Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle

by Michael Thomas Ford

  I waited a minute before asking her my next question. "Did Dad know?"

  "I don't think so," my mother answered. "But men never talk about those things, do they?" "What do you think he would have thought about it?"

  "I don't think he would have understood it," she said. "But he would have loved you no matter what."

  I fought back the tears that formed in my eyes. I was supposed to be comforting my mother, but now she had comforted me. I didn't know what to say to her.

  "Are you and Jack lovers?" she asked. "Patricia thinks so." "Well, I guess she'll be disappointed to hear we aren't," I said. I stopped short of relating our long, complicated history. I was still reeling from the sudden shift in our relationship, and wasn't ready to go into detail about my sex life. "I'm not really seeing anyone. Neither is Jack," I added, hoping to head her off before she dug any deeper.

  "She probably will be disappointed," my mother said. "But I'm glad. I love Jack dearly, but I think you can do better."

  I almost laughed. Under different circumstances, I would have. Instead, I leaned over and gave my mother a kiss on the cheek. "I love you," I said. "And I love you," she told me. "Now, can we agree not to worry about each other?" "Agreed," I said. "At least not too much."

  "I'm tired," she said. "I think it's time to go to bed." She stood up, letting go of my hand. "Do you know Monday night was the first one I've spent without your father in twenty-six years?" she told me.

  "Do you want to sleep in my room?" I asked her. "I can sleep on the couch." "No," she answered. "Your father and I shared that room since the night we were married. I've been Alice Brummel since I was seventeen years old, and whether he's in that bed with me or not, your father is still a part of who I am. I can live with a ghost if I have to."

  She turned and walked down the hallway, leaving me alone. I looked again at my father's recliner, thinking about how many nights he had sat in it while I lay on the floor, watching a favorite program. I stood up and went to it. I could see the indentation where his body had worn its shape into the cracked genuine-artificial-leather vinyl. I reached out and ran my fingers over the arm, thinking for a moment that it might still be warm from the heat of him. But it was cold, and I pulled my hand away. I couldn't bring myself to sit in it. My mother might have been able to share her bed with a ghost, but I'd had enough of haunted places. On Monday, I would get on an airplane, leaving my mother with her memories. I would go home. I didn't belong here. It was my father's house, not mine, and I would leave him to look after my mother.

  I clicked the television off. "Good night, Dad," I said, thinking about everything my mother had said. Tranquilizers or not, I knew she meant every word. "I love you, too."

  CHAPTER 35

  "Happy birthday, old men." Burt had to yell to be heard over the din. Buzzby's, as it almost always was, was packed. On that Saturday night—a warm one in the summer of 1975—it was overflowing with handsome men. Adding to the noise was the throbbing disco music pouring from the sound system. "You got me where you want me." The voices of the three women who called themselves the Ritchie Family sang the one line of their hit song "Brazil," which we'd been hearing in the bars for the past few weeks and which had been stuck in my head like a crazed bee.

  Burt kissed me, then Jack. "Twenty-five," Burt said. "Do you guys feel old?" "We're still younger than you are," I teased. To my relief, the Ritchie Family faded out and the unmistakable first notes of "Jive Talkin'" began. I'd developed a huge crush on Barry Gibb, whose beard and bedroom eyes I found enormously and embarrassingly attractive, and I tapped my foot in time with the music.

  "Where's Andy?" Jack asked. "We're going to be late."

  "Relax," I told him. "The show doesn't start for another forty-five minutes."

  "Here," Burt said, handing me what was obviously a record album that had been hurriedly wrapped. I pulled the paper off, revealing a copy of Shirley & Company's Shame, Shame, Shame , the cover of which featured a painting of Shirley shaking a disapproving finger at a cringing Richard Nixon.

  "I thought it was appropriate," said Burt. I had to laugh. I loved the song, and I appreciated Burt's humor even more. We'd both felt betrayed following the revelations of Nixon's lying about what was happening in Southeast Asia, and were even more disgusted by his involvement in the Watergate scandal. His resignation the previous year to avoid impeachment seemed to us to be the worst kind of cowardice, and our anger was only inflamed when Tricky Dick received a pardon from former Vice President Gerald Ford a month later.

  "What do I get?" Jack asked Burt, pulling a wounded expression.

  "You get to have your way with me," Burt told him, running his hands over Jack's chest and extending his tongue. "I'll do anything you want." Jack pretended to think for a moment. "All right, then," he said, pulling Burt close. "I want you to drop your pants, bend over, and…"

  "And what?" Burt said breathlessly.

  Jack leaned into him, his mouth almost touching Burt's. "Tie. My. Shoe," Jack said, breathing each word into Burt's face. "You bitch," said Burt, laughing as Jack tried to kiss him. "Get away from me." "But you said you'd do anything," Jack replied. "What kind of sex slave are you?"

  "Did I hear someone say ‘sex slave?'" Andy materialized from out of the crowd, interrupting the game between Jack and Burt. He was holding a rolled-up magazine in his hand, which he dropped onto the bar. I picked it up.

  "Blueboy," I read as Jack and Burt looked on. "‘The national magazine about men.'" "Open it," Andy said. "Page thirty-six."

  I thumbed through the pages until I came to the one he'd told me to look at. When I reached it, Burt let out an audible gasp. "Is that you?" he asked, looking from the magazine to Andy, then back again.

  "It sure is," Jack said.

  "Every last inch," I added.

  "What do you think?" asked Andy. "Aren't the pics great? They shot me so you don't see the scars on my leg."

  I tried flipping through the rest of the magazine, still unsure what exactly it was, but Burt grabbed it from me and turned back to Andy's pictures. "It's porn," Andy said, seeing my puzzled expression. "For gays."

  "How'd you end up in it?" I asked him.

  "This guy came into the bar last month," he said as he motioned for the bartender to bring him a beer. "Said he was a photographer and asked if he could take some shots of me sometime. I thought he was just looking for some action, but I figured why not? So I went over to his studio a couple of days later, and he turned out to be the real thing. He shot Cheryl Tiegs once."

  "I don't think Cheryl Tiegs ever looked like this," Burt said, still admiring Andy's spread. "Who's Brad Majors?" asked Jack. "Oh, that's me," Andy answered. "I thought I should come up with something sexier than Andy Kowalski. Gene—that's the photographer—suggested Stanley Kowalski, but I didn't really get that."

  Burt and I exchanged glances while Andy, oblivious to both the literary reference and his strong resemblance to Tennessee Williams's butch antihero, took a handful of peanuts and popped them into his mouth before continuing.

  "Anyway, he thought I kind of look like Lee Majors. You know, from the Six Million Dollar Man . So Brad Majors. Brad was my idea. I think it sounds cool." "Why use any name?" Burt said.

  "For when I do films," Andy told him.

  "Films?" Jack said. "You're going to do films?"

  "Maybe," said Andy. "Gene says the money's good. Better than I make bartending. He knows some guy who directs, and he's going to tell him about me."

  "I assume we're not talking about Francois Truffaut or John Schlesinger," Burt remarked. "I don't know his name," said Andy. "Could be. But I thought Gene said it was Tony or Tommy or something." "Well, congratulations, I guess," I said. "The pictures are great."

  "The issue just came out," said Andy. "I stopped and picked one up on the way over here." "I don't think you're the only one," Jack said, nodding.

  We looked over and saw a group of men watching us. When they saw Andy looking back, they smiled and waved. I
turned to Andy. "Well, Brad, I think you have some fans. We should leave before there's a riot."

  We walked out onto the street and headed for the main event of the evening, a performance of Beach Blanket Babylon at Club Fugazi. Although it had been running for over a year, I'd yet to see it, and I couldn't wait. Word had quickly spread about Steve Silver's bizarrely fabulous revue featuring campy songs and impossibly huge hats, and it seemed like the perfect way to celebrate Jack's and my birthdays.

  "I can't believe we're living with a porn star," Jack said to me as we walked to California Street to catch the cable car. Andy, ahead of us with Burt hanging on his every word, was too far away to hear.

  "I can't believe we slept with a porn star," I added.

  Jack put his arm around my shoulder. "That was a long time ago," he said. "We can tell everyone we knew him when." "What are you two talking about back there?" Andy called back to us.

  "You!" I shouted back.

  He and Burt waited for us to catch up. "What were you saying about me?" asked Andy.

  "We were talking about how they'll need to put Vaseline on the lens when they shoot you," I said. "To make you look younger." "I think it's more likely to be Crisco," Burt remarked, as Andy shook his head. The cable car arrived a few minutes later and we boarded. As it began the climb up Cathedral Hill, we sat alongside tourists with cameras around their necks and street maps in their hands. Many of them had made the common out-of-towners' mistake of wearing shorts and T-shirts, believing that because San Francisco is in California, it must therefore always be warm. Now, with the sun going down, they were hugging themselves to stay warm. But still they were happy, as were we. We were, after all, in the most beautiful city in the world, chilly summers notwithstanding. Where California crossed Powell Street, we jumped off and transferred to the trolley going north toward Chinatown, taking it as far as Jackson Street before getting off. The walk into North Beach toward Washington Square was not a long one, and we arrived at Club Fugazi with time to spare. We were seated at one of the tables for four in the front cabaret section near the stage, and minutes later we each had a drink in hand. By the time the lights dimmed, we were on our second ones and in a festive mood.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Beach Blanket Babylon Goes Bananas!" the announcer called out. For the next ninety minutes we were treated to a spectacle. The cast, dressed as everything from apes to Carmen Miranda, Glinda the Good to French maids, performed skits and wowed us with their singing. One woman in particular, a petite brunette, brought the house down with her bluesy rendition of the torch standard "Am I Blue?" As she sang the final line, "Was I gay, 'til today, now he's gone and we're through, am I blue," the mostly male audience broke out in thunderous applause.

  "She's fantastic," I said, whistling loudly along with everyone else. "Not only can she sing, she can do it wearing an eighty-pound hat covered in four-foot-high bananas." When the show was over, we returned to the Castro, where we hung out at Twin Peaks until it closed. Herded onto the street, Andy, Jack, and I said good-bye to Burt and walked—not entirely steadily—back to our flat. Not ready for bed, the three of us opened a bottle of white wine and sat in the living room. I put Burt's birthday gift on the turntable, and Shirley & Company serenaded us while we talked.

  "We should make a pact," Jack said, his words slurred slightly by all the alcohol we'd consumed in the past seven hours.

  "What kind of pact?" I asked him.

  "If we don't have lovers when we're thirty," he said, "we'll buy a house somewhere up in Russian River and all grow old together."

  "Thirty?" I said. "That doesn't give us much time." Jack knitted up his brow, as if he was trying to figure out a problem. "Five years," he said, sounding pleased to have arrived at an answer. "In five years, if we're not with anyone else, we're moving to Russian River."

  "Sure," I told him, feeling expansive. "That sounds good."

  "Not me," Andy said, rolling a joint between his fingers. "I don't want a lover." "You don't?" Jack said, frowning.

  Andy grinned. "Nope," he said, lighting the joint. "I want lots of lovers."

  "You're going to be a big-time porn star," I reminded him. "You'll have more lovers than you know what to do with." "Yeah, Mr…Mr…. What's your name again?" asked Jack.

  "Brad," Andy said. "Brad Majors."

  "Well, Brad Majors," said Jack. "You and all of your lovers can come visit Ned and I up in Russian River. Some of them might have to share our beds, though. Right, Ned?" "Absolutely," I concurred.

  Andy shook his head. "I don't get why anyone would want just one lover," he said. "There are too many good-looking men out there. Why not have them all?" "Not all of us can get them all," I reminded him.

  "This is San Francisco," he said. "If you can't get laid here, you just can't get laid. I bet I could look out the window and find at least half a dozen guys ready to come up here right now."

  "Let's see it," I said, motioning toward the window. "I'll bet you ten bucks." "You're on," Andy said as he got up and went to the big bay window, stripping off his shirt as he did. Leaning out, he surveyed the street below while Jack and I drank our wine and shook our heads at each other. Not a minute passed before Andy called out, "Hey! Where are you going?"

  A man's voice answered back, but I couldn't hear what he said. I did hear Andy's response, though, which was, "Want to come up for a while?" As he walked past us to the door, Andy flashed a triumphant smile. A moment later, we heard footsteps on the stairs, and Andy returned with a man in tow. He was young, probably not more than 20, with dark hair and startlingly blue eyes. He nodded at Jack and me. "Hi," he said, standing with his hands shoved into the back pockets of his jeans. "I'm Dan."

  "Well, Dan," Andy said, sitting in an armchair and spreading his legs seductively, "want a hit?" He held out the joint. Dan took it and inhaled, looking at each of us nervously. Andy rubbed his chest idly, letting his hand slide lower until it was resting on his stomach, his fingertips tucked beneath the waistband of his Levi's. Dan's gaze followed, fixing on the bulge between Andy's legs. I could tell by the hungry look on his face that he was ready for anything Andy suggested he do.

  "Think you can handle all three of us?" Andy asked. "We're having kind of a birthday party here."

  Dan nodded, dropping to his knees in front of Andy and reaching for his zipper. Andy looked at Jack and me. "You guys joining in? You're the birthday boys."

  "Not me," said Jack, standing up quickly and heading for the hallway. "He's all yours." "Yeah," I said, trying not to watch as Dan slid Andy's jeans down and reached for the already-hard dick that stuck up from his crotch. "I think I'm going to call it a night." "Suit yourselves," said Andy, putting his hand on Dan's head and guiding him down. "I'll see you in the morning."

  Jack was waiting for me in the hall. When I joined him, we both started to laugh. I covered my mouth so I wouldn't make too much noise. "Can you believe him?" said Jack. "One porno magazine and already he's acting like a superstar." "That's our boy," I told him.

  From the living room the wet sucking sound of a mouth moving up and down a length of hard flesh spilled into the hallway. I heard Andy growl something in a low voice.

  "You sure you don't want to stick around?" asked Jack. "Sounds like Dan knows a thing or two about blowing out a birthday candle."

  "Do you?" I countered.

  He rubbed his eyes with his fingers. "Yeah," he said. "But I'm not going to. That dick has caused enough problems for me already." I knew he was referring not to the penis currently enjoying the hospitality of Dan's mouth, but to its owner. I also knew he was right. We'd managed to get past our mutual entanglements with Andy and form something new from the pieces of our friendship. As tempting as it was, getting involved with him again, even on such a casual sexual level, could break anew the fracture we'd so tenderly knit up over the past two years. Walking away was Jack's present to me, and I knew how much it was costing him, because I was paying the same price.

  "Good night," I said
, giving him a hug. "And happy birthday."

  CHAPTER 36

  "‘Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time,'" Brian said as I watched a naked man spring from the diving board at the end of the pool, his impressive penis swinging like a pendulum as he rose into the air, bent, and knifed into the water. "‘She came to the city alone for an eight-day vacation. On the fifth night she drank three Irish coffees at the Buena Vista, realized that her mood ring was blue, and decided to phone her mother in Cleveland.'"

  "What are you reading?" I asked him. "It's this new thing in the Chronicle ," Brian explained, showing me the paper. "It's called ‘Tales of the City,' by some guy named…" He peered at the page. "Mowpin?" he said doubtfully. "Moppin? I don't know how you say it."

  I leaned across the space between our lounge chairs to look. "I think it's pronounced Maw-pin," I said. "Armistead Maupin."

  "Sounds made up," said Brian. "Anyway, it's really funny."

  "I'll read it later," I said. "There are too many other things to look at right now."

  Brian folded the top of the newspaper down and peered over it at the men in the pool. The diver had swum to the side, where he was talking to an equally handsome man who was sitting with his legs in the water while a third man sucked his dick. The receiver of the blow job paid little attention to what was going on below his waist, laughing and talking with the diver as if he was having his hair trimmed or his nails buffed.

  "This is why I hate porn stars," Brian remarked, putting his paper back up. "They can make anything look boring." "I guess when it's what you do for work, it gets sort of routine," I said. "Like working at an ice cream parlor. The first two weeks you eat everything in sight, and for the rest of your life just looking at a bowl of rocky road makes you sick to your stomach."

  "Then that boy's going to have quite the tummy ache," Brian said.