The Tall Boy

by Jess Gregg

  I had to laugh. I would have gone to China with him for nothing.

  At nine, that morning, we were on the rooftop of an old building in view of the Bridge, demolishing some ancient pigeon coops. Half the time, I wasn’t even sure what I was doing, but Harry seemed to know for both of us. Even when we got too busy to talk, we enjoyed the camaraderie of working together. Nostrils pinched, eyes mere slits, we pried old timbers loose and stacked them, rolled up jagged lengths of chicken wire, and swept clouds of powdered bird droppings into the brisk seaward breeze.

  We had finished the job by noon, but were unrecognizable. Dust and flecks of fluff covered our faces and bodies, except where sweat had streaked us. Harry had a key to the super’s apartment, and we went down to wash up. The place was empty, and the blinds pulled down. It was the first time he and I had ever been alone in private, and involuntary thoughts stirred in me, at once lazy and aggressive.

  Harry had already flicked on the light in the bathroom. The shower there was scarcely more than a tin closet. He turned the faucet on to get the hot water activated in advance, and then began undressing. An unexpected little warning reached up my spine and into the roots of my hair. “C’mon,” he said. “Get your clothes off.” I started to tug my T-shirt off, and then didn’t. There was something a little too pat about all this. It was somehow too good to be true—reminded me of the too-easy access that had led to my arrest two years before. A frequency far fainter than sound cautioned me that Harry was, after all, a security guard, and for all I knew, had the authority to arrest. I sneaked another glance at him. He did not look remotely threatening, but then, neither had the fresh-faced stud on Hollywood Boulevard, who had made himself so available and then flashed his badge.

  Perhaps Harry saw me falter, for, grinning, he reached over and tweaked my T-shirt. “Let’s go, man,” he said, and got in the shower.

  I backed away, yet I could not look away. Under the rush of water, his body was magnificent. Muscular. Masculine. The face and throat were day-laborer tan, and so were his arms up to the biceps. The rest of him, chest, butt, and thighs, were startlingly white. There were work scars still whiter on his shoulders and shanks, and the soap froth around his gender seemed whitest of all. In addition to the name Marie tattooed on his forearm, I could make out a faded blue panther just above his knee. “One tattoo may be intriguing,” my friend Ellis had once noted, “but two are a warning.”

  And warning seemed all around now, dense and dissembling as the steam that had begun to fill the bathroom. The powerful figure in the shower dimmed out of view, then faded in again, the same way my suspicion was doing. I kept trumping up reasons why I had to be wrong about him. If he was really an undercover cop, why would he have hidden the junkie from the law? But the question was already engulfed by the answer: that whole scene in Washington Square had been a set-up, a deliberate scheme to get me to trust him, and then when I was at ease with him, to let me incriminate myself. Even if our bodies so much as touched by accident—and how could they fail to, in that cramped little shower stall?—he would have all the evidence he needed to arrest me. “And the next time, you won’t get off so easy,” I had been warned.

  “Hey, c’mon, boy, get in here,” Harry called.

  Sweat or condensation was sliding down into my eyes, blinding me, and the inside seam of my trousers was strangling me. “I’ll meet you downstairs,” I gasped. Stumbling out into the hall, I raced down the five flights to the street.

  When I was out in the fresh air again, and the pounding of my heart began to subside, my relief at having escaped gradually settled into the realization that there probably had been nothing to escape from. Rather than relief, I felt a sharper dismay at having made a fool of myself in front of Harry.

  I had managed to clean up a little when he finally came out the front door, “Hey, what happened to you?” he cried.

  “I got too hot,” I blurted. And then, in case this could be misinterpreted, added lamely, “The steam.”

  He must have known it was a lie, but he made nothing of it; kidded me a little, read the baseball scores over somebody’s shoulder on the subway, and treated me to lunch at the Tip-Top. His uncritical acceptance made me so ashamed of my distrust, I swore it would never happen again.

  But it did. Several times. The worst was on a drive to Yonkers to return a truck he had borrowed. It was late at night, with the radio music and drizzle of rain seeming to cut us off from the rest of the world, isolating us together in the cab. Conversation gradually fell away. Our knees were side by side, not quite touching, but when he shifted the heavy gears, his elbow traced a light arabesque on my arm, as if by accident. “Give me a drag of that,” he said, when I lit a cigarette. I held it to his mouth, able to feel the supple contraction of his lips as he sucked in the smoke. Moment by moment, a recklessness I had nearly forgotten was waking up and flexing in me, a feeling I had learned to distrust, but found almost impossible to hold back now. Yet it was not my recklessness that swerved us into such sudden chaos. Behind me, and far away in the night, I could hear the thin quaver of a police siren.

  It drew nearer, louder. Uncomfortably, I edged away from Harry. I had not even touched him, I reminded myself. Maybe my intention was unlawful, but nobody could prove anything. In spite of this, my breath grew short. I began to picture the speeding police car forcing us over to the side of the road, and Harry, cool-eyed now, whipping out his badge and telling me I was under arrest. By the time the screaming, flashing vehicle actually did cut in behind us, my courage and self-control were so undermined that I lashed out at him accusingly. “Okay, you can stop acting now, your friends are here!”

  He veered the truck onto the shoulder of the road, and an ambulance shot by us. In the swiftly disappearing dazzle of its light, I could see Harry’s anxious scrutiny. “What do you mean?” he asked. I had no answer for him—squeezed my eyes shut, turned my head away.

  He asked me again when we were returning to Manhattan on the subway. “I’m just tired,” I told him. “I’ll get some rest tonight.” But I didn’t. I lay in bed wide awake, unable to shake the feelings of distrust and betrayal. I gave myself every argument, made fun of my fears, and told myself that nothing so absurd as this suspicion was going to ruin my bond with Harry. And yet, even as I was saying so, the decision to pull back from him seemed to have been made without my consent. I caught a little sleep towards morning, but while it was only eight o’clock when I awoke, I felt it was too late to meet him for breakfast. And the day following, when I started off to the Tip-Top, I somehow ended up at the Copper Kettle.

  He telephoned me around noon that day. “Hey, where’ve you been?” I told him I was sick in bed. He asked, “Want me to come sit with you?” But I gave him some excuse. All I wanted now was to be left alone.

  I found my old solitude waiting just where I had left it. I visited my old ladies, I kept my journal every day, I worked on my novel. Around ten o’clock at night, I’d wash up and go out for a drink, usually to a tavern near Fourteenth Street that catered to workmen and serious drinkers. As I recall, I never spoke to anyone there—just sat at the bar stolidly putting it away. And sitting there at the bar, one night, probably feeling sorry for myself, and already a little drunk, I saw Harry come in the door.

  I could tell he’d had a few drinks, himself, and knew he was looking for me by the way his eyes circled the room. When he saw me at the bar, he came over and sat down beside me—ordered a drink, and gave it a gulp when he got it. “How come I don’t see you anymore?” he asked, in that straightforward way of his. “I do something wrong?”

  I pretended to discover him now. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Officer Shaugnessy!” I said, full of bourbon and bravado. “Is it a ticket to one of the policeman’s balls yer wantin’ to sell me? Or if that sounds too racy, how about an invite to a cop supper?” The sudden alarm I showed was fake. “Did I say ‘cop supper’?”

  “Yes.”

  I pretended relief. “I was afraid I’d sai
d ‘cop sucker’ and broken some kind of law.”

  He frowned. “What’s got into you?”

  I didn’t want to answer, or even intend to, but the words had piled up inside me these last ten days, and suddenly I was saying them, a wild rush of them, all the suspicion and fear and frustration that had been tormenting me for too long. I mocked him as a low cop spy, and bounced his treachery and sick persistence back in his teeth.

  He neither took offense, nor laughed in my face, but studied me as if adding up all these twos and twos, trying to make them equal four. Somehow they did. “You been in trouble with the Law?” he asked.

  I gave him some more heavy-handed sass. “Now what gives you a queer idea like that?”

  “Because I been there, myself,” he said. “Did the same thing after I got out: kept thinking people were trying to railroad me back to the slam.”

  But I didn’t believe him. I stood up to go, but he went right on talking. He had been arrested for bumming across Georgia when he was twenty, he said. The punishment he took, the humiliation and contempt, belittled everything I had gone through. His first night in the county jail, some prisoners had ganged up and raped him. “They didn’t even use spit to get in me,” he said. “I found out, that first week, the only way to keep this from happening regular was to let one of those bastards have rights to me in return for protection. That’s how it was done there. And before I was done with that jail, I was doing the same for a younger guy.”

  Maybe his story was even true, but I was no longer in any state to know. Torn between wanting to believe him, and being afraid to, I was in such turmoil that being sick to my stomach was only the outward sign. I took a couple of frantic steps toward the fresh air, but didn’t get there on my own.

  He must have grabbed me up and hauled me out, because the image I got in my confusion was being carried like the black junkie in the Square. I found myself bending over a curb, with him holding me steady for the next spasm of vomiting. “Move on!” he told some gawkers in his security guard voice. When I was able to stand alone, I twisted free of him, and headed down University Place. He was still behind me when I reached my door. The high flight of stairs in the front hall tipped radically to one side even when I was sober, and when I couldn’t negotiate it, he steadied me up to the third floor. Inside my apartment, he put me under the shower, or tried to. I gave him some more resistance, and it finally got him sore. “What gives, for God’s sake?” he demanded. “Even after all that, you still think I’m the Law?”

  “I don’t know what you are!” I cried.

  “Well, let me make it plain,” he said. Holding me still, he put his mouth on mine, open and wet. Then he slid it down. I didn’t need a lot more proof.

  When I awoke at five that morning, he was still lying in bed beside me, naked now, and asleep with his arm thrown half over me. Next time I drifted around, it was seven, and he was gone. However, he phoned about three o’clock, and after work came over with a paper bag of hamburgers and a change of clothes. I won’t say he moved in, but during the next six months, he lived at my place a lot more than he did his own.

  Our relationship wasn’t going to be forever—we both knew at the onset that eventually he would go back to his wife and daughter—but while it lasted, we made the most of being together, using each other’s eyes for perspective, and exchanging our gifts. I taught him to type with more than one finger, and filled in some of his education. He got my windows so they would finally slide open, and built me some handsome bookshelves. There was another kind of building going on, too: I still could not speak of my apprehension by the police; but with Harry’s patient encouragement, I gradually stopped arresting myself every time I wanted to make love.

  I only became aware of this change the first time I got lonely after Harry went back to his own life. I was walking across Washington Square when I saw a young man with a nice smile coming toward me. Eventually we got talking, and he asked if I lived around there. I told him, “About two minutes away.”

  “Like to have some company?” he asked.

  I said I’d love it.

  PART TWO

  Bill Butler

  12

  BILL, COLLECTED

  The face that I shaved every day seemed the same, and yet there were changes—I was getting older. “Maturing is the better word,” Bill told me on my thirty-third birthday. Any show of sympathy from him was rare, and came so unexpectedly, it is best described as an attack of cordiality “You’ll finally begin to relax and enjoy,” he added, in this same celebrant tone. “Part One of your life was all self. With any luck, Part Two is going to be other people”

  Bill, himself, lived in a world of “other people.” Actors mostly do; but a writer’s life—or anyway, this writer’s life—is too often solitary. Every day, I sat at my desk, alone in my apartment, copying down my characters’ conversations, sorting over their memories, intensifying their conflicts. After dark, I had a quick dinner, then toured the gay bars. This, however, did not make for a satisfying life—tricks leave little trace. It had not occurred to me yet that I might be looking in the wrong place for the kind of companionship that shapes your life—the sort of friendship I was to discover at last with Agnes or Gar. With Marion. With Joe, Margery, Eddie. Even, I suppose, with Bill.

  Bill Butler. Nothing really bound him and me together but cussedness and a little low comedy. People assumed we were lovers, but the mere idea made us whoop with laughter. This wasn’t especially flattering to the other, but then, flattery never played much part in our long and precarious association. I never threw away any of the letters he wrote to me, but there were months, even years, when we didn’t speak.

  We had met in the eleventh grade at Cumnock, a small academy in Los Angeles, where I had been enrolled after a stormy refusal to go back to prep school. Bill was the student assigned to show me around that first day, but the single glance we exchanged seemed to sober us both: he was shortish, and I, the self-conscious reverse. What little attention he paid me after this introduction seemed designed to cut me down to size. I tried to keep up with him as he strode through the halls, but missed most of the information he flung back over his shoulder. After too many minutes of this, I slipped away for a cigarette, and he didn’t come looking for me.

  We managed to avoid each other until nearly Christmas, when both of us were cast in the school’s annual English comedy. I played a butler, and Bill’s role was not much better. Everyone agreed he was the best actor in school, but despite blond hair and ceaseless vigor, he never got to play leading roles. His slouch and pallor forever typecast him as Banquo’s ghost, and such.

  Still he turned out to be hilarious as the old Vicar. According to him, I was quite funny too, although unintentionally. I pretended not to hear his put-downs, but when New Years Eve came, I threw a party as a pretext for not inviting him. It was not a particularly good party, but it improved in the days following as everyone discussed it openly in front of him. “What’d you do on New Year’s?” someone asked him. He could have easily invented something, but answered with a kind of bitter pride, “I had a glass of tap water at twelve, and said to hell with it.”

  Somehow, this refusal to save face touched off a turn-coat sympathy in me—a suspicion that underneath his unbearable brashness, he was alone and desperate. This was something I knew about, myself, and I began to wonder if it sprang from the same secret cause.

  We ran into each other coming out of a movie, a week later. The film, Winterset, had been dismissed by the critics, but I had loved it, and got noisily protective about it before Bill could tear it apart. Except he turned out to have loved it too. We stood talking at the bus stop, and heaped so much scorn on the critics, we had none left for each other. The next day in gym class, we found further things to agree on: George Gershwin, Picasso, and almost any movie star. He seemed to have no life of his own—never mentioned friends or family, and I got the feeling he was an orphan. When I asked, he let out a wild bray of laughter. He had p
erfectly good parents in Kansas, he said, but there was no money, and he had left home to get his education as best he could.

  I had nothing against education, but he was a kook for it—waited tables in the school dining room to pay for his tuition, and after class, took odd jobs like washing windows at a Hollywood hat shoppe. This was no chore since it was his peephole into the show-business world he dreamed about. The hats there were high-styled, but low-priced, and attracted studio people, even some of the great stars. One of them, Carole Lombard, would groan as if mortally seized when she saw a hat she liked. “Aw, honey,” she moaned, trying it on, “this one’s a cocksucker!” Bill would not be persuaded that less spectacular people still winced at strong language. He repeated the story even in the housemother’s hearing. “Why shouldn’t I?” he demanded, when I called him on it. “It happened!”

  He was unwilling to compromise on anything, including traffic. When he got a ticket for jay-walking, I cut class to go downtown with him and be moral support when he paid his fine. School work paled beside such adventure, and soon we were slipping off downtown every spare moment. We discovered Peniel Hall on the seedier side of Main Street, where drum, tambourine, and trumpet summoned the bums to repentance. We sneaked backstage at the Philharmonic Auditorium while Aida was being set up, and wandered through the empty dressing rooms, trying out the singers’ throat sprays and reading their fan mail. We rode ten blocks past our bus stop, eavesdropping on a remarkably plain woman as she unbosomed herself to a friend. “—he said to me, ‘Vera,’ he said, ‘Vera, you’re not just desirable, you’re temptation itself—’” Vera, which she pronounced Vee-ra, spoke penetratingly through her nose, but it was her facial contortion that held us hypnotized. She kept every feature going as she spoke, licking her teeth, sucking her cheeks, and twisting her mouth into ever more precise enunciation. She became a part of our daily life—the mere stretch of the lips or mention of her name was enough to transform an ordinary remark into instant wit. We began to see her everywhere: on the street, at the movies, in the classroom. Reduced to Veras, the world was nothing to be afraid of.