It amazed me that Donny wasn’t. jumping on my case. My bullshit seemed as obvious to me as neon. He didn’t care about me. Fuck him.
“So if romance, love, don’t cut it, what does?”
“Depends on what you call love, Kenny. Can you love anything you don’t stick your dick in?”
“Yeah, my country.” I laughed. “Lemme ask you something, Donny. In high school, I was okay, wasn’t I?”
“Whada you mean?”
“I was in there, I was into things, right?”
“Like what?” Donny shook his head in confusion.
“I mean, I wasn’t no depresso, was I?”
“Not any more than anybody else.” He frowned.
If I was just like everybody else how come I wound up like I did? Then I thought, as opposed to who? Donny? Candy? Kristin? La Donna? Maybe we all got burned. Maybe to get burned was the nature of “normal.”
“And lemme ask you one last thing, Donny. How come, if you were so pissed at me Thursday, you called me back?”
Donny smiled at his hands, then picked up his cold coffee cup. “Because I was lonely, Kenny, and so were fucking you.”
I opened my mouth to argue, wound up sighing.
“C’mon, let’s go to a movie.” I threw my half of the tab down on the table, got up and stretched.
We decided to see Straw Dogs, which was playing in one of the dollar-fifty places between Seventh and Eighth on Forty-second Street.
We sat in a packed mainly spade and porto audience, all of us woofing, groaning, laughing and barking at the shenanigans on the screen. The air was choked with grass smoke. We sat in back of two teen-agers. They had joints parked behind both ears. We slouched in our seats grooving more on the audience than on the movie. When one of the villains got finished slapping and raping the blond heroine, a guy behind us drawled, “Ah hopes dat bitch done took her pill dot mornin’!” and everybody went berserk.
“Yeah, ah sho hopes she done took her birf control pill.” He pushed a good thing too far and someone in front yelled for him to shut up.
“Who gone shut me up?” he barked.
“Ah will, me, too, yeah me, too, ah will.” A dozen voices from all over the house.
I was proud of myself that Donny’s gayness didn’t wig me, like a sixties liberal buddying up to a yom. There was also something else going on. He said he wasn’t into balling with me, but I assumed that if I wanted to he would. And I sat there thinking about what it would be like to get it on. I’d had fantasies about guys, but I would never dream of coming on to my man here. Other than pure fear, one of the reasons was that I had a hunch that if I did it would make him feel shitty. Like he was the vulnerable one, like he was the fulltime spade, and I was just doing a night in Harlem for a goof. Like it was up to me.
“This is a fuckin’ scary movie, man.” He knocked my leg with his knee.
“This is a fuckin’ scary audience,” I murmured into my fist. On the screen four murderous bastards stalked a defenseless couple in a deserted cabin.
“They’re comin’ after us, Becker, they’re comin’ after us.” Donny laughed and slid farther down in his seat. “Pretend they’re coming after us.”
“Big deal,” I snorted. “I live my fuckin’ life like they’re comin’ after me.”
“We’re in danger, Becker! We’re in danger! We’re in dangerous Times Square! Dangerous Times Square! Surrounded by dangerous stoned psychotic jigaboos! Ooo, its’ so dangerous, Becker!” he riffed, laughing. “Whata we gonna do, Becker? Whata we gonna do?’ He got me laughing. I started to get into his trip, but he was acting weird. And his “Ooo, it’s so dangerous” sounded like faggottese to me, I couldn’t help it. It was true.
I didn’t want to-be his friend. I wanted to split right after the movie.
They Died with Their Boots On was on the late show.
“So.” Donny hunched against the cold in front of the movie house. People fanned out around us. “What’s to be?”
I shrugged. “I think I’m gonna shoot uptown.”
“It’s only eleven-thirty, where you running?”
“Nah, I’m tired.”
“C’mon, Kenny, let’s do something. You wanna score some women?”
“Get the fuck outa here.” I was embarrassed.
“Then what? I’m up for anything.”
“I’m gonna go, Donny.”
“Okay.” Donny looked glum.
I felt like a shit. “Whata you gonna do, you gonna go home?”
“Nah, I don’t feel tired. I’m probably gonna go down to some bars or something.” He didn’t sound too excited. “You wanna run with me?”
“Whata you mean?” I felt on my toes.
“You know, just see the scene.”
“Yeah, and get cornholed by one of your boys?”
“Nah. It’s not like that, Kenny. Nobody fucks around with nobody that don’t want to get fucked, around with. Too many fish in the sea.”
“Nah, I’m gonna go home.”
“Aw, c’mon, whata you gonna do at home, get in bed and watch TV? Come with me. This’ll blow your fucking mind, man. And don’t worry about nothing, you’re perfectly safe.”
“Hey, it’s not like that.”
“Well, fuck clubs then. Let’s get something to eat. All Fin saying is, we’re having a good time, man. It’s still early. I haven’t hung out and bombed around in a dog’s age, and you neither.” He squinted at me.
I was running around all week crying about my loneliness and now when someone wanted my company they almost had to beg for it.
I started feeling sleepy, a panicky sleepy like the exhaustion I felt the night before with Kristin. Donny wasn’t going to let me sleep. I would never get to sleep.
I started to waver. I could sleep late tomorrow.
“You still thinking I’m gonna hit on you?” He frowned.
“Hey, no! No!” I really didn’t.
“ ‘Cause if you are, the only thing I’m gonna hit on you with is my foot in your face.” He looked like he wasn’t kidding.
“You sure those joints are safe? ‘Cause I’m serious, man, I don’t wanna deal with no psychos tonight.” We started walking downtown.
“What makes you so sure they want to deal with you?”
“C’mon, Donny, you know I’m hot stuff.
We hit Christopher Street about midnight. It was freezing outside, but despite the cold the street was so packed it looked as if there were a street fair going on.. There were no women to be seen. I was in a totally different head than the last time I’d walked down this street. I didn’t feel so contemptuous. And a lot more scared. Donny was in a different head, too, more relaxed, less self-conscious. He barreled along as if he owned the place, staring down any guy who caught his fancy. Me, I was going berserk. My face was set in my “I could give a shit” expression but I felt like somebody was playing jai alai with my brains. I found myself tensing my muscles, flattening my gut. I got totally focused on guys’ physiques. I didn’t feel turned on, more like competitive. I avoided eyes, but I was sneaking peeks to see who, if anybody, was checking me out. “Okay, Kenny, here she comes, Miss Right.” About ten yards in front of us, a long-haired guy in a leather jacket and white dungarees hooked glances with me and walked slowly past us doing a neck-breaking head turn, his eyes never leaving my face. Donny gave me a shot in the ribs.
“Your first cruise.”
“Unbelievable.” I laughed. I was pleased. I felt the power of being a cocktease. I thought about some of the “look but don’t touch” bitches I had known and at that moment I became hip to the kick.
“Donny, you know that thing about the handkerchiefs? You know, the color signifies your sex trip?”
“No, tell me about it.” He laughed.
“Aw, fuck you. Can you imagine if singles’ bars had them? You know, you go in someplace and a chick’s got a white kerchief. That means she’ll do anything that doesn’t involve touching it. Green, only with guys earning thirty
grand or more; blue, fuck no suck; pink, suck no fuck.”
Donny wasn’t listening. He looked like he was on automatic cruise control.
Grabbing my arm, he dragged me up a few steps toward a heavy oak door. Overhead hung a sign: DANTE’S INFERNO. I put on the skids and pulled him back. “Whoa! What’s this?”
We went inside. Heads swung to the door to check out who was making an entrance. I kept my head down and nudged Donny out of their line of vision. The place was large, jammed, designed as a cross between a western and a pub motif.
“Don’t fucking move, Donny.” I stood there trying to get my bearings. I was more frightened being indoors. “Okay.” I calmed down. “But don’t leave me.” I felt like a kid who couldn’t swim hanging on to a grownup in the deep end of the pool.
“It’s lightweight, Kenny.”
I followed Donny’s heels. He was plowing through the chatting, laughing men like an icebreaker.
“Hey, hey, slow down.” I didn’t like sliding through groups of guys. My hand was casually nailed in front of my crotch. I snagged Donny’s jacket. I wanted to slap him on the back of his head for being an insensitive prick.
“Kenny, relax. Jerry!” Donny waved to a tall, thin gay in a striped rugby shirt Donny kissed him, then introduced me. We shook hands. He looked like some fraternity wimp. I felt a little weird having watched them kiss, but I wasn’t gagging either. It just looked stupid.
I stood as close to Donny as I could and scanned the place. Everybody looked collegiate, friendly, definitely middle class, in their twenties, wearing crew-neck sweaters, La Coste shirts—all-American gay. It felt like a college smoker. The only thing missing was the adhesive nametags. Not very threatening. Soon I even felt brave enough to venture a few feet away from Donny like a cocky yet shaky kid his first time out on a two-wheeler. I turned to make some snide comment to Donny but he was gone.
No good. Alone now, the place took on a sexually sinister shade. I noticed the cruising again. Lots of posing, posturing. I soon had the sense of everybody moving with an underwater rhythm, a slow-motion school of fish—drift, stop, stare, drift. Propping an elbow against the bar I ordered a Tab, Some guy tried to burn me with his stare, checking me out like he was my fucking eye doctor. I looked away, yawned. He moved on. I didn’t feel frightened, just wobbly. I didn’t feel attracted or turned on to anyone. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be attracted to. I felt like an outsider. As if I had no right to talk to anyone because I didn’t belong. A Jew in a church. Across the room several guys leaned against a wall looking bored, showing off their baskets, like someone had slipped crowbars down the front of their shorts. They were like chicks with big tits in low-cut dresses in singles’ bars.
“Kenny, Where’d you go?” Donny came up to me at the bar.
“What do you mean, Where’d I go?”
“I thought you found somebody.”
“Get bent. So what’s the story here, it’s like a singles’ bar.”
“Yeah, I come here when I feel like being sociable, when I just wanna hang out and talk.”
“But it’s really easy to get laid here, right?”
“Yeah, I guess, but there’s heavy competition. The best guys go fast. And I’ll tell you something, the final trip here is just like anyplace else. Everybody’s looking for that one person. Straight, gay, no difference. You fuck this one, you fuck that one, but in the back of your head…”
I was feeling pretty good. I was hanging out in a gay bar, being cool, having an intelligent conversation.
“You wanna check out other places?” Donny asked.
“Sure.”
Once we hit the street I started ogling a middle-aged woman with her husband.
“See that kid over there?” Donny nodded toward a blond, crew-cut runaway looking seventeen years old, smoking a cigarette and sitting on a parked car. “He lived with me for two weeks.”
The kid’s back was to us. Most of the guys passing by gave him a heavy cruise. He didn’t look up.
“Is that good?”
“Is what good?” Donny turned up the collar of his bomber jacket.
“That he lived with you for two weeks.”
“It was good for him.” Donny put his hands in his pockets and rolled his shoulders.
We moved in a westerly direction toward the river. There were fewer stores, fewer lights, a lot of warehouses. Two guys passed us dressed from head to toe in black leather. In addition to keychains, handcuffs dangled from their belts. Donny didn’t even blink. I blinked enough for a Morse code dictionary. At the end of Christopher Street we turned up Eleventh Avenue, which could have been a set for On the Waterfront. On our left was the river, rows of deserted piers and warehouses and armies of trucks parked for blocks under the gloomy shadow of the elevated West Side Highway. On our right were gay bars sprinkled among beat-up factories, meat-packing docks and trash-filled lots. The only sounds came from the sporadic, speeding rumbles of overhead highway traffic. I noticed a chunky guy dressed in leather with a blond Nazi flat-top pissing in a lot. His dick was profile to the sidewalk.
“Shit, Donny, where you taking me?”
“It’s all bullshit, Kenny. Just hang in there.”
Occasionally a low-flying taxi zoomed between the highway pillars on the cobblestone street and rocked to a halt in front of a dimly lit doorway as anywhere from one to five guys in motorcycle leather erupted from the back seat and vanished behind a club door.
“This is the other end of the spectrum.” Donny glanced around. “But it’s not as scary as it looks.”
“Oh, yeah? Tell it to the marines.”
“I’m sure the marines already know.” He ushered me into the Stockade. From the outside the place looked closed. The shades were drawn and I couldn’t hear any noise from the street.
The minute we walked in I realized we’d landed on another planet. I started wigging. I was scared. No lie. The place was huge, high-ceilinged, cavernous, with a sinister glow as if the color black emitted its own tint of light. Music boomed, pounded, exploded. The place was mobbed with giants in leather, shades, chains, shaved heads, boots, Fu Manchus. It was a cocktail party in hell. Grim dudes with crook-necked vulture postures stood motionless against walls. Suspended from the ceiling were straps, harnesses and assorted metal and leather objects which looked like they might be used for either torture or training race horses. I felt like any second someone was going to come up and hurt me. Donny led me to a clear spot on the wall and we stood silent across from a forty-foot bar over which hung an enormous American flag at one end and an entire Harley Davidson at the other.
“Snort this.” Donny passed me a gray metal inhaler, his thumb over the tip.
“What is it?”
“Just snort it.”
“Hey, fuck you just snort it! What is it?” I was so tense I couldn’t even look at him.
“It’s amyl, man, it’s lightweight.”
“Everything’s fuckin’ lightweight with you, Donny. I’m startin’ to think you’re a little lightweight, you know?”
“You scared, Kenny?” He didn’t take offense.
“No! No! I’m used to walking in on the Luftwaffe and the Hell’s Angels, man. This is everyday shit for me!”
“Kenny.” He touched my arm. “Just relax for a second, look around you, check out some of the people here.” He nodded in the direction of a guy my size. “Take that dude. How much you think those threads set him back?”
The leather looked brand new, custom tailored. “A yard?”
“Try two. Two hundred dollars’ worth of leather and chrome, man. Now who can afford that kind of dough? You get what I’m drivin’ at?”
“I mean the guy’s probably some lawyer, a professor. Whata you think, those are his everyday clothes? They get that shit in boutiques, man, joints that take Master Charge. Just look around you, man. Don’t look at the leather; look at the faces. This is an upper-middle-class scene, Kenny. I guarantee you if everybody had to empty -out
their wallets right now I’d have enough American Express cards to wallpaper my apartment.” I scanned the joint. Some guys didn’t look like they were bullshitting, but a lot did. Under a lot of motorcycle hats were a lot of kick-me faces, baby faces, scared faces, wrinkled faces. There were spindly legs and potbellied. It was as if the Junior Chamber of Commerce had dropped acid and threw a Walter Mitty party. But not all of them.
“So what we’re saying here, Donny, is that half these guys are doing Disneyland in their heads.”
“Shit, yeah, the tougher the front the bigger, the pussy.”
“Yeah, but some of these dudes look like they’d be into sucking out your eyes through a flavor straw.”
A short weightlifter wearing a gray Godspell T-shirt cruised by like a battleship on patrol.
“Well, that’s the trick here. You got to figure out who’s into what before it’s too late. That’s some of the kick, too, the danger. Just stay away from the loners, the guys who aren’t so dressed up. Everybody’s trying so hard to come on like street punk or working-class badass. It’s all fantasy. I know one kid who ran into his father here, for Christ’s sake.” I leaned back trying to tell who was into what.
Donny was ducking and weaving, grooving with the music. I couldn’t pick out any songs on the track. They all blended from one disco riff to another. Donny passed me the inhaler again. I took a five-second snort and the back of my head took off for California. The music took on echo chamber proportions and I couldn’t hear myself laugh even though I knew I was halfway to hysteria. Donny held out his hand for a slap, grinning and grooving. The music was a bouncy bitch. My neck and ears were burning with piping hot cherry red blood.
“What the fuck is amyl anyhow?” I laughed.
“Heart attack medicine.” He staggered backward clutching his heart in a mock seizure and I almost fell to the floor. We could hardly hear ourselves over the disco.
“You’re a sick man, Donny.”
“Ain’t this place a groove?” We stared at a huge scary dude with a shaved head, shaved eyebrows, no shirt, riding pants, knee-high boots and a diagonal leather SS strap slashed across his naked outrageously pectoraled chest He slid a finger to his second knuckle up his nose. We started laughing so hard I began to retch.
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