I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore Read Online Free PDF Page B

stance and patted Mac’s shoulder. “It’ll be all right. I’m sorry, too. For yelling.”
    Mac hit his chest with a fist and shook his head. “No,” I sounded. “It was my fault.”
    “No—”
    Mac hit himself again.
    “No.” The man grabbed Mac by the shoulders. “No, you … look … I gotta get back to work.” He touched Mac’s nose and gave him a quarter. “Be a good boy, now.”
    Mac smiled and nodded.
    “Right,” I said, after we had walked on a bit. “I’ve been in New York for seven years and I’ve seen, I think, everything. But did that really happen?”
    Mac shrugged benignly.
    “He gave you a quarter!”
    “People like me,” Mac wrote. “I’m nice.”
    “What’s the secret of nice?” I wondered aloud.
    “Forgiving,” he wrote.
    He could have used somewhat more in height and weight, no doubt; it doesn’t do to be quite so boyish after twenty-six. Yet he made it work, for his short and thin suited the grin and the nod. He was the kind of man who could grow a moustache and no one would notice—would see it, even. He was the eternal kid, tirelessly seeking his mate. Fastidious, he wanted true love or nothing. But love is scarce even when forgiveness makes you nice, and I wondered what Mac did to fill in meanwhile, till one afternoon when Dennis Savage and I were hacking around in Mac’s apartment and Mac pulled out the world’s largest collection of porn magazines.
    He did it, typically, to stop a war. Dennis Savage was cranky (as usual) and began to growl at me about something or other. Who knows, now, what? My taste in men? My dislike of travel? The Charge of the Light Brigade? Anyway:
    “I’m going to get a huge dog,” says Dennis Savage. “And you know what I’ll train him to do?”
    Mac touched us urgently, him then me. “Please don’t fight,” I sounded; adding, for myself, “Okay.”
    “Bite up your ass,” Dennis Savage concluded.
    “You don’t need a dog for that, from what I hear.”
    He rose, fuming like Hardy when Laurel puts a fish in his pants, and Mac got between us, scribbling a cease-fire: “Sit down to play Fantasy.” Bemused, we held our peace as he hauled stacks of magazines out of a closet. “I usually play by myself,” he mimed to my sound, “but it works in groups, too.” He handed us each a number, prime porn. “Browse and choose,” he wrote. “Each gets anyone he wants for one night.”
    “Get him,” said Dennis Savage.
    Mac wrote a note just for him: “Pretend!”
    “Where did all this porn come from?” I asked. “It’s like the Decadent Studies Room in the Library of Congress.”
    Mac went through an elaborate mime. “I threw up on the bureau of my aunt?” suggested Dennis Savage.
    Mac made a wry face as he picked up the pad. “It keeps me off the streets,” he wrote.
    “Strange men give him quarters,” I added. “They touch his nose.”
    “He forgives,” Dennis Savage noted, “and his kisses are as sweet as the bottom inch of a Dannon cup.” Innocence is Dennis Savage’s party.
    Mac reverently showed us a spread entitled “The Boys of Soho.” Writing “This one’s my fave,” he pointed out a dark-haired chap of about twenty-five, standing nude, arms folded across his stomach. There was nothing splendid about his looks or proportions, but something arresting somewhere; his face, you thought; you searched it, found nothing, but kept looking. Amid a load of musclemen, hung boys, and surly toughs, here was a man of no special detail but an attitude of sleaze too personable to ignore. I imagine evil looks like this.
    “‘Nick,’” I read out. “‘A typical Soho boy with an air of fun and a taste for the finer things.’ What does that mean, I wonder?”
    “Hepatitus B on the first date,” Dennis Savage answered.
    Mac mimed, and I sounded: “Do you think he would respond to a letter?”
    “Mac, you wouldn’t fall in love with that! What would your family say?”
    “Just for a night,” Mac mimed, then, by