Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  “Hey man, remember me?” he said. It was Rico, the Ten, and Peter was with him. Their shirts were in their back pockets; Peter’s was in his right, Rico’s in his left.

  “Peter! Where the fuck have you been!” I pulled him off the floor to the side. “Everyone at the bar is worried about you.” Rico and Andy followed us, and we all sat on the risers. Rico held Peter with both arms and rested his head on Peter’s shoulder.

  Peter was embarrassed. “Rico likes me to stay home,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Rico said. “I don’t like that bar. I don’t like to stand around and drink. I like to dance.”

  “Now come on,” I said. “I met you there. Besides, you don’t have to stand around and drink. You can dance there too.”

  “You met me when I was hunting, man,” Rico said. He hugged Peter more tightly. “And I don’t like to dance in a cellar.”

  We spoke for a few more minutes until the music changed and then Rico pulled Peter out onto the floor again. Peter looked back and waved, but soon they were indistinguishable from the other shirtless men.

  I did not want to dance anymore, and I took Andy’s hand. “Come on, I want to show you something,” I said, and I led him out into the hall and up the tight-curving open metal staircase to the balcony above the dance floor. “We used to come up here for sex when we were tired of dancing,” I said. “We’d be hot and sweaty and we’d come up here and find someone else who was hot and sweaty and we’d play for a half hour and then go back and dance. Sometimes we’d fall in love on the spot and we wouldn’t want to take the time to go home, so we’d go to the baths up the street.”

  Andy said nothing and we leaned on the railing and looked out at the semitransparent dome over the dance floor. The strobes around the outside flashed in a jarring sequence and we could dimly see the dancers jerk and turn disjointedly. As we stood there, screams went up when a new song began to come in under the music. Once I would have known what it was and screamed too if I had been dancing, but now I did not recognize it and I was suddenly terribly sad.

  “I’m getting out of here,” I said. “But you stay.”

  “No,” Andy said. “If you go, I’ll go too.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said, and I ran down the steps quickly and Andy followed. At the bottom, when we were walking toward the exit, someone called my name but I did not stop.

  “Want to come home with me?” Andy asked while we were waiting for our coats.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, although I would have liked to; it would have been nice to hold someone.

  “Please.”

  “Lay off, Andy,” I said.

  “How about a drink someplace then?” he asked.

  “Not tonight. I’m tired, and I’m going home and going to

  “I guess I will stay, then,” Andy said. He was disappointed. We said good-bye and Andy went back into the main room.

  Outside, a cab stopped to let passengers out and I held the door for them and then got in and after I gave the driver the address I laid my head back against the seat and closed my eyes.

  3

  It is a beautiful day for November, warm, like spring, and clean. In the afternoon I take my camera to the park along the river. The Hudson is smooth and still. Downriver, the sun is too bright to look at. Most of the leaves are gone from the trees; squirrels run and dig in them on the ground, making sudden rustling noises. Only the oaks still hold their orange-and-brown crowns, and I pull a leaf from one and examine it. It is smooth and flawless. I crush it and smell it and it smells like an autumn leaf: spicy. A man wearing black leather leans against a stone wall and looks down, and I come to the wall and lean against it and look down also. Another man sits below us on another wall at the bottom of a flight of stone steps. He is hugging his knees and looking out at the river; the back of his head is toward us. The man near me turns his head toward me and looks into my face and then deliberately looks down at my crotch and slowly back at my face. He smiles, and I look away at a shirtless runner, who passes close enough for me to smell the sweat. I want to reach out and touch him, but I do not. As I look back over the wall at the man below he turns to look up at us and I see that it is Peter, whom no one I know has seen since I saw him that night at the Saint a month ago.

  “Peter,” I yell, and I run down the steps, holding my camera tightly against my stomach so it does not slap. “Peter,” I say again at the bottom, “are you all right? Everyone’s worried about you.”

  “I’m fine,” Peter says.

  “So why the hell don’t you answer your calls?”

  “I just want to be left alone.”

  Peter turns back toward the river. The man above us moves away.

  The last person who told me that he just wanted to be left alone died of AIDS four months later, and I sit beside Peter on the wall, which is cold to sit on although the air is warm.

  “Are you sure you’re okay? Physically, I mean.”

  “I’m sure, I’m sure,” Peter says.

  I look out at the river for a while and do not speak, and then I ask, “Why are you cruising the park?”

  “This way you don’t have to throw them out,” Peter says. “I’m not really cruising,” he adds after a few moments.

  “What happened to Rico?”

  Peter gets up and starts to climb the steps and I climb beside him.

  “He left,” Peter says.

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. One day I came home from work and everything of his was gone. There wasn’t even a note.”

  “That’s awful,” I say. We reach the top of the steps and walk north. We do not speak. The runner who passed me earlier passes us going in the other direction and he smiles.

  “Did you ever meet your fantasy man?” Peter asks after we have walked a little.

  I go to the wall and lean on it, looking out across the river, and Peter comes and leans beside me. “Yes,” I tell him. “Once. I was his too I guess.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We lived together for a few months, but then we decided to separate before one of us got killed.”

  “You lost me,” Peter says.

  “I don’t know which was hotter, the sex or the fights,” I say.

  “What did he look like?”

  “You know me. He was the Nordic type.”

  “Probably not a brain in his head, either.”

  “Oh, there was,” I say. “That was the problem.”

  Peter is quiet and I am too. We watch another runner pass, sleek and healthy. This one is wearing a T-shirt that says “Gay Pride Run.”

  “He’s almost enough to get me running again,” I say.

  “Oh God,” Peter says. “I loved him.”

  I cross myself. “I’m a witness to that statement,” I say. “The last of the tough guys has fallen.”

  “You’re a pretty cold fish yourself,” Peter says, and I know that it is true, but I know why too.

  “So what went wrong?” I ask.

  “You were lucky,” Peter says. “When you met your fantasy man you were his too.” Peter’s voice starts to break. “The trouble was, I wasn’t Rico’s,” he says, and he sniffs and rubs his eyes and then his breath begins to come in gasps and I can see tears on his cheeks and then he starts to cry with loud sobs. I am embarrassed and I turn away but he grabs my wrist. “Don’t go,” he says through his tears, and I turn to him and first I take his hand and then I drop it and put my arms around him and hold him tightly. I cannot prevent tears from coming to my eyes.

  Gradually our tears stop and we separate. We do not speak for a long time but we are comfortable with our silence and we leave the wall and walk slowly back in the direction from which we have come.

  “You know,” I say, “in the three years I’ve known you I think this is the first genuine, human moment we’ve ever had.”

  “So whose fault is that? You’re the one who’s become the great untouchable.
”

  “I guess I have; I never used to be,” I say, and again I think about why.

  “I’m scared of dying,” I say after a pause.

  “Me too,” Peter says.

  “You? What happened to ‘throw them out after they come’? I thought you were still working your way through every eligible man in New York.”

  “You don’t believe everything I say, do you?” Peter says. He kicks at a leaf and misses it. “There’s a lot of the world I haven’t seen yet, like Patagonia and Pago Pago.”

  “Check,” I say. I make a motion in the air with my finger as if I were making a mark on a blackboard.

  We are near the wooded hill where men cruise in the summer, where on a warm evening you could once hear the sounds of sex and the scent of poppers drifted on the breeze.

  “Hey,” I say to Peter. “How about a picture?” I point to the hill. The leaves are off the trees and they form a thick cover on the ground.

  “Here?” he says. He laughs.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Peter climbs the hill and leans against a tree and looks down at me. His body is striped with shadows.

  “This is going to be quite a basket shot,” I say, and he pushes his crotch out toward me. I take several photographs from different angles and then, when I am finished and am climbing up to him, I see an empty brown popper bottle in the leaves. It has a red cap and I pick it up and hold it for Peter to see. He laughs and we kick aside the leaves and soon uncover another one, and then Peter finds a blue foil packet that had held a condom and he points it out with his foot.

  “Rubbers in the park,” he says. “It’s a sign of the times.”

  I agree, it is a sign of the times, and I take Peter’s hand and lead him down the hill and out into the bright sunlight, and I have to look away as I begin to tell him my terrible news.

  ADULT ART

  Allan Gurganus

  I’ve got an extra tenderness. It’s not legal.

  I SEE A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD BOY steal a white Mercedes off the street. I’m sitting at my official desk (Superintendent of Schools), it’s noon on a weekday and I watch this kid wiggle a coat hanger through one front window. Then he slips into the sedan, straight-wires its ignition, squalls off. Afterwards, I can’t help wondering why I didn’t phone the police. Or shout for our truant officer down the hall.

  Next, a fifty-nine Dodge, black, mint condition, tries to parallel park in the Mercedes’ spot (I’m not getting much paperwork done today). The driver is one of the worst drivers I’ve ever seen under the age of eighty. Three pedestrians take turns waving him in, guiding him back out. I step to my window and hear one person yell, “No, left, sharp left. Clown.” Disgusted, a last helper leaves.

  When the driver stands and stretches, he hasn’t really parked his car, just stopped it. I’ve noticed him around town. About twenty-five, he’s handsome, but in the most awkward possible way. His clothes match the old Dodge. His belt’s pulled up too high. White socks are a mistake. I watch him comb his hair, getting presentable for downtown. He whips out a handkerchief and stoops to buff his shoes. Many coins and pens spill from a shirt pocket.

  While he gathers these, a second boy (maybe a brother of the Mercedes thief?) rushes to the Dodge’s front, starts gouging something serious across its hood. I knock on my second-story window—nobody hears. The owner rises from shoe polishing, sees what’s happening, shouts. The vandal bolts. But instead of chasing him, the driver touches bad scratches. He stands, patting them. I notice that the guy is talking to himself. He wets one index fingertip, tries rubbing away scrawled letters. Sunlight catches spit. From my second-floor view, I can read the word. It’s an obscenity.

  I turn away, lean back against a half-hot radiator. I admire the portrait of my wife, my twin sons in Little League uniforms. On a far wall, art reproductions I change every month or so. (I was an Art History major, believe it or not.) I want to rush downstairs, comfort the owner of the car—say, maybe, “Darn kids, nowadays.” I don’t dare.

  They could arrest me for everything I like about myself.

  At five sharp, gathering up valise and papers, I looked like a regular citizen. Time to leave the office. Who should pass? The owner of the hurt Dodge. His being in the Municipal Building shocked me—as if I’d watched him on TV earlier. In my doorway, I hesitated. He didn’t notice me. He tripped. Over a new two-inch ledge in the middle of the hall. Recovering, he looked around, hoping nobody had seen. Then, content he was alone, clutching a loaded shirt pocket, the guy bent, touched the spot where the ledge had been. There was no ledge. Under long fingers, just smoothness, linoleum. He rose. I stood close enough to see, in his pocket, a plastic “caddy” you keep pens in. It was white, a gift from “Wooten’s Small Engines, New and Like-New.” Four old fountain pens were lined there, name brand articles. Puzzled at why he’d stumbled, the boy now scratched the back of his head, made a face, “Gee, that’s funny!” An antiquated cartoon drawing would have shown a decent cheerful hick doing and saying exactly that. I was charmed.

  I’ve got this added tenderness. I never talk about it. It only sneaks up on me every two or three years. It sounds strange but feels so natural. I know it’ll get me into big trouble. I feel it for a certain kind of other man, see. For any guy who’s even clumsier than me, than “I.”

  You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know. There’s one sort for grandparents, say. But if you waltz into a singles’ bar and use that type affection, you’ll be considered pretty weird. When my sons hit pop flies, I get a strong wash of feeling—and yet, if I turned the same sweetness on my Board of Education, I’d soon find myself both fired and committed.

  Then he saw me.

  He smiled in a shy cramped way. Caught, he pointed to the spot that’d given him recent trouble, he said of himself, “Tripped.” You know what I said? When I noticed—right then, this late—how kind-looking he was, I said, “Happens all the time. Me too.” I pointed to my chest, another dated funny-paper gesture. “No reason.” I shrugged. “You just do. you know. Most people, I guess.”

  Well, he liked that. He smiled. It gave me time to check out his starched shirt (white, buttoned to the collar, no tie). I studied his old-timey overly-wide belt, its thunderbird-design brass buckle. He wore black pants, plain as a waiter’s, brown wingtips with a serious shine. He took in my business suit, my early signs of graying temples. Then he decided, guileless, that he needed some quick maintenance. As I watched, he flashed out a green comb and restyled his hair, three backward swipes, one per side, one on top. Done. The dark waves seemed either damp or oiled, suspended from a part that looked incredibly white—as if my secretary had just painted it there with her typing correction-fluid.

  This boy had shipshape features—a Navy recruiting poster, forty years past due. Some grandmother’s favorite. Comb replaced, grinning, he lingered, pleased I’d acted nice about his ungainly little hop. “What say to a drink?” I asked. He smiled, nodded, followed me out. How simple, at times, life can be.

  I’m remembering: During football practice in junior high gym, I heard a kid’s arm break. He was this big blond guy, nice but out of it. He whimpered toward the bleachers and perched there, grinning, sweating. Our coach—twenty-one years old—heard the fracture too. He looked around: somebody should walk the hurt boy to our principal’s office. Coach spied me, frowning, concerned. Coach decided that the game could do without me. I’d treat Angier right. (Angier was the kid—holding his arm, shivering.)

  “Help him.” Coach touched my shoulder. “Let him lean against you.”

  Angier nearly fainted halfway back to school. “Whoo,” he had to slump onto someone’s lawn, still grinning apologies. “It’s okay,” I said. “Take your time.” I finally got him there. The principal’s secretary complained—Coach should’ve brought Angier in himself. “The young teachers,” she shook her head, phoning the rescue squad. It all seemed routine for her. I led Angier to a dark waiting room stacked with textbooks and charts
about the human body. He sat, I stood before him holding his good hand, “You’ll be fine. You’ll see.” His hair was slicked back, as after a swim. He was always slow in class—his father sold fancy blenders in supermarkets. Angier dressed neatly. Today he looked so white his every eyelash stood out separate. We could hear the siren. Glad, he squeezed my hand. Then Angier swooned back against the bench, panting, he said something hoarse. “What?” I leaned closer. “Thank you,” he grinned, moaning. Next he craned up, kissed me square, wet, on the mouth. Then Angier fainted, fell sideways. Five days later, he was back at school sporting a cast that everybody popular got to sign. He nodded my way. He never asked me to scribble my name on his plaster. He seemed to have forgotten what’d happened. I remember.

  As we left the office building, the Dodge owner explained he’d been delivering insurance papers that needed signing—flood coverage on his mother’s country property. “You can never be too safe. That’s Mother’s motto.” I asked if they lived in town; I was only trying to get him talking, relaxed. If I knew his family, I might have to change my plans.

  “Mom died,” he said, looting down. “A year come August. She left me everything. Sure burned my sisters up, I can tell you. But they’re both in Florida. Where were they when she was so sick? She appreciated it. She said she’d remember me. And Mom did, too.” Then he got quiet, maybe regretting how much he’d told.

  We walked two blocks. Some people spoke to me, they gave my companion a mild look like they were thinking, What does Dave want with him?

  He chose the bar. It was called “The Arms” but whatever word had been arched between the “The” and the “Arms”—six Old English golden letters—had been stolen; you could see where glue had held them to the bricks. He introduced himself by his first name: Barker. Palms flat on the bar, he ordered beers without asking. Then he turned to me, embarrassed. “Mind reader,” I assured him, smiling and—for a second—cupped my hand over the bristled back of his, but quick. He didn’t seem to notice or much mind.