Cockeyed ds-11

by Richard Stevenson

  “Brian Williams, Alex Trebek, Chris Matthews, Perry Como back in the old days — they all had to put out,” Hunny said and mimed an act of fellatio.

  “Do you see what I mean?” Nelson said to me disgustedly. “Is it any wonder that somebody on Moth Street cut the Channel 13 cable the other night with an ax, presumably to shut my out-of-control uncle up?”

  “Nelson,” Hunny said, “them thar was outside agitators that chopped up the TV line. None of Arty’s and my neighbors feel that way about us or would do such a thing on the night of my lifetime achievement award. Well, maybe the Brownlees. Or the Haneses. Or Peter Petengill. They all hate our guts. Or Evelyn Seltzer.”

  “Possibly the Fromes,” Art mused additionally.

  “Now you are making my point for me,” Nelson said to his uncle. “Some people just do not appreciate your flamboyant personalities and have it in for you. They don’t like the constant sexual innuendos, and they don’t at all like the activities that everybody thinks go on behind those innuendos.”

  “It is true,” Hunny said, “that some people think it’s tacky pulling college boys’ underpants down as often as possible and enjoying a nice gobble. But certainly you are not one of those narrow-minded people, Nelson.”

  “Ho!” Nelson rolled his eyes. “If only they were col ege boys.”

  I said, “So, are you also gay, Nelson?”

  “Yes, I am. There seems to be one of those genes jumping around in the Van Horn family. But it’s one thing to be gay and it’s another thing entirely to make a sorry, obscene spectacle of yourself, and your family, and most of gay America. A friend who works for the Human Rights Campaign in Washington called me last night and asked if there wasn’t anything I could do to control Uncle Hunny. This man, who my partner went to Dartmouth with, saw The Today Show fiasco, and he pointed out — as if I needed reminding — that Art and Uncle Hunny were playing right into the religious right’s hands.”

  Hunny said, “Nelson’s boyfriend is so drop-dead fabulous that hardly anybody can stand it. He’s into derivatives, which have gone out of fashion, though he is just too, too fashionable otherwise. The two of them have places — places is what they call them — in Clifton Park and Palm Springs. Nelson’s squeeze is named Lawn Brookman, spelled L-A-w-n. Art and I call him Yawn.”

  “So, Nelson,” I said, “it’s not only your uncle’s well-being that led you to bring him to me? Are you also hoping I might help alter his personality? That’s really outside my area of expertise.”

  Nelson slumped wearily. “The reason I am involving myself in this ridiculous business at all is to protect Uncle Hunny from his own worst instincts and from the people his bad instincts have gotten him involved with. I admit I have no real hope that Uncle Hunny will change. Just acting a little more discreet in public is what I’m hoping for. For his sake, and for our family’s sake, especially my parents — but also Grandma Rita, Uncle Hunny’s poor mother.”

  Hunny glared. “Nelson, anything I do or say is just fine with Mom. Always has been, always will be.” To me, Hunny said, “My sister Miriam, Nelson’s mother, is just a sad lost cause sexual-orientation-wise. Miriam thinks PfLAg is an insect repellent. And my brother-in-law Lewis tells his golfing buddies that Nelson isn’t married because his fiance died on 9/11 in the World Trade Center, and he is still too broken up over it to start dating again.”

  “Not true,” Nelson said, looking even more despondent.

  “My parents are conservative, but they are not bigots and they are not mean-spirited. They simply observe certain standards of taste, about which Uncle Hunny plainly knows nothing. I don’t understand that, really. Grandma Rita has had her personal difficulties, and now her mind is not what it once was. But she has always been well-mannered in her outgoing way, and I know she is well-respected out at Golden Gardens. And Grandpa Carl also set high behavioral standards. He was a well-spoken, churchgoing man who always went out of his way to make other people feel comfortable. Uncle Hunny, on the other hand, seems to take great pleasure in making people feel un comfortable.”

  “I have standards of taste, too,” Hunny said, winking at Art.

  “Except, I have certain standards of bad taste I try to live by. To each his own, Nelson, to each his own.”

  Art said, “Nelson, your father did so tell people you had a girlfriend who was killed on 9/11. That came back to Hunny and me from several sources. She was supposedly a securities analyst, CoCkeyed 13 and her name was Gwen Bainbridge, Lewis told people.”

  “Miriam and Lewis,” Hunny said, “talk about Lawn as Nelson’s roommate. Like they’re twenty years old and live in a dorm.”

  “Hunny, according to some of these blackmail attempts,”

  I said, indicating the bundle of computer printouts the three men had brought along with them to my office, “a number of the things people are saying about you go beyond questions of taste. Lowbrow high-spiritedness is one thing, but some of these people say they have proof that you’ve done things that are illegal. For instance, serving alcohol to minors. The law takes that seriously, as I’m sure you know. And you’ve had phone calls now from — how many? seven? — young men who say you got them drunk and had sex with them. Are any of these guys telling the truth?”

  Hunny snatched a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and lit one with a butane lighter. “Now, lookie here, girl,” he said, shooting smoke and spittle my way, “I am not now and never have been into serious chicken. A boy has to be old enough to know better, or I’m not interested. Well, interested maybe. I’m only human. But I don’t ever mess around with some youngster’s emotions. It’s fun I want, and I want a boy who’s old enough to know what he wants, especially if what he wants is just to have some fun. It’s true that sometimes a twenty-one-year-old needs a little lubrication to loosen up his inhibitions, just like I did when I was twenty-one and just like Nelson did.” Hunny’s nephew stiffened and, if I wasn’t mistaken, blushed. “It’s possible, of course,” Hunny went on, “that a few of these boys might have been just a smidgen short of twenty-one. I mean, if a kid is obviously post-adolescent I don’t see any need to check his driver’s license. Would you?”

  Hunny seemed to be addressing me. I said, “I’m in a longtime relationship, but that’s beside the point. I don’t have young guys from my past lining up and threatening to haul me into court unless I cough up thousands of dollars. You do. Can any of these under-twenty-ones prove that you got them sauced up 14 Richard Stevenson and then — did whatever it is you do?”

  “Gave them blowjobs,” Hunny said cheerfully, glancing around for an ashtray and then flicking ash into my wastebasket.

  “There could be a few pictures out there somewhere. No videos, though, I don’t think. And no pictures from any of the guys who have called so far.”

  Nelson muttered bitterly, “Oh, so far. That’s great.”

  Art said, “Hunny, if anybody accused you of being a pedophile, you could get testimony from tons of people saying you like sex with guys of all ages.”

  “Like at work,” Hunny said. “I’ve blown half the straight guys at the warehouse. But they’re mostly married, so I really can’t say how many of them would stand up for me. Hey,” Hunny added.

  “Good choice of words — stand up for me,” and he and Art cackled.

  Nelson looked close to tears.

  “And then in addition to the men who are explicitly threatening to expose you for illegal acts,” I said, “are a dozen or so who have asked for money and used language where there’s an implicit threat. We’re talking nearly twenty of these characters to deal with, and maybe more on the way, no? If I do take you on as a client, Hunny, this could run into time and money. As a sexually active gay man about town, you’ve had a busy career.

  Tracking all these guys down and then explaining to them in the nicest way possible that blackmail and extortion are illegal in the state of New York could take up a sizeable chunk of my work week or month.” I went over my standard fee schedule
, and as I sat across from not-so-plutocrat-looking Hunny and Art, I left off the surcharge I normally add for any billionaires who find their way to my Central Avenue walkup.

  Hunny looked at me speculatively and said, “Your office is kind of tacky, but your rates aren’t.”

  “Those are my normal fees. Once in a while people ask for their money back, but most are satisfied.”

  Hunny smiled and said, “Don, have you ever fooled around with an older, more experienced man?”

  “I told you, Uncle Hunny, that Donald is gay. That’s one reason I brought you to him. But he just told you that he has a boyfriend. God, can’t you ever leave it alone? All this sex, sex, sex, sex. People just get sick of it.”

  Hunny flapped his wrist at his nephew. “Well, get her!” He looked over at me and said, “Nelson and Yawn prefer collecting gym equipment to collecting boys. How silly can a drag queen be?”

  “Do you and your partner do drag?” I asked Nelson conversationally and maybe because I was curious as to what I might get Hunny to come out with next.

  Nelson said, “Lawn and I do not do drag, no. That’s just the way my uncle talks. Constantly.”

  “When you were twelve,” Art said, “you got caught wearing your mother’s underwear. Hunny’s mom told us about that.”

  Art and Hunny chuckled, and Nelson went red again. “Uncle Hunny, I am trying to be helpful. You called me and asked me if I knew anybody who could deal with these ghastly seedy characters who came oozing out of the woodwork as soon as you won the lottery. I bring you to this man who knows how to deal with predatory scumbags and might be able to keep you from being conned, or even — let’s just get it right out there — out of jail.

  And what do you do? You and Art spend the entire time insulting me and dishing detective Strachey. So, do you want help, or do you not? If you do, then I suggest that you start acting like a mature adult for the first time in your life.”

  “Anyway,” Hunny said, “I’ve been in jail before. That’s something I know I can handle, if it comes to that.”

  “That was entirely different,” Nelson said. “This time it wouldn’t be about social protest. It would be about corrupting a minor or something really serious you couldn’t wriggle out of so easily. And it wouldn’t just be overnight, either.”

  I asked, “You were arrested at a protest, Hunny?”

  “Yes, on June twenty-eighth, 1969.” He smiled at me and batted his eyelashes and flapped his wrist once.

  “Stonewall? You were there?” I had goose bumps.

  “Both of us were,” Art said. “Hunny and I met when they shoved us both in the same paddy wagon.”

  “Wow.”

  “Some of us in the Van Horn family,” Nelson said, “are actually quite proud of Art and Uncle Hunny. Lawn and I are both grateful for the social revolution that made it possible for us to live as comfortably and openly as we do as gay men. But that was then and this is now, and throwing beer bottles at the police is no longer either appropriate or necessary. And there certainly is no need anymore for gay men to go around shrieking defiantly and sexualizing every utterance and affecting the personalities of ten-year-old girls. Art and Hunny and the other people at Stonewall that night could afford to act like that because they had nothing to lose. But now, thanks to the post-Stonewall social gains, we all have plenty to lose. And lose things we most certainly will if our most prominent role models go on TV and start rolling their eyes and waving their arms around and shrieking about Matt Lauer’s ‘nice basket.’”

  As Nelson gave his speech, Hunny made a show of looking bored, and then he picked up the lists of blackmailers and extortionists that he had placed on my desk earlier.

  Paying no attention to anything Nelson had said, Hunny looked up at me with a queasy expression. “You know, Don,” he said, “there are a couple of these humpy numbers that we might have to end up paying something to. Annoying as that would be.”

  “Why is that?” I said.

  “Because two or three of them I think would have to be considered maybe kind of…dangerous?”

  Art leaned over and peered at the list and nodded, and Nelson slid even farther down in his chair.

  Chapter Three

  “I think I should get half,” Stu Hood said. “It’s only fair.

  Hunny told me lots of times he was gonna ditch Art and marry me. Just ‘cause Hunny never got around to doing what he promised is no reason for me to suffer. Anyway, I was underage when Hunny popped my cherry. That’s against the law, and I was an impressionable youth.”

  “How old were you?” I asked.

  “When Hunny introduced me to the homosexual lifestyle, I was eighteen or nineteen years of age, I forget which. I was only a child.”

  “But the age of consent in New York is seventeen, Stu. Dewy-browed stripling that you might have considered yourself to be, in the eyes of the law you were a consenting adult.”

  “No shit. I thought you had to be twenty-one.”

  “To drink, yes. But not for sex. Voting is eighteen and alcohol consumption twenty-one, but seventeen is the age of consent for sex in New York.”

  “Well, he served me alcohol.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “He told me it was happy hour on Moth Street.”

  “This was in Hunny’s house?”

  “Yeah, Art wasn’t home and Hunny was sneaking a quickie, apparently.”

  We were seated at a table near the dimly lit rear of the Watering Hole, a gay bar of robust semi-down-at-the-heels antiquity down the street from my office on Central Avenue. Hunny had told me an hour earlier that Hood was likely to be hanging out there on a Saturday, and Hunny had been right. The bartender had pointed Hood out, a hatchet-faced, late twenty-something, stringily muscular man in cargo pants and a tank top, with afternoon beer 18 Richard Stevenson on his breath.

  I asked, “Had you been acquainted with Hunny previous to your accompanying him to his house?”

  “Yeah, I’d talked to him a few times in the park. But only talk.

  I was cherry.”

  “Washington Park?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you a naturalist, or did you hang out in the park trying to get picked up?”

  “I was bi-curious, yeah. But I never did much of anything with guys till Hunny lured me into his car and took me over to his place and committed a lewd act. So, Hunny owes me. Hunny owes me big.”

  “You said, Stu, that you believe Hunny should give you half of his lottery winnings. Do you honestly believe Hunny owes you half a billion dollars for a blow job? That sounds steep to me. These days I’m guessing you only get twenty or thirty bucks.”

  “Sometimes fifty,” Hood said. “Anyways, with Hunny I just did it for the beer. He was nice to me, and I was nice to him back.”

  “So you and Hunny had a continuing relationship after your initial visit?”

  “Yeah, I’d ride my bike over there, and sometimes Art would show up and get a little, too. I’m not saying they weren’t nice to me. All I’m saying at this point in time is that Hunny did turn me into a homosexual, and then he did make certain promises. Like maybe I could move in sometime and be part of their alternative family. That would have suited me fine.”

  The bar was surprisingly busy for a summer afternoon. The air-conditioning probably served as an attraction, and in any case the two dozen or so patrons did not look like either beachgoers or men who might otherwise have been off on Adirondack birding expeditions. Some of the men in the bar glanced our way from time to time, maybe wondering who Hood’s new friend was.

  I said, “Stu, you’re a cyclist. How come?”

  I knew what was coming. “I lost my driver’s license. Too many DUIs. It sucks, but I’m sort of used to it. It’s rough in the winter, though. People give me rides.”

  “Have you had any other legal troubles?”

  “A few.”

  “Hunny says you like to set fires.”

  Hood looked down at his draught beer. Almost ina
udibly, he said, “I guess so.”

  “He said you had an arson conviction as a juvenile.”

  “Yes, I did. But I’ve been to counseling.”

  “You left a message on Hunny’s voicemail threatening to burn his house down if he didn’t split his lottery winnings with you.”

  He shrugged. “That was bullshit. I was drunk up to my eyeballs when I said that. Shit, Hunny should know.”

  “I’m here to tell you, Stu, that if Hunny and Art’s house goes up in flames, you will be arrested in a short time. And if you set the fire, you will be convicted and you will go to prison for a very long time. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

  Hood mulled this over and had some more beer. “I guess Hunny must be pissed at me.”

  “He is concerned about you. Hunny likes you, and he doesn’t want to see you locked up in Dannemora for twenty years. He said to tell you also that he would be willing to help you out financially, some small amount to tide you over. But half a billion is out.”

  “Hunny is so cheap. How much did he say?”

  “He said he heard you had been laid off at Target, and he said he would be happy to spring for a thousand to help you along until you located another job.”

  “Hmm. Check or cash?”

  “Whichever you would prefer.”

  20 Richard Stevenson

  “Cash money, please.”

  “But no more threats, okay?”

  “Well, shit, it’s more than I got out of the Catholic Church.”

  “You sued the church?”

  “I wrote a letter to the pope. He never answered it. A priest at Sacred Heart fucked me seven times when I was eleven.”

  “But there were lawsuits over sexual abuse by priests, and victims were compensated. This was several years ago.”

  “I heard about that later.”

  The music playing now was Donna Summer’s “On the Radio.”