Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Ray remembered a remark someone had once made: “Many people believe in God without loving him, but I love him without believing in him.” Ray didn’t know why the remark popped into his head just now. Did he love George without believing he existed? Ray described himself as a “mystical atheist.” Maybe that was a complicated way of saying he believed George still loved him, or would if God would let him speak.

  In his New York gay world, which was as carefully screened from men under twenty-five as from those over sixty, Ray counted as “young.” That is, some old flame whom Ray had known fifteen years ago—a guy with a moustache gone gray and fanning squint lines but a still massive chest and thunder thighs under all that good tailoring—would spot Ray at a black-tie gay rights dinner or AIDS benefit and come up to him murmuring, “Lookin’ good, kid,” and would pinch his bottom. It was all continuing and Ray knew that despite the way his body had acquired a certain thickness, as though the original Greek statue had been copied by a Roman, he still looked youthful to his contemporaries.

  In the first two weeks after George’s death Ray had picked up three different men on the street and dragged them home. Ray had clung to their warm bodies, their air-breathing chests and blood-beating hearts, clung like a vampire to warm himself through transfusions of desire. He and Anna would sniff at these bewildered young men as though nothing could be less likely than a scabbed knee, furred buttocks, an uncollared collarbone, or the glamorous confusion of a cast-aside white shirt and silk rep tie. What they, the pick-ups, wanted, heart-to-heart post-coital chat, appealed to him not at all; all he wanted was to lie face down beside tonight’s face-up partner and slide on top of him just enough to be literally heart-to-heart. Their carnality had seemed very fragile.

  After this brief, irresponsible flaring up of lust, which had followed the sexless years of George’s dying, Ray had gone back to celibacy. He thought it very likely that he was carrying death inside him, that it was ticking inside him like a time bomb but one he couldn’t find because it had been secreted by an unknown terrorist. Even if it was located it couldn’t be defused. Nor did he know when it might explode. He didn’t want to expose anyone to contagion.

  He wrote his will as he knew everyone should. That was the adult thing to do. But the paltry list of his possessions reminded him of how little he’d accumulated or accomplished; it was like the shame of moving day, of seeing one’s cigarette-burned upholstery and scarred bureau on the curb under a hot, contemptuous sun. His relatively youthful looks had led him to go on believing in his youthful expectations; his life, he would have said as a philosophy student, was all becoming and no being. All in the future until this death sentence (never pronounced, daily remanded) had been handed down.

  Occasionally he jerked off with poppers and dirty magazines. Although he found slaves and masters ludicrous and pathetic, his fantasies had not kept pace with the fashions and were mired somewhere in 1972, best simulated by the stories and photos in Drummer. He would read a hot tale about a violent encounter between two real pigs, sniff his amyl, even mutter a few words (“Give your boy that daddy-dick”), and then find himself, head aching, stomach sticky, heart sinking, erection melting, alone, posthumous. Anna wrinkled her nose and squinted at the fumes. He hoped his executor, who was his lawyer, would be able to bury him next to George as instructed, since he only slept really well when George was beside him. Once in a Philadelphia museum he’d seen the skeletons of a prehistoric man and woman, buried together (he couldn’t remember how they’d come to die at the same time). He was lying on his back, she on her side, her hand placed delicately on his chest.

  The days in Crete were big, cloudless hot days, heroic days, noisy with the saw rasp of insects. They were heroic days as though the sun were a lion-hearted hero… . Oh, but hadn’t he just read in his beach book, The Odyssey, the words of the dead, lion-hearted Achilles: “Do not speak to me soothingly about death, glorious Odysseus; I should prefer as a slave to serve another man, even if he had no property and little to live on, than to ride over all these dead who have done with life.” He’d cried on the white sand beach beside the lapis lazuli water and looked through his tears, amazed, at a herd of sheep trotting toward him. He stood and waded and waved, smiling, at the old shepherd in black pants and a carved stick in his hand, which itself looked carved; Ray, expensively muscular in his Valentino swim trunks, thought he was probably not much younger than this ancient peasant and suddenly his grief struck him as a costly gewgaw, beyond the means of the grievously hungry and hardworking world. Or maybe it was precisely his grief that joined him to this peasant. Every night he was dreaming about George, and in that book about the Greek death rituals he’d read the words of an old woman, “At death the soul emerges in its entirety, like a man. It has the shape of a man, only it’s invisible. It has a mouth and hands and eats real food just like we do. When you see someone in your dreams, it’s the soul you see. People in your dreams eat, don’t they? The souls of the dead eat too.” Ray couldn’t remember if George ate in his dreams.

  RALPH AND RAY RENTED MOTOR SCOOTERS and drove up a narrow road through chasms, past abandoned medieval churches and new cement-block houses, high into the mountains. They chugged slowly up to and away from a goat stretching to reach the lower branches of a tree. They saw a young Orthodox priest in a black soutane out strolling, preceded by a full black beard he seemed to be carrying in front of him as one might carry a salver. He remembered that Orthodox priests can marry and he vaguely thought of that as the reason this one looked so virile; he looked as though he’d just stepped out from behind the plow into this dress.

  The summer drought had dwindled the stream to a brook within its still green bed. At a certain turn in the road the air turned cool, as though the frozen core of the mountain had gotten tired of holding its breath. In the shepherd’s village where they stopped for lunch a smiling boy was found to speak English with them. He said he’d lived in New Zealand for a year with his aunt and uncle; that was why he knew English. Laughing, he offered them steaks and salads, but it turned out the only food available in the village was a runny sour cheese and bread and olives.

  Every day, despite the climate’s invitation to languor, Ray did his complete work-out, causing the heavy old wardrobe in his room to creak and throw open its door when he did pushups. Some days, specially around three, a wind would suddenly blow up and he and Ralph would run around battening down the twenty-three windows. At dusk on Sundays a naval band marched all the way around the harbor to the fortress opposite the lighthouse and played the national anthem (“Which was written by a German,” Ralph couldn’t resist throwing in) while the blue-and-white flag was lowered.

  Although the days were cheerful—scooter rides to a deserted beach, vegetable and fish marketing, desultory house-hunting out beyond the town walls on which the Venetian lion had been emblazoned—the nights were menacing. He and Ralph would dress carefully for the volta, Ralph in a dark blue shirt and ironed slacks, Ray in a floating gown of a Japanese designer shirt and enormous one-size-drowns-all lime-green shorts, neon-orange cotton socks, black Adidas, and white sunglasses slatted like Venetian blinds angled down (“Perfect for the Saudi matron on the go,” he said).

  At least that’s how he got himself up the first few nights until he sensed Ralph’s embarrassment, the crowd’s smiling contempt, and his own … what?

  Desire?

  Every night it was the same. The sun set, neon lights outlined the eaves and arches of the cafes, and an army of strollers, mostly young and male, sauntered slowly along the horseshoe-shaped stone walk beside the harbor. Sometimes it stank of pizza or what was called “Kantaki Fried Chicken” or of the sea urchins old fishermen had cleaned on the wharf earlier in the day. The route could be stretched out to twenty minutes if one lingered in conversation with friends, stopped to buy nuts from one vendor and to look at the jewelry sold by Dutch hippies. A drink at an outdoor cafe—ouzo and hors d’oeuvres (“mezes”)—could while away another forty mi
nutes.

  The full hour was always devoted to boy-watching. Ray looked, too, at the wonderful black hair, muscular bodies, red cheeks under deep tans, flamboyant moustaches, big noses, transparent arrogance, equally transparent self-doubt, black eyebrows yearning to meet above the nose and often succeeding. “Of course they need reassurance,” Ralph said. “What actor doesn’t?” These guys had loud voices, carnivorous teeth, strutting walks, big asses, broad shoulders. Ray thought they were more like American teenage boys than other European youths; they were equally big and loud and physical and sloppy and unveiled in their curiosity and hostility.

  One of the sixty-year-old Americans, a classics professor in the States, was an amateur photographer of considerable refinement. He’d persuaded, it seemed, dozens of locals to pose nude for him. He paid them something. He was discreet. He flattered them as best he could in the modern language he’d pieced together out of his complete knowledge of ancient Greek. “Sometimes,” he said, “they say a whole long improbable sentence in English—picked up from an American song or movie, no doubt.”

  Among the locals his ministrations to vanity made him popular, his scholarship made him impressive and his hobby risible, but since he always seemed to be laughing at himself in his ancient, elegant prep-school way, his laughter softened theirs. His photographic sessions he dismissed airily but pursued gravely.

  Homer (for that was his name, absurdly, “Stranger than epic,” as he said) took a polite but real interest in Ray—but strictly in Ray’s mind. Ray—who expected, invited, and resented other men’s sexual attraction to him—found Homer’s sex-free attentiveness unsettling. And appealing. Maybe because Homer was a professor and had a professor’s way of listening— which meant he winced slightly when he disagreed and cleaned his glasses when he deeply disagreed—Ray felt returned, if only for an instant, to his schooldays. To the days before he’d ever known George. To the days when he’d been not a New York know-it-all, but a Midwestern intellectual, someone who took nothing on authority and didn’t even suspect there were such things as fashions in ideas.

  This repatriation cheered him. Ralph had made a spaghetti dinner at home (“Enough with the swordfish and feta, already”) and invited Homer. Ray’s and Homer’s conversation about the categorical imperative, the wager, the cave, the excluded middle astonished Ralph. “You girls are real bluestockings,” he told them, “which is okay for a hen-party, but remember men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.” Ralph even seemed disconcerted by their intelligence, if that’s what all this highbrow name-dropping had revealed.

  After the wine and the laughter Ray thought it only natural to go on to the bar with his friends, the gay bar where they met with “true love” every night, as Ralph said. On the way along the harbor, Ray told Homer all about his sexual qualms. “I just don’t think I should expose anyone else to this disease in case I’ve got it or in case I’m contagious. And I’m not disciplined enough to stick to safe sex.”

  Homer nodded and made the same noncommittal but polite murmur as when earlier they’d discussed the Nicomachean Ethics. Then, as though shaking himself awake, he asked, “What is safe sex, exactly?”

  “Strictly safe is masturbation, no exchange of body fluids. Or if you fuck you can use a rubber. But I’m not worried about myself. The only one in danger where fucking and sucking is involved is the guy who gets the come.”

  Silence full of blinking in the dark, blinking with lashes growing longer, darker with mascara by the second. “But darling,” Homer finally confided, hilariously woman-to-woman, “then the Greeks are always safe. They’re the men; we’re the girls.”

  “Call me square,” Ray said, “but that’s old-fashioned roleplaying—and I’ve never, never paid—”

  Homer interrupted him with a soft old hand on his arm. “Give it a try. After all, it’s your only option.”

  The alley leading to the bar was too narrow for cars but wide enough to accommodate four noisy adolescents walking shoulder-to-shoulder; one of them stepped drunkenly down into the grass-sprouting ruins and pissed against a jagged wall. Ray thought of those jagged walls in … was it Giotto’s murals in Santa Croce in Florence? The kid had a foolish grin and he seemed to have forgotten how to aim, shake, button up. The others started barking and mewing. Ray found the situation and the hoarse voices exciting. Had these guys come from the bar? Were they gay?

  The bar was a low room, a basement grotto, one would have said, except it w as on the ground floor. There were several dimly lit alcoves just off the room in which shadowy couples were smoking and drinking. The waiters or “hostesses” were two transvestites, Dmitri, who was chubby and brunette and kept a slightly deformed hand always just out of sight, flickering it behind his back or under a tray or into a pocket, and Adriana, who was slender, with straight, shoulder-length blond hair, and who responded to open jeers with a zonked-out grin that never varied, as though she were drugged on her own powerful fantasy of herself, which made her immune. Both were in jeans and T-shirts; Adriana had two small, hormone-induced breasts, but his arms were still muscular and his hips boyishly narrow. Dmitri, the brunette, had less beauty and still more vitality, a clown’s vitality; he was the stand-up or run-past comic. He did pratfalls with his tray, twinkled past on point, sat on laps or wriggled deliciously against sailors, always keeping his hand in motion, out-of-focus. The bar was called “Fire Island.”

  At first this gay bar seemed to Ray an unexpected trove of sexy young guys until Homer explained that, technically, they (Ralph, Ray, and Homer) were the only gays, along with the two hostesses, of course. Everyone else was, well, a gigolo, although that was too coarse a word for it. “Greek men really do prefer male company. All their bars are like this one,” Homer said with that ornithological pride all old-timer expatriates exhibit to the newcomer. “The women don’t go out much. And the men all think it’s normal to get money for sex—just remember the dowries they receive. And then they’re terribly poor, the sailors, five bucks a week, that’s all they get. So, you take all these horny nineteen-year-olds away from their villages for the first time in their lives. Here they are, bored, lonely, with too much time on their hands, no unmarried Greek girls in sight …”

  “Where are the girls?” Ray asked, embarrassed he hadn’t noticed their absence till now.

  “Their mothers quite sensibly keep them under lock and key. I myself feel an infinite reverence for the intact maidenhead. Of course you know these scandalous mothers teach their daughters to take it up the ass if they must put out; anything to stay intact. Although why am I complaining? That’s my philosophy exactly.”

  “So the sailors are alone and horny….”

  “And naturally they want to party. That’s how they think of it. You buy them drinks and you’re a real sport. You ask them home. It’s a party. The only problem is how to wean them away from their parea.”

  “Come again?”

  “Parea. That’s their group, their friends, Oh, a very useful word. If you want to pick someone up, point to him, then yourself. Say, ‘You, me, parea?’ ”

  “And what do they call us, the faggots?”

  Homer smiled and lowered his voice: “Poosti.”

  “So we’re poosti on parea … Don’t rain on my parea.”

  “Yes,” Homer said somewhat primly, “but not so loud. You’ll scandalize the seafood,” nodding toward a parea of five sailors, smiling at them with lofty politeness.

  After two hours of drinking gin and tonic, Ray realized most of the boys weren’t drinking at all and were just sitting over empty bottles of beer, bumming cigarettes from one another and hungrily staring at the door as each newcomer entered. Only a few were talking to each other. Sometimes they seemed to be inventing a conversation (involving lots of numbers, as even Ray could decode) and an emotion (usually indignation), but purely as a set piece to show them off to advantage to potential clients. The same tape of “Susanna” kept playing over and over, last year’s disco tune, which didn’t mea
n much to him since it had been popular when George was already sick and they had stopped going out dancing.

  He excused himself, pecked Homer on the cheek, and squeezed past a suddenly amorous Dmitri, the hefty hostess, who smelled of sweat and Chanel.

  Outside the night was airless, fragrant, the sky an enormous black colander held up to the light. Since it hadn’t rained in months, dust filled the streets, dulled the store windows examined by veering headlights, rose in lazy devils behind passing shoes. In a bridal store the mannequin of the bride herself was snub-nosed and blonde, her hair bristling up under her veil at crazy shocked angles as though she’d stuck her finger in an electric socket. She was flanked by curious white cloth bouquets trailing white silk ribbons. Were they held by her bridesmaids? Ray had seen a woman bringing such a bouquet here on the plane from Athens. In that book he’d read the exhumations of a dead person’s bones three years after death were compared to a wedding. The same songs were sung; the words varied only slightly. Both songs had begun with the words: “Now I have set out. Now I am about to depart… .” Something like that.

  On the corner a man was selling round green melons out of a cart. Everywhere people seemed awake and watching—from a trellissed balcony, from a waiting cab, from a rooftop cafe. In such a hot country people stayed up to enjoy the cool of the night. Kids, calling out to one another, sped by on bicycles. In the square in front of the cathedral a whole line of taxis waited, five drivers standing in a circle and disputing—what? Soccer? Politics?

  Ray turned onto a deserted street lined with notions shops displaying lace trimmings and bolts of fabric and spools of thread. At the corner an old man with yellowing hair, worn-down shoes, and no socks had fallen asleep with his feet up on his desk in an open-air stand that sold ex-votos in tin—a bent arm, an ear, an open eye, a soldier in World War I uniform and helmet—and also tin icons, the metal snipped away to frame crude tinted reproductions of the Virgin’s face. He also had long and short candles and something (incense?) wrapped in red paper cylinders, stacked high like rolled coins from the bank.