The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  With Rex it was a completely different experience. Rex didn’t have that kind of godlike body. To tell you the truth, for all the times it was in my mouth and in my body, I never really got a really good look at Rex’s penis. Once it was erect, he didn’t like having it out of something. I remember seeing it in a mirror once, in candlelight, and noticing that it had a distinct swerve to the left aroused as well as limp.

  Rex was all about domination. Our sex really never varied from the beginning to the end. It didn’t shift, because our relationship never shifted. Rex kissed; he liked to kiss. I think the real Rex was only present from the time he started kissing you to the time he stopped fucking you. The rest was all facade, barriers, self-defense, and manipulation. Rex saw the world as a place to be used, like Genghis Khan storming across the steppes. But once he was on top of you kissing you, his marauder personality was focused on you and his defenses were down. Does that make any sense?

  Rex was a man who took a long time to come, and somewhere in that self-centeredness was the feeling that his partner deserved a good fucking, so he shouldn’t come too soon. When you got fucked by Rex Ames, you stayed fucked for a while. His concentration on getting to his orgasm was complete. He wore a gold cross on a chain around his neck, and frequently, while he surged on top of me, the cross would hit me repeatedly in the face and I would slip it over his head to get it out of the way.

  Rex didn’t have to have the lights on. He wasn’t stimulated by what he was looking at, only by what he was feeling. Occasionally, he would get very casual and want to make love with my head hanging off the head of the bed while he watched the television. It was so modern, I couldn’t really say anything. I didn’t feel neglected. It was a kind of double jolt of pleasure for him.

  Once, when we made love in daylight, he supported himself off my body at the full length of his arms so he could see his own penis going in and out of my body. He looked down at himself the length of both our bodies, while I put my arms behind my head so as to give him an unobstructed view. We were both very relaxed, lovers of much experience by that time, so his enjoying seeing his own body invading and dominating mine amused me. What Rex enjoyed looking at while making love was himself, not me. Yet he never masturbated, couldn’t masturbate. He was brought up a Catholic-that strange contradiction Italian men have to deal with. On the one hand, all the sexual sins one is forbidden, and on the other hand, the ancient dictum, probably from Roman times, that you’re less than a man if you don’t fuck everything you possibly can. That includes other men. Italians don’t like to talk about homosexuality because, of course, it isn’t acceptable. But in the world of unspoken things, it’s quite acceptable, because it feels good.

  Rex was like that. He made love to women when it was available, but only readily available. He made love to men because it was readily available, he loved all the attention, the pursuit, and even the money. Orgasms were falling into his lap, so to speak, right and left. Some people were even willing to pay for it. A handsome little guy from Baltimore wasn’t going to say no to that.

  But my feelings for Rex were completely different from those I had for Illy. With Illy, I was visiting the shrine of the gods. With Rex, the gods were visiting me. There was a kind of all-consuming dedication to the act of sex on Rex’s part that was thrilling. I honestly believe I had something to do with it. I wasn’t just another body lying there under him. After intercourse with Illy my body felt fulfilled. After intercourse with Rex, my whole self felt as though I had accomplished something I was meant to do. Very different. It was because of those feelings for Rex that I decided to throw my lot in with him. Which was a silly decision. One shouldn’t make decisions about sex. One should just let it happen and hope you don’t get too seriously shipwrecked on the rocky shores you’ll inevitably be flung against.

  Getting Rid of Illy

  I can really be a bitch. You know, I don’t really blame myself. Minda Meryl said to me once, “Your problem is that you don’t feel guilty enough.” Perhaps that’s true. But I do tell myself I was young.

  More and more as I slept with Rex, I didn’t feel like sleeping with Illy. It was carnal and fun, but as far as I was learning to define love, I was in love with Rex. I think, actually, I always knew what being in love was. It was when you not only wanted to sleep with someone, but when you had to sleep with someone. I had to sleep with Rex. Not that Rex had to sleep with me. I have no idea how many other people he was sleeping with regularly. I say “people” advisedly. He would often tell me he had slept with someone’s secretary after he had been for an audition for a television soap opera, or something like that. Rex was determined to rise above being a dancer to being an actor. He also had a good singing voice and was taking singing lessons. I always thought he could make it. I’m not sure why he never did.

  At any rate, Minda and I were talking about love one Sunday afternoon in her kitchen. Josh was watching a football game. Finishing the dishes, she turned and said, “It’s so tiring always having to pretend you’re not totally in love with someone so as to not lose their interest.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. I knew pretty well what she meant.

  “I can’t ever let Josh know that I’m absolutely nuts about him, or he’d start having that ‘Well, that’s done’ feeling and start looking elsewhere. It’s not deliberate. It’s genetic in men. You know, scalps, notches in their belt. That kind of thing.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s your female side,” Minda said. We had advanced enough in our friendship that I had told her I was having a kind of romance with both Illy and Rex. She had said, after looking them over, “I see, the two best ones.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I’ve never had anyone tell me that they were very much in love with me and wanted to stay with me forever.”

  “Mark my word. When they do, you’ll immediately feel that little slackening of interest. You have to be smart to realize that it’s just automatic. Of course, if you think very well of yourself, you may just admire them more for their good taste. It’s when you think poorly of yourself that you can’t help but feel sorry for anyone so stupid and with such poor judgment that they would fall in love with you. Know what I mean?”

  Minda had wiped her hands on a dish towel and was sitting down on the other side of the kitchen table. I would ordinarily have wiped the dishes, but she had put them in the dish drainer to dry.

  “Which are you?” I said.

  “Oh, definitely someone who admires anyone who falls in love with me. What good taste they have to love wonderful me!” She laughed, but she meant it. She was great that way.

  “I love you,” I said.

  She said, “I know you do, and that’s why I admire you. So smart. And so good-looking. If I was a boy I would want to look just like you.”

  “You do look like me a little,” I said.

  “When I bleach my hair blond I do,” Minda said. “I guess that’s why I spoke to you that day when we were both wearing white wigs. I guess I thought that I could look like you. In that role, I should look like you. You are sort of the perfect Octavian. If only you were a mezzo-soprano.”

  “I’d have to get fixed,” I said.

  “And that would be a pity. For Illy and Rex.”

  I let the subject drop. I was willing to discuss Illy and Rex with Minda, but not the details of my sex life with them. She, on the other hand, would have loved to discuss the details. She said she was hoping to get ideas for things she could do with Josh. I don’t think anyone needed to give Minda ideas on what to do. I’m sure she was a great innovator when it came to doing the big thing. “Bumping uglies,” she usually called it. She asked me once exactly what men did in bed together. I told her that they take all their clothes off and lie down and then improvise. She laughed a lot. I was not going to go into detail.

  But that was the conversation that prompted me to think about what I should do about Illy and Rex. Illy usually spent Thursday nights with me,
whether we had a show or not. Weekends he wasn’t always available because of that roommate who was more than a roommate. Sundays were always completely out, so that told me something.

  So whether we had a performance or not, Illy usually spent Thursday night at my apartment. I asked him if “the roommate” was suspicious that he was having an affair. It was obvious that he did not think that what we were doing constituted an “affair.” He said, “We sort of have agreed that Thursday night is my night to myself. That’s the night the store is open late, so he doesn’t get home until late anyway.”

  And is too tired to fuck, I added in my mind.

  “So he probably thinks you’re just out catting around on Thursday nights. Hanging around at Mary’s or the Cherry Lane.”

  “Probably.” This was clearly a subject Illy didn’t want to pursue while the zipper on his fly was going down and my hand was pulling him out of his Jockey shorts, in the back of a cab. He loved that kind of stuff.

  The next Thursday night I told Illy I loved him very much. He said, “Well, I want to thank you.” We screwed our brains out.

  The next day I wrote him a love letter. Something I had never done. He looked at me weirdly the following Tuesday at rehearsal. “I got your letter.”

  “Did you like it?” I said.

  “Yeah. Sure. I’m not quite sure why you wrote, since we see each other every day, but yeah. Sure. It was nice.”

  So I wrote him another one that he would have Friday, after our usual Thursday-night bout. Not to say I wasn’t enjoying those Thursday nights. But I was beginning to feel like you do when you pat your stomach with one hand and make a circle over your head with the other. I couldn’t really concentrate on either one of these guys. Sleeping with both of them was getting to be a kind of juggling trick. Something had to be done, and I thought I knew what it was.

  Illy didn’t mention the second letter. That week, Wednesday night, he was working in Salomé. Zachary Solov had choreographed a kind of dance thing around Salomé where she threw torches and the dancers caught them. I wasn’t in that, so I went up to the theater and waited for Illy after the show. He was surprised to see me when he came out. It was cold and I was kind of shuffling about, trying to look a little miserable. It wasn’t too hard.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “I wanted to see you. I thought maybe you could come down and stay tonight.”

  “Tomorrow night. I’m going to come down tomorrow night.”

  “Could we have a cup of coffee before you go home?”

  He looked at his watch. “Stan will be expecting me,” he said. “But okay. Let’s go. Bickford’s, right?” So we went to dreary Bick-ford’s and I really had nothing to say. Nor did Illy. Fifteen minutes later, he was ready to go.

  “It would be nice if we could be going home together,” I said.

  He just looked at me, tapped me on the ass, said, “See you tomorrow,” and bolted across the street. Our subways went in opposite directions. I went down the stairs to mine. Seventh Avenue downtown to Eighteenth Street. I felt rather lighthearted.

  Rex and I often made rendezvous on the weekends. He wasn’t available in the evenings very often. I learned if we both had the evening off he would sometimes go to the theater with me if I got tickets. Never a dance concert. He really didn’t have a very high opinion of dance. But theater he wanted to see, particularly if there was a famous actor he could watch.

  We went to see Tiger at the Gates. It was still running from the season before. Diane Cilento as Helen of Troy was great. She played the role as Marilyn Monroe. She had one wonderful line. When Cassandra pleads with her and says, “Helen, have pity upon us,” she replies, “Why have pity on you? I have no pity upon myself.”

  Rex had liked Julie Harris in The Lark better, the Joan of Arc story. I tend to not like anything that has to do with Jesus. But Rex liked it because it was a star turn and all very serious and haunting and desperate and all that.

  Looking back, Illy had the better sense of humor. His crack about “maybe Christ was German” could never have come from Rex. Rex had been brought up a Catholic. They never make jokes about God. In case God doesn’t like it.

  Sometimes after the theater we would go back to Rex’s if his mother wasn’t there and let things fly. He had recently moved to a semi-basement on Twentieth Street. A strange kind of curving metal staircase went down to the door in front of a great panel of mullioned windows. It must have been a shop at one time. He had his bed in that room, back far enough that you couldn’t see it easily from the street. One night after the theater, as soon as we descended the staircase and got in the door, I pulled him to the floor, tore his pants open, and gave him a blow job. Still in our overcoats. I just couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Whew, what was that all about?” he said as he staggered around trying to find a light switch and decide whether we should button our clothes up or take them off altogether. Both Illy and Rex were alike in that they rarely were in the mood to initiate sex; but once it was initiated, they were always interested. Probably because so many people wanted to initiate sex with them. They never had to make the first move.

  My next step was to put a love note in Illy’s shoe in the dressing room. I didn’t sign it. But I knew some inquisitive shit would find it. Robby Schmidt, of course. After La Gioconda, he was running around the dressing room when we were getting ready to leave. He’d put the note back, of course, but then he was telling Clifford Fearing in a loud whisper that he’d found a love note in Illy’s shoe, which he had started to put on by mistake. Naturally. You could count on Robby to do the wrong thing and then talk about it.

  Clifford shouted across the dressing room just as Illy was pulling the note out of his shoe, “Hey, Ilquist, who you fucking here in the dressing room? It sure isn’t me. Except once.”

  Illy was not quick on repartee. He didn’t say anything, just shoved the note in his pocket. As we left the theater together he said under his breath going out the door, “Don’t ever do that again!” He was really pissed off. He just walked away from me. It was Thursday night, and he was definitely going off to spend it with somebody else.

  I was reading Remembrance of Things Past right then, so I went home and read some more of the volume The Captive. I was really into Albertine, and just figuring out that no Victorian girl was going to be sharing an apartment with an older man and that Albertine had to be a late-Victorian boy. Smart, huh? Just about forty years after everybody else had figured out the same thing.

  Albertine was a kind of role model for me. Liberated, young, inexplicable. I guess I fancied myself a bit mysterious and liked the idea of doing things that confused people about my motivations. I was into the French writers then and had just read Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures and The Counterfeiters. Plus Camus. Existential. That was me, insofar as I had any philosophy. “Selfishial” might have been more like it.

  I knew I had to make one more move, so I went over to Illy’s the next Sunday. No rehearsals for a dance concert, and I told Minda I was busy. She knew I was up to something, but I’m not a confider. This business of having to confide everything to your best girlfriend, who then runs off with your boyfriend, seems very female to me. And very gay. Keep your own counsel is my motto. So when the shit hits the fan you only need to look like an ass to yourself.

  So I showed up there about noon. I rang the bell downstairs and Stan answered the intercom. “This is Harry. Is Illy there? Can he come downstairs?” Intercom cuts off. Illy comes on. Disbelief.

  “Harry?”

  “Yes. I came over to see if you could have brunch.” His voice squawked and garbled through the box the way voices on intercoms do.

  “I’ll be down. Don’t come up.”

  I stood around in the little foyer. You know how dreary those buildings are. The floor with those little black-and-white tiles. Some of them missing, filled in with cement, not very neatly. Those crumbly brown walls, the color of a cardboard box, the white plaster un
derneath bubbling through here and there. No graffiti, but random marks where the edge of somebody’s mattress has grazed the wall going in or out. The mailboxes looking like somebody has screwdrivered every one of them open at some point in their lives.

  Illy opened the door. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He was not planning to go out. I threw my arms around his neck and tried to kiss him. Illy hated kissing. Kissing in the lobby of his own building scared the shit out of him. It was 1958, you know.

  “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.” Illy wasn’t even registering that it was me. He pulled my arms away from his neck. “Harry, get out of here.”

  “I want to talk.”

  “What about?”

  “About us.”

  “Harry, just get out of here. Leave me alone.” And he pushed me out of the door, slammed it, and ran up the stairs. He didn’t even take the elevator, grimy and battered, at the back of the hall.

  I didn’t ring the intercom again. I thought about it, but decided I’d done enough.

  Of course, any gay guy reading this is going to be saying, “Is he crazy or something? He has two great lovers and he decides to get rid of one?” Of course, little did I know where all this was leading, but I still thought I was doing the right thing. I’m not going to go so far as to say I did the right thing.