Viewmaster

by Ferdinand Stowell

I’d gotten home a little after nine from seeing Maria. As I got ready for bed, I heard the usual soundtrack of activity coming from the rooms upstairs as guests fiddled with their luggage, the bathroom appliances, etc. No notes were left for me; no one came knocking on my door and I was content in my domestic tranquility and in my growing, mutually-felt affection for Maria. I turned lights out that evening with pleasant thoughts of the stories I would hear in the morning as my guests recounted their adventures of this day I was now putting to rest. And then I sensed that I was not alone – Scabies!

  In the morning I checked my body parts with the thoroughness of a forensic investigator. Minutiae, which I usually pass over quickly with the broad brush of my grooming habits, was suddenly very important. I was still itching, but careful study revealed no new contusions and the pink areas where I had scratched seemed to be receding. With a newly acquired confidence in my pest control, I was happier than usual to fulfill my routine duties. I found Maxine at the breakfast table sitting by her-self at a little past 8:00.

  “Good morning; where’s the other half of the comedy team? Is she sleeping in after an all-nighter?”

  “Good morning, Roy. No, Janey has left us; she wrote you a thank you note and left it on the hutch over there. She got up real early for a special excursion with The Wooly Wanderers. First they’re going to an alpaca ranch up in Sonoma, then some sheep farm in Oregon. She’s part of the knitting mafia; constantly going to shows and workshops, visiting sheep farms, you name it. I’m not a knitter, just not my thing, but she had the wool pulled over her eyes a long time ago, been doing it since she was a child.”

  “So, did she have a good time? I couldn’t really tell. I mean, I hadn’t heard her say anything the whole time she was here. She’s probably a real chatty Cathy when you’re alone.”

  “Janey’s a good listener. I just keep talkin’ and talkin’ and talkin’ and she just keeps listenin’ and listenin’ and listenin’. It’s one of those symbiotic relationships. She had a fabulous time.”

  “So, what did you do yesterday?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know we just went over to Chinatown and checked out all the shops; I bought the prettiest set of bowls ever for a friend of mine. I have to remember to tell her what they’re for, though, because she gets kind of confused sometimes. I bought her a tea cozy once, gave it to her on a Thursday and I swear, she wore it to church that following Sunday. It had a little stuffed kitty-cat on top. She got the strangest looks, let me tell you. Well, I went over to her – she always sits in the back pew, me I’m right up in the preacher’s face – and I told her right out that I bought that thing for her tea pot, not for her head. She was mortified and I said, ‘that’s all right, honey, just smile, just look at the people and keep on smilin’. Smilin’s always appropriate.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  “How are you, Roy,” she asked. “Has Porky come back home yet?”

  “No, he hasn’t, it’s a terrible situation.”

  “Oh, I know, I’ve been praying for his family,” Maxine said just as the French people started coming down for breakfast.

  “Bonjour, good morning,” they all said. I introduced them to Maxine.

  “Oh, it’s so nice to meet y’all. I just think France is the most charming place in the world. Where y’all from?”

  “La Loire,” Bruno said. “Very close to Tours.”

  “Oh, I was there!” Maxine shouted, all excited. “I stayed in the most beautiful little chateau; it was completely surrounded by water – just like a fairy tale. ‘Course when we stayed out late one night we got back to discover the drawbridge was up; we had to strip down to our frillies and wade right on across the moat – eeww, that water was nasty – and cold! Brrr.”

  Maxine noticed the French folks had “looks” on their faces.

  “Can you folks understand me alright?” she asked. “You speak with a southern accent anywhere in this town and people think you’re dumb as grass. Dumber, even.”

  “Grass? like weed?” Hubert asked

  “I don’t follow,” said Maxine.

  “Like, mary-jane?” Hubert was going somewhere with this.

  “Honey, the language barrier has descended like the Iron Curtain; I’m just not catching your drift.”

  “C’est l’ argot, n’est ce pas? Hubert asked his friends. Then he turned back to Maxine and said, “That eez slang like marijuana, no? Grass, weed, mary-jane – yes?”

  “Sugar, you are just too cute for words; now I get what you’re driving at. Except that’s not where the phrase come from. Grass is just grass, the green stuff. It gets mowed and stomped on; it’s just simple, you know? It just sits there and doesn’t do anything, so it’s kinda stupid. Not much dumber than grass ‘cept dirt.”

  “Ahh, ok, now I understand,” Hubert said.

  “Excuse heem, please; hee eez a linguist, not professionel,” Bruno joked.

  “Amateur, he eez an amateur linguist,” Martine said, “but he does not speak English well.”

  “That’s ok, honey, neither does our president and look where it got him,” Maxine said. The French folks laughed nervously. “So, where y’all goin’ to today?”

  “We are goingk to ze Castro,” Bruno said with a few highly affected, voguey poses that made us laugh. For a brief few seconds, I wondered if Bruno’s vogue-ing was his way of scratching a scabies itch, but I quickly dismissed it as my old paranoia, which, because it’s considered an unattractive character flaw by a majority of Americans, I usually try to talk myself out of.

  “Yes, Bruno,” Martine said to him, “you act silly like this in the Castro and I will sell you to the first big man with a leather coat and an Harley-Davidson; I will tell him to have fun.”

  “I em so surry my dear wife, but I love motorcycles more than the women. Have a nice life.” Martine put up her cat claws as we laughed and began mauling Bruno as he went for her ass. Maxine was more subdued than the rest of us.

  “Oh, my, the Castro; well that’s a bit too much for me. I like to have fun but flaunting sin like that; no, that’s where I draw the line.” A chill went through the air.

  Bible porn

  For some conservative Christians, the bible’s condemnation of homosexuality is their favorite part. Their corneas seem to have a special filter that makes them see demons when they look at gay people. I love watching the faces of the radical right when the subject of gay marriage comes up. They get themselves all worked up, laying out dirty scenarios of a sexual nature, giving their imaginations room to soar. They project that Armageddon (which has always sounded more like a comfy old fishing village on Long Island to me, rather than Satan’s Spring Break ) will settle in the moment gay people are allowed to marry and then when the wedding bells ring and the doors to the fire pits of Hell remain stubbornly shut and cross-dressing Boy Scouts aren’t fornicating with two-headed purple calves on the Main Streets of America; when the whole thing turns out to be a big yawn, they’re furious, like we all let them down.

  Homosexuals who won't shut up about it

  “My brother is gay; we have gay friends; we don’t hate gay people,” Sophie said indignantly.

  “Oh, I don’t hate gay people. They’re sinners but lord, if I hated all the sinners I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror every morning. I have a cousin who’s a lesbian.”

  “Eez she a southern belle as you?” Hubert asked.

  “Oh, you French folks know about southern belles, do you? Oh, my, well she’s more like a southern dinner bell – louder than the clap on a whore in New Orleans, as my great uncle Randolph used to say. Her name’s Cecile with a ‘e’ at the end but she always pronounced it Cecil like for a boy; didn’t matter ‘cause nobody called her that anyway. They called her She-boy from the time she was two. Kinda like Sheba, you know, in the bible. She’s a red head and she’s got a goatee and a moustache like the Kentucky-fried colonel. Reads the bible, too, but ain’t
doin’ her a lick a good, don’t know why she bothers, sometimes.”

  My guests departed on friendly enough terms, despite their differing views on homosexuals who won’t shut-up about it, and I busied myself with the usual clearing, cleaning, tidying. I resisted scratching my continuing itchiness, knowing that it was like phantom limb syndrome, except with scabies.

  Tip called. He wanted to know if I needed anything at Welker’s, an office supply store that has been owned by three generations of Welkers. The store has a parking lot so small and poorly designed that you have to know quantum physics just to maneuver the car around. It was a favorite of Uncle Arthur’s; who loved long-running retail drama and is still frequented faithfully by Tipton. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just another mom and pop store made slightly more tolerable by the fact that mom and pop got a messy divorce.

  A woman's man hands

  Tip was the one who broke news of the daughter’s divorce.

  “He left her because of her man hands,” he explained to me when I asked why.

  “I knew it,” I responded.

  The daughter had the hands of a man. Now, in San Francisco this might be considered unremarkable, except that this woman was married with kids and was born a girl and continued being one all through the development of her man hands, her marriage, the birth of her children and her taking over of the store after her father had died. When I’d go there on errands for Uncle Arthur, I couldn’t help staring at her hands and wondering what her husband thought of her big, bony, hairy man hands. Were they repulsive to him? Did they turn him on? Did he ever even acknowledge to anyone that his wife had the overly large, thick hands of a coal miner?

  Tip says she has a new boyfriend, whom Tip thinks is very masculine and sexy but I’ve got to wonder. If he’s into women with man hands, is he banging chicks with dicks on the side? Does he let those man hands tear the frilly mauve lingerie from his breast?

  Homosexual panic

  The day went by with exceeding slowness. Maria and I had made plans to do dinner at her place and I wanted to hurry up and get there and forgo the eight plus hours from the time I said goodbye to my guests till I was seated at her kitchen table.

  Finally the moment arrived when I was actually chatting with her while she heated up some Italian food she had picked up from a take-out place.

  “Come into the living room. Let’s sit on the couch, it’s more comfy.”

  “No, you know, would you mind if we just kept sitting on the uncomfortable wooden chairs here in the kitchenette?” Maria gave me a weird look. She shook her head a couple of times with her eyes closed, then popped her eyes open really wide and started talking like girls who lived in the San Fernando Valley in the 1980’s did.

  “Well – yeah – like, sure. Ok.”

  “So,” I began, “when we were at the park together with Adam, were we on a date?’

  “Well, yeah, I guess so.”

  “Do you always bring your son along on first dates?”

  “I have a confession.”

  “Uh, oh, here we go.”

  “I used Adam to get to you. I do it with all the guys I’m attracted to.”

  ‘You use your son to attract men? That’s so Tennessee Williams.”

  “Am I awful? I know conventional wisdom says the average guy doesn’t want to date a woman with kids….”

  “Unless she’s married.”

  “Yeah, exactly. But I discovered that guys love Adam, especially the cute ones. Excepting of course his real father, that misanthrope.”

  “That bastard.”

  “That slimy bastard. So am I a bad mom?”

  “Well, on the mother scale from a low of Magda Goebbels to a high of Mother Theresa, you’re probably right around a Mildred Pierce, well-intentioned but damaging nonetheless.”

  She laughed as she clipped the long strands of her hair back from her face to behind her ear. I was reminded unromantically of wet spaghetti.

  “I wasn’t sure what kind of a guy you were. You seemed like a nurturer, so I decided that it would be ok to bring Adam by.”

  “I am not a nurturer.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “And Adam is a monster. Weren’t you worried he’d make a terrible first impression?”

  “No, because with guys like you, I think Adam kind of brings out their inner mommies.”

  “Look, I resent that. I don’t have an inner mommy; I’m a guy. Just because I keep my chest hair clipped and wipe the toothpaste off before I put the cap back on doesn’t mean I’m not all male.”

  “Wow, we’ve really hit a nerve here. It just goes to prove my point, you’re the sensitive type.”

  “That is such a reductive argument.”

  “You’re not gay are you? I mean, why didn’t you want to sit with me on the couch? You were, like, panicked.”

  “Oh, come on; give me a break. Do I seem that gay to you?”

  “I’m not sure how to answer that.”

  “I think you just did. Didn’t Arthur tell you my whole, sad history with women?”

  “Well, yeah, he did but even he wondered.”

  “Wondered what?” It kind of creeped me out that I had showed up on Uncle Arthur’s gaydar.

  “Look,” I said before she could respond, “the last time I even touched a dick other than my own was in third grade and only because this older kid Louis paid me a dollar to do it and as soon as he started moaning, I stopped. I have never had any desire to do it again. I don’t like penises, except my own of course; I think they’re ugly, they’re like some weird slimy, aquatic mollusk thing, like gooey-ducks.

  “I mean, sure, if Louis called me today and offered me ten thousand dollars to put his penis in my mouth I would do it, but I wouldn’t inhale and I’d take it out as soon as he started moaning.” Maria gave me another funny look, she had a million of them, each slightly different than the others. I spoke directly to the look,

  “What!? If some guy offered you ten thousand dollars to put his penis in your mouth you wouldn’t do it?”

  “I need more time to think about that. That sounds like a tricky entrapment question.”

  “Look, I didn’t want to sit on the couch with you because I discovered I had scabies. I’ve shampooed and cleaned everything but I just want to make sure they’re gone before I get too physical. There, now it’s out and you probably think I’m disgusting.”

  “No, well, thank you for being responsible about it,” she said and then she gave me another funny look. “How did you get them?”

  “I run a bed and breakfast, people are coming and going all the time,” I felt I needed something more concrete, a scapegoat. “Well, I have these French people staying with me….” I said. I was immediately ashamed of myself: I sold out my French folk by playing on 600 years of stupid Anglo hyper-sexualizing of the French. I let my comment stand though, and she seemed to buy it without comment beyond a knowing

  “Oh.” We were silent for a moment and then she said, “So, you’re not gay?”

  “No.”

  Gaydar

  When I peruse the personal ads, I see there are still gay guys out there looking for straight-acting gay men. I suppose by this they mean guys who watch sports and sit in glum silence when they’re not in the company of their drinking buddies or being pandered too.

  Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding number of women looking for gay-acting straight guys. This despite the anecdotal evidence that most straight women seem to enjoy the company of gay men because of their silly humor, touching emotional confessions and sensible fashion know-how, traits that I, my friends assure me, posses in abundance.

  The gay guys I used to know were about as good-looking as I am, which is to say attractive but not overly so. They felt comfortable. I imagine the really good-looking gay guys are able to find and hang out with better-looking straight guys.

  Some straight guys who don’t hang out with gay guys used
to ask me if there’s any truth to the commonly held belief that says women who are disarmed by non-threatening homosexuals are an easy lay and I have to say, happily, there is. In the not-too-distant past, I’d slept with more than a few of my gay male friends’ gal pals and they do know some pretty hot women. These ladies share confidences and talk about sex with their gay male friends in a way that makes me weak in the knees. Girl-talk is my downfall.

  But you never know how a girl is going to react. Some women would get upset when they found out I’m straight; they felt betrayed and exposed and that made them angry. Whatever, girlfriend!

  More sophisticated women were often delighted and thrilled at the plain dumb luck of finding an attractive man they can actually carry on a conversation with, who wants to dive into their bush in the worst possible way. These are the kind of women who put the moves on me. The fact that they’ve just spilled all of their sexual secrets gives me the advantage and they’re very willing to roll with that and reap the benefits.

  There are however some women who reject me as too effeminate; they’re not into guys with gay sensibilities. That I can’t satisfy their need for Alpha males sometimes makes me feel as inadequate as I felt in high school.

  If they would only sleep with me, I think they’d find their fears are groundless. Some of my bed partners have actually complained that I’m too straight in bed; they thought that since I hung out with gay guys I would have explored other orifices of my own body, by which they mean my anal sphincter, but I tell them to keep their fingers out of there, ‘I’m not into that.’

  “I’m so relieved that you’re not gay because I was starting to fall for you.”

  “Was?”

  “Am, am falling for you.”

  “I think you’re very sexy. And beautiful, you’re just beautiful.”

  “Do scabies like faces? How about mouths? Hands?”

  “No, I don’t have scabies in any of those places.”

  “Well, I’m pretty creative when it comes to making out.”

  Maria and I made out and it was very hot – lot’s of licking, kissing, moaning; I suddenly realized the heights of sexual frenzy earlier generations could reach when they were absolutely forbidden to perform coitus before marriage. Somehow, knowing you couldn’t take all your clothes off and get down and dirty just prolonged the pleasure and made us a bit crazy. We eventually had to stop because it was getting painful.