Further Tales of the City

by Armistead Maupin

  FURTHER

  TALES

  OF THE

  CITY

  Armistead Maupin

  Dedication

  For Steve Beery

  Epigraph

  Surely there are in everyone’s life certain

  connections, twists and turns which pass awhile

  under the category of Chance, but at the last, well

  examined, prove to be the very Hand of God.

  SIR THOMAS BROWNE

  Religio Medici

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Home and Hearth

  Michael

  The A Gays Gather

  True Prue

  The Matriarch

  A Daytime Face

  The Man in Her Life

  Remembering Lennon

  Cowpokes

  House of Wax

  No Big Deal

  Ah, Wilderness

  Idol Chatter

  Father Paddy

  Chain Reaction

  Où est Vuitton?

  Downers

  The Breastworks

  Luke

  Inside

  Off to Hollywood

  We Must Have Lunch

  Tinseltown

  Prayers for the People

  The Castle

  Halcyon Hill

  Dames

  Buying Silence

  The Bermuda Triangle

  Give a Little Whistle

  Meeting

  DeDe

  Meanwhile …

  The Saga Continues

  Wishing Upon a Star

  Womb for One More

  A Man Like Saint Francis

  That Word

  Letter from the Road

  Her Wilderness Like Eden

  Adam and Eve

  D’or

  Gaying Out

  Unoriginal Sin

  White Night

  Man and Walkman

  The Pygmalion Plot

  Countdown

  Nothing to Lose

  DeDe’s Talc

  Chums

  The Trouble with Dad

  Gangie

  A Starr Is Born

  Now, Voyagers

  Keeping Up with the Joneses

  Taste Test

  North to Alaska

  Aurora Borealis

  Telepathy

  Claire

  I See by Your Outfit …

  Physician, Heal Thyself

  The Hoedown

  Learning to Follow

  Over the Glacier

  The First to Know

  That Nice Man

  The Uncut Version

  Daddy’s Gone

  Panic in Sitka

  Atrocity

  DeDe Day’s D Day

  A Sucker for Romance

  The Search Begins

  The Interrogation

  A Delicate Matter

  On the Home Front

  Dire Needs

  Definitions

  Revising the Itinerary

  Rough Treatment

  Clerical Error

  Tea

  The New Boarder

  The Diomedes

  Deadline

  Ingaluk

  Anna and Bambi

  House Call

  To Russia with DeDe

  Eden Revisited

  A Man Called Mark

  Catching Up

  Shipmates

  Family Man

  Four on the Phone

  When the Children Are Asleep

  Escape

  Crazy Talk

  The Way They Were

  Dead to the World

  Not Gay

  Home Again

  Corpus Delicti

  A Tangled Web

  Buffaloes in London

  Lucking Out

  Michael’s Doctor

  Options

  A Garden Wedding

  Back in Her Own Backyard

  Six Weeks Later …

  About the Author

  Praise for Further Tales of the City

  BY ARMISTEAD MAUPIN

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Home and Hearth

  THERE WERE OUTLANDERS, OF COURSE, WHO CONTINUED to insist that San Francisco was a city without seasons, but Mrs. Madrigal paid no heed to them. Why, the signs of spring were everywhere! Those Chinese schoolboys, for instance, sporting brand new green-and-yellow baseball caps as they careened down Russian Hill on their skateboards.

  And what about old Mr. Citarelli? Only a seasoned San Franciscan could know that this was exactly the time of year he dragged his armchair into his garage and opened the door to the sunshine. Mr. Citarelli was infinitely more reliable than any groundhog.

  Here on Barbary Lane, the vernal equinox was heralded by an ancient scarlet azalea that blazed like a bonfire next to the garbage cans. “My goodness,” said Mrs. Madrigal, stopping to adjust her grocery bag. “It’s you again, is it?” It had also bloomed in August and December, but nature was always forgiven for offering too much of a good thing.

  When Mrs. Madrigal reached the lych gate at Number 28, she paused under its peaked roof to survey her domain—the mossy brick plain of the courtyard, the illegal lushness of her “herb garden,” the ivy-and-brown-shingle face of her beloved old house. It was a sight that never failed to thrill her.

  Dropping the groceries in the kitchen—three new cheeses from Molinari’s, light bulbs, focaccia bread, Tender Vittles for Boris—she hurried into the parlor to build a fire. And why not? In San Francisco, a fire felt good at any time of year.

  The firewood had been a Christmas gift from her tenants—a whole cord of it—and Mrs. Madrigal handled it as if she were arranging ingots at Fort Knox. She had suffered too long under the indignity of those dreadful pressed sawdust things they sold at the Searchlight Market. Now, thanks to her children, she had a fire that would crackle.

  They weren’t really her children, of course, but she treated them as such. And they appeared to accept her as a parent of sorts. Her own daughter, Mona, had lived with her for a while in the late seventies, but had moved to Seattle the previous year. Her reason had been characteristically cryptic: “Because … well, because it’s The Eighties, that’s why.”

  Poor Mona. Like a lot of her contemporaries, she had capitalized The Eighties, deified the new decade in the hope that it would somehow bring her salvation, deliver her from her own bleak vision of existence. The Eighties, for Mona, would be the same in Seattle as in San Francisco … or Sheboygan, for that matter. But no one could tell her that. Mona had never recovered from The Sixties.

  The landlady’s ersatz children—Mary Ann, Michael and Brian—had somehow kept their innocence, she realized.

  And she loved them dearly for that.

  Minutes later, Michael showed up at her door with his rent check in one hand and Boris in the other.

  “I found him on the ledge,” he said, “looking faintly suicidal.”

  The landlady scowled at the tabby. “More like homicidal. He’s been after the birds again. Set him down, will you, dear? I can’t bear it if he has bluejay on his breath.”

  Michael relinquished the cat and presented the check to Mrs. Madrigal. “I’m sorry it’s so late. Again.”

  She waved it away with her hand, hastily tucking the check into a half-read volume of Eudora Welty stories. She found it excruciating to discuss money with her children. “Well,” she said, “what shall we do about Mary Ann’s birthday?”

  “God,” winced Michael. “Is it that time already?”

  Mrs. Madrigal smiled. “Next Tuesday, by my calculations.”

  “She’ll
be thirty, won’t she?” Michael’s eyes danced diabolically.

  “I don’t think that should be our emphasis, dear.”

  “Well, don’t expect any mercy from me,” said Michael. “She put me through hell last year on my thirtieth. Besides, she’s the last one in the house to cross The Great Divide. It’s only proper that we mark the event.”

  Mrs. Madrigal shot him her Naughty Boy look and sank into the armchair by the hearth. Sensing another chance to be picturesque, Boris dove into her lap and blinked languidly at the fire. “Can I interest you in a joint?” asked the landlady.

  Michael shook his head, smiling. “Thanks. I’m late for work, as it is.”

  She returned his smile. “Give my love to Ned, then. Your new haircut looks stunning, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” beamed Michael, reddening slightly.

  “I like seeing your ears, actually. It makes you look quite boyish. Not at all like you’ve crossed The Great Divide.”

  Michael showed his appreciation with a courtly little bow.

  “Run along now,” said the landlady. “Make little things grow.”

  After he had left, she permitted herself a private grin over this Great Divide business. She was sixty now, for heaven’s sake. Did that mean she had crossed it twice?

  Sixty. Up close, the number was not nearly so foreboding as it had once been from afar. It had a kind of plump symmetry to it in fact, like a ripe Gouda or a comfy old hassock.

  She chuckled at her own similes. Is that what she had come to? An old cheese? A piece of furniture?

  She didn’t care, really. She was Anna Madrigal, a self-made woman, and there was no one else in the world exactly like her.

  As that comforting litany danced in her head, she rolled a joint of her finest sensemilla and settled back with Boris to enjoy the fire.

  Michael

  FOR ALMOST THREE YEARS NOW MICHAEL TOLLIVER HAD been manager of a nursery in the Richmond District called God’s Green Earth. The proprietor of this enterprise was Michael’s best friend, Ned Lockwood, a brawny forty-two-year-old who was practically the working model for the Green-collar Gay.

  Green-collar Gays, in Michael’s lexicon, included everyone who dealt with beautiful living things in a manly, outdoorsy fashion: nurserymen, gardeners, forest rangers and some landscape architects. Florists, of course, didn’t qualify.

  Michael loved working in the soil. The fruits of his labors were aesthetic, spiritual, physical and even sexual—since a number of men in the city found nothing quite so erotic as the sight of someone’s first name stitched crudely across the front of a pair of faded green coveralls.

  Like Michael, Ned hadn’t always been a Green-collar Gay. Back in the early sixties, when he was still a student at UCLA, he had paid his tuition by pumping gas at a Chevron station in Beverly Hills. Then one day a famous movie star, fifteen years Ned’s senior, stopped in for an oil change and became hopelessly smitten with the lean, well-muscled youth.

  After that, Ned’s life changed radically. The movie star wasted no time in setting up house with his newfound protégé. He paid for the remainder of Ned’s education and incorporated him—as much as propriety and his press agent allowed—into his life in Hollywood.

  Ned held his own quite well. Blessed with a sexual aura that bordered on mysticism, he proceeded to win the heart of every man, woman and animal that crossed his path. It was not so much his beauty that captivated them but his innate and almost childlike gift for attentiveness. He listened to them in a town where no one ever listened at all.

  The love affair lasted almost five years. When it was over, the two men parted as friends. The movie star even helped subsidize Ned’s move to San Francisco.

  Today, in his middle years, Ned Lockwood was handsomer than ever, but balding—no, bald. What remained of his hair he kept clipped short, wearing his naked scalp proudly in the long-haul trucker tradition of Wakefield Poole porno movies. “If I ever start raking my hair over from the back and sides,” he once told Michael earnestly, “I want you to take me out and have me shot.”

  Ned and Michael had gone to bed together twice—in 1977. Since then, they had been friends, co-conspirators, brothers. Michael loved Ned; he shared his romantic exploits with the older man like a small dog who drags a dead thing home and lays it adoringly on the doorstep of his master.

  And Ned always listened.

  “You wanna go to Devil’s Herd tomorrow night?” asked Ned. “They’ve got a live band.”

  Michael looked up from the task at hand. He was boxing primroses for a Pacific Heights realtor who had fretted far too long over a choice of the pink or the yellow. The realtor eyed Ned bitchily, then resumed his fussing:

  “Of course, there are some potted fuchsias on the deck and those are sort of purplish. I mean, the purple might not even go with the yellow. What do you think?”

  Michael shot Ned an apologetic glance and tried to remain patient with his customer. “All flowers go together,” he said evenly. “God isn’t a decorator.”

  The realtor frowned for a split second, perhaps determining if the remark had been impertinent. Then he laughed drily. “But some decorators are God, right?”

  “Not around my house,” smiled Michael.

  The realtor leaned closer. “You used to know Jon Fielding, didn’t you?”

  Michael rang up the purchase. “Something like that,” he replied.

  “Oh … if I hit a nerve, I’m sorry.”

  “Not a bit.” He smiled nonchalantly, hoping he didn’t sound as feisty as he felt. “It’s been a long time, that’s all.” He slid the box of primroses in the direction of his inquisitor. “You know him, huh?”

  The realtor nodded. “We did a fly-in together once. Gamma Mu.” He tossed out the name like bait, Michael noticed, as if everyone had heard of the national gay millionaires’ fraternity.

  Michael didn’t bite. “Give him my best when you see him,” he said.

  “Right.” The realtor simply stared for a moment, then reached over and stuffed his business card into the pocket of Michael’s coveralls. “This is who I am,” he said sotto voce. “You should come over one night. I have a Betamax.”

  He left without waiting for a reply, passing Ned in the doorway.

  “What about it?” asked Ned.

  Michael looked at the realtor’s card long enough to read the name, Archibald Anson Gidde, then dropped it into the trash can. “Sorry, Ned, what did you say?”

  “Devil’s Herd,” said Ned. “Tomorrow night?”

  “Oh … yeah. Sure. I’d love to.”

  Ned checked him out for a moment, then tousled his hair.

  “You O.K., Bubba?”

  “Sure,” said Michael.

  “Did that guy …?”

  “He knew Jon,” said Michael. “That’s all.”

  The A-Gays Gather

  ARCH GIDDE WAS A MESS. TWENTY MINUTES BEFORE his dinner guests were scheduled to arrive the yellow primroses were still in their tacky little plastic pots. And Cleavon—damn his lazy, jiveass soul—was still in the kitchen, dicking around with the sushi.

  Arch bellowed from the bedroom. “Cleavon … Cleavon!”

  “Yo,” replied Cleavon.

  The realtor winced at himself in the mirror. Yo, for Christ’s sake. Harold had never said yo. Harold had been campy, to be sure, but never, ever disrespectful. Arch had lost Harold in the divorce, however, and Rick was too selfish (and far too shrewd) to part with a competent servant who was both black and gay.

  “Cleavon,” yelled Arch, “I cannot stress too strongly that the primroses must be potted before the guests arrive. I want four of them in that elephant planter and four in the box on the end of the deck.”

  A pause. Then another yo.

  Arch Gidde groaned out loud, then pushed up the sleeves of his new Kansai Yamamoto sweater from Wilkes. It was embroidered with a huge multi-hued hyena that draped itself asymmetrically across his left shoulder. Is it too much? he wondered.

&nbs
p; No, he decided. Not with the sushi.

  The guests arrived almost simultaneously, all having attended a cocktail party thrown by Vita Keating, wife of the Presto Pudding heir.

  They included: Edward Paxton Stoker Jr. and Charles Hillary Lord (the Stoker-Lords), William Devereux Hill III and Anthony Ball Hughes (the Hill-Hugheses), John Morrison Stonecypher (sometimes referred to as The Prune Prince) and Peter Prescott Cipriani.

  Conspicuously absent was Richard Evan Hampton, Arch Gidde’s ex; the Hampton-Giddes were no more.

  “Well,” cooed Chuck Lord as he swept into the living room, “I must say I approve of the help.”

  Arch smiled reservedly. “Somehow I thought you might.”

  “He’s not from Oakland, is he?” asked Ed Stoker, Chuck’s Other Half.

  “San Bruno,” said Arch.

  “Pity. Chuckie only likes the ones from Oakland.”

  Chuck Lord cast a withering glance at his lover, then turned back to his host. “Don’t mind her,“ he said. “She’s been having hot flashes all week.”

  Arch did his best not to smirk. Chuck Lord’s addiction to Negroes from the East Bay was a matter of common knowledge among the A-Gays in San Francisco. While Ed Stoker stayed home, popping Valiums and reading Diana Vreeland’s Allure, his multi-millionaire husband was out stalking the streets of Oakland in search of black auto mechanics.

  And whenever Ed asked Chuck for a divorce (or so the story went), Chuck would recoil in genuine horror. “But darling,” he would gasp, “what about the baby?”

  The baby was an eight-unit apartment house in the Haight that the two men owned jointly.

  “Guess who I saw at the nursery today,” said Arch over dessert.

  “Who?” asked The Prune Prince.

  “Michael Tolliver.”

  “Who?”

  “You know. The twink who used to be Fielding’s lover.”

  “The cripple?”

  “Not anymore. Jesus, where have you been?”

  “Well, pardon me, Liz Smith.”

  “He practically groped me in the greenhouse.”

  “Where is Fielding, anyway?”

  “On a ship or something. Handing out Dramamine. Too awful for words.”

  Peter Cipriani passed by and dropped a magazine into Arch’s lap. “Speaking of too awful for words, have you checked out Madame Giroux this month?” The magazine was Western Gentry, and the object of Peter’s disdain was one Prue Giroux, the society columnist. Arch turned to the inside back page and began to read aloud to his guests: