Monkey Suits

by Jim Provenzano

“Well, it’s the same money without the hassle. He definitely likes it better than catering.”

  “He always had a bug up his butt about it. I wondered when he was gonna crack.”

  “It’s not that. He just, I don’t know, awoke all of a sudden.”

  “Came out of his shell?”

  “Have you seen him? He’s got the sharpest haircut.”

  “The whole new clone look.’

  “Well, he hasn’t gotten his nose pierced yet.”

  “But he’s hung up his tux?”

  “Actually, he – he threw it out. He borrowed my old one for a demonstration recently. Did you hear about it?” Marcos shook his head. “This time they went to a dinner at the Ritz and yelled at Cardinal O’Connor.”

  “Moving up in the world.”

  “He even got arrested.” Ed grinned with fatherly pride as Marcos dropped his jaw in mock amazement. Ed didn’t tell Marcos that he’d spent a few evenings with Lee and Kevin Rook going over the floor plans of New York’s most familiar museums and ballrooms.

  “Well, I’m glad somebody’s doing all that. I mean, I’m happy to help out, but they can do all that screaming without me.” Marcos crushed his cigarette into the cool dirt beneath the neatly clipped grass. “I mean, I understand his rage, I suppose. Did you go to Philipe’s memorial last week?”

  “No. You?”

  “No.” Marcos looked away, then turned back, a slight grin on his face. “I hear the food was excellent.”

  They both shrugged out an attempt of a chuckle. A warm breeze passed, shushing through the tree limbs.

  “So, what about the creature?” Marcos asked. “Has he written or called?”

  “Just a post card. From Sitges this time. He’s ...” Ed bent over.

  Marcos first thought Ed might be sobbing, until he threw his head back in a hoot of laughter.

  “He’s a featured gogo dancer at a nightclub,” Ed gasped. “Room, board and pay for the whole summer. And he’s already posed nude for some horsehung Italian photographer who’s bringing him to Milan for a fall fashion job.”

  Several other lounging waiters stared as Ed and Marcos literally rolled over on the lawn.

  “Well, we’ll look forward to seeing him in Vogue and Mandate, won’t we? That whore. You know, I coulda told you it would happen sooner or later.” Marcos lay back, his eyes lazily enjoying the canopy of tree branches.

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t have listened. No one listens to anyone else.” Ed grinned wistfully.

  “At least you can start seeing other guys,” Marcos flirted.

  Ed shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Come on, you are one of the most wanted A-gays on the scene.” Marcos sat up. “Girl, you could snag anyone of these queens. They’re all a bunch of bottoms just waiting. One push, and it’s helium heels.”

  “I dunno,” Ed blushed. “I don’t think like that.”

  “Oh, get on with your life. Just pick one out. You’ll be making out on the bus home!”

  The two laughed loudly as Billy Heath approached to sign them up for the “La Bamba” pool.

  The bride rode down from a rolling hillside in a horse-drawn carriage to welcome three hundred of her dearest relatives and friends. Adjoining the main dining tent, a canopied walkway wrapped in imported Italian grapevines and Virginia lilies covered the pathway to the outdoor altar. After witnessing the wedding in the smaller green tent, the guests left the area and its ornate shrubbery surroundings, which were trucked in from a Connecticut nursery.

  The largest tent in the back yard was lined to the ceiling in a trail of four thousand cream and pink roses that had taken three days to assemble and decorate. Each of thirty tables, adorned in matching cream and pink tablecloths and napkins, featured a full centerpiece of five dozen equally perfect cream and pink blossoms. Their sweet perfume crowded the tent like the toilet water of a hundred debutantes. The wooden tile dance floor lay waiting to be trod upon. The fifteen-piece dance band played a jazzy version of “Here Comes The Bride,” while the DJ, hired to play a select list of favorites chosen by the newlyweds between the band’s breaks, shuffled through his stack of records.

  Dinner included Dijon chicken, potage en croix and the ubiquitous French vegetables with baby carrots. The wedding cake, delicately shipped in a separate van, sat waiting in the third tent which housed the kitchen. The tiered cake was six feet tall.

  Just another simple wedding in Alpine, New Jersey.

  “I heard things slow down in the summer,” Carl, a new waiter, murmured to Marcos. They stood guard by their table as guests circulated in after-dinner chat.

  “Slow down?” Marcos mocked. “Kid, you are not in the loop. I am booked through July for parties.”

  “Where?”

  “The Hamptons. The Pines. Montauk. I’ll be workin’ on my tan between meals.”

  “Well, jeez, which company?”

  “A private booker.”

  “Can you give me his name?”

  “Well,” Marcos hesitated. “If you’re nice ... and if you switch tables with me so I don’t have to serve those brats who think this is a Denny’s.”

  Carl nodded agreement. Marcos continued. “Then I’ll take your name and give it to my booker as highly recommended.”

  “Oh, that’d be great,” Carl grinned.

  “Then maybe, just maybe you can avoid a summer of desperate living.”

  “You’re wonderful.”

  “I know I am.”

  By the time dessert was served, coffee poured, and the remains of the wedding cake returned to the kitchen, the band began to pack up. The DJ had played a good number of dance tunes. Even the most rotund uncle had been coaxed to the dance floor. Marcos won thirty-two dollars in the “La Bamba” pool, having guessed the correct time it would be played, at exactly ten-fifty-eight.

  In a warm mood between pop songs, the DJ put on Frank Sinatra’s “The Summer Wind.” Already the more experienced waiters had wandered off to the dark recesses of the woods to smoke, chat, drink a bit of pilfered champagne, or make out.

  Half an acre beyond the neatly trimmed estate hedges and the tents, Ed lay on the cool grass with Geoffrey, a new waiter, hired late in the season. It was his first party.

  “Just think,” Geoffrey said with amazement while they gazed up at the moon in the darkening night sky. “All the food we sent out here, all of us packed into buses to entertain them. It’s quite absurd when you think about it, to say nothing of the cost of the flowers. The band, the horses, I mean–”

  “Do me a favor?” Ed lifted the young man’s head off his lap. They both stood, wiping dew from their suits. Despite his naivete, he looked a lot like Brian, a resemblance that Ed was desperately trying to ignore.

  “What?”

  “Say nothing.” Ed pressed his right hand against his partner’s back, took his left palm in Geoffrey’s right.

  People strolled and chatted along the outskirts of the glowing tent as it hummed with chatter, music, and the soft clattering of dishes. Any spirit or bird passing overhead might have mistaken the gathering for a small circus.

  Swaying under the moonlight on the grassy plain, Ed glanced over to a few straight couples dancing at the far end of the field. The women’s gowns glowed like dim lampshades. Soft giggles were heard as they kicked off their heels in the near purple light, their partners in black nearly invisible.

  Ed allowed himself this moment of soft joy, this brief indiscretion. He’d never once misbehaved at a party, and this night he somehow felt completely justified. Swaying lightly with the young man whose last name he had yet to learn, he looked into the eyes and soul that seemed only slightly jaded and still full of possibilities.

  No one noticed the two hugging closely. They were nearly invisible in the moonlight, except to the most discerning eye not blurred by drink, and unaccustomed to the sight of men dancing hand in hand.

  40 Black bomber jackets rustling as their elbows brushed, Lee walked with Cal, holding hands along Astor Plac
e, trying to match his loping strides. He didn’t do handholding walk very well, having never practiced with a man.

  Despite the warm night, they wore their jackets. Traces of sweat soaked through their Gran Fury T-shirts, but Lee felt immensely comfortable in his clothes, his hair freshly shorn, and his cautious sprout of a goatee still smelling lightly of a certain region of Cal’s body.

  With their lives so connected, it seemed inevitable that Lee would ask Cal to move in with him. Ed’s invitation had been politely declined. The money they saved gave them more time to do what mattered, but didn’t pay in dollars.

  The undefined relationship they agreed upon allowed the occasional sexual adventure, so long as it was described afterward to the other in graphic detail. Dating other guys was out, if not superfluous. When asked out by a cute guy who said he liked going to museums, Lee couldn’t help but laugh out loud, “You mean, like going in through the front door and paying?”

  Their status as a cute non-monogamous couple led to more than enough flirtations among his new activist pals, and expanded their sexual horizons to deeper friendships, and new positions. Nightclubs, jail cells, and even a flatbed truck in the enclosed loading dock of the immense Port Authority Building, where the new ACT UP office had moved, proved amusing locales for amorously testing the latest variations of safe sex.

  Cal had just made ten copies of his Trump Tower demo video to give out to DIVA TV, the archives and a few out of towners who were going to show them at gay and lesbian film festivals in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. That week, they had two affinity group meetings, a poster party using Cal’s graphics to promote a club fundraiser, and a bus trip to the CDC in Atlanta to plan.

  Late for another Monday meeting, which had grown so large they’d been moved from the Community Center to Cooper Union, the two hurried with eager excitement through Astor Place.

  They didn’t have time for bullshit.

  At first, they almost didn’t hear the muttered, “Faggots,” from the kid who shoved by them.

  “What did you say?”

  “Cal,” Lee pulled him back. “We don’t need to–”

  “Yes. We do.” Cal blared out, “What did you say?”

  The kid wheeled around, confused.

  Cal’s jaw clenched as he stood beside Lee, arms down, hands curling into fists.

  Lee instinctively pulled his glasses off, shoving them in the pocket of his bomber jacket. He felt briefly defenseless, then remembered that he was wearing steel-toed Doc Martin boots, and that he and Cal had taken up kickboxing.

  The kid backed away. “Hey, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mean it. I don’t want any trouble.”

  Cal smirked, “Then keep your mouth shut.”

  Unmoving, they stood their ground. As the guy skulked off, they broke into giggles.

  “That was ... interesting.”

  Cal patted Lee’s back. “Refreshing. Definitely refreshing. Hey, we’re late.”

  “Oh, please. There’ll be an hour of announcements before we get anything done.”

  “Freedom is an endless meeting.”

  They trotted around Cooper Union and down the stairs to join their new tribe.

  Jim Provenzano is the author of the novels PINS, Monkey Suits and Cyclizen, the stage adaptation of PINS, as well as numerous published short stories and hundreds of freelance articles. The curator of Sporting Life, the world’s first gay athletics exhibit, he also wrote the syndicated Sports Complex column for ten years. An editor with the Bay Area Reporter, he lives in San Francisco. www.myrmidude.org