[Fiction]

[Some Men Are Lookers Cover]

From "The Hunt for Red October"

By Ethan Mordden

"No, I like Roy," Dennis Savage was saying. "Look, he's spirited and friendly and youthful and even smart, and those are useful qualities in a neighbor. I just don't understand why he's always going on about cock, and big-hung, and giant meat, and so on."

"Ask him yourself," I said. "He's coming up for a coffee date in about ten minutes."

"Well, haven't you noticed? I swear, he can turn any conversation over to his favorite -- indeed, dare I suggest?, only -- topic within three exchanges, without a single non sequitur. How does he do it?"

Roy is one of the new young gay guys who are starting to take over our building. When Dennis Savage and (shortly after) I moved in, sometime before the Spanish-American War, the entire apartment house was straight but for us and the closeted old grouch in 11-I. But during the last few years a striking number of gays have joined us, including a few lookers and one out-and-out hunk who seems to have sparked fantasies in Virgil and Cosgrove. He has become known to them as Presto.

"Then there's Roy's wistful little pal," Dennis Savage went on. "So polite, so yearning, so resigned. He's like a scream of agony too well brought up to let itself be heard."

"Well, Nicky's got a case on Roy," I said, getting out the cheese-and-crackers tray.

"A case? Like Israel had on Eichmann. He's up to ears in the love of his life, and Roy doesn't notice and couldn't care less."

"What happened to all the cheeses I bought?" I called out from the fridge. "There was a Brie, a Gruyere, and a Stilton."

"I ate the little pie one," Cosgrove answered from the living room. "And Bauhaus was starting in on the Stilton."

"Who invited Bauhaus down here?" I asked Dennis Savage while examining what was left of the Stilton. "He's your dog."

"You're not going to offer that to Roy, are you?" asked Dennis Savage. "God knows where those jaws have been."

"I'll just trim off the -- "

"Nicky," said Dennis Savage, shaking his head. "If there was ever someone born to doom and gloom." He followed me and the cheese tray into the living room. "He reminds me of that pathetic little drudge in Les Mis, what's-her-name, who dies in the rain."

"Funette," Cosgrove puts in.

"Yes, Funette. And such an apt name, because in fact she..." No, that didn't seem right, did it? "Funette?"

"I think you mean Eponine," I said.

"Of course, Eponine!" Dennis Savage whirled on Cosgrove, who was reviewing his CD collection. "So who's Funette supposed to be?"

"Now you'll never be sure," Cosgrove coolly replied, rearranging the CDs in the wooden display case he insisted I buy him -- four feet tall, two feet wide, and I have no idea where we'll put it. Besides, Cosgrove owns only five CDs as yet -- a Skinny Puppy single, the 8-1/2 soundtrack, the Swedish cast of The Phantom of the Opera, the Riccardo Muti Symphonie Fantastique, and a Kate Bush album that Cosgrove swears he found lying on a sidewalk somewhere. He is very earnest about his CDs. He wants to become an aficionado, to be known for his taste, his energy in unearthing the arcane and wondrous. Having folded himself into my manner of living unquestioningly, he now wants to break out and discover something of his own. So he has refused to let me give him CDs or suggest key titles. He probes my expertise, yes, but mostly he consults reviews and catalogs and spends hours in stores and (his venue of choice) flea markets, examining, weighing, wondering.

I like this. I am sympathetic to anyone who surrenders his independence in worship of the unjust and vindictive god Demento, mythological idealization of fathers, and all known mythologies are hetereosexually man-made. But Demento has his campy side. he likes to be thought of as dread, yet he'll materialize in a Sabu take-a-peek loincloth and Rochelle Hudson fuck-me-or-I'll scream-the-place-down wedgies. Cosgrove fears and serves him. "Is it rare enough?" he worried when he considered buying the Swedish Phantom on a visit to the show buff's specialty shop, Footlight Records. I told him, "It's outlandishly expensive, it's incomprehensible, and it's available in only two places in the entire world: this store and Sweden." Still Cosgrove pondered. Then I said, "Just think, no more than five or six Americans will own that album. This is unique."

"I'm coming, Demento!" cried Cosgrove. He blew his bank account on it -- double disc CDs imported from Sweden run to fifty bucks or so. But Demento was content.

So was I, because collecting is building Cosgrove's confidence. When he and I first crossed paths, he had no facade, no protection. The slightest challenge dismayed him. Now, when I tell him that the Klondike people package their ice-cream sandwiches in boxes of four so that we can enjoy a treat on four different occasions -- as opposed to eating right through a box in a single sitting, then testing one's bedmate by groaning and holding one's stomach all night -- he says, "Demento lured me on." He says, "Too much is never enough." He says, "I suffered, you didn't."

Then there's his going-to-the-showers gambit -- and, while we're at it, his "Great Moments from Movie Cinema" (as he terms it) act. Looking innocent, Cosgrove will approach the uninitiated, then suddenly wobble his hands about his ears as he writhes and screams, in the James Dean manner, "'You're tearing me apart!'"

I've told him how disconcerting this can be; but when he feels too deeply chided he marches into the bathroom and turns on the shower. The noise locks out a reproachful world, and he actually gets under the water, washing the difficulty away. Fresh and clean, he comes out as if nothing had happened.

"Funette," Dennis Savage muttered, one eye on Cosgrove. "He slips in Funette, and I bought it."

Doorbell; enter Roy. Roy merrily says, "Did anyone see the gay porn clips on the sex channel last night? The guy with the whopper dick in the living room scene? Did you scope that?"

Dennis Savage made a helpless gesture: See what I mean? Cosgrove pointed out his CD display case, Roy called it "nifty," and within twenty seconds he was going on about veins and how much they add to a "truly elegant dick structure."

"Cosgrove's already scarfed up the Brie," I said, presenting the cheese, "but there's Gruyere and -- "

"Watch out for the Stilton," Dennis Savage stage-whispered.

"Now, here's the true thing," said Cosgrove. "Should my next purchase be a complete opera, the kind that comes in this box with a booklet like a whole portfolio? Or should I catch up on my rock classics?"

"There's so much life here," Roy observed, as he crackered up some Gruyere. "That's what I like about you guys."

"For instance," Cosgrove continued. "Should I lay in some Wagner? is the question."

"Yes, laying in. The feel of some tightboy's enormous, jizz-spurting cucumber as it very slowly plays into you, " said Roy, in the serenely reckless tone of the New Waver for whom sex talk, no matter how lurid, is to be taken as a formal element of liberation. "You're stretched out and ready. Psyched for it. Then...first, that delicious trembling as the head presses against your rim. People don't think of this, but it's all geometry. The line of your body diagramed on the bed, the triangular head and its tubular mass generating a logic of -- "

"Where's Nicky?" Cosgrove asked.

Well, that stopped him. "How should I know?"

"You're always together."

"Are we? I hadn't noticed."

Dennis Savage cleared his throat. "You're more or less inseparable," he said. "At least, to the naked eye."

Roy laughed -- a touch nervously, I thought. "Or to two naked cowboys," he said. "They were dozing, but then they get up and find a pair of thin white-linen drawstring pants. So one of them tries them on, and the other helps him, you know, adjusting the waistband, admiring the jut of his buddy's behind. So the guy in the pants get hot, while his cowboy friend rubs his neck to loosen him up. Then his hands steal around and pull the string, and the pants immediately sag to the floor, revealing -- "

"How can you tell they're cowboys," said Cosgrove, "if they're naked?"

"They'd still have their Stetsons on."

"I," Dennis Savage begin, in his careful mode, "always think these fetishist fantasies are like the haikus that fourteen-year-old girls write. For your eyes only."

"No, it can be very everyday as well," Roy replied. "Just your standard date. He says, 'Let's get naked.' And his zipper pulls down on a whopper, big-time. Instantly, the mind clears of its trash. The truth of the partnership is...Figure it." He paused, eyes half-closed, savoring the moment. "This prince, this tyrant. This wolfling about to...to stuff your cream tunnel with -- "

Roy halted as Cosgrove jumped up, went into the bathroom, and turned on the shower.

"Did I say something?"

"Try the Stilton," Dennis Savage urged.

The doorbell again. Now Virgil joined us, waving a brown paper bag like Churchill flashing victory fingers.

"Look at this contest I'm entering!" he crowed. "I could win fifty dollars!"

Out of the bag came a romance comic book; the contest, flourished on the cover and detailed on the last page, called for a brief essay on the theme of "My Dream Man."

"It's surely open only to pubescent girls," I put in.

"It doesn't say so."

"It assumes so, because that's who the readership is."

"I'm entering anyway. I even bought a composition book and an extra-fine-tipped pen. Hi, Roy. Where's Nicky?"

Hopping onto the couch, Virgil fished a spiral notebook and pen out of the paper bag, murmured, "My dream man..." and dug in.

"I wish people didn't lump me with Nicky all the time," Roy grumbled. "He's one friend out of many that I have. And he's so...you know."

Dennis Savage said, "No, tell."

"Well, sure, IÕm fond of him in his way, but he's this kind of asexual, isn't he? Try standing around in a bar with him sometime. He never wants to talk about the guys and scope them out. You'll spot some really fly number and speculate as to the size and weight of the junk he carries, and Nicky just...he just..."

"Doesn't really care?" Dennis Savage asked. "Do you find that aberrant?"

"Oh, please. There are only two kinds of gays -- size queens and liars."

"I am not a liar," said Dennis Savage, "and I'm also not a size queen -- although I can be impressed. I don't know how many kinds of gays there are, but even the four males in this room are completely different from each other."

"And wait till Cosgrove comes in," Virgil added, looking up from his notebook.

"Kinds of gays?" Dennis Savage went on. "I don't know if there are kinds of gays any more than there are kinds of people."

"I've offended you, haven't I?" said Roy.

"I'm always offended when someone assumes that his taste is my taste. I also find this romanticizing of size questionable in an age in which fucking and sucking are fatally risky. This is seventies material. It suits coming out and beginning to comprehend the expanse of male sexuality. But that was an experimental age. This is an embattled age. Today, your icon is poison."

I asked, "Who wants more coffee?," and Cosgrove rejoined us, prompting Virgil to do a little number on the Dream Man contest. Cosgrove expressed a thrill or two and we talked of any old thing till Roy blurted out, "Look, everybody, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to expose you all to my...I thought you...I mean, who doesn't feel this way? Isn't cock the center of male sexuality?"

Dennis Savage and I were silent, Virgil was deep in composition, and Cosgrove was reshelving his CDs, to study the effect from different parts of the room.

"I'm sorry," Roy repeated. "I should be more low-key about it, I guess." He shrugged. "Everybody's got something."

"That much is true," said Dennis Savage. "I gay-bashed a classmate on Halloween when I was a teenager."

Virgil came to life with, "I hid my sister Anne's Barbie Goes Camping accessories in the Victrola in the garage and didn't tell her where they were for seven years."

"I peed off the roof last Tuesday," said Cosgrove.

I was lying low in the kitchen, safe from Truth or Dare. By the time I returned, with a bowl of miniature pears and Rome apples, the air had cleared and Roy was about to go.

"I'll have to give a dinner," he said. "Because you guys were so helpful when I moved in and all." As he shook our hands, he said, "It's a gay thing, right? Support group and like that."

"Make sure Nicky's there," Virgil called out from the sofa, and Roy said, "Oh, count on it, because he'll do the cooking. He's very handy for those things the rest of us...you know, can't be bothered with."

Cosgrove was holding the door and Roy gave him a pat on the butt as he passed. Suddenly Cosgrove grew wary, enigmatic. "'Is it safe?'" he asked, almost whispering to himself.

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