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 [Fiction]


 [Some Men Are Lookers cover]

From "What a Difference Miss Faye Made"

By Ethan Mordden



(The story thus far: Dennis Savage, having sold his first book to a rather tweedy young gay editor, Peter Keene, has planned a dinner party for him in hopes to impress him. Though under strict orders to behave from the narrator, Bud, Cosgrove has other plans...)

Peter looked unhappy, the doorbell rang, Cosgrove answered it, and a drag queen entered, Kind Three. I mean with a Marie Antoinette wig, a nobody-gets-out-of-here-alive bust, makeup by Jackson Pollock, and a walk right out of Kitten with a Whip.

"Miss Faye!" Cosgrove cried. "You came!"

"That's just what Arnold Schwarzenegger said to me," she replied, "at about two o'clock last night in his -- and I do mean -- master bedroom."

She surveyed the joint, posed, said, "Who's the dearie with the big eyes?"

"That's Virgil. This is Bud, and that's some editor."

Dennis Savage, at the kitchen entryway, was going deeply rose as Miss Faye sashayed (I'd never seen anyone quite do that verb before) up to Virgil and stroked his hair, passed me making moue-lips, and parked herself before Peter. She read him up and down real slow, then purred out, "I'm a devout Mennonite, you know."

Peter was pretty rose himself. He asked me, "Do I shake hands?"

Cosgrove was looking at Dennis Savage as Iago must have looked at Desdemona; and we all caught the feel of the moment and looked at Dennis Savage ourselves. His ball.

"I'm Dennis Savage," he said. "This is my house. Please honor it." Then he went back into the kitchen.

"Who's the telegram?" Miss Faye asked.

I was shooting daggers at Cosgrove, who glared back defiantly, treacherously, independently. I liked him about as much, that moment, as my parents liked me the day I set fire to the gazebo chairs and fed my little brother Tony raw eggs (unshelled), all in one afternoon.

"Let's all sit and be nice," Virgil suggested. "We'll each tell a funny story about childhood."

"Oh, yes," sighed Miss Faye, settling into the armchair." Getting so deeply shrewed by Father O'Halloran in the choiry, and he was ever a hairy beast, but lean and jazzy." She smiled. "Ah, the blossom time." She turned eagerly to Peter. "Now to you, handsome yet secretly warped type in a suit. Who shrewed you in your teens? The full list, I please, and photographs where possible."

After a moment, Peter said, "I'm not warped."

"You're warped and jazzy, 'tis clear to see," Miss Faye rejoined, erasing Peter's resistance with a wave of her hand. "How you long to be shrewed by some rash Viking with a secret soft side. His surprising tenderness will rock you to the core, and ever after you -- as I -- will dream of this enticing combo of kindness and slaughter, symbolized in the rigid prong that -- "

"This is not a funny story about childhood," Virgil pointed out, with a nervous glance at the kitchen, where Dennis Savage was making a racket banging platters around.

"Right," I said, ready to drag out my tired old tale of breaking my mother's antiques in defiance of oppression, or at least early bedtime. It was my personal Stonewall at the age of five. But Peter seemed to light up just then, perhaps feeling he should get over resenting Miss Faye and start making the gay scene. "I've got a story," he said. "I could tell about Brokertoe."

"Yes, let's hear that, " said Virgil, looking happily expectant.

"Well, it's...it's just this old story," said Peter, in the self-deprecating manner of an amateur who has taken the floor amid a host of pros. "It was a painting I made in school. Kindergarten, I guess. Well, yes, and you see Brokertoe was a robot. And the class voted it the -- "

"How did she break her toe?" Miss Faye asked.

"Well, it was...it's just a name. I called the robot Brokertoe because...well -- "

"Isn't someone hungry around here?" said Miss Faye. "Where's the food?" She turned to Peter. "Go on with such a fascinating story, and try to include a footnote on why a pale, dim, square type like you has such big shoulders."

Peter did that silent blinking thing. Then: "Well, so I took my prize painting home, feeling so proud and perky, and I called my family in, all five of them." He smiled. "One brother, two sisters. And I unveiled my -- "

"Erect penis," Miss Faye filled in, "sending my sisters into paroxysms and my brother into a bitter tizzy."

Peter was blinking again.

"It would be best not to interrupt the story," Virgil suggested.

"Peter," I said, as soothingly as possible. "Tell."

"Oh, right, then!" he cried, suitably heartened. "It's a terribly vital ghetto party and we're all..."

"Out," said Miss Faye, dryly.

"...living in a musical comedy, I was going to say. Anyway, I announced to them all there assembled that I wanted to see my picture on the wall next to the prize of my parent's art collection, a Renaissance etching, of unknown authorship, depicting Hercules and Coccus."

"Well, how big was his coccus?" Miss Faye cried -- no, screamed. "Not bigger than yours, I fancy. Hercules -- the heart flutters. But I go for the deep, silent sort, like you, with a coccus that juts to the side. Or shall it curve, I hope?"

Staring, Miss Faye kissed her lips at Peter so obscenely that he defensively got to his feet; and of course just then Cosgrove came out of the bedroom with the raccoon and threw it right at Peter's head.

Let me explain. Last summer, at a street fair, Cosgrove was captivated by a risible novelty item, a simulation of a raccoon rummaging in a potato chip bag. All you see of the animal is its tail; but with the batteries in place the thing seems remarkably lifelike.

Obviously, Cosgrove had planted it in Dennis Savage's apartment. When Cosgrove came out of the bedroom shouting, "Help! The raccoon is loose!" and tossed it at Peter, a certain amount of hell broke out. Dennis Savage came roaring out of the kitchen, Cosgrove cried "Yipes!" and fled to the bathroom, and it took considerable wheedling and begging on both Virgil's and my part to convince Peter to forgive it as a childish stunt.

In fact, once we explained that Cosgrove's true target was Dennis Savage, Peter not only calmed down but became curious.

"You see," he said, "the stories attract me precisely because of their sly undercurrent of dissatisfaction. At first, we see a group of men who enjoy their gayness to the fullest. Not only do they have no wish that they were straight, but...Oh, thanks, splendid" -- as Dennis Savage passed out refills on the drinks and settled in for Making Peter Feel at Home. "Yes, they seem clearly to be having a more successful life because they're gay. It's quite inspiring. And yet." Peter leaned closer to us to Make His Point. "It is the very limitless nature of this paradise that provides extraordinary tensions -- the sheer physical competition of who gets whom, the anxiety of losing power through aging -- "

"Yes!" cried Miss Faye, who had sat quietly through all the excitement and was now absently petting the raccoon's tail and mouthing up the ice from her drink with insidiously loud crunches. "We must learn to make the fashion sacrifice."

Peter hesitated, then decided to pursue this line of inquiry. "Now, how do you mean that, Miss Faye?"

Preening, Miss Faye made little cooing noises, and I got worried. Old-guard drag queens like Miss Faye are essentially tempestuous, not socialized, and I feared she might be hoaxing him when she spoke, as now, with the delicacy of a schoolmarm trying to slide through the chapter on Reproduction in the sixth graders' biology text.

"The drag queen, you see," Miss Faye began, "was put on earth to symbolize the contradictions of the homosexual. Yes. Yes, true." She's so smiley, so considering. "We are women, yet we are men. We have sexual needs, yet we hide them in banter. Our dreams? Ecstatic. Yet our dialogue is trash. We revel in costume, to your despair -- and how do you see us? As spoof. Who led the Stonewall revolution? Drag queens, look it up. Yet we are the lowest in the Stonewall pecking order, despised by he-men and feared -- yes, I dare to say it -- by you university types."

She seemed demure now, dainty, the princess of the Junior Prom; Peter was intrigued. He took up her thoughts, she expounded further, he quizzed her, and Dennis Savage was nearly beaming when he popped out to announce the imminent serving of dinner; so I slipped off to check on Cosgrove.

He was napping in the empty bathtub. I woke and scolded him. "You promised to behave," I said.

"Yes, but I didn't say how."

Copyright © l997, Ethan Mordden.



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