How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle Read Online Free PDF Page A

my hand, he wrapped it around the glass to hold it for him so he could show me how he did it.
    “Now that cunt is down, and that’s all she wrote! ”
    He was almost panting with anger, his face flushed, his eyes fireworks.
    “That’s all she wrote, ” he insisted, retrieving his drink. “And let’s hear from you now.”
    “I’m happy you’re here,” I told him. “I’m happy you raid my fridge when you’re hungry. I’m happy you trust me.”
    Taken aback, he slowly wound up to “Say something about what I told you.”
    “It’s good that you weren’t hurt.”
    Thinking that over, he pressed the glass into my hands. “You drink,” he said.
    “It’s too early.”
    “Just a sip, real personal, as a favor to me.”
    So I did.
    “Right,” he said, reaching over to take the glass and put it down.
    “Can I get away with this?” I asked, putting my hands on him. I wanted to know what something that big and free felt like. His heart was still pumping heavily, but otherwise he was still and almost welcoming.
    When we broke, he said, “I have to be somewhere.”
    I smiled. “Quincy?”
    “Business.” And off he goes.
    I went right up to Dennis Savage, who had finally invested in a photo album and was sorting through an epoch of loose photographs.
    “Should it run chronologically?” he asked. “By categories? Relatives, trips, tableaux vivants, tricks? Does one organize it by type, do you think?”
    “The big guys, first of all,” I suggested. “Especially the ones with big personalities.”
    He gives me his satiric look as he starts arranging his pictures in piles. “Someone’s been on another coffee date with Ivanhoe and got all amazed again. Here’s one of you in drag.”
    Horrified, I grabbed it—no, it was just the Grand Canyon and some Boy Scouts, young Dennis Savage among them. Recounting what I’d just heard in my place, I began helping him sort.
    “He was testing you, of course,” said Dennis Savage.
    “That story, you mean?”
    Setting down a series of family shots, he said, “Midwestern farmboy from a very narrow society where everyone has the same value system arrives in the total city where society is a mix. Where some people treat values they don’t share with savage attacks. He has an evil run-in with a street crazy, and when he tells of his adventure, some react unsympathetically. With accusations, even. How dare he not show compassion, tolerance, or the leftist’s favorite posture, passivity? Why, his … his violence, isn’t it? His moral primitivism! His outrageous act of self-defense! It is forbidden in the total city.”
    I said, “Why is he so special? It’s Stonewall, and we’re overrun with tall and handsome and built and hung. Some nights in the Eagle, it’s like—”
    “Hair. Nipples. Forearms.”
    That stopped me.
    “Your friend so special why is he?” he went on. “One, he’s got crazy hair that’s smooth and soft yet seems to edge up into the air so that it more or less shimmers over him. It’s wonderful. It’s implausible.”
    He shuffled through the visual record of his family life for a moment. Aimlessly, just doing it. Punctuation, maybe.
    “Two, his nipples are big red circles with heavy white spiking. Is it sexy or freakish? He’s too something. As if he’d sprouted out of the earth, like a carrot. And three, where did he get those gigantic forearms? He’s Popeye. He’s a cartoon. In fact  … he’s a fantasy. Quick, what’s his name?”
    “You say Rip,” I replied. “But he told me to call him Carlo.”
    “See? Ripley Smith is his name. Carlo’s his hustling name. That’s what you want to connect with—a fantasy.”
    “Or is fantasy the gay equivalent of what straights call ‘sin’? Isn’t it simply that he has a lot of sexual content?”
    “He has a lot of emotional content, which he is using sex to explore, as blindly as possible. He is, I repeat, a fantasy.”
    “He’s not a fantasy. He only looks like