My Worst Date

by David Leddick

  “But yet, you do still call that a great love?” Mr. Korman asked.

  “Oh, I think so, yes,” Mom said. “But it’s not the kind of great love that would work for me.”

  “And what about people who have never known great love?” Mr. Korman wanted to know.

  “That’s everywhere,” Mom told him.

  iris counts the bodies

  Our talk tonight at dinner with Mr. Korman has made me think about love. What do I really think? The conversation was all right for Hugo to listen to. It was more about being witty than anything else. But our Mr. Korman would have been surprised if I had told him what I really thought. Maybe not. Those kind of studious, inexperienced types are always surprising. A lot more has gone on in their lives than you might think. I guess a lot more has gone on in everyone’s life than others might think.

  However, there was that night years ago, on location in France, when the director was talking about Grace Kelly. She was still alive then. His father had been a director in Hollywood and he had been raised there. He said Grace was known as “old mattress back” out there in those days. And I said, “Well, who is there among us that doesn’t have a story to tell?” And that nice producer, John Greene said in a woeful voice, “I don’t.” So perhaps some people don’t.

  But to get back to bodies. Yes, bodies. When I fell in love with someone it was always their magical person that I loved. But after the initial excitement, it’s their body that keeps you in love with them. And every man’s body is so different. The skin, the muscle underneath, the color, the way they smell. I’ve never seen two exactly alike, although a lot of Italian men seem to be quite similar. It’s probably the interbreeding of the races. Probably in the days before people traveled around the bodies in one region were pretty much the same.

  But when I think of Baby, his body was sort of naturally hard and rather muscular. He didn’t exercise very much. His body hair was coarse on his forearms and legs, although he didn’t have a lot of it. He had very nice hands and feet, you could see the bones and muscles in them and his skin was smooth, but not particularly soft. And he had a clean smell and when you kissed him he never had bad breath. And his body was quite warm. I used to rub his back sometimes, he liked that, but I never thought a man’s body was extraordinarily beautiful. It was sort of what I expected a man’s body to be like. Different from mine. But my fascination and feeling were really for his overall presence. When he wrapped that warm body around me it was the feeling I liked.

  But Fred, the man I loved in New York when Hugo was little, was an entirely different thing. He had a big, white, athletic body with almost no hair at all. And he had kind of fleshy thighs and buttocks. Big arms and his pectoral muscles were almost like breasts. I loved the feel of all that smooth skin. My lesbian side coming out I suppose. And he did like to be on the bottom a lot. But when he raised the big arms over his head and his chest lifted, it was like making love with a big statue come to life. He had nice hands and feet, too. Just thinking about that body used to turn me on. Made me want to get on top of it and dominate it, control it. Maybe I was growing up, too, and wasn’t just a little poupée for men to play with anymore. And I liked to play with his penis, which I never did with Baby. I used to give Baby blow jobs, but I never really looked at it. It’s so curious how a real sexual relationship unwinds so differently with each person. Maybe that’s why men like one-night stands. They can just climb aboard and do their thing and they don’t ever have to go on and find out what the other person’s body is like and might like to do. Bodies, bodies, bodies. I have to believe that people are just as much their bodies as their minds. Because you can be very involved with someone’s body and have very little to do with their minds. Such a mistake to live with someone because you think alike and get along together. That’s just a roommate with some meaningless sex thrown in. I sort of get the feeling that’s what most young people’s relationships are like. Someone to fend off the world with and sex that doesn’t move you any more than masturbation. Maybe not as much.

  Well, I certainly missed Fred and his big body when he left me to get married. He was studying French in the evenings and lo and behold married his French teacher. She wasn’t even French. I have often wondered how good her accent was. I was too old for him. And too inappropriate, being foreign and having Hugo. Too glamorous maybe, in his eyes. He went back to Kansas City and good luck to him. He wrote me once and told me he had never told his wife about me and never would but he thought he had learned a lot about life from me. He could have learned a lot more.

  Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Or sleep with the people we do? I learned my lesson early on not to sleep with someone just because they’re nice and they want to. I’ve never understood the French and their “baise de santé”—for your health. Sleeping with someone when I didn’t feel like it certainly has never made me feel healthier. It’s like going to the gym. Somehow things that can be very exciting when you’re in love with someone only tickle when you’re not. And make you want to laugh. And trying not to laugh just makes them think you’re in the throes of passion.

  Because that nice guy George I used to see after Fred ditched me was physically much the same. Even better looking. But his skin and flesh were all wrong. Kind of rubbery when he was going to the gym and sort of saggy when he wasn’t. And he had a stale smell. And there was always something impersonal about making bamboola with him. He always used to say, “Ooh, that’s good, baby,” which really isn’t at all the kind of thing you say to someone like me. You might curse and say foul things but you wouldn’t say “baby.” All my friends used to think I was crazy not to get more serious with him, so good-looking and all and so crazy about me. But I used to tell them he wasn’t really so crazy about me and I’m sure I was right. His body was not thrilling in any way to me even though everyone seemed to think he was such a hot ticket.

  And that hunky young kid I thought I was so interested in last year. Very muscular, tiny hips, big shoulders, but he had curious skin and muscles. He had been a swimmer and there was something fishlike about him, or maybe a sea otter, with that straight almost Oriental-like body hair, even the bit on his chest. When you’re massaging someone’s back and their buttocks suddenly look like a baby’s to you, they must be too young for you. At least he didn’t remind me of Hugo in any way. No one I’ve ever been attracted to does, thank God. Hugo is a real combination of his father and me. That blond hair comes from my mother’s side of the family.

  It’s all sort of Zen-like I suppose. Zen people believe that we aren’t separated into mind and body. I remember hearing a Buddhist abbot say one time, “Your thoughts aren’t all up in your head, you know. Your liver could be having a great idea right at this moment.” So I guess if you’re all wrapped up in somebody it’s all right to be crazy about the way their back fits into their ass. That’s just as much them as the fact they can talk about Proust. I guess that’s why women are always so crazy about scholar-athletes and poet-mountain climbers. You get some sensitivity and some real physical beauty in bed.

  Like Donald. I slept with Donald off and on right through all the other involvements because he was really great to be in bed with. You could spend hours with him because he’d made the sensual exploration of his own body a real art. He was technically crazy, I suppose. Well, I’m here to say crazy people can be great in bed. What’s that quote, from Aldous Huxley I think it is, “Love-making: two maniacs struggling in the dark.” Not always in the dark. Donald had that long dancer’s body with large thighs and really beautiful skin and he always smelled of Lilac Vegetal. He loved being massaged and fooled around with. I guess in many ways I was more the masculine aggressor and he was the female recipient, but we certainly both enjoyed it. Sex was really his most important product. But he wasn’t a great kisser. Baby was a very good kisser and I can really get carried away with that. I didn’t really mind not kissing Donald. Our mouths got quite a workout, even so. Well, time has torn them all from my ar
ms.

  Oscar Wilde was walking in a garden in Paris after his disgrace with a friend who said despite everything he still had so many friends. And Oscar said, “Friends? Friends? I don’t need any more friends. What I need is a lover.” Honest, that.

  glenn elliott’s worst date

  “So, what was my worst date?” Mr. Paul and I were lounging around on his bed, which we did from time to time after our sordid physical maneuvers. I actually should have been out of there and at my final period gym class, but I figured I had already had my gym workout in a manner of speaking. And my gym marks didn’t affect my overall average anyway.

  Glenn had heard me talking about how the guys and I down at the Bomber Club used to play “My Worst Date” between numbers and evidently he’d been thinking about it. And I didn’t bring it up. “My worst date wasn’t really a romantic one. It was a date with my father. I was eight I think. About.” I can never express surprise when I should. I always take these surprise statements very coolly. Only later do I realize I should have asked something like “Your father? You’ve never mentioned your father before.” Glenn went on.

  “It was here. I bet you didn’t know I was brought up here in Miami Beach, did you? We lived up on Twenty-fourth Street and Pine Tree Drive. I went to Beach Grade School at Fifteenth Street.”

  Another chance for me to have a reaction, but I just react cool again. Like I’m an analyst or something.

  “Yeah, my old man was a professional gambler. I think he had connections with the Mafia probably. Not big connections. My parents were divorced and he had visitation rights. He used to take me to the movies every Saturday. Usually to the big movie house down on Washington. The place that’s the disco Prince owns now.”

  He turned to me and pulled me to him. Mr. Paul is very cuddly. He likes to hold me a lot and frankly, I have no objection.

  “I hated my old man. He was really a drag. In his fedora and his gabardine suits and his two-tone shoes. I don’t think he liked me very much either. I think I bored him. He had married my mother because he thought she was classy, with her college degree and her sweater sets. And when he found out she objected to him boffing other women on a regular basis, he was out of there.

  “And when she discovered he wasn’t an accountant with a night job, she was glad he left. A poor gambler he was, too. He didn’t play cards for shit, but I think he just liked the big-guy image of himself gambling. And not having to get up for a nine-to-five appealed to him, too, I’m sure. I’m like him a lot in that way.

  “Anyway, this must have been about nineteen sixty-four. No, more like nineteen sixty-two. I was born while he was in the army and stationed in Florida. The Korean war had just ended. That’s probably why they got married. He was in uniform. She fell in love. They screwed. And then he did the right thing. You can say that for him anyway.

  “Anyway, by the time I was eight years old my mother was tired of Miami Beach and wanted to move back to New York. She was from Short Hills, New Jersey originally. That wouldn’t mean anything to you but that is a good address, for Jersey. You know what they say about New Jersey. Three-quarters of it is underwater and the other quarter is under surveillance. All of this means nothing to you. And I digress.”

  Mr. Paul snuggled me closer to him so he was talking into my ear. I put my head on his chest. He could be really funny in his own deadpan, nonfunny way. I think lots of times these handsome guys with no sense of humor actually have quite a sense of humor. It’s like they belong to a very exclusive club and they only occasionally let us see how funny they think the rest of less-handsome us are.

  “My mother’s family was still in Short Hills and I guess she got tired of having a tan. So she was planning to move north, even if it meant my not seeing the old man. And making it a lot harder for her to get her alimony payments out of him, too. He was a tight bastard, and of course he never really had any money. Plus he had this girlfriend, Sharon Cherie, who had been a dancer at the Villa Venice. Pronounced to rhyme with ‘grease.’ During the war. Before the Civil War probably. I really hated her. And she was actually there on our movie dates.

  “But this Saturday, my old man decided he was going to kidnap me and disappear. He was really a sorry case. So dumb. He was going to take me somewhere, I think primarily so he wouldn’t have to pay alimony anymore. He told me this while we were having a soda after the movies. We’d just seen Dorothy Malone in one of those cowboy movies she used to do. Never heard of her?”

  I just looked up at him, all woo-woo eyes, from where my head was resting on that wonderful chest of his. He kissed my forehead. Really an affectionate guy.

  “I think John Derek was in it, too. Never heard of him either, I’ll bet. Very cool. I think maybe that’s when I realized I liked guys. I used to get this very little hard-on thinking about John Derek.

  “So. My dad had this place that we were going away together to. We were going to stay in an apartment in the same building Sharon lived in over in Miami Shores. Some friend of hers was out of town and she had the keys. Like no one was going to find us there, right?

  “I told him I didn’t want to go and he told me it was just to keep my mother from moving away because he would miss me so much. I can see it now. Him sitting in that booth at Wolfie’s and Sharon beside him in her kind of Lauren Bacall side part nodding and smiling. She had pink fingernails. This was when nobody had pink fingernails. She was terrible. You’d hate her.”

  “Now, you mean?” I mumbled into his armpit.

  “Oh, yeah, she’s still around. So is he. They’re still together. Two very old farts. Out in Hialeah.

  “I was a tough kid. I didn’t cry or make a break for it. Hell, we were only about five minutes from Mom’s apartment. But he kind of buffaloed me into it. And you know how kids are. They love being the center of attention.

  “Now get this. He and I were going to cross the bay in a boat. Who knows what movie he’d seen. Key Largo maybe. Sharon was going to take the car and pass by a girlfriend’s and say she had left us at the restaurant and that would be the last anyone would ever see of us. He was going to rent one of those stupid little boats up there on Indian Creek and we were to putt-putt away on that. And then he was going to abandon it somewhere and then no one would know where we were. Is this boring?” I mumbled no, not at all of course. I could feel he was beginning to get hard again. Me, too, of course.

  “We take this dumb little boat and we putter across the bay and somehow wind up in one of those little inlets over at Miami Shores. We just get out of the boat and let it drift away. And walk, more skulk, along those streets until we got to Sharon’s building. I was really dragging my ass by this time. I didn’t think it was fun—I hated Sharon and when I saw the apartment I really hated being there. It must have been some ex-showgirl friend’s of Sharon’s or some drag queen’s. It was all in fake leopardskin. Even the lampshades. I shit you not. And red lacquer. Lots of mirrors. You’ve got the picture. Someone who had a very strong identification with Maria Montez. You don’t know who she was either. To move along.

  “We’re sitting around in this hot, stupid apartment. Remember this was before air-conditioning was everywhere. Fans. Nothing to eat in the refrigerator. Nothing but cologne in there. Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden. God. How well I remember it. And finally Sharon shows up and she has forgotten to go shopping, so there’s really nothing to eat and I throw a fit. I cry. I scream. And instead of trying to calm me down the old man loses it and starts throwing me against the wall and Sharon is screaming and so I shot them.”

  I try to pull away. This time I don’t have any trouble having a reaction. Glenn doesn’t let me go. He hangs onto me real tight and he pushes his certainly not so teensy-weensy cock between my legs and starts moving it slowly and steadily. I say in a steady voice, trying to play it very Sharon Stone, “You shot them?”

  We are on our sides and while he’s talking he is definitely fucking me. “That’s right. My old man always kept a gun on him. Not in a shoulder h
olster but in his coat. A small gun. In his wallet pocket. And his coat was over a chair. And I knew how to shoot that gun. He had taught me. I grabbed it out of his pocket and he yelled, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ And I let him have it. I was really pissed off. It wasn’t that I wanted to kill him, I just wanted him out of my life. So I blammed him a good one. And he went over. And then Sharon made a grab for me and I let her have it, too. Pow. I had had enough. And then they were both lying there howling and carrying on, screaming, ‘Get a doctor,’ and stuff like that. I went over and called my mother and told her where I was. I didn’t know the address, but trust her. She knew where Sharon Cherie lived.”

  Something was going on here. I squeezed my legs together as hard as I could and held him to me very tightly, too. He was moving very rapidly and his breath was getting shorter.

  “Was there a lot of blood everywhere?” I asked him.

  “No, you know how bullet holes are, a little hole with black around it. And then the blood oozes out. Really.

  “I went out and closed the door and left them in there squealing. They’d heard me so they knew someone was coming. And in about ten minutes there were sirens howling and policemen stamping up the stairs. A mob. ‘Where are they, sonny?’ I remember the first cop said. I told him. He threw his shoulders against the door. I said, ‘It’s open.’ He gave me a dirty look, walked in, then stuck his head back outside. ‘Who shot them?’ he said. ‘I did,’ I told him. ‘I might have known,’ he said. From inside he yelled out, ‘Where’s the gun?’ ‘Over by the telephone,’ I yelled back. By this time there were medics running in and stretchers and all of that stuff. I just stood there. They carried them out past me on a stretcher. My dad had his fedora on top of him, I remember. He looked at me and said, ‘You little bastard.’ I said right back, ‘You’re the bastard.’ Sharon wouldn’t even look at me. Then the head cop said, ‘I guess you’d better come along with us.’ And I said, ‘Can’t I wait for my mom?’ And right then she showed up.”