He seemed embarrassed by my fervor. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Sit down and have some more coffee. You’re all revved up. Maybe the coffee will have the opposite of its usual effect on you, and calm you down.”
He refilled my majolica cup from the pot. He seated himself on one of the armchairs, opposite me, and he drank from his own cup.
“And here you are … living here, in this building,” I babbled, for lack of anything better to say.
“Everyone has to live somewhere.”
“I have so many things I want to ask you. About your career—”
“Some other time,” he said, firmly. “Right now, I’m more interested in finding out more about you. Tell me who you are. Are you always this excitable? If you are, I envy you. It must be wonderful to have so much energy.”
I quickly learned that Gino was the sort of conversationalist who, by putting the other person at his ease and asking leading questions, got you to open up to him. I ended up telling him quite a lot about myself. By the time I was finished, the sun had set, and it was dark outside. The room was dimly lit by the table lamp, which threw its light onto the poster on the wall. We sat there, in the shadows.
“Now it’s my turn to ask you questions,” I insisted.
“No, not tonight,” Gino said. “It’s getting late. I don’t entertain too many visitors. I certainly hadn’t planned on doing so, this evening. I tend not to stay up late. When you’re my age, you look forward to getting your sleep. It may no longer be beauty sleep, but it’s sure as hell restorative sleep. Tomorrow,” he added, in a decisive tone of voice. “Tomorrow evening, if you’re don’t have anything better to do, why don’t you come here and have dinner with me? I’m not a bad cook.”
“I’ll come,” I promised. “What can I bring?”
“Yourself, and your appetite. That’s all. I usually keep my kitchen—and my liquor cabinet—well stocked. You won’t go hungry, not if I can help it.”
“And you’ll talk about yourself? You’ll answer my questions?”
“Within reason. A man has to have some secrets, after all! But don’t you worry. You pour enough wine into me, and I’m likely to be as indiscreet as the next guy.”
I was reluctant to leave, but I stood up. “When, tomorrow?”
“Shall we say seven o’clock? Then we can sit down and eat around eight. Would that be convenient for you?”
“That’ll be fine. I am so looking forward to it. It’s been such a privilege to meet you, Mr. Dagaust. You have no idea—”
“Please call me Gino, not Mr. Dagaust, or Gene. I never changed my name legally, you know. Let me be just plain Gino—to you.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow night then, Gino.”
As I’ve said, this story isn’t really about me. And so I’ll skip over some of the subsequent events.
Gino and I were neighbors and friends for the next five years. In the course of that time, I inevitably learned a great deal about him.
Unlike some retired celebrities, he didn’t live in the past. In fact, I had difficulty getting him to talk freely about himself and his career, at first. I soon discovered that the way to get him to open up was to make some casual reference to bodybuilding, or moviemaking, in general. Then Gino would start to reminiscence, and he’d be ready to answer any questions I had.
Like a lot of people, I hadn’t been aware of the full extent of Gino’s acting career. He was best known for “sword and sandal” films and “spaghetti westerns.” But he’d made movies in other genres—horror films (“Not so much Shock Cinema, as Schlock Cinema,” was how he described them), spy movies (“James Bond rip-offs, every single one of them—it’s a wonder the studio wasn’t sued”), and even a sci-fi flick in which he played an astronaut. (“At least I got to fire a laser gun in that one, instead of waving a sword around. The costume designer put us all in these weird shiny futuristic jumpsuits, which made us look like Christmas ornaments. The first day on the set, the director took one look at me, and he yelled, ‘How’s he going to lose his shirt, if he’s not wearing a shirt in the first place?’ He knew what the audience wanted to see—and trust me, it wasn’t my acting. We solved the problem by having one of the space monsters—played by a guy in a rubber lizard suit—attack me. He shredded the top half on my jumpsuit with his claws, so I could do my ‘stand and flex’ routine for the rest of the picture.”)
Gino had also done a lot of work in Italian television, including a long-running series in which he portrayed a cop. (“By then, it was the Seventies, so this cop looked more like a hippie. He had long hair and a bushy mustache, and he never wore his uniform hat, because that would’ve mussed up the big hairdo.”)
“But all that’s ancient history,” he told me once. “I had a pretty good run—especially in light of the fact that I got my break in the first place because they needed another pair of big biceps and pecs. Any one of a hundred other guys who put in serious time at the gym could have filled that bill. And I had enough sense to get out of the business while I still ahead, before the offers really started drying up. Before somebody on a set told me to ‘Keep the shirt on, please!’ with a pained look on his face.”
After retiring from acting, he’d owned a gym in Rome. Eventually, though, he sold the business, and moved back to the States.
Now, Gino lived quietly.
He’d described himself to me as a hermit, but in fact that was far from the case. Like me, he was comfortable living alone. But he was no recluse.
He went for a long walk in the neighborhood, every day, without fail, no matter what the weather was like. “I may be slow,” as he put it, “but I’m persistent. I get to where I’m going, eventually.”
He also belonged to a health club downtown. He made daily visits there, too. He worked out with the weights and the machines, he swam in the pool, and he relaxed in the steam room. He befriended a number of young bodybuilders who also belonged to the club. They knew who Gino was, of course, and they idolized him. He mentored them, often providing them with good advice—not only about their weight training, but about life in general.
“I like being around young people,” he remarked to me, once. “They keep me sharp. Boring old fogies, set in their ways—who needs them?”
At home in his apartment, Gino always spend an hour or two each day on the Internet. He had a number of regular e-mail correspondents, all over the world. Some of these were old friends of his. (“My fellow survivors, the dinosaurs,” he described them, to me.) Others were younger admirers of him—fans, in short.
He also received fan (snail) mail—at least a half dozen pieces or so, every week. Often, this correspondence was forwarded to him, from various places; fans who didn’t know Gino’s current address would often write to him care of his agent, his lawyer, or one of the studios he’d once worked for.
Gino was scrupulous about answering all of this mail personally, himself. Some correspondents would receive a nice little letter, written on his computer, printed out, and signed by him. Others, whom he liked better, were the recipients of hand-written notes, accompanied by old eight-by-ten glossy publicity photos of Gino, which he’d autograph for them.
Gino was living, I knew, on a fixed income; he didn’t have much money to splurge. Paying for these photos, for padded mailing envelopes, and for postage did cut into his disposable income, each month. But he insisted on doing it.
“The fans made me whatever I was, back in the day.” he told me once. “I owe them. This is the least I can do to pay them back.”
Sometimes, he did travel. He’d accept an invitation to make a personal appearance, often tied into some sort of a film retrospective event. There, Gino would meet with fans face-to-face, sign autographs, and give interviews.
“The old muscle whore has to go out and meet his adoring public,” was the way he’d put it to me, in anticipation of one of these events. “God, are they going to be disillusioned, when they see me in the flesh! What’s left of it, anyway!”
But in fact, far from being disillusioned, the fans always seemed thrilled to meet Gino in person. He was (I gathered) approachable, down to earth, and an eloquent and entertaining public speaker.
Gino was as good-humored a man was I’ve ever met. Only once, during our entire relationship, did he ever lose his temper in my presence.
It happened early on in our acquaintance.
I’d noticed that, except for that poster on the wall, he seemed to keep no mementos of his movie career around the apartment, let alone on display.
“Oh, all that junk is packed away, in storage,” he said, dismissively, in response to my question. “It’s been sitting there gathering dust for years. Nobody’s interested in it. Least of all me.”
“I’d be interested,” I insisted.
He shrugged, and he changed the subject. (But, in retrospect, that casual remark of mine may have planted a seed, which had far-reaching results.)
Gino had a small desk in his living room; this was where he did his computer work and attended to his mail. On the desk, propped up in its easel frame, was a small photo of an extraordinarily handsome man.
“Who’s this?” I asked Gino, when I finally noticed the photo, and I went over to take a closer look at it. “One of your old boyfriends?” I teased him.
“You bet,” he retorted. “And one of the best. What’s the matter? Don’t you recognize him?”
“No. Should I.”
Gino seemed surprised. “That’s Alain, of course. Alain Camargue.”
I sort of recognized the name, but I couldn’t quite place it. I searched my memory. Oh, yes. He too was billed on the poster, right there on the wall. “He was in some of your movies with you, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he some sort of a French actor?”
“Some sort of a French actor!” Gino exploded. “Jesus! For your information, kiddo, Alain Camargue was a real actor. He wasn’t a fucking muscle head joke, like me! People took him seriously. And for good reason!”
When he calmed down, Gino proceeded to deliver a lecture on Alain Camargue’s life and career. No professor, addressing a classroom of film students, could have done a better job of compensating for my woeful ignorance.
In the weeks that followed, we often spent part of our evenings together watching one of Camargue’s films, which Gino would pull out from his extensive DVD collection. I became an Alain Camargue fan.
Alain was older than Gino. He and Gino had remained in touch, until a few years previously, when Alain had died, in his native France. Gino told me many stories about their friendship.
His feelings for Alain hadn’t been limited to admiration for the Frenchman’s acing abilities. They’d been lovers.
“He was the best fuck I’ve ever had, by a long shot,” Gino told me, bluntly. “And when you’ve racked up as many notches on the bedpost as I have over the years, that’s saying a lot.”
Age, as they say, is only a number.
Gino wasn’t reticent about his sex life—as his memoirs demonstrate.
At one point in his life, he was in the closet. He had plenty of company. Gino was a product of his time and place, New Jersey in the 1960s, to be exact. He’d grown to manhood in the pre-Stonewall era, we must remember—before Gay Liberation.
Eventually, he did come out. After that, he was openly and unashamedly gay.
“I was an aggressive homosexual,” he told me, once. “I worked at it. I put a hell of a lot of time and energy into it!”
When I first met him, he was already a senior citizen, of course. But I know for a fact that he still led a robust and satisfying sex life.
Once we became friends, Gino kept no secrets from me. He was interested in my sexual and romantic affairs. I confided in him. And he confided in me. He enjoyed flings with many of the young bodybuilders whom he mentored.
“Still got it, at my age,” was how he put it, to me. “Who’d have thought? I should be ashamed of myself, I suppose. But I’m not,” he admitted, gleefully.
As for myself, I was gay, unattached (at the time), and no more or less promiscuous than the average gay man my age.
I was attracted to Gino from the start of our acquaintance. The discrepancy in our ages was simply irrelevant, to me. So far as I was concerned, he was one hell of a handsome, sexy, foxy mature man. To put it honestly, it wasn’t long—about a couple of weeks into our friendship—before I more or less threw myself at him, like the whore I was.
Gino, I’d already discovered, was a man of the world. Nothing surprised or shocked him. As such, he found my sluttishness amusing.
“You’re going to be sadly disappointed, my boy,” he warned me, the night when, fortified by several glasses of red wine, I first came on to him in earnest. “I’m an old man. I don’t have a young man’s body.”
“I don’t care about such things, Gino. Do you really think I’m that superficial?”
“No, you’re not. But let’s face it—I may not be able to get it up at such short notice, you know. It usually takes an hour or so of looking at porn, or equivalent intense, prolonged stimulation.”
“I don’t care about that, either. We can still make love, in one way or another.”
“Well, aren’t you accommodating.”
“I like to think of myself as fairly easy-going, and open-minded. Adaptable,” I bragged, drunkenly.
“Yes, that would seem to describe you, very well. You remind me of myself, when I was your age.”
And so we went to bed, where we made love.
I suppose I ought to draw a discreet veil over the specifics. Suffice it to say that Gino’s age wasn’t a problem. Not at all! Nor did he have the slightest difficulty obtaining, or sustaining, an erection. He was a wonderful lover. Disappointed? Far from it. I was more than satisfied. I was ecstatic.
Afterward, we lay together and cuddled, with the bedclothes drawn up over us, to keep us warm.
“You’re a very bad boy, Roland,” he told me, in a way that made it clear he meant it as a compliment.
“I try to be,” I bragged.
“You have an undeniable—and a remarkable—rejuvenating effect on me.”
“And you make me hot.”
He laughed. “That, I don’t think I can take any credit for. I suspect you were born hot. Bad boy,” he repeated.
After that, I became a regular visitor to Gino’s apartment. We’d share a meal, or we’d just sit and talk. We often slept together. The sex was fantastic, every single time. For the time being, I lost interest in most of my other tricks. I was smitten. I can’t be sure exactly how Gino felt about me, but I hope I gave him some pleasure.
I never gave much thought to the age difference between us. As I’ve said—so far as I was concerned, he was a handsome, sexy, hot, interesting man. His age mattered only because it gave him an advantage. He was more experienced than I was; he’d lived longer, done more. There was an innate modesty and reticence about him. Gradually, though, I got him to loosen up. I loved coaxing him into talking about himself, about his life and his career. I soaked up his stories, like a sponge.
We went on like this, as I’ve said, for five years.
Because Gino was so sharp, mentally, and so physically active, on the whole, I never gave much thought to his health. But the truth was, he was not a young man. Sadly, he was not invulnerable to the inevitable processes of age and decay. He simply hid them, more successfully than most.
During that last year, he did slow down a bit, by gradual, almost imperceptible degrees. He spent more of his time lying on his sofa, comfortably bundled up under a quilt. Our relationship became platonic, although there continued to be a distinct charge of eroticism in it. (He never stopped taking an interest in my sexual and romantic adventures with other men, and he continued to be a source of shrewd advice.) But he remained a wonderfully lively companion.
One night, when I was getting ready to leave his apartment, he casually remarked, “Listen, kiddo. I won’t be able to invite you over for a few days, starting tomorrow.”
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“Oh? Why not? Are you going on a trip?”
“Hardly. Not in the way you mean. I have to check into the hospital. They want to keep me there for a few days, a week at the most. Nothing serious. Just to do some tests. It’s such a nuisance. But I guess I’d better get it over with.”
“You’re going in tomorrow?”
“First thing in the morning. I’m all packed.”
“How were you planning to get there?”
“I’ll take a taxi.”
“No, you won’t. I’ll drive you.”
“That isn’t necessary. I’m sure you have other things to do.”
“I insist. No arguments. I can be as stubborn as you are, when it comes down to it.”
“No doubt. Well, if you’re sure it’s not an inconvenience … I won’t say no.”
“Don’t waste your breath.”
The next day, I drove him to the hospital.
Gino treated the whole thing casually, as no more than a nuisance, as he’d said. But I was concerned. I made a point of visiting him, late every afternoon, on my way home from my daytime job. I stayed with him through dinner time, and I usually didn’t leave until the end of visiting hours.
He had a private room.
“I never realized there was so much sheer crap on daytime TV,” he remarked to me, during one of my visits. “And the worse part of it is, I’m so bored that I’m actually watching this stuff. And getting caught up in it! It’s addictive.”
“You’ll be home soon,” I said.
“Let’s hope so.”
He’d brought his laptop with him. Typically, he was keeping up with his e-mail correspondence.
I never asked him direct questions about the exact nature of his condition, or about these mysterious “tests” the hospital was conducting. Gino and I were close, but I respected his privacy. I didn’t want to pry. I knew that, if he wanted to confide in me, he would.
During one of my subsequent visits, I found his room occupied. There was a man in a business suit, with a briefcase, seated beside Gino’s bed, shuffling some papers. And a female nurse and a male orderly were standing there in the room, as well.
Sword and Sandal Page 2