Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Back at my apartment, we undressed together. (Since Laurent, I had lost my modesty.) I watched as Craig, like any good first son, carefully folded his shirt and balled his socks before climbing into the makeshift bed I had created for him on my floor. These old habits, taught long ago by his mother, were second nature to him, which I found touching. I looked at him in the bed. He had lost weight, and a spray of fine red pimples covered his back.

  Raped. I can hardly say that word. Besides Craig, the only person I know who was raped was a friend in my dorm in college named Sandra. After it happened, I avoided her for weeks. I imagined, stupidly, that simply because I was male, I’d remind her of what she’d gone through, make her break down, melt, weep. But finally she cornered me one afternoon in the library. “Stop avoiding me,” she said. “Just because I was raped doesn’t mean I’m made out of glass.” And it was true. It was always Sandra who brought up the fact of the rape—often in front of strangers. “I was raped,” she’d say, as if to get the facts out of the way, as if saying it like that— casually, without preparation—helped to alleviate the terror, gave her strength. Craig had told me with a similar studied casualness. And yet I suspect his motive was not so much to console himself, as to do some sort of penance; I suspect he genuinely believed that he had been asking for it, and that he deserved it, deserved whatever he got.

  Perhaps I am wrong to use the word “underside” when I describe the world Craig led me through that first summer in New York, perhaps wrong in assuming that for Craig, it has been a matter of surfaces and depths, hells and heavens. For me, yes. But for him, I think, there really wasn’t much of a distance to travel between the Westport of his childhood and the dark places he seemed to end up in, guide or no guide, in whatever city he visited. Wallets, travelers’ checks, your life: these were just the risks he took. I lived in two worlds; I came in and out of the underside as I pleased, with Craig to protect me. I could not say it was my fault that he was raped. But I realized, that night, that on some level I had been encouraging him to live in the world’s danger zones, its “ayor” zones, for years now, to satisfy my own curiosity, my own lust. And I wondered: how much had I contributed to Craig’s apparent downfall? To what extent had I, in living through him, made him, molded him into some person I secretly, fearfully longed to be?

  He lay on my floor, gently snoring. He always slept gently. But I had no desire to embrace him or to try to save him. He seemed, somehow, ruined to me, beyond hope. He had lost all allure. It is cruel to record now, but the truth was, I hoped he’d be gone by morning.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, we had lunch with Laurent. Because Craig spoke no French and Laurent spoke no English, there was not much conversation. I translated, remedially, between them. Craig did not seem very impressed by Laurent, which disappointed me, and Laurent did not seem very impressed by Craig, which pleased me.

  Afterwards, Laurent and I drove Craig to the Gare du Nord, where he was catching a train to Munich. He had relatives there whom he hoped would give him money to spend at least a few weeks in Germany. For a couple of minutes, through me, he and Laurent discussed whether or not he should go to see Dachau. Laurent had found it very moving, he said. But Craig’s only response was, “Uh-huh.”

  Then we were saying good-bye, and then he was gone, lost in the depths of the Gare.

  On the way back to my apartment I told Laurent about Craig’s rape. His eyes bulged in surprise. “Ton ami,” he said, when I had finished the story, “sa vie est tragique” I was glad somehow, that the rape meant something to Laurent, and for a moment, in spite of all our problems, I wanted to embrace him, to celebrate the fact of all we had escaped, all we hadn’t suffered. But my French wasn’t good enough to convey what I wanted to convey. And Laurent was depressed.

  He dropped me off at my apartment, continued on to work. I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting alone indoors, so I took a walk over to the Rue St. Denis and Les Halles. The shops had just reopened for the afternoon, and the streets were full of people—giggly Americans and Germans, trios of teenaged boys.

  I sat down in a cafe and tried to stare at the men in the streets. I wondered what it must have been like, that “Hola,” whispered on a busy Madrid sidewalk, that face turning toward him. Was the face clear, vivid in its intent? I think not. I think it was probably as vague and convex as the face of the Genie of the Crystal in Gatlinburg. Then, too, it was the surprise of recognition, the surprise of being noticed; it will do it every time. The Genie of the Crystal, she, too, had wanted Craig, and even then I had urged him on, thinking myself safe in his shadow.

  I drank a cup of coffee, then another. I stared unceasingly at men in the street, men in the cafe, sometimes getting cracked smiles in response. But in truth, as Craig has endlessly told me, I simply do not have the patience for cruising. Finally I paid my bill, and then I heard the churchbells of Notre-Dame strike seven. Only five days left in July. Soon it would be time to head up to Montmartre, to the drugstore, where Laurent, like it or not, was going to get my company.

  I GO BACK TO THE MAIS OUI

  James McCourt

  WHEN THE OLDSMOBILE CONVERTIBLE JACKSON POLLOCK was driving hit the tree—

  I call myself Delancey. (And why not?) “It’s a Lazy Afternoon” was my song.

  When the 1950 Oldsmobile convertible Jackson Pollock was driving in East Hampton on the night of August 11, 1956 hit the tree on Fireplace Road and flipped over, Jackson Pollock was sent “planing” into the air, some distance into the woods in Springs. His head hit the trunk of an oak ten feet up from the ground level, and that killed him instantly. When, after some time, a policeman and a neighbor from Springs came upon him, “He looked like an old dead tree lying in the brush.”

  WE WENT TO GREECE LAST SUMMER—Sicily and Greece, Phil and I—for old times’ sake. Phil got to cry a lot in Sicily, looking out the windows of trains crawling along slower than the milk train out of East Hampton and standing for intervals of untold length in stations like Caltanissetta and Enna and Castelvetrano and Trapani, looking out over landscapes (to me reminiscent of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Southern California) he only dimly remembered from childhood, telling me we should have come in spring to see it all green; looking out at families he kept swearing all closely resembled his: whole families that came down to the stations to see one member off—off maybe as far as Palermo, or off to Rome, or Florence or Milan. (Phil said most Sicilians had never left their towns, that they were like the Bonackers in East Hampton’s Springs, who had never been up island to New York and never would go. I asked what was he talking about? What about immigration, the Mafia, foccaccerias, Bellini? He said, “Shut up, you know what I mean.” So I shut up. I knew what he meant; he was just wrong.)

  Meanwhile, I’ve got the radio on, turned to the usual respectable call letters—wishing I could listen again to one program of The Mysterious Traveler instead of yet another quality evening on Carnegie Hall Presents, or wishing crazily that Carnegie Hall would present the Judy concert. (We’ve got the record, of course—I’m on it, out of my mind—but we never play it. I’d like to be taken by surprise, but they won’t play it, not in my lifetime.) So, anyway, I’m listening, when over the track of a decent enough rendition of the Appassionata, this voice informs the listener that, “This music is not being played by a professional musician.” It is being played by one Doctor Something-Slithery-or-Other Dove. (Not as in “Dove Sono”; as in the soap, as in the Holy Ghost.) Doctor Dove is a pianist whose talent is evident, I am informed; also a sculptor whose work has been recognized, and the director of Flashbacks, the institute for cosmetic reparation staffed by artists. I am invited to ask myself this question: Do I honestly want to keep looking the way I look, and wondering—

  Click.

  This line of attack is new to me from this station. I am myself, so far as the upkeep of the face and form is concerned, as it happens, a devout adherent to the Dolores Del Rio method: long, unhurried excursions in the Land of Nod, wo die Zitron
en blühn. (Dolores, they say, went abroad for up to sixteen hours at a stretch, under a blanket of dried fruit. I can make do with eleven under Scandia duck down, but no matter; I feel myself taking a nervous turn for the worse.) The gall of them. What would Beethoven say?

  Did Jackson Pollock, an artist whose work was at last and is for all time recognized, ever think along the cosmetic reparation lines? Or did his spouse? Not according to the snapshots of him and her we keep in an honored place in the living room. I have just been sitting reading in the new oral biography of the great martyr of modem art and former friend of the head of this household (who is not represented in the said work, by his own choice), and have been amused by one thing: Willem de Kooning’s sputtering indignation in insisting that not for one minute of his life could Jackson Pollock have been considered a faggot. (I like Willem de Kooning. Once I spent an afternoon in his studio, blitzed by the work, and afterwards, in withdrawal, was admiring a collection of pre-Columbian sculpture distributed in the conversation pit of the living room. “Do you like it? It’s my vife’s. I dunno vat any of it is, but it’s all autentic.”) Amused because I think that, as specimens, both Pollock and de Kooning were what the Bonackers call “finest kind,” and that they knew it. Angels with dirty faces; rough trade rêve bateaux, Satans in stained slacks; two big bad boys (despite Bill’s size). They were not nice in the ’50s, especially not to faggots. But I don’t like thinking about that time too much, great as it was—and we knew it. All that sorrow in all that sunlight; express.

  How far we’ve come from the river. Kyle, Mitch, Mary Lee, Delancey.

  “Yes, yes,” the Bonackers say. Jackson Pollock and Brando, Rock Hudson and Jimmy Dean. “Bent Shoulders” cologne. Then time goes by, and you say, “Fuck art, let’s dance.” The cha-cha, the way they danced it at the Mais Oui. And always, the Madison.

  What I want to see more than anything is that pornography of Tchelitchew’s. I want somebody to get it out of the Kinsey archives and make a book out of it, a book I can put right next to L’Amour Bleu and my glorious still-frame enlargements from the great Joe Gage trilogy, Kansas City Trucking Company, El Paso Wrecking Corporation, and L.A. Tool and Die. How I loved the Joe Gage aesthetic, and now it too is blasted.

  Sister, I’m a child in the world who does still cry for the moon (even having had the stars, many of them, yes, yes).

  I was brought up in a sharp school. So it turns out life isn’t anything like I thought it would be.

  I ordered from Wok Around the Clock one portion of cold noodles and sesame sauce and one portion of Szechuan ginger shrimp (no MSG). I got two tea bags, and three fortune cookies, but Phil repeated he isn’t in the mood for anything until later. (Subtle.) In each of the first two fortune cookies there were two identical fortunes, two on yellow paper slips and two on cream white. On the cream white from cookie A: “Pass now, the risk is too great.” I’ve never had such a fortune from a cookie in my life. Never mind. In the yellow, from cookie B: “Ignore previous fortunes.” Sufficient unto the day. I wake up pure.

  “When you wake up in the morning and you don’t know what you want, ask an ad?” Remember that? I just woke up from a nap, turned on the radio again, and got an ad for Je reviens. How far from the river—whichever—in Manhattan. And let’s not forget Monty and Marilyn either.

  THIS GIRL—YOU HEARD ME, I met her on the Old Met Line— asked me to take her to an important prom. I didn’t rent anything; Phil got me the full dress regalia. (I remember I asked him, “Is this off anybody—anybody you used to know, up till last week?”) It was beautiful, ’40s. I still wear it, to those summer musicales on Long Island’s glittering South Fork at which my Versace combinations might be considered too emphatic. The affair was at the Statler, in the ballroom with the big eagle over the bandstand. I danced the cha-cha and the Peabody with her. She was wearing Je reviens—a lot of it. I remember the Peabody especially, because it was the first time I’d ever had the chance to lead in it. (Not that I wasn’t butch; I was butch, if it matters. Phil always told me I was a real butch entertainer. Only that he always led in the Peabody.) We went to the Copa after, got our pictures taken and put on matchbooks, and then to Reuben’s, where we ate eggs Benedict and poured the Hennessey from the hip flask into the coffee. (That was the kind of thing you did.) Then over to the Plaza sidewalk to take a ride through the Park in a hansom. She slapped on more Je reviens. We didn’t do anything, (I was not about to have those beads rattled on The Line is what I told myself, and anyway she seemed to like me, as we used to say in those days, for myself.) When we got back to the Plaza, I asked the driver could he drive us from there to the Met by way of Seventh Avenue and Broadway—the Mawrdew Czgowchzw route. It was very early on a Saturday in June, but of course we knew that they would all be there: the ballet line for the Bolshoi (the one the ’50s goon flagwavers picketed). They were sleeping overnight. “As long as it’s down Broadway, right down the middle,” the hansom cabbie insisted. “I used to drive a crosstown bus. You wanna know why I stopped? The two rivers.” So we got our tickets to Ulanova’s last Giselle, and we stayed friends. I used to put on Je reviens from time to time. I’d waltz through Macy’s on the way up to The Line and spritz it on from the samplers. It used to make Phil crazy in the dark standing room (only). Later, when we got rich and joined the Club (faggot central) in the Grand Tier—but that’s another story.

  THIS REMEMBERING PERFORMANCE is a relatively new thing. I thought it was all chalk dust rotting away in the vacated play schoolroom of the mind, with a very short half-life. But it’s like it’s gone up some flue instead, like snow up my fragile nostrils used to in the ’70s, and is a kind of sky writing on my cerebellum’s dome. Or something that figurative. I was sitting here, where I am now, in bed, having decided to switch to something very now, listening to Voltron Toilet, and wondering when the old wop is going to come in to rest from his heroic labors: recording the early ’60s Sunday-night Judy show reruns, while (because of some strange propensity he has for spiritual balancing acts) watching the rerun of that terrible tribute to Maria (Callas) that features about eleven minutes of herself and eleven hours of all the self-promoting foghorns who claim they ever crossed her path, physically, mentally, or spiritually. When is he going to click all that off and come in here to this tastefully appointed, mirrored boudoir and jump on my bones. When, à propos unearthing the past and what-not, I started in on a piece in the one magazine I read about this absolutely forgotten figure of the ’50s Abstract Expressionist revolution and Vanity Fair by the name of Shapinsky. Shapinsky had been discovered in an East Side walk-up over a Japanese restaurant by a diminutive, irreproachable zealot hailing from the Indian subcontinent; has been pitched to and caught by some ga-ga gallery retailers in London’s Mayfair, and is going to wind up after all that— and some all that: everything but the bloodhounds—a generation after the death of Jackson Pollock, a rich man. Not as rich as de Kooning (and does de Kooning remember? Does de Kooning care? The best guess is that de Kooning is, as Ralph would say, “uhmbothered”), but a rich man. This is what is known as redress. What would I do by way of redress? Tear out Lincoln Center and reopen the Mais Oui? I might.

  FROM SICILY TO BRINDISI TO ATHENS, to Iraklion to Santorini to Naxos; back to Athens, through Yugoslavia to Venice. In two weeks. In Knossos, I found the entrance to the Labyrinth in the Queen’s toilet, just behind the throne, but we didn’t go down. (I dreamed I did, but that’s also another story.) The the what happened, happened on Naxos, birthplace of Dionysius (my patron deity, according to the old publicity), Ariadne’s way station.

  We’d run into Kiki and Clio Fragosiki (a.k.a.—can-we-talk?— “Fafner” and “Fasolt”), having dinner on Santorini in a place called The Kastro, overlooking the harbor that is the remains of the volcanic crater from the eruption of whenever forever ago that raised the great wave that destroyed Knossos, and decided to sail with them to Naxos, on an ordinary tourist boat, with the people. Attention: The trip was horrifying. Kiki kep
t saying over and over that something must have happened suddenly; but Clio, grim, but resolutely candid, kept correcting her. “Bullshit, Ki! You talk as if you don’t know why we got out—and it wasn’t sudden. And why we almost certainly will never come back. It’s over, very over.” After a seven-hour sail— the watchword was agony—we chugged into Naxos harbor. Leaning overdeck, Kiki went into a kind of forced rapture, remembering the concert Mawrdew Czgowchwz gave there in another lifetime, when she stood in the portal of the Temple of Apollo and sang “Es gibt ein Reich” to a regatta of the advanced elect. “Don’t go looking for her in these parts either,” Clio snapped. “After they disposed of what was left of Maria in these troubled waters, and the currents carried it back to Colchis, Czgowchwz realized what was over in the way of an era, too.”

  Es gibt ein Reich wo alles rein ist; er hat auch eine Namen; Totenreich. You’ll notice, I said to myself, that the one M.C. wasn’t part of the famous tribute to the other M.C. either, close as they’d been. (And we were there.)

  Whatever kept Ariadne on Naxos was not what kept us. We were anxious to get up to Mykonos and over to Delos to spend a day in the last divine place in Hellas, but the wind came up—the one they call “Melteme” not the one they call “Mar-eye-ah,” (remember, that John Raitt used to sing on Your Show of Shows?)—and held us there for three days until a boat big enough to make the voyage docked. On the afternoon of the third day, leaving the women behind among the bronzed German nudists in their cunning thatched-hut Tahiti colony at the beach along the strait facing Paros, we took a bus ride in search of something I’d seen listed in the guidebook, called the kouros of Melanes.