Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  He lay as if lifeless with the snow quickly covering his face and hair. A few persons began stopping and looking down at him. Soon others began to gather.

  A policeman got out of a squad car and hurried over to where he lay. When he saw the policeman, Hayes rose on one elbow, and made every effort to get up.

  The cop kept asking him if he was going to be all right, or if he thought he should go to the emergency room of a hospital.

  Hayes managed somehow to get on his feet, and, shaking off the accumulation of snow, assured the policeman and the onlookers that he was all right. But his eye fell on someone in the crowd the sight of whom almost caused him to fall to the pavement again. There, watching him with a kind of lunatic fear, was Clark.

  Hayes moved quickly away from the last of the onlookers and sat down on one of the benches thick with snow. He was as a matter of fact not certain Clark had really been there staring at him. He decided that he had sustained a slight concussion and it had made him imagine Clark’s presence. He held his face in his hands, and felt the wet snow descending on his mouth and throat.

  Presently he was aware someone was standing close over him. He removed his hands from his face. It was Clark, no mistake.

  All at once a great anger took over, and he rose and cried: “Well, what’s your excuse?”

  When Clark did not respond, he moved close to him, and taking a swipe with his right hand he hit the boy a fierce blow knocking him to the pavement.

  Standing over him, Hayes muttered again, What’s your excuse?

  THEN HE MUST HAVE BLACKED OUT, for when he came to himself he was again seated on the wet snow-covered bench, and Clark was standing over him, saying, “Can I sit beside you, Hayes?”

  “What ever for?”

  “Please.”

  “Well,” Hayes snarled, “to quote the way you talk, suit yourself.”

  Clark sat down beside him, but Hayes moved vengefully away from him.

  “The reason I left, Hayes,” the boy began, “the reason has nothing to do with you, understand. It’s only what’s missing in me … I wanted to stay—stay forever,” he gulped and could not go on.

  But Hayes’s anger was only getting more intense.

  “That’s a lot of bull, if I ever heard any,” the older man roared. “You missionary people are all alike, aren’t you. All nuts. You should all be locked up from meddling with the rest of the human race.”

  “I’m not a missionary person, as you call it. I never was, Hayes. They took me in, true, but I couldn’t believe in what they believed. I couldn’t believe in their kind of love, that is.”

  “Love,” Hayes spat out. “Look at me when you say that. See what it did to me …”

  Hayes stopped all at once. He could see that Clark’s own mouth and jaw were bleeding, evidently from Hayes’s blow.

  “I have done lots of soul-searching,” the boy was going on as if talking to himself. “But the reason, Hayes, I left, you ain’t heard, and maybe you won’t believe me. See,” he almost shouted, “I left because I felt such great happiness with you was … well, more than I could bear. I thought my heart would break.

  And I feared it couldn’t last. That something would spoil it. When I first left you I thought I’d come back at once, of course, once I got myself together. But a kind of paralysis took over. The night with you was the happiest of my life. And you were the best thing ever. I couldn’t take such happiness after the life I have led. I couldn’t believe it was real for me.”

  “Bull, bull,” Hayes cried. He rose, the anger flashing out of his eyes, but as he moved toward the street where he lived he fell headlong and hurt himself on the paving stones. He was too weak to rise, too weak also to resist Clark picking him up.

  “Hayes, listen to me … you’ve got to let me help you home.”

  Hayes swore under his breath. Then, as if remembering Clark had been a missionary, he used all the foul language and curses he could recall from his army days.

  Impervious to all the insults and abuse, Clark helped him home, holding him under his arms. Hayes tried a last time to shake him off at the front entrance, but Clark insisted on coming up to his apartment with him.

  Hayes fell almost unconscious on his bed.

  “If you could only believe me,” Clark kept saying. He began taking off Hayes’s wet clothing. Then he went into the kitchen and heated some water, and put it in a basin he found under the sink.

  He began wiping Hayes’s face of dirt and blood and snow. When he had finished these ablutions he took off Hayes’s shoes and socks. He drew back for a moment at the sight of his naked feet, for they looked as if they had been run over, and at his touch the toes streamed with blood. He wiped them gently, bathing them again and again though Hayes winced and even cried out from the discomfort.

  All at once Hayes raised up for he felt Clark kissing his feet.

  “No, no,” Hayes cried. “Don’t humiliate me all over again.”

  “Let me stay,” Clark begged him. “Hayes, let me stay with you.”

  “No,” Hayes growled. “I don’t want you.”

  Hayes could feel the boy’s lips on his bare feet.

  “You need someone,” Clark beseeched him.

  “Not you, not you.”

  Clark covered his friend’s feet, and came up to the bed and lay down beside him. He refused to budge from this position, and then slowly without further remonstrance from Hayes he put his head over Hayes’s heart, and kissed him softly.

  At these kisses, Hayes began weeping violently. Almost like an athlete who has been told he must give up his place to another younger, more promising candidate, he yielded then any attempt to dispute Clark’s claim.

  Clark removed all of his own clothing now, and held Hayes to him in an almost punishing embrace. Still weeping, indeed almost more violently, Hayes nonetheless began to return Clark’s kisses.

  Then slowly began a repetition of their first evening of lovemaking, with perhaps even more ardor, and this time Hayes’s cries could be heard beyond their own room, perhaps clear to the river and the boats.

  “And tomorrow, I suppose, when I wake up, you’ll have cleared out again,” Hayes said, running his fingers through the boy’s hair.

  “No, Hayes,” Clark said with a bitter contriteness. “I think you know now wild horses couldn’t drag me from your side. Even if you was to tell me to leave you, I’d stay this time.”

  “And do you swear to it on that stack of tracts you used to peddle?” Hayes asked him.

  “I’ll swear to it on my own love of you,” the boy confessed… . “Cross my heart, Hayes, cross my heart.”

  SOLIDARITY

  Albert Innaurato

  EARLY IN THE AIDS EPIDEMIC, my friend and I decided to march in the Gay Parade. We wanted to take some kind of stand and show our solidarity. He had been christened La Golgotha, and I, Sandy, by our mutual friend Leatherette, a giver of names if there had ever been one in Western history. We’d often talk about this issue of solidarity—among gay men, fat people, opera queens. Was solidarity possible for us? Was it possible for anyone?

  AIDS had begun to haunt us, although rather theoretically. We didn’t know anyone who had the disease, but we understood the symbolic value of AIDS in a country become rabidly right wing. The arch bigot, Patrick Buchanan, had been vomiting forth the most vicious calumnies about homosexuals in the New York Post and elsewhere, using AIDS and his much vaunted Catholicism as his excuse. La Golgotha and I were both ex-Catholics. La Golgotha was Irish-American as was Buchanan, and loathed what he stood for. I am Italian-American but am a renegade from the simpleminded idiocy blasphemers such as Buchanan insist on calling Catholicism or Christianity.

  We were both fat and in our mid-thirties. Neither of us had sneakers or jeans, helpful one would think for the long march. La Golgotha summed up our opinions about fashion neatly: “There are certain kinds of clothes fat people oughtn’t to wear.”

  Both of us tended to affect shapeless, seasonless pants
, usually wrinkled and sometimes linty. Comment in our circle was that La Golgotha was color blind rather than flamboyant, for he was given to multi-hued checks and stripes which rarely matched. Whatever he spent, La Golgotha’s toggery tended to the scrubby. Once, upon seeing La Golgotha in spanking new threads, Leatherette, dowager regnant of our circle of queens, had crowed (it was at the ballet, Moreshita was making a doomed Samurai attempt at the Black Swan with the agonized Ivan Nagy): “Oh, she’s gone cycling out to Sears of Queens once again for a panty raid!”

  Leatherette was fonder of ballet than opera, La Golgotha adored both, I tended to suffer the dance, being too stupid to follow the steps and too cowardly about my French to battle over this or that dancer’s fouettés or jetés. In any case, Leatherette and La Golgotha were the divas of a mafia that specialized in getting themselves and a select corps of fellow gallery girls into cultural events for free.

  “There isn’t a passageway, a back alley, a hidden entrance to any theater, opera house or concert hall that I don’t know about,” Leatherette would claim, “and there isn’t a Security Guard of color I haven’t sucked off in one of them.” Since Leatherette had studied to become a Jesuit, and then gotten his doctorate in Logic, I believed him.

  But I suppose my point about our clothes is, I had discovered Brooks Brothers, and tended to look fleshy but neat. La Golgotha, recently hired after a long stint of unemployment, had economized on clothes for too long to feel comfortable spending money on them, and had a certain naive pride in being an outcast. That one looks somehow distinguished is a reverse narcissism one finds in many lonely, ugly people. Smirks and snubs become one’s badges and scars.

  I had felt much the same myself in the old days, and had also flaunted what was unsuitable, even grotesque about myself. But then I had a brief period of promise on the concert circuit as a pianist and learned that La Golgotha and I had shared a provincial delusion. As my promise evaporated and I had to struggle harder for ever less remunerative engagements, I realized the habit of not fitting in has serious and concrete disadvantages in the real world. It is only desperation and anonymity which allow the fantasy that abasement is transcendence.

  There came the night before the march. I have to admit. I was nervous. There’d been rumors, even promises, of violence. Some from the hate-filled orthodox Catholics, incited by Buchanan. others from the police, furious that there would be a section of marchers calling themselves “gay cops.” According to the New York Times, there was going to be unprecedented mass media coverage of the march. This was the first year AIDS had seemed a major enough story to make the march more than a freak show. There would even be a section of marchers openly admitting to having AIDS.

  I wasn’t able to sleep and forbore taking the heavy dose of Nembutal my shrink of those days was recommending. Instead. I paced; I pondered practicing. I watched television: WTBS had an all night program running all the Flash Gordon serials. I watched out of the comer of my eye as I read for the seventh time Giovanni Battista Meneghini’s memoir about his wife. Maria Callas. Her death, six years before, had signaled the end of a portion of my own life.

  False dawn, then the real thing: I glanced out my barred window at the brilliant sunshine. I patted the piano and went through the ritual of rebuking myself for not practicing. I set about preparing coffee, trying to find a comforting daydream to distract myself during the millennium it would take my Chemex to drip. Nothing came, so I went to the Chinese baker}’ on the comer for donuts.

  It was a beautiful day. I wonder if there have been many like it in New York since. When I used to run away from Philadelphia to the Old Met, a precocious queen of fifteen, it seemed to me the weather was often like this. Autumn might be colder, spring more volatile, but there was, in those days, the same sweet city promise. The sun would be there in a clear blue sky, a friend almost, and what a breeze there would be! A current— complex (smells of coffee, baking, bus exhaust, last night’s perfumes) yet simple in its easy optimism. I remembered that endless promise with a pang. I was surprised that it seemed to spring up in me still, automatically, easily.

  I got just the donuts I wanted and, on the way back, inhaled a fresh jelly donut, praising God for creating sugar and this weather.

  Going into my building, I passed our super. He was holding his two year old, a baby so large its diapers could well have been sold for weapons once the dung dried. The first time I saw the super, I told La Golgotha we were guilty of hubris about our weight. The super would have sunk the Andrea Doria just by sitting down heavily, say on a gilded toilet. It was all he could do to squeeze through my apartment door.

  “What are you doing up so early?” the super declaimed, truly a loss to Wagner. “Oh, that’s right, the fag march! Well, have a nice day.” He had smiled when he said it; but he had also put his mega hands around his infant son’s gigantic ears. Perhaps this was plebeian humor; but I think it was resentment too. At that time he must have regarded all the gay men in the neighborhood as likely to live better and longer than obese married men like him.

  Coffee, Callas, donuts, a shower. Drying my bulk, I surveyed the little garden, bright and fragrant outside my barred windows. I would have preferred staying home, but no, I had promised La Golgotha. We were meeting for breakfast before the march, at La Pincushionova’s coffee shop.

  I rode the subway uptown. It was packed with mostly young gay men going to the march. They got off at Columbus Circle. I stayed on to Lincoln Center. As I stood waiting for the doors to open, a middle-aged woman smiled at me.

  “It’s their day,” she said, “the sickos! And now they’re spreading this disease. It’s God’s punishment on them.”

  I leaned over her: “How do you know that?”

  “Pat Buchanan makes the case. Can’t you read?”

  I climbed the steps to the street slowly. That I hadn’t slept, or taken my Nembutal, weighed on me all of a sudden. There were mists in my head; and when I gained the street, the day had turned muggy. I strode across Broadway and walked to La Pincushionova’s. The place was surprisingly crowded with people breakfasting before the march. Entering, I heard: “Here is Sandy.” My hand was taken, and my interlocutor continued: “Sandy, I have been betrayed, one of my girls (pronounced gurrels) has betrayed me.”

  “It was I, Miss Brodie,” I answered, twisting vowels and trilling consonants, in our version of a Scottish accent.

  “Who do you think it was, Sandy? Can it have been Marrrry MacGrrrregor?”

  “Marrrry’s dead in Spain, Miss Brodie.”

  “You’re so gloomy, Sandy. My gurrels are the creme de la creme. Give me a gurrel at an impressionable age, and I’ll turn her into a boy. Look at the Scottish army. They’re all my gurrels. Who do you think betrayed me, Sandy?”

  “It was I, Miss Brodie!”

  “You’re so self-centered, Sandy. I like that in a man. Pity you aren’t one, like Mussolini. Are you?” My dialogist paused and sighed melodramatically: “Carrumpet?” Then, he reared back in operatic shock and horror, and cried: “Sandy, it was you!”

  La Golgotha and La Pincushionova clapped madly as they always did when Leatherette and I did one of our routines. Leatherette tossed his head, accepting their applause regally, and sipped his bourbon.

  Leatherette and I had met at the Broadway production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I was at Juilliard. He was at Columbia in Logic. I started sneaking into Broadway theaters when there was nothing at the Met. I much preferred opera to concerts and recitals. I would, in fact, have loved being a singer or conductor, but I had no voice, and my classes in conducting were a shambles. So I was stuck with the piano.

  I liked plays, too, and had no shame about sneaking in. For a time I thought I was the only person doing it. Then I started seeing a small man with a tiny line of thin brown hair over his upper lip, invariably carrying a huge leather bag slung over his shoulder. I saw him at various performances, darting for empty seats as the lights went down. And I saw him on matinee days, scurryi
ng around for stubs and used programs, as I did. And I saw him watching, as I watched, for the best moment to use those programs and stubs to go in—usually while the oldest or dimmest-looking ticket taker was at his or her busiest. Every once in a while somebody would get caught, but neither he nor I ever did.

  Finally there came the evening when we went out for coffee.

  “I usually go to the baths, but it’s my time of month and I’m tender there,” he said. With him was a fat young man with an oddly shaped face, who walked his bicycle as he accompanied us, chaining it when we arrived at a dingy hole-in-the-wall. We were greeted by a young woman who sat us in the booth of honor, the only one where there was enough room between the table and the back of the seats for someone with a big stomach to fit comfortably.

  I said to the little man, “Excuse my being a cliche, but it makes me uncomfortable that I don’t know anyone’s name.”

  “Well,” he began, “I’m called Leatherette, and this is La Golgotha of Queens, works at Alexander’s and rides a bicycle. I dub you Sandy, and this is La Pincushionova.” He pointed at the young woman who had admitted us. “She owns the place.”

  “I’m the ugliest genital female alive in America,” Pincushionova said, and it might well have been true. “I don’t mean deformed, I don’t mean scarred or burned, I don’t mean Mongoloid or handicapped, I mean ugly. Simply and impurely ugly. What do you think?”

  “Do you think you’re uglier than any of us?” I asked her.

  “Yes, for genital females are always more harshly judged than nongenital females, let alone males, genital or not. I emphasize female, born with the appropriate genitalia.”

  “I don’t believe you, Pincushionova,” crowed Leatherette. “Have faith, friend.”

  “I had faith, but a bishop I know sucked it out of me when I was thirteen.”

  “Then look and lament!” With that, she stood on the seat, lifted her dress and pulled down her panties. Leatherette and La Golgotha screamed and averted their eyes, shrieking with laughter. The other people in the coffee shop whistled and applauded. Her vagina was shaved, but normal looking, and rather large, though perhaps that was the absence of hair.