one way and says 21st, the other says Barlett—and the two arms look like they’re embracing (staggering?). On the back I read David’s tentative, vulnerable handwriting. “We discussed ambition, Hocquenghem and I gave you a great blow job. David Miller 387-8454 (M.F.C.C.).” The initials stand for David’s projected therapist credential—by implication, a middle-class berth in life, no?

  The Princess phone has put on its Hula-Hoop, shaking itself, a Hawaiian lei, started to dance like a cartoon cutout. R-r-r-i-n-g, r-r-r-i-n-g! all festive like the illustrated brochure the phone company sends, price list—somewhere between Trimline and Touch-tone. 9:30 in the morning, too early, isn’t it?

  Hlo? Groggy with sleep. A philodendron at the end of the room telegraphing infectious enthusiasm and waving its leafy green arms.

  Hi dear, I just got to work and don’t have time to talk. I’m calling to invite you to a party tonite at my friend Naphtali’s.

  Ng ng ng and inarticulate glugging noises.

  So you wanna? We’ll get a chance to unwind a little know what I mean?

  The glottal stops now indicate Bruce might be on the verge of a choking attack, hysterical fit.

  Sweetie? So think it over sweetie and I’ll call you again at the end of day OK?

  The hysteria’s now definitely set in.

  Sweetie? There’ll be lots of food, I’ll call you again at the end of the day OK? … Hello? Anyone there? Dear?

  3 Dreams

  In the first I’m running up a heath, above me roll the ominous thunderclouds. I’ve got to reach … it. “It” turns out to be Northanger Abbey, on account of a conversation I’ve had with Dodie about the vampire novel she’s writing. As I reach the door, I wheel around to face my pursuer, a famous ex-San Franciscan who’s into s/m. This person happens to be a lesbian and she’s in her full leathers. I know she intends to go for my neck, but it’s too late. The languor seizes me as she pins me against the huge medieval oak door of the Abbey and I give up. I can’t fight this anymore. I’ve reached the end of my resources. She starts to rub up against me and I can feel her cruel metal-studded bracelets bruising my delicate flesh. Too late the realization dawns on me—this is what I’m made for, this is what I’m born for. I groan, ineffectually resisting the pleasure I’ve started to feel. I allow her to take her will.

  Also: I’m at home at my family’s house in Portland, Oregon. It’s late in the afternoon, since it gets dark early here in the North country. So I turn on the lights in the bedroom I’ve had since I was a child. My mother comes in quietly and just stands there. For your punishment (but what was the fault?—I can’t remember) I’m going to have to ground you—and a little tremor scurries down my spine. Brass gleams in the late afternoon twilight. I think, I must remember to get off my article for the Poetics Journal. Is there a deadline? I can’t recall if there is.

  In another I’m visiting my friend Martin at his pied-à-terre in the Silver Lake area, L. A. He’s teaching a class in art criticism there and has rented this cottage temporarily. The warm evening floods us. Outside, banana trees are spotlit, L.A. style, wonderful yellow green against night. Where the traffic is down below, the streetlights make a frivolous diamond necklace. We’re waiting for Martin’s friend Tom to come by and take us to the bars. Why isn’t he here yet? I demand. We’re horsing around, then take off all our clothes so we won’t be encumbered. It’s obvious where all this is leading to, I think—I’m going to get to suck Martin’s cock, why has it taken so long? But Martin suddenly changes the whole scenario. He spreads my legs and tells me quite calmly he’s going to fuck me. The proposal enrages me. What about AIDS! I tell him indignantly. Martin is very self-possessed. He remarks casually that I must be a very repressed person if I let a few vague fears stand in the way of a good fuck. I fall to the floor immediately and start a temper tantrum—Martin isn’t taking me seriously as a person, I’m just a sex object for him. “I’m not your little boy and you can’t tell me what to do!”—I protest disingenuously, hot salt tears in my eyes. The L.A. light goes cool, as in Raymond Chandler. And suddenly I think, but really—why not? My eyes narrow to slits. I’m a hot little bitch. I give Martin my ass, maliciously.

  I want to add a note about sex as power. During the whole time I was with him, David was still crazy for women. He couldn’t get enough of them. One part wanted to be gay of course. The rest was obsessed with what David called pussy. When we went out walking and saw women and he’d say stuff like “Nice tits huh?” I felt hopelessly outclassed, out-maneuvered. I realize I should have said something sarcastic like, Nice for you don’t you mean, David? But I didn’t, and maybe this was part of our dynamic. I was getting trade, straight dick. Should I stop loving them because they’re shits?

  David used to tell me how he beat off to the pussy mags or how he’d meet some nice woman at work and sneak off with her, they’d do it in her car or maybe in one of the empty conference rooms. Big deal. Then one time he told me about going to the Sutro, a local bi bathhouse, men and women both. David really likes bathhouses. When he turned the comer, there was this big guy, barrel-chested and macho, standing there, legs akimbo, arms folded across his chest. A couple of demented-looking women were at the crotch, sucking and licking and carrying on all over him. The trio was the center of interest of a larger circle of men around them, watching what was going on, beating off, and looking like hicks who’d never seen anything like this. The big man demanded of the women more and more insistently—this is what you want isn’t it? Huh? Isn’t this what all women want huh? According to David’s story this had got the watching men so hot their tongues were lolling out and they were jerking themselves off like mad. “So what were you doing, David,” I ask him. David looks at me like I got a screw loose. “I was jerking off too, what do you think?”

  You just can’t tell what, if any, of our sexual systems are going to survive. That’s what I say. On the one hand, who wants terrible things happening to women? Not me; I identify with them too much, it’d hardly be in my interests to allow for stuff like rape battering etc. One thing I do know is I want hot sex, and that for me presupposes a power imbalance. Maybe the future will figure a way to put all this together. I dream of hot sex. I want it. My life depends on it to be happy. For the rest, don’t ask me. I don’t know.

  Here’s a snapshot. David and me are trading stories, we’re talking about the history of socialism like we often did. He tells me about his political work, the relatives he found later in life who’d been stalwarts in the old CP. We’re little boys in the 3rd grade again—trading baseball cards. I tell David about this wonderful/terrible quote I found from Max Eastman, when he’d gotten back from some conference in the Soviet Union (this is all in the 1930s). He’d discovered “scientific socialism in the process of verification.” We both have to laugh. Such generous hopes betrayed by such stupid language. But the fact that David could laugh at this and is laughing with me, and is one of the few people I know who knows all the levels of hope and disillusionment and then hope again that this laughter means for me, kindles hopeless desire in me. It makes me want to conclude every story of David I ever tell with just one conclusion. Seeing me grow pale with desire, David decides to seize this opportunity to treat me like a thing, an object, takes me defenseless and sticks his big dick down my throat till I choke on it. That’s the fantasy. Like I told you earlier, if I could reduce David to so many pounds of meat on the hoof I’d do it.

  Onward, but to where. The news is, they come and they go. I haven’t heard from David for at least a year.

  Last time we talked, he said he had a girlfriend. A girlfriend, David? He was at this dance and told her, I want to be completely honest with you—looking straight into her eyes and holding the glance to show sincerity—so I’m gonna have to tell you I’m a gay man. But
if David was expecting to épater les bourgeois, did he ever get a surprise. The woman looks back at him equally straightforwardly and says brashly—well, I’m a dyke! And apparently that was the beginning of a very happy relationship. They’re going steady now. They both really like getting it on; and what makes it all the more exciting is that, since one is a gay man and the other is a gay woman, obviously they don’t have to feel boxed in. You are who you are, and they’re not heterosexual. All the fucking in the world won’t make you who you aren’t. When David tells me this, he slightly averts his eyes. I like that actually. And really, I like David a lot. Just the way he is. With that slight gleam of animal terror in his big blue eyes. Don’t change, David.

  THE MOST GOLDEN BULGARI

  Felice Picano

  From Men Who Loved Me, a novel in progress

  No one has yet determined who can be loved and who cannot.

  Old Yiddish Proverb

  IF EVER IN THE GLOOMIEST MOMENT of yet another broken affair I wonder if I was truly loved, I always stop and recall a certain Bulgari watch given to me by Djanko Travernicke.

  For years, I’d forgotten the watch even existed. Then, in 1972, my apartment was burgled and the thief caught. Even more surprising, the watch reappeared ten minutes later, draped over the midnight blue sleeve of a big blond cop. “I figured it was yours,” he said, “because of the F. before your name on your doorbell.” He flipped the glittering object to its golden back which read:

  Carissimo Felice

  Oro per L’Oro

  Mai domenticar—Djanko

  “What’s it say?”

  I translated: “Dearest Felice. Gold for the Golden One. Don’t ever forget me. Djanko. That was his name,” I added.

  He looked me in the eyes and said right out. “My partner says that watch must ta’ cost plenty!” On his lips, unsaid, fluttered the questions he wouldn’t ask, that I wouldn’t answer: Who was this Djanko, and how had I merited such an expensive gift?

  “I should thank that burglar,” I said, hoping to forestall his questions. “When I sell this, I’ll have more money than I’ve had all year.”

  The next morning I went down to the Sixth Precinct to reclaim the watch. I did sell it, two days later, wearing my best suit and tie, using my copy of the precinct claim as an ownership I.D. It brought me several thousand dollars, although less than its value, and in fact got me through the rest of that year, including rent, food, and utilities. And, as the elderly Hasidic jeweler on Forty-seventh Street looked it over for flaws, I sighed and said, “It’s 24 karat gold, throughout,” remembering with a pang the day that Djanko put it around my wrist in that plush first floor lounge of the shop on the Via Condotti and whispered in my ear, “As I promised, no? The most golden Bulgari of them all!”

  Djanko was not the handsomest, the sexiest, the most emotionally intense nor the most intellectually gifted of my lovers. He wasn’t even the richest, despite his munificent gifts. He was my only European lover and the most sophisticated human being I’d ever encountered. Ten years my senior, Djanko was in the manly glow of his early thirties when I met him in 1966, but already as wise and loving as a centenarian. A Yugoslav from the mountains of Croatia, he’d moved to Rome in time for the movie-making boom at Cinecitta, and there had directed dozens of films from low budget science fiction to costume and muscle epics to “spaghetti westerns.” He even managed to find the time, energy and money to shoot a few serious films in the Croatian language, starring some of his Rome-based ethnic colleagues. I later learned that he’d received a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

  Djanko never had the least illusion about art or love. The first time we separated, he kissed me in the front seat of his silver Maserati, overlooking the flats of the Ostia seaplane port at dawn, and said in his own brand of English, “One of us shall break the other’s heart. If it must be so, I hope it is my heart. You are too young.” His prediction would come true, though he never actively did the least thing to make it happen. In truth, I would have had to be as perfect as Djanko thought I was to not have hurt him. But in the instant that policeman held out the watch I knew that while I hadn’t thought of Djanko for years— so concerned with the petty madness of my own life—he had probably never ceased adoring me. His adoration was neither pure, nor idealistic, nor unneurotic, yet oddly enough for about a year I made him happy, and I’m sure if, as old men, we meet somewhere, he will agree that I was his finest lover.

  Given the fact that Djanko’s earnings in those mid-60s years were enormous (according to one Italian magazine), it made sense that I would be kept by him. There was always more than enough spending money left around for my jaunts and lunches out. Everything else was charged or else somehow or other paid for. In addition, Djanko periodically dragged me down the Via del Corso to buy me things. In and out of Ginori, Ferragamo, and Cerutti we would go, with him insisting that I dressed like a Provo when I should be dressing like a marquis. I would try on a silk shirt that I sort of liked yet not be certain of the color: Djanko would buy all six colors the shirt was made in—that way I would have a choice and no excuse not to get it—or three pairs of a particular kind of shoe, or a half dozen bathing suits, or three linen suits.

  A modest if fine dresser himself, Djanko adored gold jewelry and would stop and stare at ridiculously expensive pieces in Bulgari’s windows, while I tried to pull him away. He owned almost no gold himself—which I attributed to residual guilt over his having become a world-class capitalist, given his socialist upbringing. This he hotly denied and I came to another conclusion: Why should he wear anything to detract from that 24-karat head of hair.

  But if Djanko didn’t wear gold, he certainly insisted that I wear it. I spent hours in shops with him, fending off bracelets the size of manacles, rings thicker than my fingers, neck chains too lavish for a Byzantine empress. In the end, of course, he got his way.

  How was it that I went from being a social worker living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to being a film director’s lover kept in a suite in the most exclusive hotel in Rome, hobnobbing with aristocracy and movie stars? In retrospect, it appears to have been utterly accidental. If any two people are to be thanked they arc my Department of Welfare co-worker Phil Koslow who got me to Europe in the first place, and an Italian citizen whose name I forget who smashed my motorcycle against a rock cliff outside the Genoa city limits and thus made sure I would have to take a train to Rome—the train on which I met a handsome fellow named Orazio who worked for the Ministry of Finance and who promised to meet me and show me around the city.

  Those first days told me a great deal about Rome and why it was as it was in those few years. My pensione overlooked the Piazza della Repubblica; my windows in front, so I could sit there an hour at a time looking down seven floors to the enormous train station or the National Museum or the Baths of Dicoletian. It was a late sunny afternoon when I got off the train from Genoa and ascended to my rented room. An hour later, washed and cool, I noticed that the sunset rush hour traffic appeared unusually congested in the piazza. It remained that way for the next day and a half: the longest traffic jam I’ve ever witnessed. I found it difficult to believe that it had required that long to untangle mere traffic. Then I realized how Italian, how specifically Roman, that madness was—like the unexpected, instant closing of museums and shops and restaurants and even churches anywhere in the city, without rhythm or explication, like the sudden drenching rainfalls which came out of cloudless skies, like the incomprehensible system of streets and piazzas, like the winding of the Tiber itself, and the decision where to place bridges across its sluggish waters.

  Still, I was free: free, impatient, bored and homy.

  Orazio arrived and with him the expected brother—no, he was a friend—only a shade less handsome, named ’Cesco, also a worker in the Italian Treasury Department but with about sixteen more English words. Could Orazio have guessed my interest in him for what it was? Better still, had he found ’Cesco for me?

  No
. It turned out that both men were engaged. After many months in Rome I would discover that every unmarried male over fifteen considered himself engaged and that even if he were, in fact even if he were married, this hardly meant that he wasn’t open to a little hanky panky, hetero or homoerotic, depending upon your charm and generosity and his whim. At the time I was still untutored and the two of them seemed far more interested in their Camparis, and in the various women strolling by along the Via Veneto, or using narrow makeup mirrors to check their appearance in low-slung pearl-gray sports cars, or sitting in the abutting sidewalk restaurants—especially three females at a table separated from us by a large, noisy, four generation family. Even so, during a lull in my conversation with ’Cesco and Orazio I decidedly heard two of the three girls talking excitedly, saying in English, “I’m certain he is.” To which the other replied, “No. No, he can’t be.”

  Until the first one declared, “I’ll prove it to you.”

  She wove around the family and came to sit right next to me: a short, pretty girl with light brown eyes so large they shone through all of her eyeshadow and lashes, a close cut “Italian boy” haircut, the palest pink lipstick. She wore a lacy long sleeve blouse that revealed as much as it hid, and skin-fitting shiny ebony slacks, all of which showed to great advantage her extraordinary physical development.

  “You’re not Italian, are you?” she asked. “I mean Italian Italian?”