Big Steve thought anything a kid did was forgivable, as kids were on the scene for one purpose: to be bunked.
It was great to hang around Big Steve, soaking up lore, for I was gleaning copy and every third word out of him was a term.
“Bunked?” our boy asks.
“Sure.” Big Steve was cutting up vegetables for some huge elaborate salad to be delivered to some party along with cold-cut platters and a cake. Like many gay men in New York—fantasy masseurs, or “actor-models,” or makers of tape collages for parties—Steve chose a calling that had scarcely existed before Stonewall. True, he did not invent the profession of caterer. But surely he was the first caterer to guarantee caped and cockstrapped waiters among his help—and the only caterer I ever heard of who made a point of closing the evening by passing among the guests entirely nude (a truly awesome sight) to treat the host to a fabulous smooch. “It tends,” he explained, “to make them sporty with the tip.” But I think he did it for the hell of it.
“What’s bunking?” I asked.
“You know what screwing is, right?”
“Yo.”
“You know about sleeping over after, where you kind of nest the kid you screwed in your arms so you wake up all nice and warm together?”
“Sì.”
He handed me a slice of green pepper, fresh, wet, gleaming. “And there’s having a special breakfast, right? Like with honey toast or a farmer’s omelette.”
“Do.”
“What’s that?”
“Yes in Welsh.”
“So,” he went on, “you put all that together in one night for a nice kid who deserves it, and that’s bunking.”
Who deserves it? I wondered, examining the cake, a humungous rectangle sitting demurely under wax paper and bearing a motif of music notes and G clefs on its frosting, with the legend, “To my sleeping beauty: best wishes on the birthday from Cleve.”
“What’s this for?” I asked. “Some uptown faggot?”
“Don’t use that word,” he replied, evenly but with a fierce command. Something else worth learning: some gays don’t think we can use straights’ expletives, even for our purposes. Faggot is not our concept, therefore not our word.
“Besides,” Big Steve went on. “Besides. What for do you want to put down someone you never met? That doesn’t hardly make sense.” He handed me a radish. “Everyone’s got something to offer, if you look in the right place.”
His ability to get along with practically everyone was legendary; but everyone, in Big Steve’s world, was gay. He not only lived entirely in the ghetto, leaving the West Village only to deliver and serve his collation, but literally did not know a single straight, did not watch television because it was all “straight stuff,” and would not open a bank account because banks were ungay.
“Have you ever bunked a man instead of a kid?” I asked him.
He paused. “You mean did I bunk a big old clone, like me?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“That’s what I am, anyway.”
“It’s just that bunking sounds like sort of a fatherly act,” I said. “Where you make the rules, you take the initiative, you have the power. Right?”
“It works best with kids because they like to be taken over.”
“As a rule?”
“Never met a kid who didn’t. See the idea is, when they’re young they don’t have the experience, see? They don’t know what to do. You have to teach them. You might almost call it a clone’s duty, teaching kids. They’ve been raised by straights, so they’re a little afraid of what’s going to happen even though they want it. So you have to … what’s the word?”
“Seduce them?”
He thought it over. “Seduce them. Yeah.”
“Egad.”
“See, you can’t just take a kid home and say, ‘I’m going to fuck you.’ They’d run. Instead, you say you know this photographer who likes to shoot buddy pictures. Always looking for new talent. Kids like that—you can’t give them enough attention, for some reason, even the really cute ones who’ve been getting attention since they were old enough to love. So you get them to take their shirt off, like you’re just looking them over for the photographer.”
He stops chopping up the salad to enlarge at ease. Big Steve is like a gay Gene Caputo, the ironworker: sex is the topic that covers everything.
“So you move them around a little. Let’s see this angle, or like, fold your arms and turn this way. You get your hands on them, but it’s very professional. You keep it clean. It’s best to take your time. Then you say, ‘This is very promising,’ or something like that, and put in about what the photographer pays his models, because kids never have enough money. And you say, ‘Let’s try a certain pose like this.’ You get them out of their shoes, sit them on your lap. You say, ‘Look at the camera. Let’s see you smile. That’s a pretty smile.’ Then you get them to drop their pants, and that’s when you can start working on them. A little stroking here and there, and you’re keeping it smooth. No kissing or like that, just slowly bringing them along till their body starts to tingle all the way to their toes. When you think they’re ready to go, you can start kissing them, and when they put their hands up to hold on to you like little lost boys is the time to touch their behind. Not before. Because by then they know what’s going to happen and they want it.”
“After that treatment,” I said, “Bob Haldeman would want it. What if a kid believes you about the photographer and just wants to pose for some money? What if he goes along with you because he’s afraid you’ll beat him up if he doesn’t?”
He considered that for a bit, then smiled. “So what? I give them a real neat time.”
* * *
I complained about this to Carlo, who was then, as Michael likes to put it, Big Steve’s “current ex-lover.” It seemed to me that Big Steve’s technique was immoral, might well be taking in a number of innocents against their judgment. But Carlo, who has lived on the concept that good sex is its own morality, was not much bothered.
“That’s his way of making friends,” Carlo said.
“Oh, good grief.”
“Come on. You and Dennis Savage and the other collegiates don’t realize how difficult it can be for those of us who truly aren’t born talkers. When we are trying to set up a social thing, I mean. Anyone knows how to talk sex. But getting to know someone, trying to make a friend … well,
you
always have something to say, sure. Big Steve doesn’t. All he can do is cook and smile at you and … and touch you. That’s all that man can do. And you have to make friends, don’t you?”
“Hmm.”
“Friends is how you survive. Besides, do you really think he’s seducing anyone who doesn’t want to be? Really?”
“You must admit, he’s kind of overwhelming.”
“Which would probably discourage anyone from coming home with him unless they were ready to go for it. For some of them, maybe the only way to come out is to have it done to them.”
I thought of his tale of hitching across the country when he first came to New York.
“Admit it, Bud. Isn’t that how you came out? Someone shows you what to do.”
“Did he show you? Big Steve?”
“He truly showed me how to behave the next morning. I wasn’t always so sure of myself, then.”
“You’re not exactly the kid type,” I said. “A cuddleboy. It’s odd seeing you in that position.”
“There’s a kid hidden away inside every clone, I sometimes think. Even Big Steve.”
I wondered who might be more helpful to the raw recruit: a precise queen, dryly citing stylistic code, or an embracing clone, limited in what he knows but strong in certain manly virtues. Queens, clones, kids. As the years went by, I noted the new arrivals and heard dish on their metropolitan debuts, heard that this one had a smash gallery show in Soho, that that one burned out on drugs and whoring, that another was going uptown, trying yoga, or never seen by day, and that two others met one day, fell hopelessly in love, moved deep into New Jersey, and now would not come out even for brunch. Friends is survival, Carlo says, yet the recruits do not come to this city of utter trash and absolute power to make anything as mere as a friend.
I sometimes think.
* * *
But then comes an arresting exception and you have to reorganize your theories: as when Dennis Savage got bored one evening and hied himself to the theatre and there found himself next to a kid fresh from the midwest who agreed to go out for coffee and exchanged phone numbers and said, “I think you’re a nice handsome man” when they parted—but that’s just it, they parted: the kid would not go home with him.
They met for dinner and it went, I was told, really well. Yet still the kid would not budge in the indicated direction. A number of dates followed, after each of which Dennis Savage came running into my apartment like a fish whose scales have been stripped.
“He says he likes me!” Dennis Savage feverishly reported. “Now, why won’t he let me—”
“Maybe you should send him to Big Steve for breaking in.”
Dennis Savage paused, crushed by a thought. “Maybe he isn’t gay?”
“Bring him over here for socializing,” I said, “and we’ll figure it out,” realizing as I mouthed the words that I was showing signs of turning into a wise old queen. “On second thought,” I added, “what do I know?”
“No, yes,” Dennis Savage insisted. “Tonight at seven.”
“Not good. I’ll be doing my cartwheels then.”
“Seven-thirty.”
“That’s seance hour,” I said, panicking. I don’t want to give advice. I want to take it. I want to be broken in, thrown around, snubbed, flattered, not paid for first-rate work … anything but regarded as a wise old queen. “Fuckin’ A,” I growled, to throw him off the track. “Fuckin’ A. Let’s pick up some bimbos and—”
“Eight o’clock.”
“Gotta watch the Jets game.”
“That’s football. This is summer. They don’t play football in—”
“Take him to Carlo!” I think I was beginning to scream. “Or—”
“Are you going to help me or not?”
Shattered, I collected the pieces of myself and shrugged. “Anytime.”
“Eight.”
At eight, Dennis Savage introduced me to a slender kid with floppy black hair, a blond’s skin, and the most helpless cute appeal I’ve clocked yet. “Pay dirt,” I—almost—said, as we shook hands.
“This is Little Kiwi,” said Dennis Savage.
“No, Virgil Brown,” said the kid.
I thought it over, surveying him. “No,” I said. “Little Kiwi.”
I served coffee—Little Kiwi wanted ice cream in his—and we talked of this and that. It was my job to get a bead on him, but he said little. He looked around a lot. He admired the antique model car that sits on my desk. He appeared to be perhaps fifteen, and was dressed in clothes designed to look like posters and menus. There was writing of some kind on every corner of him—we suppressed
that
damn fast—and, in all, the little he gave out revealed a young man unknowing, shy, and fearful. Later on, it turned out he was twenty and had done two years of junior college before coming east. But the oddest damn things spurred his fancy. A friend had given me an out-of-season pumpkinhead carving, and Little Kiwi asked me why it was smiling.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“But I think I know.”
He looked at me the way some waif might have looked at Horatio Alger the evening he launched his series of waif-makes-good novels. “Why?” I asked.
“He’s smiling because he likes me.”
I fought down the urge to pat Little Kiwi’s head and went on playing the cocktail dandy with the two of them, but my mind was traveling. Are youths supposed to remind us of our own dear emergence? Or: was
I
that raw? This is the city of the debonair, is it not? Apparently unaware that one of our cardinal givens is that one does not eat four consecutive frozen Milky Ways out of the fridge of a man you just met that night (me), Little Kiwi ran on like a movement of one of those toy symphonies of Reinecke’s day, with a plunk here and tinkle there. And finally everyone stopped talking. And Dennis Savage looked at Little Kiwi. And Little Kiwi looked at Dennis Savage, and how he looked was apprehensive. I felt
de trop
in my own apartment.
So I threw them out, and, at the door, as he shook my hand, Little Kiwi suddenly said, rather quietly, “I just wanted to be sure we were friends first,” and he was looking at me but somehow he sent the message to Dennis Savage. Then they went upstairs to Dennis Savage’s place and I didn’t see him for three days. So it appeared that they had indeed become … friends.
And friends they stayed, which made it all admirably domestic, though it was some doing getting Little Kiwi out of his midwestern clownsuits and into something fit for life in the cultural capital. He took our advice in good faith, but there was a very great deal he didn’t know, and sometimes, when things were explained to him, he became upset. You never knew how anything would hit him. A host of subjects, most of them sex but also talk of nuclear war and almost any social theory, would send him running to Dennis Savage like a lost babe found. And of course I would then get hell for the dread crime of Being Sophisticated With Little Kiwi.
Our circle in general found him amusing. All right, he was of age, but he
looked
so young; and he could find a turbulent whimsy in almost anything, as a child does. The rest of us brunched and dished, interpreted, analyzed. Little Kiwi romped and frolicked. In his life, the most risible acts were made conversant with the most sensible—as when he took pity on a stray dog and took him back to Dennis Savage’s. Little Kiwi had had enough presence of mind to stop off on the way to secure food and plateware and even rubber toys, and he gave the dog a rather chic name, all considered: Bauhaus. (A bunch of us had been talking over Weimar at dinner the week before.) But the dog turned out to be eerie and pointless and klutzy, sort of a Carmen Miranda in Polish. Not long after Bauhaus moved in, I dropped in to find him parading around in one of those cardboard neck ruffs that vets put on animals to control their scratching a sore.
“What’s going on here?” I asked.
Dennis Savage made a defeated gesture.
“Bauhaus saw an Airedale wearing that,” Little Kiwi explained, “and he wanted one, too.”
“Yes, o queen,” I said, bowing to Bauhaus, “it shall be done as you command!”