“It’s astonishing,” I said. “Dennis Savage and I tease each other about being jaded and decadent, but it’s really because we happened to be there when Stonewall sexuality exploded. We were witnesses, more than anything else. But you, Carlo. You have done all this, everything. Yet every now and then you take some man to bed and suddenly the world cracks apart. You’re like a kid wondering how far he’ll get the night of the prom. Do the men with the most sex know the least about love?”
Carlo took out a bag of grass and butt papers and prepared to roll a joint. He can do it one-handed. “What was your first time like, Bud?” I didn’t answer; it was not a question but an opening flourish. “Mine was in the back of a truck, when I was seventeen, on my way to New York. I hadn’t even crossed the Mississippi then.” He sorted the herb, flicked away a bit of twig. “This guy was driving a moving van filled with furniture. Someone probably got himself transferred from Denver to Toledo. Took his wife and kids and went on ahead. Anyway, the mover picked me up. Big fellow, bearded, rough hands, fancy green eyes. He flashed them every other second. Your typical gay kid’s nighttime fantasy.” He licked the paper, nodding at the recollection. “My first
real
time, I mean. All the way. I was scared, but I knew I wanted him, and I thought, There’s probably a road in if I phrase it right. Because he kept looking at me, you know? Heavy looking. Two times, it’s gringo rivalry. Three or four, you remind him of someone. Ten times with green eyes, he wants to fuck you.” He folded the joint, lit it. “And that’s what he said he wanted, right there in the cab of his truck.” Took it in. He smokes too much, but other than breaking hearts it’s his only vice. “He said he wanted to cornhole my cherry. Those words. Those words, Bud.” He looked at me. “I’d never heard the term but I knew what it meant without thinking about it and I wasn’t afraid. I was glad. We were passing a very empty stretch of road and he made it clear we could pull over and do it or he’d dump me right where we were. And I told him I’d be glad to let him cornhole me. He looked over again, the biggest look yet. What a fool I was. I was smiling, so relieved, after all that fumbling I had known in high school. And you know what he said? ‘I don’t want you voluntary.’”
He proffered the joint. I shook my head.
“Anyway, that’s how I got to New York, hitching with truckers, and I swear every single one of them fucked me. One took me to a motel in the afternoon, one got me out in the trees behind a Howard Johnson’s, and one gave me twenty dollars to do it with him in front of his best friend—to settle a bet, he said. A bet. Okay. But there was one you should know about, different from the others. This very man took me to his mother’s house in some small town in Ohio. It seemed the same as the others at first—me face down and him on top, no talking, just the gentle pounding in the darkness. See, they were all men and I was a raw kid, so that was fair. But I wanted to find out what it was like on top, making someone happy like that. Because that’s what it is, isn’t it?
“Anyway, this guy with the mother. He wasn’t much to look at, I guess. Kind of clumsy. Said the wrong thing a lot, you know. Laughed too much for nothing. But he was very nice, and I wasn’t used to nice men then, especially not big ones. Big men truly aren’t nice where I come from, you know. They’re tough. Okay. That’s how we grow them. Anyway, this guy … I can’t remember his name now, but I can see him as clear as I see you. Brown hair, kind of scraggly, the hair that never looks combed, like. Brown eyes, bushy mustache. Gigantic shoulders, like he’s been carrying stuff all his life. Arms, too, big. Chest. Not cut up. Fleshy. With a light dust of hair and nipples as big as a woman’s. Stomach just starting to loosen up. Squared-off ass, big junk. Oh, I truly see him. I see him, Bud.” He put the joint down. “He was the best of them all. He shouldn’t have been, but he was. Very basic, slow and certain. That means something, anyway. And like we were lying around talking and I asked him if I could take a turn and fuck him and he said okay, and it was totally different from then on. The moment he turned over and I got behind him I felt … more involved, somehow. What could be more involved than being fucked, right? But this was. I sat on him and stroked his sides as if I was giving him a massage, great long strokes all the way down him, and each time he let out a deep breath, like he was struggling not to moan. The lights were out, but the bed was by the window and a ray of light from a street lamp was hitting him just at the neck where the hair ends, and I thought that must be the sexiest piece of flesh a man can have, just there. I ruffled the bottom ridge of his hair and he gave out this incredible sigh. We were using soap, you know, dipping it in a little bowl of warm water. It was like stepping back fifty years into the past. Like something
The Policeman’s Gazette
might have known about but wouldn’t care to mention.” Stirred by the recollection, he paused. “Soap and a little bowl of warm water,” he went on. He cocked his head, seeing it again. “We had dinner with his mother, and then we went upstairs, to a little room under the slope of the roof. Maybe he kept it especially for this. When we got up there, he said, ‘What we need is some soap and a little bowl of warm water.’ I guess I remember details like that more than I do what a guy looked like. But I remember this man. The way he looked all stretched out under me. The light on his neck. As I soaped him open, he began to spread his legs, bit by bit, wider and wider. And I thought … well … that I
knew
him somehow, like I was closer to him than … than anyone. He was my ally. My teammate. I was a real jerk about getting my cock into him. I guess I must have thought it would just slide in, but it took some practice. I had to pull him up on his hands to work it all in, and then we froze like that. I could scarcely breathe. I was filled with some wonderful feeling and I didn’t know what it was. Never felt that before. Never.” He paused again to relight the toke, nodding at some thought. “Well, so we hunkered down again and I began to fuck him and all I could think of was him, this man I was hitched up to, legs and arms and torso. All the way, right? All the way is how they put it. I kept saying his name over and over.” He looked at me. “Jed. His name was Jed. Jesus, twenty years ago. Jed. And then I knew what the feeling was—I
loved
him. It was love! I did, I felt it. Him, that man, his skin and his muscles and his neck. Not just sex, not even just good sex, but love. I swear to God. I loved him. And I put my head down on his so our cheeks sort of touched, and I like nodded slightly, so my hair brushed his. It wasn’t wild at all. It was serene. It was like … maybe like giving something to him and keeping it at the same time. That must be sharing. All the way. And when we broke apart, I grabbed him in this hug of death, and he laughed and said, ‘You’re a real live wire.’ It may sound crazy, but I actually considered staying on with him, living in that house, in that room, maybe. With the street-lamp light and the little bowl of warm water. I didn’t even care if we never fucked again, I just wanted to … I … what?
Touch
him. Say his name. And then he shifted over and put his arms around me and he nuzzled the back of my neck. And, do you know?, I was crying. My whole body was shaking. Lying with my head on those big chest muscles sobbing like an infant while he comforted me. I finally calmed down, and we lay there for a long time. Maybe an hour. We weren’t dozing, either. Just lay there, nothing doing. All the way. Then he suddenly said, ‘I’m forty-six years old.’ That’s all. I waited, and at last he said, ‘How old are you?’ And I told him. So then he put his hand on my head, stroking my hair. Playing with it. And then you know what he said? He said, ‘You’re going to be so happy.’”
“And are you?” I asked.
He stabbed out the joint, rose and aimlessly crossed the room, deep in thought. He came to a halt at the Victrola, lifted the lid, idly inspected the machine.
“Maybe I should have stayed with him forever. It was like that first night for a few days, and then I started to mind it when he’d roll me over for his turn to top me. I didn’t want him to know me the way I could know him.”
Here Carlo turned back to me. “And don’t ask me why. Don’t ask me anything. I just didn’t. So I came here. And then San Francisco. Then back here, home. And I tried all the types and all the scenes. I had everybody. I did it and I did it, with the musclemen and the tender kids and the stars and the straights. But never again did I feel the way I felt that night in that little town with the ray of light on Jed’s neck. I guess I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed with him. What if that was love, that time? I want to go back to the way that … happened. That stranger. And maybe Hugh is the only stranger I have left.”
“Even now?”
“Almost. Maybe. The way he lies on his stomach, waiting to be pleasured. There’s something in him.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, he’s such a soft thin shell of a guy. God, does he need a gym.” He turned to the window, watching the ironworkers bulling up the frame of the block’s new office tower. “There’s nothing as excellent as a big man. A really big, wonderful man. If I were a big man, I’d be happy.”
“Carlo, you
are
a big man.”
He turned back to me and grinned. “I only look big.”
“You know, every other day I pass one of your ex-es. They always ask after you. Steve Bosco is moving back from Seattle. He wants to call you.”
“Big Steve.” He smiled. “He’s a teddy bear. Every Sunday he made French toast in the waffle iron. He shouldn’t call, though. I’m not free yet. But the bad things always end. Trust me. The good things hang on forever.”
“So it is bad?”
“Not … not the way you think. See, I know Hugh is mean, so he can’t hurt me any more than the nice men can help me. It’s only your true friends who can hurt you, right? When they get mad at you.”
I said nothing.
“It’ll be over soon. I’m waiting for something.”
“What?”
“You think I’m a sheltered sweetheart like Little Kiwi. Dennis Savage won’t speak to me, did you know that? He gets off the phone so fast you’d think his building was afire.”
“He wants to run you out of gay.”
“You’re all wrong about me. See, I’m truly not a cuddleboy. I’m a cockdude. I can risk anything.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“I can’t call it by name. But I’ll know it when he does it.”
* * *
He did it the night Carlo turned forty at a surprise party I threw in his apartment. The ruse was a peacemaking visit from Dennis Savage, piled on a dinner date Carlo had with who knew whom; and the guests were assembled an hour ahead, decorating, cooking, and drinking. What a comparison to Hugh Whitkin’s lawyer party: half the group were in T-shirts, leather and lumberjack flannel lent an air, and Big Steve Bosco wore nothing but a netted pouch and running shoes.
Little Kiwi, in charge of the food, took offense. “His chest hair is infiltrating the lasagna!” he cried, carrying the platter back to the kitchen. “Make him wear something!”
“Be gentle,” I warned him. “He’s an affectionate elder who wants to stay in touch”—hanging on forever, I almost added, like a soap character.
“His hands are too big. He’s always hugging people!”
“That’s the mode of his circle. Don’t be a monopolist, boy. Learn the modes. Welcome diversity.”
He eyed me warily. “Will there be a quiz on this?”
“Lights!” someone cried, and out they went, but the footsteps traveled past the floor. “False alarm.”
I took the lasagna back out, but had to drag it right back in again because in the darkness someone had slipped an ice cube into Big Steve’s pouch and now he and several others were chasing around the living room in lighthearted melee.
“Is it true that Carlo is dating Hugh Whitkin?” Little Kiwi asked. “Snug won’t tell me.”
“Why do you call him Snug?”
He smirked. “I better not say.”
“You can tell me.”
“Like fish!”
“Lights!” This time was it, and we huddled grinning as the door opened. You know the festive moment, when the victim walks in and someone yanks the lights on and everyone screams “Surprise!” But this victim walked in with Hugh Whitkin and they were in the middle of a fight.
* * *
Hugh, of course, fights in undertone and Carlo never fights. Still, it had a nasty edge, the two of them framed in tight doorway light while the rest of us stood unseen at the far end of the living room waiting for no cue.
“You don’t get to ask those questions,” Hugh was saying. “I’ll tell you what you can know. Everything else is none of your business.”
“Enough for tonight, now.”
“No. Oh, no.” Hugh grabbed Carlo’s elbow. “What do you mean by calling Randy Pinkerton a bohunk, you ghetto slime?”
“It’s just a word, Hugh. I don’t even know what it means.”
“It means that you are a shabby slut and I doubt that we can continue this relationship on any level.”
Carlo slowly pulled away from Hugh, spilling more light into the doorway. “You’re truly a beautiful man, Hugh. No one else I’ve been with had anything like your style. They had the gym and The Look, that’s all. You’re perfect. Yet they were all terrific guys and you’re a grungy prick. Why is that?”
“You little whore,” Hugh rasped. He was actually angry. “You godless Christopher Street savage.”
“I’m tired of fighting, Hugh. Let’s be gentlemen and shake hands.” He extended his. “Tomorrow, if you still—”
Hugh cracked the flat of his hand across Carlo’s face, someone snapped on the lights, Little Kiwi yelled “Surprise!” and what a pair of faces the party then beheld. Carlo looked like a Munchkin the day the house fell on the Wicked Witch and Hugh like a truffle trapped in a gumball machine.
Big Steve hulked forward with dishonorable intentions toward Hugh’s health, but Carlo intercepted him with a cry and an embrace. “You look great!” Carlo told him. “I must get the name of your tailor.”
Hugh took a long look at Big Steve’s jaw, a fleeting one at Big Steve’s pouch, and fled.
“It’s my birthday, right?” Carlo asked us all as we milled about, laughing nervously. “This is my party!”