Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  The years seem to be perfectly balanced, at work and at home. Bradley has his elite, adoring public; I have good parts in important productions. In the season when I triumph triply as Macbeth, Trigorin and Ernest, he is invited to the White House for dinner.

  Our happiness abroad overflows at home. We sleep together in the attic now, under the sky-window, where we scrutinize each other for hours, by lamplight and moonlight, noting details which give new pleasure: the hollow of a throat, the little valley where the thigh locks into the trunk, the drifting eddies of hair. There is nothing we cannot do together, no fear which cannot be shared, no joy which cannot be celebrated. The swirl of our blood matches the swirl of the world. We are often invited into homes just so people can observe us together.

  And then, little by little, the excitement of my career begins to pall. Maybe the enthusiasm of starting out is gone. But one night I have a clear vision of a future filled with boredom. Why am I dressing up in other people’s words and lives? Why do I need all this acclaim?

  When I tell Bradley this he nods quickly, the tossing shake that signifies he has been thinking about the same thing. “Sometimes I think if I have to answer one more question …” he doesn’t finish, just sits glumly. He is slimmer now, lighter. It occurs to me that we are mutating from hard-working grubs to butterflies, from husk to flower. Perhaps our job is merely to bloom.

  One night, soon afterward, he tells me that the brain secretes a substance that makes us forget. This fluid, whose name I can’t recall, saves us from the past, wipes the slate clean, so that we can only look ahead, plan, hope. When he says this I cast my mind back, trying to remember. What did I call that heavy black woman at the Happy Village who pushed me up the ramps in my wheelchair? What did I speak into my tape recorder? What was Bradley’s nickname for me? Everything has faded. Another memory nudges at me, something about a gun. Did Bradley really hate me to the point of murder once?

  I don’t know who suggested the trip to Europe, but we both knew that the time had come for our honeymoon. A long trip— we plan to stay away for at least a year—means the end of our careers, but neither of us cares. We haven’t really cared for several years. We have both begun to forget our skills, preferring to spend time dreaming or walking or running, our heads as empty as the sky. I have no idea now how to hold an audience, how to charm the people who give out the parts, how to walk quietly into a room and hold every eye. And Bradley doesn’t seem to be sure of his facts anymore. Last week he got two of the pharaonic dynasties confused. He didn’t even care. A few years ago he would have sat up all night rememorizing the list, from Hatshepsut to Ptolemy.

  And so the day of our departure arrives. It’s going to be a grand tour, a dazzling procession of palaces, ports, galleries. A journey of wonder and discovery, the climax of everything.

  It is in Paris that we have our last and greatest quarrel, proof (as if we needed it) that we live more intensely in each other’s company than anyplace else on earth.

  It started in a restaurant, Le Chien Qui Fume, where a new friend, name of Chester Maynard, had joined us for dinner. Chester was staying at our hotel, a fleabag near the Sorbonne (we had reached the age of youthfulness and insolvency). He was a southern boy, with a poorly defined chin, squinty eyes, airbrushed hair. I thought of him as a walking pudding.

  At one point during dinner, Chester made a pass at me. It wasn’t unusual, of course—I had grown into a handsome young man—but for some reason Bradley took it very amiss. After Chester had drawled out his double entendre and squeezed my knee, Bradley picked up the carafe of wine and poured it down the front of his shirt. Chairs were overturned, waiters aroused, punches exchanged. We were made to pay for a meal we hadn’t eaten, ushered to the door and told never to return.

  Bradley, striding beside me through the leafy streets, refuses to speak, but I don’t mind. In fact, I am full of a throttling joy. Bradley is jealous! I recall, with an effort, his earlier envies. This is very different. In the old days he’d been acting from an empty heart; this time his heart is full.

  When we get back to the hotel we have a shouting match. The usual accusations—we have read about them in cheap novels, but now we let fly with a melodrama that is new to us. It seems that strangers are screaming at each other. A few minutes later we’re on the floor, tearing, hurting, punishing. But it’s a warm anger, a fury hiding love, and the inevitable happens. Before long we’re grappling with passion on that filthy carpet, our supple bodies reflected in the giant armoire a glace alongside. Even as I maltreat Bradley’s slender body, I adore it. Only once, near the end, am I aware of a paradox: how the body invites and then prevents true union. By the time we finish, the awareness is gone.

  Bradley remains on his back. Loss and death are all around —in the grimy mirror, the tattered chairs, the wet spots on the dirty rug. We have plated the room with gold for a few minutes but now it’s uglier than ever. Bradley’s forearm is over his eyes and it takes me a few minutes to realize he is weeping.

  “What’s wrong?” He doesn’t answer. His chest heaves. “Don’t cry, Brad.”

  And then I know he’s right to cry. Why not, after all? I roll over on my stomach, wondering if it hadn’t been better when we were old and full of mistrust. Those were minor pains compared to these.

  “Don’t you see?” He sits up, his nose red, his eyes bloodshot. “Don’t you see?”

  I try to reassure him but without conviction. Our mutual need, our hopeless dependency, lies on us like a deformity. We are both cripples at heart. I see it as clearly as he does.

  At last, exhausted, we burrow into the bed and sleep. When I wake up, I discover that a new necessary truth has blown into my ears: the whole world is my home. The notion took up residence while I slept, the shining residue of our struggle on the floor.

  It’s hard breaking the news to Bradley. In fact, I wait until we get back to tell him he’s been replaced by something larger, more general. He feels betrayed, of course—at first, anyway. It’s only later, when his own changes come, that he accepts it.

  I begin to look at children more closely, at the fierceness with which they feed on life, at their greed in eating, sleeping, speaking. Sometimes, watching an infant grasp a toy, I am struck by the simplicity of it all. One day I shall be as old as a baby.

  Of course, there are times when I resist change, remembering my dream in the nursing home, clinging to Brad and the old comfortable love. But these resistances become fewer. Not long after returning from Europe I insist that he move downstairs, out of the attic room. I don’t want to be interrupted in my progress. He doesn’t mind. He too is exhausted by our years together. He wants out of that slavery as much as I.

  As the years go by I see him less and less. Most of the time I’m outside, playing in the street with new friends. Sometimes, in the middle of scrimmage, or a game of hide-and-seek, I reflect on the long voyage now coming to an end. Its purpose, I see now, was only to bring me here, to this field, waiting to be tagged or raced or wrestled. It was for this I mastered all the changes of mind and spirit and gland. A shudder ripples through me as this discovery expands. I have passed through solitude and doubleness in order to merge into every particle around me —the trees, the dirt, the bricks of the school, the dresses of the girls, the flashing faces and quicksilver forms of my teammates. I am at the peak of existence, closer to birth than ever before.

  And then, as more time goes by and I move forward into the rapid changes of boyhood, I marvel at the peculiar progress of my life. How brilliant is the plan that moved me from disillusion and disgust to the playgrounds of youth! How subtle the hand that steered me from wheelchairs to marriage to games! How terrible it would be the other way around. How, I wonder, could the human race ever handle such diminution, loss, decay?

  And then, as my frame fattens and shrinks, as my fingernails shrivel into tiny half moons and my ears into the most delicate shells, as people appear who hold and rock and tickle me, I am filled with increasing joy.
It won’t be long now! Bradley has disappeared, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the changes ahead, the voyage home, when I shall kick off my booties, wriggle out of diapers and pins, and pierce the membrane that separates me from my mother’s womb.

  At last the day comes. There is much excitement all around but I pay no attention. I do not need them; my course is charted. And then it begins. I enter and dissolve. The warm fluid surrounds me. I start to glide upstream, propelled by spasms and waves. Gradually I dissolve into my component parts, ovum and wriggle-tailed sperm, molecules, atoms, shudders of electricity. The warm core waits and I am deconceived, unbegotten, at the very moment that I marvel for the last time at the richness of life, at the beauty of the world. And then, on the edge of eternity, I am possessed by the last necessary truths—truths that have arrived too late to be of any use: Love is eternal. Death is an illusion. Trust everyone.

  HARDHATS

  Ethan Mordden

  AS THE SON OF A BUILDER I spent high school spring vacations on various construction sites in and around New York. It was my first experience of absolutely impenetrable men, not only tough but emotionally invulnerable. Ironworkers—the men who lay a building’s steel skeleton—are a class unto themselves. Passing someone while carrying a load of material, they don’t say, “Excuse me,” but “Get the fuck out of my way”—yet they say it in the tone Edmund White would use for “Excuse me.” Challenged by their own kind, they can be vivacious; challenged by an alien, they are fast and lethal.

  It’s an intolerant class, racist, sexist, fascistic yet patriotic about a democracy; almost the only place to see the flag these days, besides outside federal agencies, is on the trucks serving construction sites. (They also mount a flag atop each building as the last girder is placed, as if they had climbed rather than built a mountain.) Ironworkers are not merely proletarians; they are proletarians without the barest internal contradictions, without ambition, pull, or PR. They are the cowboys of the city, skilled workers who are also vagabonds with nothing to lose. They have one of the toughest jobs in America: exhausting, permanently subject to layoff, and extremely dangerous. The raising of office towers routinely claims a life or two. At least bridgework is worse. The Whitestone Bridge was regarded as a life-sparing marvel because only thirty-five men were lost on it.

  There is one major contradiction in the ironworker, his endless enthusiasm for street courtship. What other set of Don Juans ever went out so unromantically styled—casually groomed, tactlessly dressed, unimaginatively verbal? “Got a cookie for me, honey?” they will utter as a woman strolls by. Of course she ignores them; it wouldn’t get you far in the Ramrod, either. Sometimes a group of them will clap and whistle for a ten, and I’ve seen women with a sporty sense of humor wave in acknowledgment. But there the rapport ends.

  So why do they keep at it? Has one of them ever—in the entire history of architecture from Stonehenge to the present— made a single woman on the street? There are the occasional groupies, true: a few days ago I saw a young woman with the intense air of the bimbo about her waiting outside the site next to my apartment building just before quitting time with a camera in her hands. But this is the kind of woman these men have access to anyway, not least in the neighborhood bars where they cruise for a “hit.” The ladies of fashion who freeze out these lunch-break inquiries are a race of person these men will never contact. After all, women like being met, not picked up, especially not on the street.

  One of the workers next door eats his lunch sitting on the sidewalk in front of my building. Men he discounts or glares at; women he violates in a grin. The pretty ones get a hello. I was heading home from the grocery when I saw a smashing Bloomingdale’s type treat his greeting to a look of such dread scorn that, flashed in Ty’s, it would have sent the entire bar into the hospital with rejection breakdowns. But the ironworker keeps grinning as she storms on; “Have a nice day!” he urges. Emotionally invulnerable, I tell you. Yet are they really trying to pick these women up—sitting on the ground in a kind of visual metaphor of the plebeian, chomping on a sandwich while ladling out ten or twelve obscenities per sentence? This ironworker at my building is young, handsome, and clean-cut; but he’s riffraff. Sex is class.

  When I started working on my dad’s sites, I saw these men not as a social entity but as ethnicities and professions. There were Italians, Poles, Portuguese, and the Irish, each with a signature accent. There were carpenters, electricians, cement people, and the ironworkers themselves, the center of the business, either setters (who guide the girders into their moorings) or bolters (who fasten them). They were quiet around my brothers and me, not respectful but not unpleasant, either. We were, as they term beginners, “punks.” Still, we were the boss’s punks.

  My older brother Jim fit in easily with them and my younger brother Andrew somewhat admired them; I found them unnervingly unpredictable. They were forever dropping their pants or socking each other. They’d ignore you all day from a distance of two feet, then suddenly come over and bellow a chorus of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Old Oak Tree” about two inches from your nose. Surpassingly uncultured, they were nimble conversationalists, each with his unique idioms, jokes, passwords. One might almost call them sociable but for their ferocious sense of kind, of belonging to something that by its very nature had to—but also by its simple willfulness wanted to— exclude everyone who wasn’t of the brotherhood. Their sense of loyalty was astonishing—loyalty to their work, their friends, their people. Offend that loyalty and you confronted Major War.

  Most of them were huge, the mesomorph physiques expanding with the labor over the years so that even fat wrecks sported gigantic muscles under the flab. Strangely, ironworkers don’t throw their weight around, don’t try to characterize themselves the way gay attitude hunks so often do. Ironworkers don’t care whether you’re impressed with them or not: they are what they are. They’re impressed. And just when you think you’ve figured them out, they’ll pull a twist on you. My dad built the Louisiana pavilion at the 1968 World’s Fair, an evocation of “Bourbon Street,” and one of the setting crew, a tall, silent Irish guy who drank literally from start to finish of every day, impressed me as being the meanest bastard on the site. “Hey, you,” he said to me, on my first hour on the job, “what the fuck are you doing?” I had been sorting material so bizarre I don’t think it has a name, and I said as much. He stared at my mouth for a moment, then said, “Fuck you and fuck your college.” I avoided him as much as was possible. And it happened that one day, some weeks later, the wind blew a speck of dirt into my eye while I was on the roof, and before I could do anything about it, he had come over, pulled out the bandanna they all carry, and was cleaning out my eye with the most amazing tenderness. “Okay?” he asked. It was, now. “Thanks,” I said. He nodded, went back to what he was doing, and never spoke to me again.

  The younger ironworkers had a certain flash and drove dashing cars, but my dad warned us not to take them as role models; they spent their evenings getting drunk and came home to beat their wives when they came home at all.

  “Is that what you want to be?” he asked us grimly.

  “Yeah,” said Andrew.

  The superintendents on these various jobs were supposed to keep an eye on us lest we get into trouble, but they seemed to delight in posing us atrocious tasks, such as climbing rickety, forty-foot ladders on wild goose chases. Sometimes they’d give us a lift home, whereupon we’d be treated to an analysis of the social contours of the business: “Doze Italians, now, all dey wanna do is make fires. De niggers are lazy good-for-nothings.” And so on. Once, on lunch break, Andrew told my dad about this. “That idiot,” was my dad’s comment. “Look,” said Andrew, pointing to a group of Italians who had just made a pointless little fire so they could watch it go out.

  UNLIKE THE REST OF US, Jim stayed with it. After a year of Rutgers he abandoned college forever and joined the ironworkers union, an unthinkable act for a building contractor’s son, virtually a
patricidal betrayal of class. Yet I doubt he could have gotten his union book without my dad’s assistance; The building trade is harder to get into than a child-proof aspirin bottle. By the time I reached New York he was living in Manhattan. We ended up a few blocks from each other in the east fifties, and tentatively reconvened the relationship. My dad’s “Is that what you want to be?” ran through my head when I first visited Jim’s apartment, nothing you’d expect from a birthright member of the middle class. It was somehow blank and gaudy at once, rather like a pussy wagon with walls. Mae West, reincarnated as a blind lesbian, might have lived there. No, I’m giving it too much texture. It was the house of a man whose image of sensuality was a nude photograph of himself, his torso turned to the side to display a tattoo of two crossed swords. The photograph hung on his wall, and when I saw it I said, “If that thing on your arm is real, you’d better not let Mother see it.” He pulled off his shirt, smiling. It was real.

  “Girls like a breezy man, sport,” he told me. No one else in my family talks like him.

  I don’t understand this craze for tattoos among working-class men. Permanently disfiguring oneself falls in with that hopeless flirting with inaccessible women and other self-delusory acts of the reckless straight. At least Jim’s tattoo was high up on the arm, easily hidden even in a T-shirt; his pal Gene Caputo had a tattoo on each biceps, forearm, and thigh. Colored ones, no less —snakes and eagles and murder and paranoia. Socially, Gene had one topic, “layfuck.” For the first three beers and two joints, he would expound on the attracting of “my woman.” Four beers and another joint along, he would outline the various methods of layfucking them. By the eighteenth beer, he’d get into how to dispose of them. Then he’d pass out wherever he happened to be.