The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  Another Summer Season

  After our holiday on Fire Island, I went back to the Lambertville Music Tent for the summer. Illy was going to the Santa Fe Opera, because there was a chance he could choreograph something there for one of the operas. For very little money. I, on the other hand, was always ready to make money.

  Sally Ann had urged me to come back. They were going to do Finían’s Rainbow, South Pacific, The Boy Friend, and Kiss Me, Kate. She thought I could get the Harold Lang part in Kiss Me, Kate. I told her she should audition Rex Ames, from the opera company, who I thought would be better for the part. I knew Rex longed to become an actor and was studying singing and would like to do the role. We weren’t really friends, but occasionally we chatted during rehearsals.

  She did. He got the part. I wound up in the chorus. That started the ball rolling in the direction my life was to take.

  Rex didn’t join the company until the end of the summer. He didn’t want to do chorus and had jobs floating around the summer-theater circuit. He was doing the lead dance role in Brigadoon, the one I had done the summer before. It was up in New York State somewhere. Then he was doing a lead in The Boy Friend in Kansas City, not in our production. He showed up in Lambertville in mid-August.

  Of course, he was a hit in the company. Everybody wanted to fuck him, and the nice thing about Rex was that he wanted to fuck everybody. Regardless of race, creed, or place of national origin.

  Rex really crept up on me. I knew him fairly well from the opera and knew his story, so none of this surprised me. And didn’t embarrass me, even though I had recommended him. I don’t think Sally Ann thought there was anything between us.

  But Rex had a car, and I started going back and forth from the city with him. He didn’t want to stay in Lambertville because he didn’t like leaving his mother alone any more than he had to. That stopped me. Mother? He seemed the last person on earth to be concerned about his mother. But such was the case.

  I wanted to take classes from Alfredo Corvino in the summer course he was giving in a studio over on Eighth Avenue. So I was going into the city to stay overnight in my awful little flat on Sixteenth Street. We usually got back at about one o’clock in the morning and I was up for Alfredo’s at eleven o’clock. It was pushing it, but it was worth it. I wasn’t about to start the second season at the opera with my technique falling apart.

  My contract had been renewed, with a slight increase in salary, and I really didn’t want to go anywhere else. The New York City Ballet had made vague gestures in my direction, but I didn’t want to audition and fail. I thought one more year and I would pass their audition and then could decide if I wanted to go into that frigid, female-oriented company.

  Riding back and forth, Rex and I started to get friendly. He confided in me. He didn’t have a lover and he liked to sleep around. He started to pull me over and kiss me on’the lips when I got out of the car on Sixteenth Street in the middle of the night. And Rex was a good kisser.

  He also told me his real name was Rinaldo Ambrosino. He changed it so that he would have a real star’s name when the moment came. And he was sure it would.

  We didn’t have any nights off at the tent, so I didn’t get a chance to miss Illy. I called him in Santa Fe once a week. He was going to choreograph Die Fledermaus. I knew he had to be sleeping with people right and left but I didn’t really care. It wasn’t happening right under my nose.

  One night Rex said, “Maybe I’ll stay over one of these nights. If my mother goes to Baltimore.” I said, “Mmmm.” The mysterious mother. I wasn’t even so sure there was such a person. It would certainly make a great excuse for getting out of anything you didn’t want to do.

  When he dropped me off, Rex and I were taking longer and longer to say good night. He loved to kiss and would be on top of me in the front seat, pressing his blue-jeaned groin into mine. Through his jeans I could feel his hard-on, which was pretty rampant, but he always pulled my hand away when I tried to unbutton those jeans.

  One night when we were practicing our usual maneuvers he said, “Let’s go upstairs.”

  I said, “What about your mother?”

  He said, “She went to Baltimore today to visit my aunt Alice.”

  So we did go upstairs. We both got undressed pretty quickly, without much small talk. I got into bed first and turned off the lamp on the bedside table.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Rex said.

  “I want to,” I said. I was very nervous and very excited.

  He climbed in and immediately got on top of me, placing his penis between my legs. It felt very big. He kissed me and we pressed our crotches together as we had been doing in the car, but this time sans blue jeans.

  He put his hands under my buttocks and said, “I’m going to have to go in you.” And I came. All over the place. Just like the first time I slept with Illy. Really.

  And you know how the last thing in the world you want to do is have more sex just after you’ve had an orgasm? Rex immediately pulled out from between my legs, rolled off, and turned on his side. He didn’t seem particularly disappointed. I went into the kitchen and cleaned up, and when I came back he was sound asleep.

  Rex jumped right up in the morning, looking at his watch. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “We’ve got early rehearsals for Kiss Me, Kate.”

  There would have been time for a little action, but he was clearly not interested. Probably felt he’d already gone too far the night before.

  So we did our two-week run of Kiss Me, Kate. Rex’s mother was back from Baltimore after a very short visit. Her story was that she couldn’t sleep until Rex was in the house. So his staying overnight must have been quite an event even if it was so abortive.

  Rex was still kissing me when he brought me home from the show, but it was pretty clear he was putting our relationship on hold. A little heavy petting and that was going to be it.

  I didn’t really object. Summer stock ended. The opera season was in the offing and we were back in rehearsals. I was concentrating hard in my classes with Margaret Craske and Alfredo Corvino. It was one of those rare periods in life when sex was in perspective and not more important than anything else.

  The ballet evening had never materialized the season before, but now Antony Tudor was ballet master, and the ballet evening was definitely on. There would be a Cost fan tutte, and Callas would be back. It was going to be fun.

  And somehow I was seeing both Illy Ilquist and Rex Ames. It was really Rex’s fault. There was no reason to stop seeing Illy, because Rex didn’t really want to sleep with me. He just wanted to neck furiously, sometimes fondle me, but never masturbate me. His own penis never came out of those blue jeans again. I was fascinated. And I didn’t have any real relationship with Illy, did I? We met on Thursday nights, sometimes on weekends. But falling in love wasn’t in his repertory.

  So Rex Ames sort of snuck in the back door. I have no explanation except that I was really concentrating on my dancing and wasn’t giving the situation my full attention. Would it have been any different if I had?

  Illy in St. Vincent’s

  I stopped by to see Illy every day. As with most dying people, there was no way to know exactly when he was going to die. The dying can linger on for months and months, or they can suddenly be gone. So I tried not to miss seeing him.

  His only other visitor was Anne Hatcher, who had been a dancer with us at the Met. She had been an all-business, no-nonsense dancer, and now she was an all-business, no-nonsense advertising executive. She and I had never been particularly friendly, but we had the bond of former dancers who have escaped into other worlds.

  Somehow I realized that Illy and she had been lovers at some point as well as friends. I could only admire her loyalty, since no one else ever appeared.

  Illy told me that both his parents were now dead and buried in far-off Moorehead, Minnesota. And that his beautiful, curly-haired younger brother had disappeared into the Pacific Ocean in northern California. He
said he had been asked to come to California and identify the remains of a corpse found floating but that it had been impossible. I had met the beautiful brother, who had been my age, several times. He hadn’t seemed to be the kind of person to be devoured by New York, but he was. I suppose he fled the city and headed west and when he reached the Pacific Coast realized there was no farther to flee and he was still who he was.

  I couldn’t stay too long at Illy’s bedside, but I would hold his hand and chat a few minutes while I was passing through on my rounds. He asked me one day if I ever saw any of the people we had known at the opera, any of the boys from the Sex Squad.

  I told him that as far as I knew Antonio was still there, unbelievably enough. Alfred had gone to art school and was now teaching in Philadelphia. He sent me cards, though I rarely saw him. He was the only one to stay in touch after I went back to Michigan.

  And I told him about Robby Schmidt. I told him that I had run into Robby on the corner of Bleecker and Carmine Streets shortly after I had seen him at the Metropolitan Museum. He really had become a street person; a wrinkled little creature with stray, gray hair, mad eyes, and a bad smell. He smiled, teeth loosely scattered in his mouth. “Hi, where are you going?” he asked.

  “Mona’s Candlelight,” I said. Robby blinked. Mona’s had been down at the other end of Carmine Street thirty years ago. An after-hours hangout when all the other clubs had closed. It was really called the Royal Roost, but had been Mona’s Candlelight in an earlier incarnation. I guess no one got used to the new name. As I remember, Mona was on hand, tiny and ancient, and in something that looked like a Chinese robe. There was always a mix of homosexuals, lesbians, drag queens, and unrepentant celebrities. When you had scoured the town until four in the morning you could go sex shopping at Mona’s among the dregs. A very similar crowd to the Five Oaks up on Grove Street. When the Five Oaks closed, they moved en masse to Mona’s. Mona’s had closed at least twenty years ago.

  Robby’s drug-crushed brain was trying to process the news that I was on my way to the now-nonexistent Mona’s. He was thinking, What year is it? Is it 1958? Am I in fact still young and beautiful and this old wreck of a body is just a bad dream? Are we still at the Opera? Is Harry on his way to meet Rex Ames or Illy Ilquist at Mona’s Candlelight?

  Out of the chaos that was his brain he asked for twenty dollars, so I gave it to him. It was a bad idea. When I came home from the hospital the next night he was waiting on my doorstep. I don’t know how he had found out where I lived. He still had some cunning in that drug-raddled little brain. He wanted another twenty dollars. Of course, I gave it to him. Then he proceeded to wait every night. This went on for a month. It was pretty depressing. Yet I knew it was for his night’s lodging and if I didn’t give it to him he’d wind up sleeping on the street.

  It had to stop. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the money. It was the oppressiveness of knowing that at the end of every day Robby would be waiting. Crazy as he was, he realized he’d stumbled onto a good thing. Even when I worked late, he was always there. He would have waited all night for his twenty dollars. He had nothing better to do. One night I told him, “I’m going to rent you a hotel room, Robby. This is ridiculous. You’re living from day to day and I’m being driven mad by your hanging about like this.” Robby didn’t seem to be particularly pleased. Being able to take care of yourself seems to depend on how far ahead you project your life. For Robby, it was one day. As long as he was all right until the next day, that was good enough for him. When the next day dawned and he had no money or lodging, no food, no bed, he became hysterical. Until he got some money. Twenty dollars would do. As soon as he was secure for the next twenty-four hours, his hysteria subsided and he lived in the moment.

  Some people are okay as long as they know what’s going on for the next two weeks, from paycheck to paycheck. Only when the paychecks stop do they unhinge and worry about their future.

  I have a two-year span of projection. I look ahead and have some idea of what I’ll be doing for the next two years and that’s enough of a plan for the future. There are some people who need to project to the end of their lives. I’m not that uptight.

  So I created a one-month plan for the future for Robby. After some hunting and inquiring, I found a cheap hotel near Times Square. Not a fleabag, but grim. They changed the sheets and towels weekly. A small but not too dismal corner room with its own bath. I paid for it one month in advance. Now Robby had a key in his hand and a roof over his head. A few times after he continued to show up at my home and I turned down his requests for money flat, he got the picture.

  That was when I got an answering machine on the telephone at home, too. I thought it was pretentious. I didn’t have the kind of life where a missed phone call mattered very much. But then Robby began to call nightly to complain about his hotel room. Could he be moved to a better hotel? The spoiled child he always was hadn’t disappeared into the clouds of drugs he’d taken. When he was young and beautiful, he had demanded petulantly of older lovers any number of unreasonable things, and they’d always been delivered. Continuing to demand unreasonably still worked pretty well for him. People who pitied him delivered to his demands, but they soon disappeared and had to be replaced with other pitying people.

  So when the phone rang, I stopped picking up until the machine told us who was on the line. It was rude, and I hated doing it, but it weaned Robby of calling. When he fell upon the answering machine time after time, he stopped calling. But I was never able to dispense with it, because he would randomly call from time to time, hoping I had let my defenses down.

  I paid for that hotel room for a year, rarely seeing Robby. Then one day he was at the hospital. He had the reception desk page me. He had never done that before. When I went down to the reception area, he confronted me in an angry manner. “I want to go to California,” he said. “I have friends there I can stay with, in Los Angeles. I hate the weather here. I want an airline ticket.”

  I knew what he would do with an airline ticket. “I’ll get you a ticket, but it will be one-way and unchangeable and nonre-deemable,” I told him. “You pick the date and it will be done.” He turned and rushed out.

  The next day he was back. He paged me again, and when I came down he angrily said, “I want to go to L.A. by train.” This was a ruse to get some kind of ticket that could be exchanged for money. “Same deal,” I said to him. “I’ll get it, but it will be for a specific day and you won’t be able to change it or exchange it.” As before, he turned and disappeared.

  That was the last of him. The hotel said he had left when I went to pay at the end of the month. I didn’t worry about him. His nuisance value was so high that his absence only created a great feeling of relief.

  It had been almost a year since he fled in high dudgeon. I told Illy about my dealings with Robby and he laughed.

  He said, “He’ll be back, I can promise you that.” Then he said, “I should have come back to you.”

  I said, “I don’t know if that would have worked out, Illy.”

  He said, “You were really in love with Rex Ames, weren’t you?”

  I was feeling very uneasy carrying on this conversation within earshot of the passing nurses, but I didn’t let go of his hand. I nodded.

  “I’ve thought about you many times, Harry. You probably didn’t know it, because you didn’t sleep around that much, but you were a great little piece of ass. For my money, you had the best little make-believe pussy in New York.”

  I laughed and let go of his hand. He laughed, too. “Coming from you that’s a real compliment,” I said, and reached down and patted him on his lank, limp penis.

  I didn’t care if a nurse saw me or not. Illy had been a very sexual being. It had been his life. I knew it made him feel good to still be considered that same sexy person.

  I put my hand on his cheek and told him I’d be back before I left the hospital. When I dropped by at the end of the day, he was sleeping and I didn’t disturb him.

&n
bsp; Whatever Happened to Belle-Mère and Levoy Ping?

  I never was really out of touch with my mother and Levoy. I had gone over to see their apartment on Twenty-second Street that they shared with Afro Afrodisian. It was large and bare and I noticed that they each had their separate bedrooms. That is, Belle-Mère and Levoy each had their bedrooms, and Afro slept on a folding couch in the living room.

  Belle-Mère and Levoy had started studying with a new teacher in the village, Robert Joffrey. They were crazy about him. They believed he was going to be very important in American dance.

  Evidently Robert Joffrey also liked them. He was using Levoy in the little company he had pulled together to do concerts. It looked like a station-wagon tour was in the offing.

  My mother was helping in the office and also with the children’s classes. Because there wasn’t any other ballet school in the Village, they were doing very well with children. In fact, it was supporting the school.

  I went there to see her and she proudly introduced me to Robert Joffrey, a short, dark, and stocky man. He had danced with the Roland Petit company when it was on tour in the United States from France. Perhaps he was in the productions Belle-Mère and I had seen when Zizi Jeanmaire did Carmen. Belle-Mère, introduced me proudly to her boss and told him I was in the Metropolitan Opera Company and that the New York City Ballet had put out feelers in my direction.

  “Feelers how?” he asked politely.

  “Lincoln Kirstein sent me a note after he saw me dance in Faust” I told him.

  “That could mean any number of things,” he said. “But it’s good. It’s good. It means you’re getting noticed. I’d like to see you in class here sometime.” I told him someday I certainly would do that. But I never did.

  At about the time my second season got underway at the Met, my mother surprised me. She called and wanted to have lunch, something we never did. Neither of us could think of a good place to meet, so we wound up eating at the Pam-Pam’s on Sheridan Square in the Village.