Plays Well With Others Read online

  I next found four to seven hands under my towel is what I found as, gingerly, I excused and, oops, unhasped myself. God knows, I didn’t mind being groped; having lived a good while in New York, I no longer required extended previews, credential-establishing conversations. (Go to buy a necktie, wind up with the customer behind you in the giftwrap line who winks, “Got a few minutes, Dropdead Gorgeous?”)

  But I was still old-fashioned in certain thank-you-note folkways. I did not need names and school affiliations, I didn’t even ask to hear the guy’s voice, but I did like having one face to match each pair of hands working on and under me. Call me conventional.

  Was the orgy room this dark as a gentle nod toward our older clients? Fingers felt like some web of tentacles let loose, presumed welcome, up under my rental towel, set free on home-boy home-grown goodies. You know how in a car wash, hula skirts of octopus-sponge shimmy your vehicle rudely clean, almost against its will? Like that. Would the universe allow this much wet mischief at once? My parents on perfect days told us, “Enjoy this weather. We’ll pay later.”

  I’d grown up.

  For some reason, I pictured my never-smiling father. He seeing this, would absolutely die then absolutely kill me.

  I’d grown up Presbyterian, okay? And now, sobered by the image of my dad’s lipless face, I sidled, smiling, toward the glowing exit sign, “Excuse me, thank you, ooops, no offense, li’l bathroom visit … coming out … nothing personal …” From the water fountain in a non-steam area, I drank deep. Then, having found a dime, I dialed Angie from a pay phone (they all reminded me of her), “Guess where I am and what I’m wearing?”

  “First, did you mail away your cocker spaniel-divorce short story this morning? Number two—you gettin’ any?”

  My voice is the voice of thousands, and my towel encases much. Walt Whitman, are you watching? Because, Walter, check these guys out! Nudity is democracy. Erection, the great leveler. In here, bare young milkmen outrank myopic Wall Street brokers. NYPD detectives stake out chorus boys, figuratively then literally. All are alike only in the unlikely eyes of God.

  You get reduced to your most major owner’s strut while wearing the most minor of rental towels. No secrets, no closets—only timeshare cubicles where you, odalisque, recline, then beckon or reject the passing cavalcade of chest and leg hair. One boy had precisely Robert’s ears. Another Angie’s butt.

  I dallied with a somber smoldering lad whose crazed glare bespoke a cleric freshly, wisely, defrocked. He was sexy till admitting he’d soon snag his doctorate at Columbia. When he mapped out his thesis topic, “The Ontological Impasses Implicit Between the Populists Sympathy and the Tooled Aesthetical Surfaces of Flaubert’s Prose,” he sent my erection toward such an impasse. “Abiento,” I departed.

  I felt followed and it pleased me, “Well, hello, Ed. Sorry, been busy. Yes, well, thank you. But tonight I’m trying to widen my, I was hoping to … you know, branch out.”

  What am I, a tree?

  I toured a hundred open doorways where nude boys summoned me or waved one past. I remembered my own quiet horror during a student trip to Amsterdam—lady prostitutes on display, gals busy knitting in small overlit houses, wearing no underpants, wives for lease.

  Here, boys made much of timeshare cubbyholes. Some had brought along their own pink lightbulbs and screwed in a little flattery. They lolled, but only after oiling their very best sides. Padding around I recalled Lord Byron’s description of Turkish baths: “marbled palaces of sherbet and sodomy.” Might our snackbar serve sorbet?

  One fellow had outdone himself. He’d draped his booth with towels of a moorish pattern, sand-colored silk softened the lightsource. Some tasteful sandalwood incense burned. Mideastern music whined from a hidden ghetto blaster and, on his person, a wide brass bicep bracelet, actual saffron harem pants. I overheard one toweled peruser tell another, “Little Turkish Delight back there deserves a big E for effort. He’s not that cute really but the poor queen’s done more to that room than I did to any of my science fair projects. I’m gonna give myself to him. I’ll consider it a form of group thanks. So you guys each owe me one, okay?” We, strangers, laughed.

  In towels, we stood here, glad for this odd sensibility linking us: our love of hopeless comedy, our appetite for outrageous effect, our honest fellowship that springs from sinning very often and extremely well.

  Now I slid into a smaller steamroom lit by one red bulb. It felt safer here. This looked like the set of the newest Bob Fosse musical I’d just seen in preview for seven bucks. Only two other patrons present, a relief.

  One watchful old man listened to his transistor radio (it was that long ago), scratchy coverage of a hockey game. The other person, a spectacular youth; he was perfect as any platinum Aryan poster-maker’s hope for his own one son. Such an ideal specimen seemed to belong, cast in wax, lording over some glass case at the Natural History Museum. “Homo sapiens” definitive. His nudity had such fierce authority, such frieze-worthy geometry, not even busloads of Connecticut schoolkids would dare giggle at it.

  We nodded—amid staticky reports of some goalie’s face-to-ice despair after allowing a score. The young man soon made slow seductive small talk in a German-Italian-Britishy accent easy to like, hard to place. His naked manner was assured, urbane. Even in such red glare, his sudden white smile, the whites of his animated eyes exerted the glamour of some silent screen star. Lordy Mercy, happy hunter, me.

  He sidled nearer. The long legs, easing ever nearer, gave comic ducklike suction sounds across wet tile as I felt readier. I slid my key on its elasticized band around my wrist. The light in here was blood red, poetic. The guy appeared handsome as Robert. I would later say so to Robert—my friend but not, as yet, my lover.

  Here, in this tiny room, one face per customer, the best-looking boy at St. Mark’s was about to be mine, all mine. I was, as usual, already making a story of this beauty before we’d even established skin contact. I asked what he did. A flight steward, he said, someone who “touched down” all over the world.

  “Spreading joy?” I asked, my tone trying to sound dry amid the therapeutic vapors.

  “D’accord,” he responded. “Spreading, anyway.”

  Then his whole hand pressed my lower back, specifically my ass. “Prego?” asked the master of flight and international dissemination.

  “Well,” I stalled. “But …”

  I was too recent on the scene to feel ready: getting jumped right here, before our hockey enthusiast. That fur-backed codger had, I noticed, already rearranged his sideline position so he might watch as he (radio still pressed to right ear) kept up with his beloved Canucks.

  Something in the insistent touch of this archangel of mechanical flight, something in how—this close—his perfect features looked so overdetermined—hollow-eyed and masklike, something in his intention toward the one deed only, and without prelude or nicety or compliment—something in his sudden erotic sternness, his very frontal perfection—now felt offputting to the point of making me shudder.

  As the red glare slid from Poetry to Poe, I could not help notice that, without consulting me, he was already turning me around, then over. Expertly as a mom about to diaper her toddler junior, he wielded some evolved inexorable strength, he wielded much implied half-surgical experience, this slickster grappling me facedown into a far likelier position. I was, in fact, being—wasn’t I?—somewhat gingerly pinned, rump-up. Hello, major experience incoming.

  —Sometimes, even in a world as cerebral and abstracted as our New York one—your own beasty instinct hollers at you by means of all hairs on the backs of both your hands: “NO. Not this one! Wrong move, wrong. Haul your sweet cherry ass out of here, pal—preferably right now!”

  “Excuse me, I’ve got to go and see a man about a hockey bet,” I said, saving perhaps my life. The steward, proving me immediately correct, suddenly cursed so. Ruddy steam sputtered cumulus, a guttural venomous Indo-European language I did not speak and have not heard since. I elbow
ed him, found the carved door handle, wriggled backward into open air.

  From his red mist, I literally ran. True, I’d left behind my only towel, but oh, to feel unwedged, to breathe.

  Even a Purgatorio like this must have a roof.

  I followed three flights of stairs and, depending on the banister like someone old, found myself—naked as when my shame-faced mother bore me—on the lid of the baths. Fresh air! Oxygen unsullied by saunas, Aramis cologne or suntan stick, or the hard-luck aroma of the junior high school gym.

  This roof, being gay-owned, proved perfectly landscaped. Pointy evergreens rested in round cedar buckets. Boardwalks crossing tar made the building’s top a Parcheesi board of routes that only seemed haphazard. From circular grottos set in far corners, hot-tubs released column-shaped clouds. Those rose straight up. City glare filled each with borrowed light that appeared original—original to this place, original to us—this town’s unwanted outlaw-cowpokes.

  It was a warm evening for late March. Lucky for me. The bath’s roof garden felt jammed right up against the skyline. From here, you felt you could reach forth one of your male, King Kong paws; you could play chess with all the famous skyscrapers waiting on their grid. Signifiers, dildoes, bishops. Who’ll jump whom? Many of these lit-up structures had once been World’s Tallest, former subjects of Hart Crane poems, John Marin water-colors.

  The Chrysler Building glowed, fantastical, Industry’s toolmaker Deco wetdream of itself. I, itemizing landmarks like some out-of-towner, tried to calm myself after that scuffle with the German. How rude. Unfair, being poleaxed by some guy that so outweighs you.

  Being up high in the middle of a city this great, you could read by its byproduct light. Scraps of cloud passed over me, half ticklish. Odd, I felt safer now I was nude out here in its harsh soothing blaze. I still had my locker key! And I felt chaperoned, by Wannabe Has-been Manhattan itself.

  Beyond rental office towers’ serrations—a free and melon-colored moon rose.

  One Moon. To Let. Short Monthly Leases Avail. Act Now.

  This far aloft, light seemed a genial voyeur, half a companion.

  I swallowed belated panic at that guy’s scary strength. Breathing deep, I found myself near crying. Mom? Dad?

  Plank fences screened nude men from nosy neighbors. You felt an absolute privacy out here. Safe except from the eyes of God or very good binoculars off the Empire State.

  To stand undressed out of doors in the winter night of New York. I recalled my boyhood treehouse where, that hidden, my first impulse was to strip.

  Emerging from hot steam, you find your wet body glossy with reflected light from the Empire State. The concept itself is Art Deco, pure Broadway in its earnest artifice. People wishing to escape the countryside band together. And, through their own hard density, they formed a carapace, an alternate, a vertical and yearned Bucolic. Five hundred thousand little towns candle forth into this one big blaze.

  God, but I love New York! An addiction undying.

  One silhouetted stranger, as endearingly tentative as the air steward had seemed cruel, is now circling this tub, is asking in a ripe baritone if he might please slip into the churning water pinwheeling here beside you. “How hot is it?”

  “Fairly.”

  “Thought so.”

  Something to say.

  You exchange first names, one dumb joke and the briefest of career résumés (Dean, a commodities gold salesman from Laurel, Maryland, near Baltimore? Owns two cockatiels, collects eighteenth-century miniatures, often up here on business). Winter air across your freckled shoulders feels brisk, but the genitals’ water boils, Barbados with a fever.

  Then this nice guy—who seems to hail from an large affable Maryland Catholic family—this Dean’s educated right hand starts massaging all the city tension from your upper back, your neck. All the crisscrossed wire cording required to hold up yonder Brooklyn Bridge. Tense much?

  Unlike the totalitarian mitt of the Eurotrash steward downstairs (he’s surely found someone else to jump by now), there’s this kid-brother feeling in the touch of my young Dean here. How much of his decent life is communicated through the morse code of one supple cushioned paw. Anything can happen. Soon you permit the trusted hand down along your spine and it’s under the shared water and with and on your lower half, and is truly getting to know you. Hello. Is it not a joy to trust someone this brand-new to you and find you mostly can? And so follows tender Pastoral Symphony sex here in the open in the middle of New York.

  The corner privacy of a most public space, the openness of a great mineral city that likes to watch the innocent gambolings of bare winter animals sunk gullet-deep into hot water behind evergreens set among towers erect full-time, year-round. Act now. Constant upright inspiration.

  The prigs won’t tell you how sweet and rollicking the peasant dance was. Before such accurate lightning struck us.

  Oh, but if our parents had known just the half of it (young Dean’s and mine, Robert’s preacher and his choir-director wife, and Angie’s doctor-waitress, camped forever at the edge of Savannah society)! They’d have sent thickened detectives to abduct us. And that might’ve saved some of our lives. But it would’ve meant our forever after being tied up back home in old childhood bedrooms—the Fifty Years of Aviation wallpaper, the suspended models, the tall tin horse-riding trophies—we prisoner-artists bound and gagged but safe, subjected to factory-recall on Country Club Boulevards all over America.

  From Other Galaxies

  ngie had a date, it flopped. She had another date, with the med student, he was forty minutes late and she hated herself for even being present when he showed, barely apologizing, convinced as the Israeli Army in which this Moishe had served, and whose funny stories he served Ang and the waitress, soon especially the waitress. Angie finally threw the contents of her waterglass at him … “Mainly as something to do. But it was a mistake, it just drew them closer together, Moishe and the blond blotter waitress. Why am I like honey to gay bees and Raid to the little yellowjackets I could use a big one of?”

  We would see other clusters of gay men, also with a single complete-looking stylish woman in their midst; each group believed itself the most gifted, and therefore entitled to be, in all of New York’s history, loudest.

  Angie explained how certain subjects, adored by males, made her space out so: ball scores, cars, inner-office politics, college frathouse hijinks, mothers as saints. Chat concerning a flaking unplayable Jacksonian-era harp was, she suggested, wasted on these dateable fellows. To us, of course, the loss seemed theirs.

  Angie admitted she craved male companions. She conceded being a Daddy’s girl. But the guys she longed for were verbal, expressive, could dance, knew five good wines, and some art history, plus the names of colors, and told hilarious jokes as filthy as hers. Somewhere, there must be men alive on earth as self-mocking as she and therefore as self-aware? Were there fellows who saw language as a playground, not a minefield? And who lived at comic ease with themselves and who could acknowledge sex in all its comic technical details. Angie said she needed to be near men who did not view younger women painters’ intense opinions as just “cute,” Foreplay.

  Once at a party, I expressed an emotional opinion. A self-confessed CPA, hovering at one edge of our talk, his face not-showing, half-hollered my way, after one of my emphatic clipped opinions about an overrated stage actor, “Excuse me, but would you say you’re from Mars?”

  He snapped it like some drill instructor, hard as my father’s disciplinary voice. Angie stepped forward, tensed to protect. “No,” I said first. “From Falls, North Carolina.” My first impulse was to stay bland, to seem to miss this putdown. If you were emotional, you became a public nuisance, you lived as a visible threat and enemy. You never knew when such dudes might hurt you with it publicly. When you met a good straight guy, he only made you more scared of the others. They’d been getting away with this for years.

  It was safer to stay around the few that you could trust. We
did have some married friends; but we noticed that, if both were painters, one was always called The Talented One, and the other The One Whose Parents Bought Their Loft for Them. At dinner parties, they often seemed midfight, they were gathering votes, just putting off the final round till the dramatic cab ride home. In company, they seemed to give us only half as much as any Single one of us offered them.

  So, I was Martian. Okay. In the long run, however accused, it was easier being kind. (My mom, wife to my complicated chillsome dad, had taught me that.)

  Still, it shook you every time they called you foreign, not quite human. Over coffee, after the CPA, Angie “talked me down” as we then called it.

  Certain guys—Angie coached me from her bitterest experience—take their sports metaphors to the metaphysical. “For such fellows as our CPA, Hartley, the sex act is Scoring. My good breasts here, pips, hunh? Signify second base. The goal? It’s this. —By your last athletic quarter—you’ll wanna get as many other human beings to say ‘I Love You’—without ever giving up even one of your ‘I Love You’ points aloud to them, see? Now you understand the object of life’s game. Okay. And, for them, that means we’re losers because we give so much away, to our work, to complete strangers, to playing around in our work, and with each other. They’re devoted to a lifetime spent holding back. That alone makes your Mars-hating CPA-guy a real end-zone winner, see? How have they stayed in charge so long? Has to involve our own self-loathing. —Sad, because he was not half-bad looking, really, the CPA. —Just joking, sheesh. Don’t go ballistic on me.”

  About Stepping Out

  t was easier being half of a decorative boy-girl unit. Simpler to turn up at some East Side literary party as a conventional couple, not your usual self—gay and alone or with some person of your own sex.