The Duplex

by Lucky Stevens

  “What the hell’s going on?” he said.

  “What? Cliff?” I said. I was practically howling.

  “Yeah! What are you doing?”

  “What are we doing? What are you doing? Besides scaring the hell out of us. Goddamn it, Cliff!” said Barbara, as she got up off of me.

  “I’m putting in a pulley system to make it easier to bring things up and down from the attic. It was your idea, Barbara, from months ago. But listen, if it scares you so much, I can take it out.”

  Cliff Lonigan

  We were standing in the corner of the breakfast nook when Jerry put his hand on my shoulder. “Do you love me, Cliff?”

  I clenched my lips and assumed the only look I really can in such a disgusting situation. “Is this an example of one of those rhetorical questions I’ve heard so much about?” I said. “Wait, wait, don’t answer that.”

  Jerry was right. There are some things that are harder than riding a motorcycle a hundred miles an hour in the desert.

  The trouble with Jerry is that he expects you take that ride a lot more often than can be reasonably expected of a guy. But that’s Jerry. He’ll drive a guy nuts. But I suppose I wouldn’t trade him for anything.

  Not long after my “suicide”, as the closet pulley incident came to be known, I decided to go back home and visit my folks. My mother couldn’t stop hugging me. My father looked up from his paper and told me it was my turn to take out the garbage. And that it had been for ten years.

  Later, me and Pop went fishing. On the bank, Pop told me some great stories. One of the perks of being the son of a bartender. Maybe the only one, but what the hell. It’s something. After we were done, and as we walked back from the lake to the car, he decided to tell me that he wished he had never had children. Biggest mistake of his life. Women were no bargain either. Getting married was the second biggest mistake of his life.

  “Women and children are the two biggest pain in the asses since God invented the double-decker hemorrhoid,” he said. I shrugged. Well, I couldn’t ask for a better cue, I thought, to tell him that I preferred the company of men. So I did.

  Well, the way he reacted, you’d have thought I told him I like mixed drinks or something.

  First, he calls me a “homo,” which struck me as a little redundant, considering what I had just gotten through telling him. Then he took some pretty good swings at me for an old guy, which really brought back those happy days of my youth. Fortunately, I was ready for him, and ducking and dodging a half dozen times or so was all it took before he was winded. Bent over, breathing hard, with his hands on his knees, he said, “Next time I see you, I’ll kill you, you flying pansy.”

  “Well Pop, don’t think there wasn’t a reason I suggested fishing over hunting,” I said with a wide grin. But I felt like sitting down. I was a little lightheaded, and hollow in my guts.

  I told him to expect a Christmas card this year, and that we really oughta go fishing more often. Then I took off down the road and cut through the forest, making the wild assumption that Dad wouldn’t be giving me a ride back home. I ran as fast as I could to beat him back so I could say goodbye to my mother. I studied her face, trying to take a snapshot in my mind. She was just like Dad, and I knew I would never see her again, not after she heard the news. I thought about telling her myself. But I figured she would find out soon enough, and when I looked into her eyes, I knew I couldn’t be the one to hurt her.

  All in all, my trip went pretty much the way I expected it would, with no surprises. I was glad I went.

  So, it was back to L.A. where I had to deal with the fact that my “wife”, Dot, was apparently not coming back. The hens in the neighborhood were cackling about it, and eventually, with our heads hanging low, we told them that the Lonigans were headed for divorce. Whatever stir this caused was relatively minor—after all, this was Hollywood. A lot of things are relative. People seemed especially curious as to why she had moved out instead of me. Not that they’d ask me directly, of course. The hypocrites. “Why shouldn’t she move out? She was the problem, after all. Oh, I can’t talk about it,” I would say, clutching my heart.

  Jerry, Barbara, and I would sit around and shoot the breeze about it. I would tell Barbara that I was the talk of the town, and that the pressure was more than I could bear. She’d “better help me pick out a wife, or I’ll do it myself—and I have terrible taste.” Then Jerry would give me a cross look. “In women,” I’d say. “I have terrible taste in women.” Barbara would laugh and tell us that it was too soon for her to think about other women.

  Barbara had been on an interesting ride and no worse for the wear. I would say, if anything, she had improved. She had learned to loosen up about things and told us that she no longer believed that everything in life was supposed to be a certain way. “Perfection is a great burden,” she said one day. “The best cure is some imperfection. Then all the following blemishes are not so bad.”

  Things just went the way they went, and she would no longer expect otherwise, especially of others. She also told us that there is more to life than straightening picture frames and arranging knick-knacks with a ruler.

  I rested my chin on my hand and nodded. “Hmm. I’ll have to remember that. We can work on it together.”

  When I left her place, I put my coffee cup on the edge of the table and “accidentally” bumped into a picture frame on the way out. “Ten to one, this will all be taken care of before you can close that gaping hole between your nose and chin.” Then I ducked, just in time, as a dishrag went sailing over my head.

  And it did take a while, but eventually, through a girls’ softball league she joined, Barbara did meet someone for “me”. This was fine since we needed a socially acceptable amount of time for the ink to dry on my “divorce” papers anyway.

  Her name was Cora, and she was cute. The girl next door type. She was a swell kid who fit right in. When I first met Cora, I told Barbara that she could go now. That I was very lonely and wanted to be alone with my new wife. Then I kissed her on the neck and whispered in her ear, asking her if Barbara was still there. It was decided that Cora and I would “date” for a while before making permanent plans. This of course meant no staying overnight, which gave Barbara the short end of the stick in our little set up, but she was happy anyway.

  Years later, Mrs. Rayburn, our landlady, died. Her heirs lived in the Midwest and decided to come all the way west and wanted the place for themselves. So, we patched up the wall in the closet, packed our bags and all moved west ourselves. To West Hollywood, I mean. Through his connections, Jerry had heard that West Hollywood, by that point, was more tolerant of homosexuals than other areas. Besides, the L.A.P.D. has no jurisdiction, which makes things easier.

  These connections that Jerry had made were through his involvement in the Mattachine Society, an organization for gay men. He was one of the local leaders and it kept him pretty busy. At first I told Jerry I would go with him to the meetings—for the booze. I was never much of a joiner. I have to confess though, I ended up going to more meetings than I ever thought I would. And I met some great guys, too. A lot of them are still friends.

  Jerry, along with Barbara, also started providing legal services, on the side, to gays who found themselves in trouble with the law. This led to trouble for Jerry himself when he was fired for his efforts. It took him awhile to find a new job, but he eventually landed a good one. He says he has no regrets and no plans to stop fighting for gays who get into hot water, claiming it’s easier to be happy when you’re not afraid of being fired.

  As for me, sometimes I ask myself if I’m really happy. I am calmer than I used to be. Like that fight Jerry and I had in the living room. That’s the last time I laid a glove on him—with my fists, I mean. He wouldn’t stand for it.

  You know, I used to think life was pretty anticlimactic. These days, I’m not looking for climaxes. Life is not as interesting, but so
mehow better. I know, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. I guess I’m happier when I’m not constantly on the prowl for ‘here today, gone tomorrow-type kicks.’ That stuff is like a bottomless stomach being doused with whiskey—after a while a guy gets tired of always being thirsty. Oh, but don’t take my word for it. Far be it from me to teach lessons that are much more enjoyably learned by every man for himself.

  So these days, I do what I gotta do, try not to squawk too much about it, have a few laughs and try to be grateful. And I count my blessings. If there’s more you can get out of life, I haven’t found it. Oh, and incidentally, yes, I’m still in advertising. It’s the perfect job for me. I’ve been pretending all my life. Only now I try to keep the pretending at work. I guess in the end, when all is said and done, everyone just does the best he can.

  In the winter of 1967, a Christmas card from a Mrs. Dorothy Hauser, arrived. The postmark simply read, The Suburbs. Actually, it said, Granada Hills, but same thing, really. Enclosed was a snapshot of our Dot, her husband, two blonde-haired children: a boy and a girl, and a handsome all-American mutt named Rex or King—I’m assuming. Not a bad looking brood (but I did wonder where the other .2 children were). The family was standing in front of a ranch style white house with green shutters, station wagon in the driveway and a picket fence. All they were missing were bottles of Coca-Cola in their hands. In the card she shared how happy she was and how much she loved being a mother and how much she loved her children, her home and her life. She asked us to only share the letter with Barbara if we felt it would be okay, and if we still were in touch with her, of course. She told us how much she loved us all, how much she missed us and how we had all helped to shape her life. And the last line of her card read, in part, “…and though it now seems like a lifetime ago, until the day I die, I will never forget our little duplex on S. Keniston Ave.” Neither will we, Dot.