Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle Read Online Free PDF Page B

wry smile, Dennis Savage shook his head. “The funny part of it is, years later the blond kid turned up on
Ryan’s Hope
, tattoo and all.” He laughed. “I was so glad when itwent off the air. I hope to pass him, a year or so from now, undergoing meltdown in some gutter.”
    “I always thought the most beautiful men would be the nicest,” I said.
    “But what if there’s nothing special inside of them,” said Carlo, “to live up to this special picture they show on the
outside?
They think they should be a movie star, or someone on a yacht. But all they’re good for is hotting up the sheets. A few days later the money’s gone and they’re back where they were. No yacht, no movies. It makes them mean.
    “I truly say
that’s
what you ran into that night in Weasel’s. Here’s this guy—young, handsome, build. And what’s he doing? Sipping one of those cocktail drinks with fruit and a little paper umbrella by a Hollywood pool while producers do the seven-year-contract shuffle? He’s hauling those damnhell stacks of beer! Running them upstairs, downstairs, hurting his back and making him sore, and where’s it getting him? Sure, now and then some fat cat’ll take him to Key West for a weekend. But he’s got to put out for it, doesn’t he? Or he’ll bunk up with someone like himself, another guy just as sore as he is. Two of them together can’t even make the rent on a little room in the slums. And right in the middle of this, here comes this guy who hasn’t got a worry uptown or down, strolling into Weasel’s with all his bills paid, and the blond beauty lugging his beers is thinking, What’s
he
so glad about? It’s like in Vietnam, sometimes, when American soldiers would capture a village, and instead of cowering the villagers would be giggling. So the soldiers would get mad and shoot at them, and now they’d be crying and screaming, and the soldiers would feel righteous about it.”
    “How do you know about that?” I asked.
    “You remember my buddy Daniel Johnson? He’s a vet.”
    “So how come you’re not like that?” Dennis Savage asked Carlo. “What makes you so pleasant and easygoing and, resent it though you may, caring? When they were sorting out the gifts, who gave you what?”
    Carlo was silent for a bit. Then: “Can I say something about Tom Driggers? If you don’t go see him off, and you come to regret it, you will never be able to undo it, and you’ll hurt real tough. But if you do go, and come to regret that, it won’t matter. Because giving too much never feels as bad as giving too little.”
    “What do you say?” Dennis Savage asked me.
    “I think there’s some pathos in this man hanging around waiting to be forgiven. But he is in fact partly responsible for the incredible growth of Attitude in gay New York. It’s unfair to exculpate him just because he’s dying. One thing has nothing to do with the other.”
    “Listen to this,” said Dennis Savage. “It was something like three months after the Weasel’s disaster. Tom had finally given up on me. I was feeling low that whole year. As if I’d already got everything that was coming to me and it would be downhill from there. Remember?” he asked me. “You must have noticed.”
    “It’s hard to tell with you. Your depressed is rather like your playful.”
    He sighed. “So the night was young and I had to do
something
, so I just went out walking and there I was, passing the Forty-sixth Street Theatre, where
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
was playing. It had been running for a year and I hadn’t seen it, and I was looking at the people waiting to go in, and checking out the pictures, and feeling utterly miserable and left out, and then I saw this big blowup of the chorus boys doing what looked like a striptease—that number where they change from football uniforms into cowboy drag?”
    I nodded; Carlo hadn’t the faintest idea what we were talking about.
    “Well, you know chorus boys. There was one in the