Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  You may remember that in Key Largo, for which the divine Claire Trevor won the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress (and let’s face this: with few, very few nods to the big girls, this has been the fabulous gay category over the years since its inception), that Gay Dawn’s real name was Maggie Mooney. Many people think, or used to think, that I got called Gay Dawn not just as a joke on Phil and his supposed (or much exaggerated) Cosa Nostra connections, but because my real name was Mooney. My real name, although Irish, wasn’t, and isn’t, Mooney. I knew and was beholden, however, to a Maggie, or rather a Marge, Mooney, and I always think of her in connection with Venice because she put me in a motion picture there one summer, and then died the next.

  The whole thing came about in this way. Years before, I had been sent from Delancey Street “up the river,” as the little old New York guttersnipes like me used to say, to a New York Archdiocesan correctional facility—a reform school—called Lincoln Hall. The fact is I got turned around there, through the efforts of a very kind and saintly monsignor called Gregory Mooney, whose sister was this enormous woman with three chins, right out of Dickens, whose occupation it was to engineer little musical vaudeville shows in grammar schools in the archdiocese. She came to Lincoln Hall and made me a star at eleven, singing “America, I Love You.” More than eleven years later, some time after Lincoln Hall (and after the Mais Oui and Panache), I was walking across the Piazza di San Marco, and there coming out of Florian’s, as large as life in the Italian manner, was Miss Margaret Mooney. “I’m here making a picture,” she said. “I’d heard you’d gone into the profession, and from the look of you, you might be just right for the regatta scene we’re getting ready to shoot. Come with me.” That’s how I got into—I can’t even tell you what they finally called it, but Princess Saroya and Richard Harris (remember them?) were the stars. It’s never, so far as I know, been screened here, but Miss Mooney and I did make the Sunday News picture centerfold. M.M. (or should I maybe say M.’ M.’?) was playing a sort of Elsa Maxwell American party beast, and she sailed down the Grand Canal in a great draped gondola, and I sailed right down with her, as a Pierrot, without whiteface. I got a lot of offers from that appearance, which I turned down, but everybody asked me what I was doing, or thinking about in that sequence, because my face read deep mystery. (A similar question, you may recall, was once asked of Miss Garbo.) Well, what I was doing, since I had no character, no direction, no script, was: I was rolling that O’Maurigan Panache monologue in a slow crawl across my brain pan, and seeing Sant’Ariano and the supper party on it—although I must tell you I have never felt the slightest inclination to inquire as to the authenticity or whereabouts of that darkly fabled venue, as often as I’ve been to Venice. (For one thing, Phil… .)

  Miss Mooney died the very next summer, as I’ve said, in Venice, but they shipped the body home, and I went to the funeral. I was by then, and resolutely, no longer in the profession. I remember thinking for a minute while shaking hands with Monsignor Greg that maybe I should go and work with the kids who came from where I had been, but the Holy Ghost, that dove, sort of let me know that that wasn’t my line of work, either. I haven’t been back to church.

  PHIL SAYS WHAT I OUGHT to do is write a book. I said, “Sure, you’ll get it printed and make sure it gets stocked by all the better Italian restaurants in the city now, right?” He says I ought to tell my story; he says he’s sure it means something. He says I should write about it all, since when. I said, “Who’s going to look after you after I start writing books and going on talk shows and end up going back into the profession as an attitude faggot?” “I could look after myself.” “You could look after yourself. You could eat scungils, but you don’t.”

  “Well, you ought to think about it, anyway.”

  “Should I put in what you heard Judy say to Diane deVoors that time?”

  Phil really adored Judy. I guess I did, too. I must have; I was always there. This one time, just before she went onstage, she was looking from the wings over the house as it filled up, and she turned to Diane deVoors and said, “Why do I get all the cripples?” So, she was in that kind of mood, the poor woman, with God knows what variety of shit rocketing through her wounded veins. Do I have to repeat the story? Yes.

  MANY YEARS AGO NOW, in the infirmary at Lincoln Hall, I woke from what was billed as rheumatic fever, but was really a nervous breakdown—my first and last—hearing children’s voices, alternately crying and calling like newsboys, “Read it and weep! Read it and weep!” The monitors had taken the letter away, and not a word was ever said about it. “What we were doing was wrong, no matter how it felt, no matter what you told me. Father says it was a question of honor. I must trust he won’t tell anyone … but I know if we start again. …” You got it? Good. My confessor, grab this, had gone on about Saint Augustine and God’s love and the illusory grandeur of the self. (I’d actually said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this; I don’t believe in hell, or in heaven, or in anything.”) The illusory grandeur of the self! You ready? “Fuck you, Saint Augustine!” I cried. I had sung “America, I Love You,” and brought down the house. I had almost sung “I love you” to another human being (all right, a guy, a fabulous, spectacular animal male). And there’s one thing I’m glad of to this day and will be until I die, and that’s that I had no mother to run to and babble at. Phil knows the right thing to do: He pats me on the head; we fuck. That’s all I want; I’ve never wanted anything else. That is my absolution. (Which reminds me of something else I’ve heard of, but have never seen, in Venice: a very ancient Clorox-blond who supposedly tramps the Lido in August, every August, wearing short pants and a sailor top, looking for absolution, in German, from strangers, for a sin he cannot reveal.) (Italics mine.)

  SO, I SHOULD GO ON TELEVISION in the mornings? Should I be the day keeper and diviner invoking the midmost seers, as it were, of the gone gay life? Should I rattle my beads like com kernels or coral seeds in lots of four in front of the burnt offerings? Should I call upon Miss Desiree, La Reine Voltige; upon Diane deVoors; upon Miss Charity; upon the Good Witch of the South to take me back to—

  The Maria program is ending. I hear her through the wall growling over Tito Gobbi’s mortal coil, “E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!” She will leave the candles burning, drop the crucifix on the villain’s lifeless breast, put her crepe de chine in her beaded bag, and leave home—just as I did.

  I see four supine figures in a vision: Jackson Pollock, the kouros of Melanes, Judy in the open box at Campbell’s, and Tito Gobbi as Scarpia. I must sort my memories in lots of four and—

  When they finish reconstructing Central Park, they can put me in a pagoda on the promontory of the Ramble. I shall sit there singing “It’s a Lazy Afternoon” and planning the Mais Oui memorial float for the 25th Annual Gay Pride Day March, in 1994. I shall dock my gondola there, and in the summer evenings, resuming it, I shall circulate among the little vessels on the lake, garbed in the Venetian peacock-blue ensemble I brought back in September along with the Versace, holding the Pierrot mask in one hand as I tell fortunes with the other. I’m not so young as I was, but I’m still gay, I’m still lovable (I’ve heard it said), and I’ve still got the same nice teeth. What more could people want?

  WHY PEOPLE GET CANCER

  Anderson Ferrell

  I WANT TO TELL YOU THE FOOLISHNESS some people have when it comes to their own souls. Foolishness is all I know to call it. Right there in the Bible it says, “the wages of sin is Death,” so if you’re staring your own death full in the face, it’s a deadly foolishness looks like to me. There she lay up there in that hospital, her lungs ate up with cancer, not knowing, or knowing and saying no to knowing. We come to give her the strength and the hope, but they turned us out.

  At the time I thought, Well, maybe she don’t even know we’re here. You see, I was sure they had her drugged and all. Maybe she’s just too sick for any knowing. I only talked to that friend of her son’s, and he wasn’t even in th
e family. What right did he have to speak for her or her son? That boy struck me funny right then and there. It turned out she knew plenty and then some, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  See, the reason I tell you this story in the first place is because it just shows so plain the way of Satan. How he’ll spit in your face, and you’ll just lick it off, make you walk right through a cow pasture and see nothing but the clover, give you nothing but misery and then let you stand there and thank him for it. I believe I can show you that right clear.

  You see, saving souls is the main business of Christians. Well, Satan can make that business mighty hard, especially if that soul just don’t want to be saved. It’s hard to do, and you can’t take the blame for that. But I’m going to make that clearer plus a few other things.

  We, Earnest Sauls and me, were making our rounds of the hospital last Wednesday. Earnest and me were both saved on the same night, two years ago at a prayer meeting held by Reverend Pate, and from that time on, we’ve used our Wednesday lunch hours to help ease the suffering of others. We bring them the Lord’s Word and a prayer and try to show them that it is Satan’s work that has made them sick and not the Lord’s. You’d be surprised how many times I hear people next to death, blaming the Lord for putting them there. Now Death is Satan’s Saturday night good-time girl, and people have got to be shown that if they want to blame somebody they had better have a look in the mirror and blame who’s looking back. They let Satan know they were interested, same as if you’d tell a friend you were looking for a live one. Well, Satan fixed them up with Lady Death, and up there in that cancer ward, she’s got on her red high-heels, and she is open for business. But when they find out she don’t come cheap, they start blaming the Lord for the shape they’re in. You’ve heard people do it, I know: “If there was a God in Heaven, this wouldn’t happen to me,” “How can a just, loving God let folks suffer?” “If God’s all powerful, how come he don’t stop this or that?” On and on and on, I tell you, I’ve heard them all.

  Now if it’s two people that knows about blaming the Lord, it’s me and Earnest. And, if it’s two people that knows how the Lord works in ways you wouldn’t think He would, it’s me and Earnest. Of course, Satan can work in right many different ways too. He was doing a pretty slick job up there with Mrs. Eagles. That’s her name, Mrs. Eagles. By the time I got there, He had put so much between her and salvation I was starting to wonder if the battle wasn’t done lost. Satan don’t just deal directly with the person involved, you see. He covers all the bases. He knows how to use your loved ones to get to you. That was plain and clear what was going on over there with Mrs. Eagles. Satan’s got a strangle hold on that friend of her son’s, and the friend’s a big influence on the boy. The only other link is the pure and natural feelings between a mother and her son. See how it works? But I really want to tell you about how the Lord works.

  BEFORE EARNEST AND ME were saved, we lived for the Devil as hard as anybody ever has, drunk most of the time, a pint of Rebel Yell every other night, Wild Turkey if we could steal some mag wheels or chrome fender skirts. I could tell a lie long as from here to Biloxi, and about twice a week, Earnest would have to knock his way and mine too out of some scrap I’d get us into. Earnest Sauls is the best friend I got in this world, and back then he was the friend to have too. He’s six foot one and weighs one ninety, and it’s all power. Back then, no man wanted to meet up with Earnest in a dark alley. The ladies was a different thing. All that power’s behind the Lord now, of course.

  Now the one thing I never did, and I don’t think Earnest did neither, not that he didn’t get plenty of chances, was cheat on my wife. See, we were two sorry husbands of two of the best, Christ-lovingest girls in the community, and all that hell-raising would have gone on like it was going on if it hadn’t been for our girls. They hung on when many a wife would have quit. But me and Earnest didn’t know what we had. Finally my wife laid down the law. “It’s me or the Devil,” she said. “You got one week.” Earnest said his wife told him just about the same thing. That was a Friday night. Me and Earnest didn’t pay them one bit of mind. We went out and got drunk that very night. I saw Earnest more than my loving girl that week, but it wasn’t nothing new about that. Anybody that didn’t know better would have thought something funny about me and Earnest back then.

  Now that’s just a joke. But that son of Mrs. Eagles’ and his friend, that is no kind of joke at all. There’s nothing funny about that. It would be real easy to have a laugh about that and go on about your business. Some would say, what the heck, each to his own, and they’re not hurting nobody. Well, the Lord don’t see it that way. And they were hurting one in particular real bad. You’ll see.

  Now it was Saturday night, a week and a day after my wife had said what she did that I came home and found a note from her which said, “I can’t have you and Jesus, and I’d rather have Jesus.” Have you ever heard it put better? She’s written some poems that Reverend Pate has read up in front of everybody in church. I can think of one mother’s son that needs to hear an either-or something like that one.

  Earnest moved in after my wife left me, and the place wasn’t fit for white folks by the end of the day. Of course that was how we liked it, and it was a fine old time there for a while. Earnest is the kind of buddy you can just be with. You don’t have to all the time talk junk about getting women with Earnest. A buddy like that is easy to live with. We had some laughs, and Earnest can still make me laugh. He didn’t lose his funny nature when he got saved. It’s a friendship we got that has held up to all kinds of tests. But that fellow and Mrs. Eagles’ son, people like that just make it hard for you to have a friend. I can’t laugh about them.

  What is funny is how I talked against the Lord. Thought I was smarter than He is. I’d get drunk and think I was smart. Say things like “Religion has broke up many a home.” It had broke up mine, hadn’t it? Or, “More harm has been done in the name of Christ than in the name of the Devil,” or the worst one, “It don’t matter whether you are a Christian or not, long as you got a good heart, and don’t hurt nobody.” The Devil talking. “How long shall I bear with this evil congregation which murmur against me.” Those are the Lord’s words, and I can tell you the answer. Not long. The Lord got to work on me right quick. I started getting lonely. Missed my sweet girl, I reckon. I just got lower and lower. And I got something else, a funny feeling, like when you’re kiting down the highway doing eighty in a fifty-five, and out of the comer of your eye you see that old blue light start to flashing through a clump of bushes at the bottom of a hill. It’s just too late to slow down by then. That kind of feeling. It’s funny, I didn’t have no kind of interest in the good-time girls. Reverend Pate says that was just the Lord’s way of wearing me down.

  So then it was just me and Earnest, no sweet girls, no good-time girls even. Just me and Earnest, and I’ll tell you right now Earnest just don’t cut it that way. I hope you’re getting used to my sense of humor. I tell you, it got so bad that one night Earnest and me waited outside the church in hopes of seeing our sweet girls. Now that was something to laugh at. There we were, like two old yard dogs, in the very place our sugars had tried to get us for years. You might not see nothing in that, but I see the Lord’s hands in it. And I won’t ever forget that it was Earnest that got me to go down there in the first place.

  The girls came up directly and said the only way they’d even talk to us was if we’d go to the prayer meeting with them. We would have done anything by that time. We hadn’t had nothing but canned stuff to eat since they left, and we were both going broke buying clean underwear. Nothing looks worse than a man in a laundromat.

  Well, in we went, and to get to the point, God worked a miracle. That evening Reverend Pate preached a soul saver if I’ve ever heard one. I was ransomed from sin by the grace that makes you whole. Earnest gave his heart to Jesus too. Me and my sweet girl held hands in the pew.

  All that was two years ago, and anybody around here can tell you I’m
a happily married man now. Earnest too. But that’s not the story I want to tell. That is just to point out to you that it was Satan and not the Lord that was the cause of my troubles. You see, the Lord is the answer not the question. I didn’t get straight until the Lord took something away from me, until he worked through my sweet girl and through Earnest, through the people close to me. All that blaming the Lord made the crooked and evil seem more like the way to go. Out of my loss, I was saved. It’s these fine points that separate us Bible-believing Christians from the Methodists.

  From the time it hit me, I wanted to show it to people. I started to search my heart to find a way. I asked myself, who are the ones more than likely to be mad about their situation and blame the Lord? Who would have the hardest time seeing the connection between their own lack of faith and their troubles? And just like Christ ministered to the lepers and all, I decided it was my mission to try and show this fine point of Christianity to the ones that needed to learn about it the quickest. The Lord showed me that my duty, as a Christian, lay in the cancer ward over there at Memorial. There is where I could make the biggest splash for Christ. I told Earnest about my plans, and you know what he said? He said with his muscle and my looks working for the Lord, it wouldn’t be a sinner up there in Memorial inside of two weeks. Getting saved just made Earnest more fun.

  We prayed about it with Reverend Pate, and with his blessing, we have taken our lunch hour every Wednesday to bring the Lord’s Word, a prayer, and maybe a little hope to these poor dying men and women. And praise God, I know He will bless Earnest and me for it. Our reward will be great in Heaven, because I don’t have to tell you this kind of work can get you down, down here on Earth.