[Fiction]

[Some Men Are Lookers cover]

From "The Music of the Night"

By Ethan Mordden

Have I ever mentioned that I play the banjo?

Quite some years ago, in my days as an off-Broadway music director, I coached the teenage son of a producer and an actress I worked with, in preparation for some music exam that he had to pass to get into Dublin University. In return, he gave me banjo lessons and helped me find an ax of my own -- a Fender, no less, secondhand, in splendid condition.

The producer was wealthy, with a gigantic apartment on Central Park West; each of his kids had not only his own room but his own terrace, and the boy and I would sit outside of an afternoon and trade jokes as I mastered "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" and "The Groundhog Hunt."

I'm rusty now, but every so often I haul out the banjo and take it for a spin. Cosgrove, who found it fascinating from day one, kept trying to sing along, improvising lyrics when the folklore failed him. He hit some sort of apex with "Camptown Races":

Cosgrove's tired 'cause he slept too late.
Doo-dah, doo-dah.
Chicks with dicks are a heavy date --

and I immediately put the banjo in his lap and taught him some chords. If he's busy playing, maybe he won't sing.

(When neither Virgil nor I am around to stop him, Cosgrove parks himself in front of the erotic cable channel, where he incubates an obsession for "chicks with dicks" -- preoperative transsexuals -- waiting hours, if necessary, for a glimpse of this ultra-contemporary phenomenon.)

Oddly, Cosgrove, who usually can't find anything he can do without fumbling, is a decent rudimentary banjo artist. With the instrument tuned to G Major, Cosgrove can muster a worth D7 and quite a competent "bar 5" (for which one places the finger flat across the fretwork at the fifth bar, lining the strings up in C Major), all together giving him the wherewithal for at times quite lengthy concerts.

Of course, Virgil will not be left at the hitching post when the latest Pony Express is mounting up, so I had to show him some chords, too. Then you get the Bremen Town Musicians in residence on your sofa.

Virgil and Cosgrove were down here all the time, because Dennis Savage was trying to become a writer and he needed a silence, a room of his own, to create in. I didn't mind; I wasn't working much. After publishing twenty-one books in fourteen years, I was discovering the joys of CD liner notes and magazine work: You write a few pages, announce, This is finished, and take the rest of the month off.

Anyway, the kids had also taken up the pleasures of the CD, especially my portable Sony D-10, a tiny box that hums with Beethoven, Wagner, and show tunes. You juice up the machine in the wall, plug in two headsets, plant Virgil and Cosgrove with the player between them, and enjoy the peace -- broken at intervals, when they suddenly join in on a line they like, such as "In the tea, my Lord," and "Don't ask me how at my age one still can grow," and , in Show Boat (which they adore because it has a prominent banjo part), "Maybe that's because you love me." They stare off into space when singing out these lines; it's quite bizarre.

Actually, many things in my apartment have long delighted and attracted them: the wind-up Victrola, my high school yearbooks, my old French Meccano building set (which they love to take out and examine but never literally play with). Still, the jewel in the crown is always the banjo. When I played, they would hover, watching my fingers and singing along. They even danced, an improvisational combination of do-si-do and the finale of A Chorus Line, Virgil's favorite musical. For novelty, I showed them how to turn the banjo into the Japanese koto by stopping the fretwork way at the bottom of the fingerboard, where the strings sound high and diffuse.

This they loved.

"The koto!" Virgil breathed out.

"Teach me, now," said Cosgrove.

I did teach them; and Virgil decided to buy his own banjo, so I took him down to Matt Umanov's on Bleecker Street and helped him pick one out. That night, Dennis Savage banged at my door, shouting, "I'm going to kill you!"

He was coming down a lot, too, to show me his pages and take criticism, resisting all the way. Usually the kids are deep in their CDs when he arrives, but one evening they got out the banjos to show him what they could do.

"Play some Sondheim," he suggested, probably figuring that of all the composers, Sondheim is the least banjo-friendly.

He underestimated the possibilities. Virgil plunged into the first bars of Pacific Overtures (on the koto) and stamped on the floor.

"Nippon!" Cosgrove howled. "The froating kingdom!"

"No," Dennis Savage suddenly begged in a poignant manner. "No."

"We froat," Cosgrove concluded, cutting to the last line of the number.

Dennis Savage was floored. "I didn't think you could play show music on the banjo."

"We can play anything," said Virgil.

"How about 'Over the Hills and Far Away'?"

"Actually," I said, " you can play show tunes on the banjo. For instance, harp effect." I ran through the chords of "(Everything is beautiful) At the Ballet."

Virgil was humming; he knows his art. Cosgrove tried a line: "Raise your arms, and there's a dying swan!" This is not pure Kleban. And Dennis Savage was contemplating all of us, and our past and future. He does this pretty often now; time has made his melancholy avid.

"'I was pretty,'" he sang.

"'I was happy,'" Virgil sang.

"I was Cosgrove," Cosgrove sang; but someone was banging on my door.

"Guess who I saw at the gym today!" Carlo cried as I let him in.

"Give us a hint," said Dennis Savage.

"Someone you've met. Incredible-looking. Redhead's complexion with hair half-blond and half brown at one time. You keep looking at it, want to smooth down that hair. Beautiful strange, everything tight and trim, thighs, tips, abs, mustache. Clone of death. Especially how he carries himself, swaggering around like he invented rimming."

Dennis Savage was stumped.

Cosgrove said to Virgil, "I bet it's one of those chicks with dicks."

Virgil said, "Cosgrove"; and Cosgrove was abashed.

"Clone of death," I put in. "Are people like that still around?"

"This one is," Carlo answered. "That whole weight room was in a hypnotic state. He was taking turns at the weight bench with some cute little mud puppy who wanted to do some innocent flirting. But our man suddenly starts feeling the kid up. Everybody's watching. And the guy tells the kid, "I could get high on your cream. I want to fuck you like crack."

"Jeepers," I said.

"Someone we've met?" Dennis Savage repeated.

"We all knew him. Some time ago."

"And he's still -- "

"He's stiller. He was never like this before, he's new! He's tough and he's tight and he'll take no prisoners."

"I insist upon guessing this," said Dennis Savage.

"Look at it this way," said Carlo. "He could also be one of your maybe B or B-plus hunks, junior slim grade, always having boyfriend fights with Scott Hellman."

"That's Bert Hicks," said Dennis Savage. "I mean, half of the description is Bert Hicks. The other half is...who?" "He says he's all Bert Hicks. But he's surely got someone else's eyes. You know? Like he's been having nothing but the most evil sex for ten years. And like where did Bert Hicks get that shithouse build on him?"

"Gyms are public places," I said. "Anyone may enter."

"Builds like this don't happen in public."

"Not to Bert Hicks," Dennis Savage agreed. "And where'd he get the heavy eyes from? No one knew that about him before."

"No one knew anything about him before," said Carlo. "He wasn't the kind of guy you needed to know about."

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