Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  Just then I heard a noise. Someone at my end picking up or putting back the receiver. Wait a minute! Not here, but there! Sydelle herself. She'd been there all the while. Listening in. Hearing what I had to say. That...!

  "You tell Mizz Auslander if she can't dish it out with the big boys, she's got no business in the kitchen," I shouted and hung up.

  A few minutes later, the phone began to ring again. I ignored it, still fuming from the last call, and took a fresh mug of coffee out to the front deck. Luis appeared in the doorway, holding the phone. He was wearing only white jockeys and had a piss hard-on. The rest of his body looked extra hard, dehydrated from a night out, his taut skin an edible cinnamon tan. Once again I thought what great-looking guys I had as pals and roommates.

  "Well?" he asked about the phone call.

  "Under no circumstances." I shook my head, and Luis shrugged, said something into the phone, hung up, and toddled off, no doubt to the john.

  Sometime after Luis, Alistair, Patrick, and I had breakfasted, Matt deigned to awaken. I'd just made a fresh round of French toast and eggs for him when Marcy phoned a third time. She sounded upset. She said if I hung up again, our friendship was over. It took almost an hour to calm her down, by which time the others had all eaten, showered, and taken off for the beach.

  Even Matt had gone, and he seldom went near the sand. Not that he didn't want to show off his body—he did—but because it was so difficult hiding his foot on the beach, and because of the many possible injuries he might sustain if he went barefoot. At the beginning of each season, he'd go out there with me wearing sneakers and socks. Later on, when those were too hot to wear or seemed too silly or obvious, Matt stayed away. In vain did I attempt to explain that not a single one of the dozen numbers who hung around our beach towels as pesky as blackflies in August gave a thought to his foot, for Chrissake! About the lowest their eyes ever traveled was Matt's crotch. Now, however, it seemed that Alistair and he had worked out a better solution: a tightly wrapped bandage over the top of Matt's foot covered his missing toes and allowed him to be otherwise barefoot while sitting down. He'd use a pair of loose-fitting loafers to walk in. It looked natural and required little explanation.

  Neither did the way in which Ivan—the Australian bathing suit model—suddenly got up from our beach blanket when he saw me coming down the stairs onto the beach at Ozone Walk. Alistair had joined Luis and Patrick in the surf. Matt was alone at the towels. I saw Ivan say something final to Matt, then take off. He swerved gracefully around the volleyball players and jogged off down the beach. I dropped my beach bag next to where Matt sat, took out my towel, paperback, and sun block.

  "I know, I know," Matt said before I uttered a syllable. "He gave crabs to John Neary last month."

  "Well, he did!" I handed him the Tropic Tan. "Smear some of this on my back!" I commanded, putting myself in his hands.

  "This stuff's really thick! What is it?" Matt asked.

  "Solidified semen. Read the label."

  "You read; my hands are covered. This stuff reminds me: did I tell you? Last weekend I was in Gunther's house on Coast Guard Walk and found some great cucumber-avocado dip in the fridge. I was poking into it with some pita when his housemate sees me and screams 'Stop! You're eating my face mask.'"

  "Dieter? The skinny one?" I asked. "His complexion's so bad he needs Plaster of Paris as a face mask! That feels good. Thanks for going out last night with my cousin. In fact, thanks altogether for everything with him."

  "It's okay. I like him," Matt said. And finger-wrote R-O-G inside a heart on my back.

  "Well, he told me he thought you were the cat's pajamas. You've got a regular mutual admiration society going."

  "Don't be bitchy," Matt said. "It makes those lines around the edge of your mouth that you hate."

  "Now who's being bitchy!" I said. We wrestled until the others emerged from the ocean and shook cold water on us, making me jump up.

  Soon enough we were holding court for the entire Ozone Walk Beach Club, not to mention passing acquaintances. Even that other great-looking and "Socially Significant" Pines couple—Nick Rock and Enno Poersch, who'd been together a year less than Matt and me—felt compelled to stop by and schmooze.

  After a while, Alistair pulled me up and dragged me into the surf. After some body surfing, I noticed that Ivan had returned to our beach towels. And even though Matt was ignoring him as I'd asked him to, I was afraid I'd be unable to hide my nastiness toward the model if I went back while he was still there, so I remained standing around die strand, lounging in a tide pool, watching two guys madly necking in the surf a la From Here to Eternity, while a few feet away, two oblivious little boys with beach pails and shovels were busily conferring about the sand edifice they were building, and a black retriever was enjoying the hell out of rolling himself back and forth in the wet sand.

  Alistair hooked his arm into mine. "Got the divorce papers," he said.

  "Oh, Stairs, I'm sorry!"

  "It's okay, Stodge. In a way, I'm glad. I rented a house here."

  "You what?"

  "For the rest of the season. You can see it from your back deck. It's on Floral Walk between Fire Island Boulevard and Bay. Not very big. No great views like your place, of course. Too flat for that. But it has a garden. Big deck. Pool."

  I must have looked surprised.

  "I figured I'd be able to lick my wounds and recover here as well as anywhere," Alistair explained. "Especially surrounded by such good, helpful friends. Back on the Coast," he began haltingly, "when we were working together... remember? Even though it was San Francisco and even though we had it good, I thought I'd have to... you know, be like everyone else."

  I wasn't sure I knew what he meant.

  "Funny, isn't it? I came out years before you. But once you came out, you were out! I never suspected there could be a life like this. A place like this where I'd fit in, and not ever have to make excuses or give explanations for what I said and thought and felt and did... I don't mean everyone so beautiful and so free to be themselves and of course to be gay. Well, yes, I guess that's exactly what I do mean! Am I babbling?"

  He was, but I was glad he was.

  Three great-looking numbers—one corn-silk blond, one darker blond, and one redhead—with three different but absolutely stunning bodies, in three similarly paneled Speedos, were walking toward us, smiling.

  "CYT's ahead," I announced.

  The Cute Young Things split apart to let Alistair and me through, then immediately turned around as they passed, to see us turning around to look them over. All five of us laughed, then continued on our opposite ways.

  "Get you!" Alistair scolded. "With Matthew Loguidice not a hundred yards down the beach."

  "You're right! Absolutely right!" I admitted, in a tone of mock shame. "But they are cute!" I allowed myself a dramatic sigh. "God, I love men!"

  Alistair whooped and began to do cartwheels on the sand.

  I don't know if Roy Thode actually had a name for the sequence, although I wouldn't be at all surprised. He'd been playing it more or less intact for the past several Weekends at the Ice Palace, around 4 A.M. Sunday morning, when the place was at its most crowded and dancingest. Jeffrey Roth, my dance buddy, had recognized the sequence first and

  called it "Good Times," because it usually included the Chic song of that name, the biggest hit of the summer, which Roy himself claimed to have been the first DJ to "break," earlier that year at Twelve West's White Party. The next four or five numbers varied but generally included "Party of the First Part," Gloria Gaynor's "Casanova Brown," and Carly Simon and James Taylor's very danceable remake of Inez and Charlie Foxx's sixties tune "Mockingbird." Whatever other cuts were included, the sequence generally climaxed with the Trammps' sizzling "Disco Inferno," and when one thought it couldn't go any further, Thelma Houston's unstoppable "Don't Leave Me This Way," which had—in its short history—already become known as the Gay National Anthem. After that, three loud, clanging chords slam
med in, followed by a much lighter instrumental mix, say Abba's "Dancing Queen" or Gaynor's "Searchin'."

  Patrick and, especially, Luis swore that behind the anodized gold and brushed aluminum dual turntables, Roy Thode used the sequence to end his "uptrip" of the night and to launch his "downtrip."

  One cloudy afternoon a month before, while I was shopping in the Grove, hanging around with Barbara, an attractive transvestite I knew from the city, who worked at a clothes shop just off the dock, I'd almost casually encountered the DJ himself and had gotten to flirting with him. One thing led to another—Barbara's offer of a Quaalude apiece (Rorer 412, the best) hadn't hurt—and Roy and I had ended up at the place he rented off Doctors' Walk. After sex, I asked him to confirm or deny the Luis Narvaez theory of the "climactic sequence." I soon discovered that while Roy was sweet and possessed a stiff, long wiener, drugs had—as we were wont to say—already significantly T.T.T.—i.e., Taken Their Toll—on the lad, particularly upon his memory circuits. He seemed unaware of what he had played the previous weekend, and had no idea what I was talking about, which to Jeffrey, the Jungian Supreme, proved absolutely nothing.

  Tonight, Roy had begun the sequence more subtly: A Taste of Honey's "Boogie Oogie Oogie," Anita Ward's new hit "Ring My Bell," then Shirley and Company's naughty "Shame, Shame, Shame" leading into the key "Good Times."

  Me and Jeffrey were "dates" for the night, as we'd been for the past two summers. Matt's infirmity pretty much limited his dancing to begin with, and as he had become progressively more lionized as a model, he'd also become more leatherized—"Naugahydized," Jeff said in mockery— with a public stance that put down disco dancing as "Twinkie Stuff." Tonight, however, Matt had come along with us to the Grove as companion to Alistair, who also hadn't planned a full night of drugs and dancing.

  Alistair had watched and listened earlier as I explained what our usual "contoured" drug trip for the night consisted of: a hit each of window-pane acid, softened with a few joints of good grass before we left the house and on the way to the Pines harbor, where we would catch one of the small water taxis to flit us across the black bay waters. Upon disembarking at Cherry Grove, we'd cosmetically inhale a hit of coke for that "Entrance Buzz" into the Ice Palace, a sort of last-minute blush-on. During the remainder of the night, we'd pick ourselves up with poppers whenever appropriate. As a rule, we eschewed angel dust and ethyl chloride, two quite popular "enchancers" among our set. But we always carried a light hypnotic—Quaalude or Dormidina—to ease our way off the acid, which could at times become speedy and teeth-clenching:

  The trick to taking one's down was to do so at the exact point when one was about to be physically and mentally exhausted, yet before one actually was, so if an emergency came up—e.g., one had to trek the mile home along the beach from "Downtown" in the Grove to Sky Walk—one didn't collapse along the way. Those who didn't contour their drugs, who took too many ups or downs, or took them too early, were "pigs." Tales of extreme piggishness were gossiped about—"She was found facedown on the edge in the Grove Meat Rack, out like a light! Not even the deer would fuck him!"—and laughed at all the following week. One group of buddies so looked down on this behavior that they handed out an annual Luis Henriquez Award (named after a famous downhead) for the year's most spectacular example of a public passing-out.

  Jeffrey and I had already been on the Ice Palace dance floor since after midnight; the most recently past hour without once stopping. Our drugs had peaked with the expected machine-milled perfection. Our smooth, tanned, muscled, shirtless torsos had effortlessly and rhythmically bumped and grinded and slid along six hundred other smooth, tanned, muscled, shirtless torsos from one end of the long, wall-and-ceiling-mirrored dance floor to the other, and we were back where we'd begun, near Roy in his elevated DJ booth.

  To our left, Patrick and Luis were dancing together, and when I looked at them long enough to read their lips, I could tell Patrick was demanding the downs they'd brought, and Luis was shaking his head, saying no, it was too early for their downtrip. On the other side of us were Hal Seidman and Paul Popham with his cute new lover. Alongside Nick and Enno was Wes Weidener, not with his lover, tall John, but with two of the three Michaels who were their roommates that summer. Nearby was Frank Diaz with the incredible Rainer. Off to one side, against the wall, stood George Stavrinos, next to and saying something to Rick Wellikoff, the two of them laughing uproariously. Bart, in from L.A. for his annual vacation, was dancing with his pal Ray Ford, tall and lordly and blond no matter how wild he became. Near them, darkly handsome Jack Feiner was getting down with someone whom he'd flown in from Miami, while behind them Val Cavaliere was dancing with two doctors named Larry, next to big, rangy Texan Steve Lawrence and his ex, the always adorable Zeb Freedman, the two of them crisscrossing with Jimmy Peters and his boss, Mel Fante, owner of the Pines' tiny boutique.

  Gloria wanted to tell us about that jive time, and everyone shouted, knowing we were in for a good long boogie. Next to me, someone— Mark Mutchnik or John Iozia—began to shake a counter rhythm on a tambourine.

  We were surrounded by acquaintances, previous tricks and lovers and friends—close, old, to come, but friends, people I knew and loved and trusted and enjoyed being among.

  Twice so far that evening I'd arrived at that specific and desirable point in a night of hard dancing which I named "stepping into the box." This was how Jeffrey and I had come to express that almost magical, seemingly impossible moment we'd both experienced and in search of which we drove ourselves onto the dance floor week after week. In laymen's physics, it was that precisely perfect output of physical energy required to sustain a high degree of complex rhythm and motion without any apparent effort. In more Zen terms, it was the attaining of a certain point of mental and emotional abstraction and physical enervation in which our bodies ego-lessly, will-lessly, danced by themselves! Were danced! The effects were exhilarating, the intricate cross rhythms virtually levitating our bodies off the dance floor for periods of nine or ten seconds at a time. A friend had once filmed from the sidelines while we were in "stepping into the box," and he reported that our feet did touch the dance floor, but only once for every six or seven times anyone else around us touched down.

  There, I was totally relaxed, completely fulfilled...

  I closed my eyes and spun around, and when I'd completed my spin, I opened my eyes. The hundred ceiling and side mirrors from which the Ice Palace got its name were completely fogged over, dripping with the condensation of hundreds of male bodies' perspiration. The air itself in the huge space seemed to have condensed and begun raining down in a fine, pervasive mist.

  Suddenly it was no longer fever-hot inside that modernistic mirrored hogan filled with twirling limbs and thumping feet, but cool—cold, frigid, frozen, ice itself. Every chord emerging from the hundreds of suspended tweeters clanged weirdly, transformed into the clashing of vast glaciers calving massively against each other, titanic ice floes ripping themselves asunder in herculean dissonances.

  As I turned in amazement, seeking confirmation in the faces of those around me, I was astonished to see all of them paralyzed, their features crystallized into finite attitudes of excruciating ecstasy or intense rictuses of agonized release, their perfectly modeled shoulders rimed blue-white, their expensively styled out-swirled hair solidified to stalactites, every worked-out limb stilled within its own glaring, gelid, unreflective light, every well-exercised torso almost transparent, encased, hollow, organs replaced by glassed drifts of icicles, every single so-familiar eye frosted by inexorable chill, blinded from final sight.

  Wonder stopped me.

  Terror gripped my heart.

  Panic shoved me away... away... away...

  Away from it all and out! Out! Out! the glass side doors into fresh air, into the night, onto the upper deck surrounding the pool. When I turned and looked back in through the sweat-frosted glass, everything, everybody was normal, in motion again.

  I staggered against the railing.
Behind me I heard voices. I recognized one but couldn't move yet, my chest hurt so with the devastation I'd witnessed.

  A hallucination, of course. I knew that. Why that hallucination? Why so terrifying? Why now? And worst of all, why hadn't it gone away?

  "Rog?"

  Matt had me by one shoulder. At the other, I recognized through the recurring flashes of that arctic vision, Alistair, asking, "What's wrong, Cuz?"

  "Put that shirt over his shoulders. His T's soaked through," Matt said, doing it for me. "Rog? You okay?"

  "Is it... your drugs?" Alistair asked.

  Safe, I accepted their ministrations and distractedly, slowly began to narrate what I'd seen; tried to explain how awful it had been, how alone I'd been, how horrified and alone amid images of those I knew. How cold and alone.

  They listened. It was important I convince them of what I'd seen, what I was saying—Matt especially. But I could see I wasn't convincing him. He was only half-there, thinking of something else. Or someone else. Thaddeus?

  That only saddened me more.

  They got me to the other side of the deck. Matt wangled hot coffee from the big dyke in a WAC uniform who tended the inside bar, and that helped. I began to feel warm again, though I continued to shiver. I wanted Matt to hold me, but I was afraid to ask. I was surprised really that he didn't see what I needed. He always had before.

  The big sequence ended. People poured out the glass doors onto the deck. Jeffrey and Luis and Patrick found us. Naturally they asked what had happened.

  "Roger had some sort of... scare," Matt said.

  It sounded so unserious the way he said it.

  Not to Jeffrey, though, who was all concern. "What kind of scare?"

  Matt attempted to piece together what I'd said, but evidently it hadn't made much of an impression on him. Jesus! I found myself thinking, what if all that I'd just experienced were nothing more than, like, some sort of correlative to our relationship, showing how Matt was, I don't know, freezing me out for Thad or something?