Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Plenty of ironworkers are happily familied, jovial, and intelligent. I even knew one who was—on the quiet—a Dickens buff. But it is not a settled life: the work wanders, the schedule is erratic, the weather can freeze you, boil you. It’s not for anyone who has the chance to do something better. So ironworkers tend to be roughnecks—and in this Gene was the essential ironworker. He was a fabulously uninhibited slob. He was also one of the largest men I’ve known. The flow of beer bloated him a bit, but he had something like six shoulders and a chest that could cross the street. A good man to have on your side, if you’ve got to be in the war.

  He was hard company, the sort who expresses his joie de vivre by putting headlocks on you. He also laced his endearments with threats of sexual attack, a typical ironworker anarchism. When I asked him to stop mauling me, or do it more gently, he said, “I could screw your butt. Would that be gentle enough for you?” Of course, one doesn’t take any of this literally. They like to shake up the taboos. Jim would say, “I don’t know why I’m so exhausted,” and Gene would reply “Because I was fucking you all night and now your fucking asshole’s all sore.” Imperturbable, Jim would observe, “Yeah, that might be it,” and they’d proceed to other matters. After a number of these outbursts, I began to wonder if something genuine might be pouring out of Gene.

  He was often at Jim’s when I was, elaborating his theory of layfucking, and, out of loyalty to Jim, would attempt to draw me into his philosophy. Or perhaps it was just because I was there; perhaps he would have polled Eleanor Roosevelt for dos and don’ts of lay fuck had she been in the room. He would be deep in the depiction of a pickup, acting out the parts, even filling in passersby who, he once said, were “huffy and out of date.” Then, he told us, tensing, showing us how it felt, “My woman spots this briefcase dude and she is traveling. She is traveling away.” Now he showed us Rodin’s The Thinker. “But what she don’t know is, see, those guys in suits don’t spend money on my woman like an ironworker does! Am I wrong or what?”

  “You’re right, my man Gene,” says Jim; and I’m trying to figure out where all this lingo comes from.

  “What about you?” says Gene, to me.

  “What about what me?” I respond, trying to look about six foot eight.

  “What do you think of my woman dodging me like so?”

  I took up my beer can, swirled the liquor thoughtfully, and offered, “I read that as an uncanny act on the part of my woman.” Had I made it, passed? Jim was nodding, but Gene was just looking at me. I looked back.

  His face a puzzle, Gene asked me, “So like tell us why you didn’t join the union like Jimbo here.”

  “Jim already knows,” I said, backpedaling.

  “So me.”

  “The punk’s a writer,” Jim put in.

  “What kind?” asked Gene, his brow clouding. “Novels, fiction, stories?”

  “All of the above,” I answered, for they already were all of the above.

  Gene looked dire.

  “Fuck me and fuck my college,” I said. “Right?”

  “How come you could have joined the union and instead you’re being a writer?”

  “Well,” I said, “every family has its black sheep.”

  Gene looked over at Jim, digesting this comic flattery, and I believed I had scored the point. But there was one more test.

  “So tell us,” said Gene, “some of your unique procedures in the enticing of my woman.”

  Jim smiled. I hadn’t told him I was gay, but brothers always know. Sometimes they care; not Jim. Gay neither irritated nor interested him. It was like water polo or raising sheep: someone else’s fucking problem.

  As it happens, I am bent toward the analytic. I love codes, theories, lists. So, despite our differences, I easily fell in with Gene’s taxonomy, following—and sometimes leading—him into theoretical situations calling for the most finely honed expertise in layfucking. And I laid one concept in particular on him that struck vastly home: the wearing of shirts with a college insigne, I had noticed, encourages people to talk to you. “It’s a mark of class,” I concluded. “Especially if it’s a snappy college.”

  Gene thought it over. “Girls like college, don’t they?”

  “They admire a college man.”

  “Yeah,” said Gene, slowly. “I could be the fucking football hero.”

  Well, rougher men than Gene have attended school on jock scholarships. Jim remembered a Rutgers sweatshirt in some closet at my folks’, and I retrieved it the next weekend. It was early spring, a nice wind up—excellent sweatshirt weather, and apparently Gene did score a social coup in his new accessory, though he had had to cut it up to fit into it. He didn’t win any woman over to a date, but a few actually replied to his addresses; according to Jim the most popular remark was, “Did you really go to Rutgers?”

  From then on, I was Gene’s main man, after Jim, and he took to dropping in on me for confidence and advice. He called me “little brother.” I put up with him, at first because I was trying to straighten out my standing in the family at that time and I thought it politic to tolerate Gene as a favor to Jim. After a while, however, I began to like Gene himself, for under the perversely insensitive behavior he had a rather touching sweetness, a Dostoyefskyan idiocy, maybe. Too, there was that amazing ironworker loyalty, something I’ve never encountered in members of the leadership classes, gay or straight. There was this as well: though his days were filled up with labor and his evenings with pub talk, he was a very lonely man. Jim and I were his only friends; the women he took to bed, I gathered, were whores of small quality. He disposed of them not because he was heartless but because there was nothing between him and them but a hit. One night he turned up at my place in his Rutgers shirt, drunk and sorrowful and inarticulate, but clearly heading toward something. The subject was love.

  “When you got a buddy, man,” he said. “Then you can show him how you feel about him, right? It’s radical. Because when you really like a guy, and he trusts you, you know him … you know him right down to his cock, know him like a man. You get a buddy like that, you can do anything with him. Anything. You could ask him to lie down on his stomach because you’re going to lock him up and ream his cherry out for him, and he’ll do it. That’s what love is. Loving your buddy.” He gazed at me as if measuring my ability to understand what he was saying. “You hear me, little brother?”

  I nodded.

  “Now, your brother is really solid. That is a fucking solid guy, and there aren’t many. You better know that. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Sure. Because if you don’t know it I’ll kick your butt in. Shit, he’s solid. But he doesn’t like to let a guy show him how he fucking feels. Know what I mean?”

  “You’re hurting my arm.”

  “I’ll be good, little brother,” he said, releasing me. “Because listen. This fucking city is filled with buddies. And they trust each other. Sure they do. But there comes a moment when you got to show your fucking buddy how you feel about him. You got to. There’s no words. A guy just looks at his buddy, and he loves him. He loves him. Not just as a friend but as a man. He’s got to show him, don’t he? Put his arms around him, show his buddy. Am I wrong or what?”

  “You’re right.”

  “Say my name, too.”

  “Gene.”

  “Okay. I like to hear it. So, like all this time there’s buddies together, and there’s this one fucking moment, and they both feel it. They know it’s true. It’s fucking true. So one guy just takes his buddy and shows him how he fucking feels, whatever it fucking takes. That’s how they know they’re buddies.” Finally he slowed down, took a deep breath, and shook his head. “I can’t do that with Jimbo, little brother. Do you know what he’s like?”

  “I grew up with him.”

  “A rubber band. You can stretch it just so far, and then …” He pantomimed an explosion that almost blew me off the couch. “I just wish there was a place you could go and find a buddy. You know?”
/>
  A thought hit me.

  “There is one, Gene.”

  “A buddy club, like.”

  “Listen, there is one!”

  I had been going to the Eagle, and it occurred to me that what Gene needed and couldn’t quite name was a man to take home. Or was I making the mistake of taking him literally?

  “What is it?” he asked. “A gin mill?” Their term for a pub.

  “Sort of. Potential buddies stand around and try to meet.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “They go somewhere and show how they feel about each other.” That didn’t sound right. “No, they … try to like each other.”

  “How?”

  “That’s hard to say.” Then I added, “It doesn’t always work.” The greatest understatement in Stonewall.

  He took a last swig of his drink. “I don’t fucking care anymore. Let’s go.”

  Thirty seconds after we entered the bar, I decided I had made a mistake. The Eagle, then in its heyday, was the showcase for tough men, and I knew Gene would never have taken it for a gay bar. It looked, in fact, like what he had asked for: a buddy club. Still, Gene may have been too authentic a buddy for this gang. There was always a lot of leather and muscle, and bar discounts for shirtless men encouraged a trashy savor. But that impenetrable invulnerability set Gene off from the others, and the tattoos, when he pulled off the sweatshirt, were a shock. After all, this was the place where I once saw two incredibly ruthless-looking hombres intently conversing in low tones, and innocently sidled over to eavesdrop. One of them might say, “So we stripped the kid and secured him and then …” The other might say, “Belts are kid stuff, just makes them giggle. You have to whip those butts.” Lo, this is not what I overheard, boys and girls. One was saying, “Barbara Cook could play Sally and Angela could play Phyllis,” and the other replied, “What about Liza?”

  In fact, I couldn’t have blundered worse if I had set up Ozma of Oz on a blind date with Leo Tolstoy. This was a place of sculpted hunks; Gene was lewd. They were practiced; Gene was improvisational. And they had polish; Gene was basic. He’d find no buddy here. A partner for the night, maybe: but he would have been repelled by the idea. A man has one-night stands with women, not men. Anyway, Gene didn’t want a sex partner. He wanted a buddy he could like so badly he would be bound, almost incidentally, to fuck him. That particular stylistic riddle he could only solve among his own people, where tattoos are not exotica but a convention, and where loyalties fiercely combine. Sex is class.

  Dimly, through the liquor, Gene realized this. He said he liked the place, and energetically approached a few men, yet nothing panned out. “Let’s blow,” he said; once we got outside, he didn’t want to go: “Let’s just talk.” We leaned against a car on the corner and watched the others saunter back and forth between the Eagle and the Spike. We didn’t say much, and, after a long silence, Gene put his arm around me. I looked up to cheer him with a joke and saw that he was crying.

  We stood frozen like that for a long while, till he put his arm down and said, “I don’t think those guys liked me.”

  “Maybe I should have—”

  “I couldn’t fucking understand half the things they were saying. And one of them called me a fucking Bulgarian! I never even been there! I never been out of this country!”

  Hell, I thought, if Gene is a vulgarian, whoever called him that, you’re a Firbankian!

  “I want to deck somebody. Anyone here you don’t like? Point him out.”

  “Let me call Jim.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s your best buddy, right?”

  “Yeah, but … look, does he ever come here?”

  “No. But let’s see what we can arrange.”

  Jim, roused from sleep, was annoyed till I explained the delicacy of the case.

  “Shit, the fucker’s on a crying drunk, that’s all,” said Jim. “Everyone does that now and again. He can stay with me tonight.”

  “Jim’s coming to get you,” I told Gene.

  He mauled me in relief.

  I must say the Eagle—Spike parade had picked up notably— but for all the lingering stares, no one actually dared to cruise Gene. Is it possible that there’s a man too authentic to be hot?

  Gene was still crying when Jim’s cab pulled up—it is, as they say, a jag. I thought, everyone likes my brother except his family, as Gene threw himself at the door. Suddenly he turned back.

  “Gotta thank little brother,” he said, and, staggering back to me, he planted a huge wet kiss right on my mouth.

  “The fucking meter’s running, man,” said Jim.

  After they left I noticed that Gene had left his Rutgers shirt on the car with me.

  Later, when I told friends of this incident, they invariably turned against me, one of their favorite activities. How did I dare bring one of those violent homophobes to a gay bar? What if he had wrecked the place? Or me?

  Rubbish. I was protected by ironworker loyalty: your buddy’s brother is your brother. As for ironworker homophobia, Gene would never have taken the Eagle for a gay bar, because ironworkers don’t believe in gay. Males are men or faggots; men are solid and faggots are weak. A husky leather dude who beds his own sex is even so a man. A little New Republic nerd who proudly bangs his wife and sneers at gays is still a faggot. This is why ironworkers casually throw around what we regard as gay references, and why they can climb into the sack with a buddy without regarding it as a sexual assertion.

  No doubt all Gene got out of Jim was the chance to sprawl in his arms all night. There are buddies you fuck and there are buddies you only love; and I think Gene loved Jim. And sometimes I think there are hardhats and there is everyone else, because in looks, worldview, and behavior they are unique. I have been wrong about one thing: they are not invulnerable. When I pass a file of them, I look for Gene, but he is probably working some other part of the country now; they move around a lot.

  However, they never change, whether in their habits, dress, loyalties, or patriotism, though their fix on love of country is at times comprehensively ignorant. Just a few days ago, as I walked by our local gang lounging out the lunch break, I heard one of them casually call out, “Hey, traita!” Accustomed as I am to New Yorkers’ public speaking, I paid no notice. About a block later, I began to wonder what the heckler had seen to inspire the epithet. Jane Fonda? La Pasionaria? There were only a few shoppers and businesswomen walking with me.

  Then I realized that he had been speaking to me. I was wearing my Yale sweatshirt, and ironworkers regard the big eastern schools as hotbeds of Stalin-loving treachery. Inadvertently, I had challenged an ironworker’s loyalty to his kind, and probably baited his sense of class as well.

  Anyway, it proves my contention that college-logo sportswear encourages people to talk to you.

  STREET STAR

  Wallace Parr

  LESLIE’S MOTHER WANTED TO RAISE A DAUGHTER in a lovely home and when she was in her teens take her to Hollywood and let the producers see her. Instead she had Leslie. Before she had a chance to try for a daughter her husband, who was a demolition contractor, was killed by a falling plate-glass window. With the insurance money and what she earned as a mental hospital night nurse she was able to give Leslie many advantages her own childhood had lacked—disc-jockey music and nonstop TV, backyard blanket parties with a portable record player, popcorn and Dr. Peppers. She taught him to pin up her hair and do her nails as she read aloud from Photoplay. As far back as he could remember they went to the movies every time they changed. Gone With the Wind came around every year and they took a picnic basket and sat through it twice. They watched the Late Show together and worshipped the stars—Judy, Lucy, Marilyn. They both had little hillbilly faces like Marilyn’s and thick, light hair. She laughed at the church-work ladies who read Gone with the Wind and said they’d never get anywhere. She went everywhere—Memphis, Nashville, Louisville—and Leslie rode his bicycle through the colored town to where there was a town the Yankees had
shelled and burned. It was overgrown with brambles so he could hardly tell where the streets were and the center where the church and cemetery were had flowerbeds tended by a woman who smoked cigars. She lived in a dugout and Leslie had the idea there were corridors between the graves and the dugout, as though death were a continuation of life conducted under the cemetery surface with visits and parties and lace dresses which would crumble away if sunlight touched them, like dreams or the images on the screen in the movie theater when somebody opened the balcony fire-door, or the way his face faded in his mother’s bedroom mirror as night fell. After he was too big for his bicycle he went in his mother’s room when she was away and smiled and talked in her mirror. As he grew older he leaned closer to it and with his eyes nearly closed and his mouth puckered whispered what a wonderful person he thought he was and kissed it. He made friends with the cigarface movie projectionist who told him there was a Marilyn movie coming with men with women’s clothes on in it. The morning the stills for it were up Leslie went in his mother’s room and tried on some of her Revlon Combination. That afternoon the TV said Marilyn was dead. That night they went to her movie and laughed through their tears and came out feeling as though they’d been watching Gone With the Wind. They got home and saw her casket on the late news and listened to sidewalk-interview people groping for words for their feelings. Leslie made up his mind he’d do anything to be loved like that. He began cuddling the yard and kitchen cats in an attempt to make himself more magnetic and taught the parlor cat to sleep on his bed. He bought his own makeup and secretly practiced reshaping his eyes with shadow and his mouth with lip- and makeup-sticks. He told his mother gangster movies and westerns irritated him and got him in too many fights. That fall he took Photoplay to school to read during lunch hour and when anyone teased him he hit him in the mouth. If anyone said anything about the stars themselves he’d just as suddenly and as though in a manic outburst get him down and sit on him until he took it back. One morning the parlor cat had kittens and on the way to school he walked by the theater and the projectionist was out in front changing the stills. He told him the cat that slept on his bed had just had kittens and the projectionist took the cigar out of his mouth and said he had just the thing. He gave him a shipping box such as distributors send the reels of a feature in. When Leslie got it home that afternoon the TV said the President was dead. He decided to go through his Photoplays and clip out all the things on Marilyn and put them in the feature box. By the time the President was buried the box was full.