Monkey Suits

by Jim Provenzano

  “And just when I wanted to sing along to Madonna’s ‘Oh, my God’s’ that faggot waltzes up to me and says “Darling, why haven’t you called me!’ As if he wasn’t the one who didn’t return my last three phone calls!” Serina, his Black drag friend, shouted into Marcos’ ear. As they talked, she handed out small flyers for Fagriculture, her Monday night parties at the Pyramid. Lee took one and smiled.

  “Really!” Marcos responded, glancing at the boy whom Serina dished, who danced no less than ten feet from them, his backward-turned baseball cap hiding a flattop, while his Read My Lips T-shirt clung to his lean, sweaty frame.

  “So I asked him if he said that to make himself feel better, because that line wasn’t working on me.”

  Marcos turned back to Serina. Her blonde wig glowed under the club lights like radioactive cotton candy. Her simple black plastic mini-dress clung tightly to her thin brown body, revealing a tightly muscled physique. “And what did he say then?”

  Serina waved it off, her nails slashing precariously close to Lee’s nose. “Oh, he just slithered on to some other ditzy queen.” They both scanned the crowd. “So, is it kicking?” she asked. They’d each taken bumps of Gustavo’s supply.

  “Like a rocket, girl,” Marcos giggled.

  “You?” She peered at Lee, checking his eyes for a delirious glaze. Lee nodded silently.

  “Well, I sure as hell don’t love everybody I see, but I’m gonna dance my butt off! Maybe I’ll shove your little amour around on the floor.” She pinched Lee’s butt and whisked off.

  “That girl is Miss Mess, I’ll tell you,” Marcos warned. “Don’t bother with such trash!” Serina’s fingernailed hands fluttered away as they shouted above the booming music.

  “I should go see if I can wrangle a DJ gig out of Miss Dukat.” Marcos introduced a few passing friends, whose names he shouted into Lee’s ear. They chatted away the February blues. Work was in a total slump, but they’d saved a few thousand dollars each, and didn’t plan on working until March.

  “Where’s Calvin Clone?” Marcos asked.

  Lee shrugged. “Went to get us more beers.”

  “I’d check the party stalls if I were you.”

  At a moment when he stood to the side, Lee’s mind racing from the speed-laced drug, his eye caught a stunning black-haired man with sharp features, which for moment he thought was Cal. He had a tight yet not overdeveloped body in blue jeans and a black T-shirt that read Empire State. A small drawing of the phallic building trailed up his T-shirt, pointing through his pectorals. He stared through the other dancers, looking at no one, only briefly making eye contact with Marcos, while arms and heads blurred between he and the man’s face, as clear, striking and sharp as an Apache warrior. His was a face one desires immediately, so handsome as to make one turn away. Lee didn’t, and neither did Marcos, who’d glanced to see what distracted Lee.

  The man looked around, smiled at them both, then turned away. He stood drinking his beer, watching the dancers with a sports fan’s objectivity. He stepped back, placing his empty bottle atop a cluster of others on a cigarette machine. A busboy swiftly passed by, dumping them all into a tub while the man walked away.

  A warm hand around his waist and a cold bottle against his arm interrupted Lee’s stare fest at the man, He turned to face Cal, who handed him a beer.

  “So, what happened to that guy you were talking to?” Cal asked Marcos.

  “The drag queen?”

  “No, the guy dressed as a guy.”

  “Oh, him. Just a friend,” Marcos shrugged.

  “Nothing goin’ on?”

  “Moi? I think not.”

  “Why not?” Lee asked with a sudden curiosity brought on by the drugs.

  “Look, I had boyfriends. The problem with that meal plan is the unwanted dessert. Heartache, girl. Men do not do crying well. Men shudder and break and prove that they are truly the weaker sex. Men fall to pieces and become hollow when they can’t drown in distraction. Tears do not become the male, honey. Tears do not feature.”

  “Well, I guess that’s all there is to that,” Lee said, pulling back into Cal’s arms, hoping not to fall into Marcos’ picture of romantic hell too soon.

  “Not that I’ve given up on fun.”

  “Let’s go up to the roof and dry off,” Cal suggested.

  “No, I’m gonna dance, girls,” Marcos said, turning his attention away from his departing friends and toward the dance floor.

  Marcos watched as the Empire State man moved forward to the edge, his eyes closing as if immersed, stepping through a wet wall of terpsichorean power. His body began to move, tight hips jutting side to side. His wide V-shaped back hunched a bit, then upright and side to side as his arms gestured a rough butch sketch of a rumba.

  As the house mix of “You Used To Love Me” thudded through his ears, Marcos saw this transformation as if witnessing a private sexual act. The man occasionally grinned as he sang along with the lyrics. Marcos’ drug-induced clarity/haze accentuated each word. Ignoring a few who bopped about near him without style, Marcos shifted closer.

  The gorgeous guy, his Empire State logo twisting as the tight shirt contorted to the bulges of his muscles, moved closer to Marcos, but not intentionally. Several men watched him, admiring his carefree gestures, never for a moment out of step, his machismo unforced.

  Marcos moved closer, facing him, trying to remain nonchalant as a space near him opened up, taking a moment to adjust his chain necklace and tuck his T-shirt further in to hide the slight love handles at his hips. The Empire State stud, however, turned in all directions, dancing for no one and everyone.

  A skinny blond with a nearly shaved head and an East Village look edged up and within minutes began dropping his hands down to the stud’s ass, who responded by turning toward the blond, dancing to face him. Marcos watched them grind their hips close for a few minutes, enjoying each other’s heat. But as the music shifted to Erasure, he swiftly patted the blond on the shoulder, eyed him briefly while smiling, then shoved his way off the floor, displayed for all and available to none.

  Marcos’ heart sank. The crowded trail of faces and heads pouring from the stairs enveloped Empire State, who was probably heading toward one of the quieter floors, where he would lean against a wall, drink another beer, and be easily seduced into a night of sex with whoever had the guts to approach his unapproachable beauty.

  Marcos considered pursuing him, but what would he say? I like the way you dance. No. You sweat divinely. Absurd. Minions of jealous ex-lovers follow such handsome bodies, Marcos felt sure. He counted himself lucky to have witnessed such beauty and escaped with his dignity intact. He let the moments soak into the excessive panorama of emotions. He swirled about and kept on dancing. The fates of love and rejection flirted madly with him, swooping about between swaying arms and sweating chests like sirens, tempting him to play the game.

  The skinny punky kid, who’d also been circling the Empire State guy, stepped up to Marcos and shouted in his ear, “Dunt it drive you wild?”

  Marcos smiled and stated loudly, “I remember a day when a man conquered me by appreciating more than the protuberance of my flanks.”

  The kid laughed, then shouted, “I think you got nice flanks.”

  “Why thank you. Shall we?” They danced. Girl had not quit just yet.

  Lee and Cal lay in bed looking up at the ceiling. They’d made out on the club’s rooftop patio, on the way downtown, and even on the empty train home. Finishing in bed seemed almost quaint.

  They’d both come quickly and ferociously, yet the sex and drugs energized them both. They talked of family and growing up. Between shivers and tingling strokes of affection, they’d wolfed down anything found edible in the fridge, and babbled enthusiastically.

  “People always want to know about percentages,” Cal said. “How black am I? How white? They really need to know so they can figure out how to treat me.”

  Lee looked into the warm brown of Cal’s eyes. He was attracted
to his face, his large sexy nose, not because it was black or white or both, but because he was simply handsome. Lee was trying to deal with his prejudice toward extremely hunky men.

  “I don’t get why you have such a grudge with some of those older folks, though,” Lee turned and grazed his fingers over Cal’s chest.

  “Well,” Cal said. “”Remember when I told you I didn’t have any brothers or sisters?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I had a sister, but she died.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. How old was she?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Jeez. Was it an accident?”

  “Drunk driver.”

  “Oh man, that’s awful.”

  “Years before my sister died, she lived in Washington, DC. She was an assistant to a diplomat. A Russian diplomat. I never understood that. I mean, we’re middle class Black and Italian, from friggin’ Boston, and she goes socialist on us and gets a scholarship. Her friends used to call her The Black Russian.”

  Lee laughed, and shifted in bed to lie alongside Cal.

  “I just see her, so young, dying like that, and I get angry. It was snowing that night. My parents called that night and told me she died in a car crash. Tell me when to stop.”

  “No, no, that’s okay,” Lee rubbed some more, soothing him.

  “I just see these people, so old. It makes me mad. The day she died, I was away at school, and my roommate drove me back. I didn’t say a word. Couldn’t think. Just watched the snow. But the moment I saw my parents, total messes, both of them, I knew I had to take charge. I called the hospital, got the morgue stuff and the funeral started. When I walked out of her room, I heard this old woman next door, a shriveled little creature, sitting up in her bed after some operation, saying, ‘It worked! I’m a new woman!’ I wanted to walk into her room and smack her.”

  Cal stopped a moment, looking away.

  “I look for reasons, especially on nights when I go to weddings and the people there are so old you’d swear some of them sleep in the crypt room at the Met. People so old they can’t speak anymore.”

  “I know. You serve them dinner and they don’t even say anything.”

  “The veins on their skin are like road maps. Their relatives just waiting for them to die so they can slice up their inheritance, break their corporations into chunks. But they cling, they hold on. It’s like they’ve got some secret, something that keeps them going. I look at them, heads bobbing over their own dinner plates and think, your life doesn’t matter anymore. I can judge your life’s worth with a copy of the Wall Street Journal.”

  Lee hugged him closer, waiting for Cal’s quiet rage to pass. He thought some more orange juice might ease their post-X anxiety. That or fucking. He kept listening anyway.

  “The only reason people like this live so long is that God hates them so much he keeps postponing the time when he has to deal with them.”

  Cal’s neck had become tense, his words louder. Lee put a finger to his lover’s lips, leaned down and kissed him lightly. Lee popped out a last comment.

  “I guess I don’t need to be polite when speaking of our clients.”

  “You ought to get this hate out. Make a film, do something.”

  “Go scream and yell in the streets?”

  “Well, if that works. Deal with death. You need to find a way to ...” What did he know? Lee thought of the fury he’d heard that had a focus. “You should come to one of these meetings I go to at the Center.”

  “What, the gay center on Twelfth Street?”

  “Lotta hot guys.”

  “Oh, well in that case ... ”

  “Roll over,” Lee ordered, pushing Cal onto his stomach. He took some lotion from the bottle beside the bed and tried, very slowly at first, to press the pain out of Cal’s knotted muscles.

  “It’s not that bad,” Lee, murmured as he began to push and massage. Both of them sprouted erections. Gripping Cal’s shoulders, Lee rubbed his cock along Cal’s butt, then slipped on a rubber. After massaging Cal’s behind and prodding one, then two fingers inside him, he slid inside Cal with a smooth care, slipping in and out, pushing a kiss down to his face, dipping his tongue deep inside, muffling Cal’s moans. Theirs was only heat and touch and skin, for a while.

  Marcos lay alone. Having traded numbers with the punky boy, he had felt satisfied with the possibility of a real date, not just take-out. He’d walked home a few blocks along the West Side Highway in the February chill to see the sunrise over New Jersey. His search for the Empire State guy, and many runner-ups, was lost for the night. But somehow, he managed to get over it. It was a beautiful day, and he didn’t plan on working for weeks.

  “You really ought to be a prep cook. ”

  “A prep cook? But I am ze artiste! ”

  Ed sat at the kitchen table before his glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, giggling as Brian swirled around him in his rendition of Waiter-Skater. Brian set down two perfectly garnished omelets with chunks of hash browns and ketchup artfully squiggled across the china they’d permanently borrowed from a Brooklyn Academy of Music party.

  “Sit down and eat your art.”

  “Awright. You take your meds?”

  “Yes. I took my meds. And don’t remind me, or I’ll get nauseous again.”

  Trish Fuller was seated to her noon lunch with Philipe at Mortimer’s, “just to chat” about her June Benefit. “At the Met. Can you seat two-hundred in the main plaza?”

  “Madame, it is done. Was there anything about the fall event that displeased you? ”

  “Heavens, no. The same folks. That florist from Long Island who did Ida’s party last month. Get him.”

  “Very well. I’ll have some plans made and call your assistant to get things rolling. Now may I recommend ze wine?”

  “For the party?” Trish asked.

  “For lunch, Madame.”

  19 Armed with staple guns, fourteen florists swiftly wrapped tent poles with yards of green vinery trucked in from New Hampshire. The tent, still dark while the miles of tiny white lights were being adjusted, glowed with the last burst of February dusk. Set up for a Metropolitan Opera benefit, the interior of the tent was a fury of last-minute settings, re-settings and adjustments. While dozens of buildings could have been rented, and perhaps even a lobby at Lincoln Center itself used, in the middle of a chilling winter, the party was to be held in Central Park.

  The numerous inconveniences of setting up a four-hundred seat dinner in a park included not only renting extension cords to plug into Tavern on the Green’s power source, and supplying heat from a rumbling generator, but also constructing a level floor to walk on.

  Two days before the affair, the lighting and production company also hired a dozen carpenters to set up foot-high platforms on a three thousand-foot square space. The intricate leveling of applying shims to accommodate the uneven rise and fall of the ground was completed only minutes before the wheeled ladder lifts were rolled in to hang the lights and floral arrangements. Despite their best efforts, a few bumps remained, but were smoothed out by the unrolling of thirty-five hundred square feet of bright green artificial turf.

  Neil Pynchon yelled out for waiters to move tables while he rubbed his hands together. The temperature outside barely approached thirty degrees. Inside, the crew of workers fumbled about with the series of heat ducts attached to a generator. They were still arguing over the most aesthetically pleasing position for the ducts. In the meantime, what little heat did escape into the tent smelled like bus exhaust. Neil yelled more instructions as the waiters grumbled about the cold and the stench. Marcos dutifully obeyed, all the while whistling the theme from the movie Brazil.

  The curled network of wire and tiny bulbs did finally achieve its brilliance, wrapped in over two thousand yards of white Christmas lights. The tables glowed, creamy clusters of silver, glass and china. Sweet-scented rose bouquets mixed with the gaseous odor of motor-generated heat.

  The glamorous array of guests finally showed up
in a fluffy array of furs, which were dutifully checked by a three-woman crew and a security guard at the tent’s entrance.

  Neil stiffly paced toward Marcos, who checked his table for any missing place settings.

  “Mr. Tierra?”

  “Yes, dear?” Marcos turned.

  “You’ll need to get an extra chair for your table.”

  “But I already have ten place settings,” he insisted.

  “I know that.” Neil rolled his eyes. “You need an extra chair for the guest of honor, Stefano di Quercio.”

  “Di Quercio the opera tenor?”

  “Yes, he’s singing here after dinner.”

  “But he’s not eating?”

  “He is eating. He also has a special dinner that you’ll get when we serve the entreé.”

  “But why the extra chair?”

  Neil cleared his throat, then nervously looked to both sides. “He’s very ... large.”

  “Everybody knows that!”

  “A little decorum,” he said, gritting his teeth. “He needs an extra chair. Just put two together and don’t say anything. Understood?”

  Marcos held back a broad smile. “Understood, dear.”

  “Don’t call me dear.”

  “Of course, stud muffin.”

  Neil walked off in a huff.

  Marcos turned to a nearby co-worker, “At least I didn't call him Pines Orgy Pushy Bottom.”

  In the crowded kitchen area, while they waited for the chefs to refill their trays, Marcos snuck up behind Ed and Ritchie. He gave Ed an affectionate butt pinch. He passed on Ritchie, who although gay-tolerant, did not care to have his butt pinched by another man. Marcos had been warned.

  “So, what are you boys up to?”

  “Not much, babe. You?”

  “Can’t complain. There isn’t enough time!” He forced a laugh. “How’s that straight thing of yours hangin’, Messieur Ricard?” Marcos cooed.