On the Other Hand, Death

5

Word had spread among Albany gays about the incident at Dot Fisher's, and nearly fifty of them who'd seen the six o'clock news showed up at the Gay Community Center to be harangued by Fenton McWhirter. Two hours later, twelve had actually signed up for the gay national strike. Twelve thousand were needed to make an impact locally, but McWhirter took what he could get. Donations for the strike campaign added up to $37.63.

I phoned Dot's house from the center and was told by her that yet another threatening call had been received. "Death to the dykes on Moon Road!" was what the caller had said, then hung up.

Dot and Edith were in the kitchen with Dot's friend Lew Morton seated by the back door and an APD patrolman just outside. Dot sounded shaky but controlled and said she'd be just fine until Peter arrived at midnight to look after things.

At the center, I also picked up a phone message from Timmy. His car had broken down and he'd meet me later, up the avenue, the message said. I thought, For sure.

I looked for Peter Greco, and at ten o'clock I joined him and McWhirter and six other leafleting volunteers as we piled into my car and McWhirter's and headed toward Central Avenue to further signal the revolt.

The sultry streets were alive with sweating crowds, and the bars even hotter and more chaotic, but revolt did not seem imminent. There was a blurry, enervated feeling to the night. I couldn't tell whether this resulted from the suffocating heat or from the simple fact that these were now the eighties, a decade in which, so far, most people, straight and gay, couldn't quite settle on what to do next and so didn't do much of anything at all. It was the fifties all over again, except with Reagan this time, and the New Right, the AIDS epidemic, and the Bomb multiplied ten thousandfold. It was the age of nervously milling around.

The music in the discos that night was no help: cold, sarcastic punk stuff that kept only the dance junkies sporadically on the floor. I'd heard the old funky, sensuous, friendly dance music of the seventies was still alive and well in Manhattan-preserved in West Village private clubs, like family genealogies in a Mormon vault-but on this night Albany didn't even seem to have the energy for nostalgia. The music did seem louder than usual, as if more were better, but the higher volume didn't help either. At Coco-nuts, the ersatz South Seas disco where the Lacoste crowd hung out, even the tropical fish in the aquarium seemed to be clapping little fish hands over their ears.

Nor did Fenton McWhirter's presence anywhere cause enthusiasm to break out. Most people received the flyers and leaflets cordially, then studied them, and you could see their eyebrows shoot up at the point where they got the drift of what the leaflets were asking them to commit themselves to. One person asked McWhirter if he'd lost his marbles, but the rest only thought it.

There was only "incident." At the Watering Hole, McWhirter screwed up the pool shot of a golden-maned, mean-eyed, drugged-up "cowboy"-who could well have been a real one, in town after the drive from Abilene to Schenectady, as he smelled powerfully of the stockyards.

Or, it could have been a new scent, Shitkicker, from the makers of Brut. The cowboy grabbed 26

McWhirter by the scruff of the neck and instructed him to "get your faggot ass outta my way," but I rapidly separated the two, and Greco placated the cowboy with a rum and coke and gamely attempted to recruit him. The cowboy suddenly recognized McWhirter and Greco from the TV news, and Greco's pitch did seem to set some wheels spinning in his mind, but he said his parish priest wouldn't like it and he didn't sign up.

At the Green Room, McWhirter worked the backroom disco while Greco made his way into the smog of beer breath and smoke of the front-room piano bar. I tagged along with Greco into the crowd of alcoholic fifties queens up front, even though the room had always made me uncomfortable. The problem was, I always left with the nagging feeling that I belonged there.

The yellow-haired cowboy from the watering Hole came in just after Greco and I did. He peered around, seemed to decide that he didn't belong there at all, and fled back into the night.

At the piano bar, Greco unexpectedly ran into his old lover of ten years earlier, Tad something-or-other. It seemed to be a night for that. Timmy was still nowhere to be seen.

Greco and Tad were startled to see each other. Their brief conversation was awkward. I didn't listen in, but, trained and inclined to be nosy, I took in what I could by glancing their way from time to time. Tad, who'd been alone at the bar and sullenly preoccupied with a snifter of something warm and murky, grew quickly hostile, and Greco, looking injured and confused, soon retreated.

"An unhappy reunion?" I said.

Greco shrugged, trying to look philosophical, but his dark eyes were bright with hurt.

"You can't go home again," I said, and looked around to see if Timmy had come in the door. He hadn't. "When it's over, it's over. Never apologize, never explain. Never look back, or something might be gaining on you. What are some of the other ones?"

Greco didn't laugh. "Tad asked me for the money back," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. My immediate assumption was that Tad, my age or older, had once "kept" Greco. "All he could talk about," Greco said glumly, "was his lousy three thousand dollars. Of our whole year together, that's the only thing he remembers. God."

"Tad's quite a bookkeeper," I said.

"He never called it a loan then. That's so unfair. It really is. 'Where am I going to get three thousand dollars?' I said. He just said, 'You get it! Before you leave Albany!' It's the only thing he'd talk about. And how his business folded last year and how broke he is these days. Well, jeez.

I'm sorry things aren't going well for Tad, I really am. He deserves better. He was always extremely possessive, but he was also loving, and generous-"

Greco began suddenly to cough and gasp, and said the foul air was bothering him, so we walked out into the oppressive but smokeless night and stood alongside my car.

I said, "Tad took you in when you first came out?"

"Oh, no," Greco said, laughing lightly and breathing more easily now. "It was nothing like that.

I'd been out since I was fourteen and on my own since I was eighteen. Tad was ten years ago. I was twenty-four then and I'd already had several lovers. Tad must have been the-I don't know — fifteenth or twentieth."

Persons of the New Age. When I was twenty-four I was getting my kicks trying to decipher whether or not Ishmael might actually be getting it on with Queequeg.

"I didn't really settle down," Greco went on blithely, "until the year after that when I met Fenton and realized what I wanted to do with my life and who I wanted to do it with. No, the thing with Tad was… he was in love with me, and he paid to have my first volume of poems printed. I was reluctant. I knew I wasn't as crazy about Tad as he was about me. But I was too excited about 27 seeing my work in print to think straight, and I let him do it. I know it cost him a lot of money, but-God, how can somebody be that bitter after ten years?"

"Right. You'd think in all that time a person's feelings about someone would have gone through a lot of changes. Gotten milder, mellower." I watched for Timmy's yellow Chevette to pull in off Central.

"Oh, jeez, it's time," Greco said, glancing at his watch. "I've gotta get back to the house by midnight and stay with Dot and Edith so their friend can go home. Are you coming out for a while?"

I looked at him, wondering if the invitation was significant in a particular way. Being a not unattentive fellow- fifteen or twenty lovers by age twenty-four-he saw my interest.

"We could go out for a swim in the pond and lie down together under the stars," was what I first thought I heard him say, but what Greco actually said was "We could run off some more leaflets and wait for Fenton to get home. The mimeo machine's in the trunk of the car."

Ethics. Had I had them once? Could I again?

I said, "No, thanks. Timmy-my lover-is probably looking for me, so I guess I'll hang around here. I'll be at home later, so call if there's any problem out at Dot's. Otherwise, I'll be out there first thing in the morning."

"I'm glad you're helping us," he said, smiling. "Even if you're on the payroll of the Great Satan."

His eyes shone with their sweet humor, and I wanted again badly to touch him.

"Better not let the Ayatollah Fenton hear you say that," I said. "He still has this crazy idea that just because I'm a minion of Moloch I'm somehow not to be trusted."

"Trust is something you have to earn with Fenton," Greco said. "But once you've got it, you've got it for keeps."

He grinned again, looking as though he were trying to tell me something useful, and wondering if I'd caught on. Then he brushed my cheek with his hand again, the exasperating little shit, and we both went back inside the bar so that he could find McWhirter and get the car keys.

A few minutes later, I watched Greco head back out to the parking lot, and I rejoined McWhirter and the leafleters. They had signed up two men for the GNS at the Green Room, bringing the grand total for the bar tour to six.

By three-fifteen Timmy still had not shown up. By three-thirty I had befriended, in a narrow but specific way, a slender youngish man named Gordon whose black hair was as curly as Greco's, and whose eyes were as dark, though a good bit dimmer, as was the area behind them. At three-forty we pulled into the deserted parking lot of a Washington Avenue institution of higher learning. At three-fifty-one we pulled out again. He asked if I'd mind dropping him off at the Watering Hole, which wouldn't close for another nine minutes, and I did.

"Catch ya later, Ron," he said.

"For sure, Gordon, for sure."

Then I drove home.

The shower wasn't necessary except for purposes of general sanitation and cooling off. I wouldn't even have had to brush my teeth. Or wash both hands. But still I stayed under the cool-tepid spray for a good, cleansing fifteen minutes.

I settled into an easy chair and lit an imaginary cigarette. I wanted a real one and thought about driving over to Price Chopper to pick up a pack; it had been more than four years since I'd been off the killer weed, but what the hell. No, I'd smoke a joint instead, just something to feel the soothing harshness on my throat.

I rummaged around in the freezer, but all the little foil-wrapped packages I opened contained chicken necks. Timmy, the world's only Irish anal-retentive, saving up for a chicken-neck party or some goddamn thing.

A car pulled into the parking lot down below. Zip, back to the easy chair. I opened Swann's Way and sat there frowning toward it, as if I had been absorbed in the book since the second Eisenhower administration, which, intermittently, I had.

His footfall in the corridor. His hair would be mussed, his shirttail out. Cum on his eyebrow.

Anal hickeys.

His key in the lock.

"So, there you are, you elusive devil!" He laid his jacket on the couch and bent to kiss me. "I've been all up and down the avenue since ten-thirty. Everywhere I went I just missed you. You must have left the Green Room about a minute before I got there. Sorry about the screw-up, but my damn radiator sprung a leak. Seems half the cars in Albany overheated today, so I ended up with a rental car for the weekend. How'd it go tonight?"

He was busily climbing out of his Brooks Brothers work clothes, noticing with horror, of course, the jacket he'd just dropped on the couch, and carrying it to the closet, where he smoothed it out and hung it carefully on a wooden hanger.

"Oh, it didn't go too badly," I said, my finger poised with conspicuous impatience on the line in Swann's Way where I'd left off in the spring of 1977.

"I met McWhirter at the Green Room," he said airily, taking off his pants and clamping them authoritatively into a pants hanger. "He didn't think it had gone all that well. He seemed pretty depressed, in fact. In the bars, only five people signed up for his big national strike. No revolt of the masses on Central Avenue."

"Oh, really? You saw him? He told you that? When I left the Green Room at three-thirty, there were already six signed up."

"Yeah," he said, neatly folding his dirty shirt before placing it in the laundry hamper. "But one guy changed his mind and came back and crossed his name off the list. McWhirter had a few choice words for the poor bastard too. It wasn't nice to see. I felt sorry for both of them."

I said, "Oh."

He slipped out of his briefs. His cock was limp, shrunken, exhausted.

"I'm going to take a quick shower," he said casually. What an act. "And then let's fuck. "

I said, "Wait." My heart was thudding and snapping like my office air conditioner.

He turned in the bedroom doorway to face me. I said, "How did your evening go, anyway? With Boyd-boy. You neglected mentioning that."

"Oh, shit," he said, shaking his head and looking wearily amused by it all. "Boyd is such a flake.

I'll tell you all about it in a minute. Just hold on. Boy, do I stink!"

No doubt. He sped into the bathroom to, I assumed, scrub down his eyebrow.

I read in Swann's Way the words "But, whereas" several times, then reinserted the yellowing bookmark. I waited. When I heard the water stop running, I opened the book and reread, "But, whereas."

"But, whereas."

"But, whereas."

"But, whereas."

Timmy came back, theatrically erect. Quite the athlete, Timmy.

"I love your ass, Donald Strachey," he said in a low voice, and dove at me with the concentrated enthusiasm he generally reserved for a misplaced article of clothing.

I said, "Did you and Boyd-boy do it? You know-'it'?

The famous and ever-popular but-still-controversial-in-some-circles 'it'?"

He halted in midair, hung there briefly, then descended to his dumb, ugly puce shag rug I'd never liked.

In a tight little voice, he said, "No. We did not. Boyd and I did not do… 'it.'"

He stood there hot-eyed, waiting, his mind working, not so extravagantly prepossessing below the waist now, but staring hard at me, as if he had just been fucked-in the metaphorical sense this time. A well-rounded evening for Timmy.

I said, "Just thought I'd ask. When you came in you had some kind of goddamn dried white flaky stuff on your eyebrow."

"On my eyebrow. On my eye brow. Ooops," he said, looking mock-guilty and clamping a hand over one eye. Then the anger surged through him and he spat it at me: "Ooops! Ooops, ooops, ooops."

His face was an inch from mine. I turned away. He was sweating, breathing hard, eyes like blue and white saucers.

He said, "Look at me."

I said nothing.

He said, "One of us doesn't trust one of us."

I could feel myself flushing.

He said, "You are the one who doesn't trust one of us.

I knew what was coming.

He said, "You don't trust the one of us who picked up a SUNY student in Price Chopper in June and was seen doing it by Phil Hopkins." Hopkins, that insufferable busybody. "Which aisle was it, lover? I want to know. I want to find out which are the cruisy aisles at Price Chopper in case I ever start doing again what the mistrustful one of us does now. Which aisle is the hot one? Is it fresh produce? Oral dentifrices? Day-old baked goods?"

I looked into his face now. I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it. Then I opened it again and croaked out, "The meat department, naturally. In fact-poultry." He tried not to laugh. I tried not to laugh. We laughed.

We lay together on the comfy puce shag rug and shared a joint. Ever the cautious bureaucrat, he'd hidden it in a pint of Haagen-Dazs boysenberry with a false bottom. We ate the Haagen-Dazs too.

"I apologize," I said.

"Mmm."

"It was me I didn't trust. I knew that. Sort of."

"Uh-huh. So, how many have there been? Since June?"

"I thought you never wanted to know the sordid details."

"A number is not sordid."

That's all he knew. "Since June? Oh… about three."

"Approximately three."

"More or less."

"Uh-huh. More or less."

I said, "Seven."

He sighed, very deeply. "Look, Don," he said. "I don't like it. You know I don't like it. Maybe I shouldn't care. But I care. I'm not a man of the brave new world. You know that. I'm just me, Timothy J. Callahan, an aging kid from St. Mary's parish, Poughkeepsie, and I care.

"But I also know that if you're going to do it, you're going to do it. And apparently you are going to do it. You told me that a long time ago. However," he said, leaning up and looking sadly into my face, "if you're going to do it-and I'm not giving you permission, because you're not a child and I'm not your parent, so I'm not in a position to either give or withhold permission, and as a free adult you're not in a position to ask for it. But, if you are going to do it once in a while, I want to ask two things of you, okay?"

"Ask away."

"One: Don't get herpes or AIDS."

"I promise."

He sighed again. "And, two"-he looked at me wistfully now, with just a lingering trace of bitter resentment-"don't assume, Don, that I'm doing it too."

I said nothing. I couldn't. I knew that it would be so much better for both of us if I changed. And that I wouldn't.

Finally I said, "Gotcha."

"So," he said, going through the motions of relaxing again. "Don't you want to hear about my drink with Boyd?"

"Sure. What was it like?"

"Glorious," he said, grinning. "We went up to his room at the Hilton and fucked the bejesus out of each other."

I slowly turned and studied his face with great care.

"Oh," he said, shrugging. "It didn't mean anything, Don. Hell, it was just for old times' sake. That was all. I mean, it had nothing to do with us."

He couldn't keep a straight face for long-he never could-and when he began to laugh I grabbed him. He'd been ribbing me, the mischievous rascal, I was 93 percent certain.

We were just getting going again, and then, too exhausted to do it, to fall asleep together instead

— when the telephone rang.

I groped onto the end table and snatched down the receiver. "This is Strachey."

"Is Peter with you?"

"Peter? No. Is this… Fenton?"

"Peter's not here. He didn't come home. Where is he?"

"He left the Green Room before midnight, didn't he? In your car. I saw you give him the keys."

"But he's not here!" McWhirter whined, a clear note of fright in his voice. "The cars not here."

"Don't go anywhere. Don't leave Dot and Edith. I'll be there in twenty minutes."

We dressed. As we headed out Central Avenue in my car, I brought Timmy up to date on the day's events at Dot Fisher's. He didn't react much, but he didn't like the sound of any of it.

We pulled into the parking lot at the Green Room. The place was quiet, deserted. One car sat in the far corner of the tarmac lot, McWhirter's old green Fiat. We got out and examined it. The windows were rolled up and the car was empty and locked. The keys were not in the ignition.

As we sped on out Central, dawn broke in a cloudless sky.