Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  When he went to college he took his box and his thirty-threes and Photoplay write-ups on all the stars. By then he wore his hair in a feathercut and spoke in a sound-stage love-scene whisper. When the students rioted and went to smoke-in rock concerts, he went too. Wasn’t it part of growing up? And yet by the next spring he knew there’d be no one on campus he wanted to be loved by and decided to go to New York. He liberated the cat and bleached and set his hair like Marilyn’s and put her writeups and pictures in the cat carrier. I guess a little air won’t hurt her any, he thought. All the other stars he sealed up in her old box and got on the Louisville bus, changed there and in Pittsburgh, and when he got off in New York felt like he was stepping into a movie. He’d seen the city on the screen already, with a xylophone trilling while a muted trumpet made a sound like a car skidding and thick sidewalk crowds were shown. He got a job working in the cashier’s booth of a conventioneers’ hotel and smiled through the glass as though his mouth were overpainted with strawberry and fluttered his lashes. When he spoke he sounded like Marilyn and laughed at how he could make people think they were seeing her. One morning he was on his coffee break and went back to the kitchen, got his coffee and walked back to the corridor to the service entrance and stood by the door. The coffee was too hot and he leaned his head back against the wall and shut his eyes. When he opened them the corridor was full of what appeared to be businessmen. One nudged him and said here’s your chance to meet your senator and air your views. Your senator’s anxious to meet you. He’s coming this way now. The crowd parted and the senator took a step toward him and stopped. Nice to see you, Senator, Leslie whispered. The senator turned away and the crowd followed. One of those weird things, Leslie told himself. In the days that followed he brooded. Hadn’t Judy, in one of her movies, come to New York and had all the key people say she was what they’d been waiting for? He wondered if people might not be the opposite with him and laugh when he talked and when they saw how he walked. One evening he walked up to a policeman and hit him in the mouth and was in Bellevue before he heard the senator’d just been shot. In a few weeks he was released and put on welfare and given a room in a hotel at the corner of Barrow and West. It was a truck-driver’s hotel and his window opened onto a fire escape and faced a blank wall. He bought a Jap battery record player and listened to his thirty-threes and sorted through the stars. When it got hot he walked up Christopher. All the other kids were on welfare and with his southern manner he quickly made friends. They turned him on to doctors who’d write ups and downs, told him they all found their drags in the garbage and took him to the Silver Dollar and introduced him to Jackie and Candy. Candy’d just had a sex change and was taking hormones. Leslie wanted some too but you couldn’t get them without cancer checkups and you couldn’t get the checkups on Medicaid. Anyway he found falsies and cocktail dresses in the garbage and in no time was a street-star—walked around thinking he looked like the big studio product while wearing things he trashed or ’twenties drags he bought on credit, soon terminated, in the Christopher Street antique stores. Sometimes he had his record player cradled in one arm like a viola playing Judy. He decided to go on the stage and Jackie promised she’d write a part for him in her next play and took him around to the factory and Andy said he’d use him in his new movie. He chose Fuschia for his stage name. Ultra Violet was then big and too much originality puts people off. It had all been so easy. Here he was nearly a star already and he hadn’t taken any acting classes or been in a road company. He thanked Marilyn and the Senator. In a way he brought them together again and now they were opening doors. The President, too. From the other side they singled him out, found him capable of carrying out their wishes and rewarded him. He thanked them by remaining true to Marilyn’s taste, stuck to barbiturates and said they did for him what ups did for the rest of the kids: took away his inhibitions and gave his mirror-smile that big studio look. When he got a script filled he liked to take twenty and walk around the halls wearing a bedsheet or go up and down Christopher in heels with a pinch-toe ’forties walk. A year went by and a new element moved into the hotel, drug derelicts, mental hospital fodder, colored winos. Garbage and broken bottles accumulated on the fire escape and even on hot days he kept his window locked and the shade down. It isn’t hard to make people think I’m looking the way I want to look in my shadowy room, he said. When he had no more downs he reverted to the feathery-voiced nice guy who had James Dean-type speed-cadets crashing with their boots on on his bed.

  When a fairy’s favorite movie star dies or when a fairy’s mother’s favorite movie star dies he goes into a trance—an image worshipped from afar becomes accessible in death. That summer when Judy was laid out at Frank E. Campbell’s he waited in the line of mourners, cradling his record player in his arm playing her thirty-threes. When he got to the door he turned it off and when he was in the deadroom turned it on and stepped back out of line. The attendants said nothing. In a few minutes someone from the office came in and asked them to help him find his way out. Outside some reporters thought the idea’d been ricky-tick and snapped his picture and took down his name. The next morning he was in the centerfold of the News. He sent a copy to his mother, saying he had a new kitten and had named him Arithmetic. He began wondering if Judy’d been appointed to carry on Marilyn’s work. Marilyn had given him the Senator’s frightened glance across the service entrance corridor. Judy’d given him a news camera shot. Maybe Judy and not Marilyn was the one. He reminded himself his news pic looked like one of Marilyn without makeup and in other ways struggled with doubt. Hadn’t the paper said Judy’s final interment place was as yet undisclosed. Lying on a mortuary or cemetery shelf she’d be powerless. Without a grave or a tomb the body can call its own the spirit can no more wander around doing favors than undeposited money can earn interest. He got a letter from his mother, mentioning Judy and groping for words for her feelings. After thinking it over he wondered if she could be induced to send money. He called her collect and said he’d found unhappiness in love and it had caused him to—he hesitated in the phone booth—become a little addicted to something. After a silence she said, “Addicted to what, Leslie?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Scag I guess.” “Oh, Leslie.” “Oh, well I think I can get off it all right if only I have a little help.” “Well what do you mean, help?” “Money, I guess.” “Well how much, Leslie?” “Oh,” he let half a minute go by. “Well, you see I owe some people something and if I could pay maybe they’d stop coming around because when they come they always have more and I could get off it.” “Well yes but how much, Leslie?” “Well not a whole lot. I guess fifty’d cover it and leave me something until my next check.” “Well all right, Leslie,” she said, and in a moment hung up. In fact in the next few days he did borrow from the cigar-face who ran the hotel, saying he was expecting something in the mail. When her letter came there was a dollar folded in it. The kitchen cat had had kittens and after a page of what she’d gone through trying to think of names she said she was sorry to hear he’d been driven to the use of his own medications. They could only lead to further heartbreak. The cigarface running his hotel said he could work off his debt doing the graveyard shift on the desk.

  He soon knew the colored winos’ names and made them his audience. He’s always imagined the nitty-gritty was like showbusiness movies—Busby Berkeley girls braving it through bankruptcy or war, backstage heartbreak followed by self-destruction by the poisons. When he got a prescription filled, he liked doing a scene where a showgirl who was on the brink of stardom when she hit the skids and got fired goes back to the theater one evening, doped-up and moved by reminiscence, and wanders along the corridor behind the third balcony and comes to the head of the stairs when the orchestra goes into her old dance number. Her eyes widen, her mouth sags open and she tumbles down the stairs to her death. When the winos saw Leslie wandering around the halls in a bedsheet they clapped their hands and said show us how the old showgirl went when they played her number. And Leslie,
full of tuies, always obliged, rolling down the staircase and lay at the bottom wearing a mortuary smile. The winos always chuckled and offered him a pull on a pint. One night Fat Mary, the junkie on the top floor, copped it and after the police went the morgue wagon came and as she was too big and stiff to fit in the elevator and too heavy to carry they pinned a sheet around her and rolled her down the five flights. When they were gone Jackie called and said she was having tryouts for her new play. It was cornball Busby Berkeley with blood and guts thrown in and Leslie rehearsed and appeared in it and as other cast members dropped out enlarged his part and took other parts but satisfaction eluded him. He got his first big break when Sophia, who was shooting a New York movie, chose him and Candy to do cameos in her jailhouse scene. His was scheduled after Candy’s, just before lunch. Sophia, who appeared in the background, had a camera and crew scheduled out in Brooklyn that afternoon for the trial scene. Leslie blew his lines all afternoon. At five Sophia hit him in the mouth and walked out. The director said they’d splice his scene together from the footage they already had. Leslie wondered whether Marilyn, watching from the other side, had envied him. He’d always believed Marilyn’s was the wrath and late that night, behind the desk in the lobby, he touched his bruised lip and wondered if Marilyn couldn’t be induced to make Sophia sorry. He closed his eyes and pictured her kissing Sophia’s knuckle joints and then, holding both her hands, leaning closer and whispering what a wonderful person she always thought she was. He imagined Marilyn’s eyes closed and her mouth faintly puckered. One of the lobby winos came in and started toward the telephone and fell and broke the window. Leslie screamed at him to get out and the wino pulled a knife. When he tried to put him out the wino slashed him. He beat him with a windowshade roller and the wino stabbed him in the arm. He shoved him out the door and called an ambulance. The ambulance men found the wino on the sidewalk. There was a lot of blood. When they picked him up his head rolled off. They came in and called the police and the police asked Leslie what happened. He said there was a fight and the wino stabbed him. He shoved him out the door and he apparently picked a fight with somebody else who got hold of his knife. The police drove Leslie to St. Vincent’s and had him sewn up and took him down to the Tombs and booked him for murder one. The others in the gay ward were in for loitering or soliciting or possession and when they heard about his murder one count looked up to him. His legal-aid lawyer said it looked bad and he spent the days and nights in a trance. Depression-days’ movies in which a beautiful rich girl is on trial for her life were big on ’fifties TV and he looked forward to the trial scene. He imagined the thousand things they’d say—that he was from the south and did dragshows and had hit a policeman. He imagined the wino’s body being taken apart by wise-cracking medical students, the strands of arm and leg muscles separated out in fan shape and held with pins and labeled, the nerve casings cut lengthwise with scalpels and the nerves themselves viewed, the brain and eyeballs sliced for cross-section examination. He pictured the hands and feet flayed so the bone and muscle structures were visible. Little by little at first, then in larger amounts the skin, the fat layer under the skin, the musculature and finally the tendons and nerves and bones would be deposited in the garbage, the teeth, the shapeless gobs that had been the vocal cords, all of it smelling of formaldehyde and in a while, in plastic garbage bags mingling with parts of other bodies being dumped in the ocean or buried in a trench. The trial itself was disappointing. There wasn’t enough evidence, as there were no witnesses and the knife was never found and it was known there were methadone Nam veterans in the building who’d cut anybody up without a thought, for a verdict of guilty of anything to be brought in. Leslie went back to the hotel for his things (Arithmetic was gone) and took most of it over to Jackie’s apartment. He only stayed a few days. It turned out the cast had abandoned the play and Jackie’d closed it. Leslie’s arrest had frightened them, Jackie said, though each cast member seemed to have had a different reason.

  He took the bus back to visit his mother. Her father, a virile man in his sixties, had moved in and Leslie saw he wouldn’t be able to come back again so he told her everything—the time in Bellevue, the speed-cadets on his bed and what he wore on certain occasions and on the stage and his stage name, the hotel work and the fight, jail and the trial. His mother embraced him and cried and said he was braver than she didn’t know what. The next morning his grandfather came downstairs with a shot-gun. Queer, he screamed, women’s clothes. Now you get out and never come back again. Leslie’s mother cried again and said she’d go too. Her father said all right he could stay until the afternoon Louisville bus. He stomped out of the house and the mother and son spent the morning packing. Leslie said he’d get an apartment and she said then he’d have to have another cat. He said he couldn’t take one on the bus and she said she’d give her something to make her sleep and he could take her in a wicker picnic basket. How could anybody think of an apartment without a cat? While she was getting her he went in her room and put some of her costume jewelry in a lunch bag and put it in his traveling case—’forties dimestore stuff, summer white wooden beads, clamp earrings that looked like flattened beads (the purse of white beading he didn’t have room for), other necklaces of cut or molded glass, some plastic cameo pieces. When he was on the bus he opened the case and she’d switched lunch bags on him, this one had only his rubber baby pants and baby shoes. He left it in the garbage and when he got back and found an apartment on east Fifth, got his things from Jackie and began trying out for parts. Everyone said he had talent though of course he was no longer a discovery. Candy had inoperable cancer by then and as she wasted away did the things the kids all dreamed of doing—did Williams’s plays uptown, appeared on German TV, had plastic surgery on her nose so she looked like an old-fashioned movie star in the hospital when the drugs calculated to kill the cancer were killing her. The vogue for Late Show drag queens was dying with her. Andy’d dropped them and when an open casting call went out for Ruby’s Busby Berkeley show, Leslie and Candy and Jackie all said they’d go. But that morning Jackie was crashing and Candy felt too weak and Leslie was walking on with a line of girls when the cigar-face calling the steps said, “Ah, miss, I’m sorry, you’re too tall.” Down in the dressing room when the girls saw she was a he they giggled and asked if it was part of a fraternity initiation. He got evicted from Fifth Street and moved into a cockroachy place down on Ludlow. The cat played with the roaches. He’d hoped she’d eat them. He visited Candy in the hospital, having heard she was dying this time. In the midst of flowers and chocolates and imported tidbits she couldn’t swallow she wept. “I could have had a TV series and been like Lucy,” she said. “I know,” Leslie said. “Tennessee said I could play anything.” “I know.” “What have you been doing?” “My check didn’t come so I’ve had to scrounge.” “You can take all this stuff Andy’s friends keep sending.” “Maybe I will. Listen, don’t think about dying. You’ll be out in a few days. Just like the other times.” “Look at me. I’m like a skeleton already. And the smell.” “It goes away. It went away the other times.” “I could have been loved like Lucy.” “She’s retiring, you know.” “No. Where’d you hear?” “On the TV I guess.”

  That winter the cat found a way in and out and had kittens and on the day Lucy retired Candy died. Though by then the kids were scattering they showed up at Campbell’s for the funeral. Leslie wore the sari-material cocktail version of Chanel’s last afternoon dress, the one with the jacket with the three-quarter-length sleeves. All in basic black with a sleeveless white blouse, elbow-length black cotton gloves, two strings of jet, ’twenties’ pointed pumps and a cartwheel black gauze hat. No stockings, no makeup. When he got there Judy’s room was occupied by the son of one of the Revson brothers, automobile accident, couldn’t have been over twenty-nine if that and not bad looking. Just what Candy’d have wanted. He thought it was sweet of Judy to go out and get him for her. In Candy’s room the flowers were piled to keep anyone from getting too cl
ose to the coffin because of the cancer smell and though Candy looked as glamorous as ever Leslie could see the wax on her throat covering the emaciation. And he could tell the dress was padded. There was a crowd and all the kids’ faces shone with excitement. Jackie asked how his kittens were doing. He said they were nearly full grown. It took all his check to feed them. He wished they’d eat the cockroaches. They all slept on his bed though he left the window open hoping they’d find their way out. Jackie said she’d heard they were going to bury Judy soon. “Bury?” Leslie said. “She’s been dead all these years.” “Yes but they wanted a mausoleum or couldn’t agree on which grave or something, I don’t know, it was something, anyway the attendant told me they’ve had her on a shelf and this year they’ll bury her.” After the service there wasn’t room in the hired cars and Leslie started back downtown. The flowers and flesh-colored lights had dazzled him so he felt as though he were just coming out of Gone With the Wind. He was full of yearning and gnawed by envy. Though they’d buried Candy the real Candy lived on, nesting in the plastic coils of her videotapes and films. Once he’d have done anything to be one of those smiling creatures in a headdress and tutu made of ostrich feathers and carrying a big ostrich feather fan around in a circle on the stage and when the number was over being picked up by a gangster in a long car, a man she’s trying to drop from her life and who in the end dies for her. Now he stopped trying out for things. His thirty-threes stayed out of their jackets and covered the floor. At night the cockroaches walking on them sounded like rain on the window. Like a lot of the kids he went only to Jackie’s wine and speed and popcorn Late Show parties. On the first day of a cold snap Jackie said she had the use of a camera and crew tomorrow out in Brooklyn and wanted all the kids to be there. “What do you want us to do?” they all said. “What shall we wear?” “I want everybody to do shtick,” she said. “And wear antique lace.” She gave them the address and said eight o’clock. “It’s way the other side of Brooklyn so take taxis,” she said. “I’ll pay when you get there.” By daybreak Leslie had on his dress and shawl and white satin dancing slippers, had washed his hair and found a taxi. They drove for half an hour and came to a marshy dump. The driver said this was the address and one of the kids waved. The wind took away Leslie’s breath when he got out. As the other kids arrived there was talk of a mistake and the drivers talked among themselves and when it began to snow drove away. The kids thought of building a fire (none of them had a coat) then made a dash for a place where they saw cars. It was an expressway on the other side of a fence in a ditch. Someone said this was how Jackie was getting back at them for abandoning her play. Someone else said no, it was Candy’d got hold of her mind from the other side so she made a mistake. She’s a lot further into Candy than you think. They started walking back the way the taxis went and reached a place where they caught a bus and when it left them off caught a train. Leslie had a fever the next morning and couldn’t get out to borrow money for food and died a few days later, flic kittens were faithful to the end, devoured his genitalia and entrails and worked their way up through the stomach cavity, tearing away liver, lungs and heart. They ripped away the skin and swallowed it and ate the muscles and tendons of his arms and legs and hands and feet and gnawed away at the bones until they were dry. The scalp they ate, leaving the hair scattered in gobs, also the eyeballs and tongue. The cockroaches got the brain. The kittens fought over the bones and, fighting, scattered them through the three rooms. They ripped open the kitchen garbage bags and scattered the garbage around so the place looked like the sort of welfare hotel room in which often as not an old widow or wino is found decomposing. That spring the cigar-face landlord came for the back rent, unlocked the door, took one look and went and hired another cigar-face to empty the place out. On the day a cortege of a few automobiles behind the hearse wound their way through a Westchester County cemetery to Judy’s mausoleum with her coffin, Leslie’s bones and hair in a dozen black plastic garbage bags were stacked on the sidewalk.