Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  "Well, no matter who arranged it, or even what happens to Julian and me, I'll always thank him for bringing you and me together again."

  I meant it. Because in fact Alistair Dodge now was the changed person my mother had promised he'd be at sixteen—when he hadn't been. I didn't fool myself into believing that it was Love and Peace and drugs that had done the trick. Maybe what had finally calmed Alistair and allowed him to be himself—charming, bright, and funny—was simply success, and that he needn't ever have to worry about money again. Whatever was responsible, I only discovered it with many hesitations and reluctances during late summer and early autumn, as Julian courted me, and only because Julian's ego required that anyone he love in turn love everything and everyone else Julian loved—which happened to include Alistair.

  "He did bring us together," Alistair agreed. "Last time... I didn't think you'd... I sent Julian to do my dirty work. I knew he wouldn't take no for an answer."

  The French doors onto the terrace opened, and someone peered at us.

  "C'mon out!" Alistair said. "Plenty of room."

  Three new guests had arrived. Alistair rose to greet them and show them around. I heard him call the houseboy. "Kenny? Are you alive?" Getting no response, he went indoors with one of the three young men.

  As the door opened wider, I heard the Chambers Brothers chanting "Time" again and again over a ragalike bass guitar drone. I smelled a new brand of grass at the same time the two newcomers drifted across the terrace and offered me a hit. I offered them a seat. There followed the usual chat about how spacious the terrace was and how stupendous the view: it encompassed the West Village, the lower Hudson River right to the Statue of Liberty. A graceful arc of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge glittered in the distance.

  When we stood up for me to point out more specific views, I confirmed that the young man not doing the talking was by far the more interesting-looking of the two. Unlike most people I now associated with, his hair—so black that like Clark Kent's in the comics it was blue—wasn't halfway down his back, but straight, in a natural-looking Beatles bowl cut. In contrast—and when I saw him by electric light and later in daylight this was even more striking—his skin was quite pale, ivory-white, as though he'd managed to avoid the entire recent summer. His eyes were another contrast: coal-black, lavishly lashed, probing, and restless.

  I thought his face almost too perfectly featured—small nose, fine lips, cleft chin, deep little dimples—and from what I could see of his body in his black corduroys and short-sleeved chambray shirt, it also seemed petitely if perfectly proportioned. He looked as though he'd been drawn to model for a children's book, stories by the Brothers Grimm, say—except for those eyes: they smoldered like banked fires.

  "Cord Shay," he introduced himself. The other was Christopher something or other. Their friend, Alan, now joined us. He carried the bong, newly filled with strong, sweet Michoacán grass, which Cord lighted.

  "Know who's inside!" Alan gushed.

  "I saw!" Cord said, a hint of sourness in his voice.

  "Julian Gwynne," Alan went on, "from -----," naming the band.

  "I saw!" Cord repeated. "And I chose to come out here."

  "Don't you like Gwynne?" I asked. If not, it would be a novelty.

  "Never met him. Never want to," Cord added.

  His sentences were like that: short, declarative, final somehow. When he looked at you, it was off to one side—not far, an inch—a fast glance; instant assessments seemed to be his metier.

  "You know Gwynne well?" Christopher asked.

  "Not well. We fuck," I said in the most casual way I knew how and reached for the bong from Alan, who'd begun choking on what he'd inhaled—I hoped because of what I'd just said. Over the top of the water pipe's mouthpiece, I saw Cord Shay stare at me. Did he believe me?

  ''How do you know Alistair?" Alan asked. I think he was expecting me to say we fucked too.

  He was amazed when I said we were related, had known each other since we were boys.

  Alistair chose that moment to come onto the terrace, check the bong, add grass, take a hit, pass it around. Inside, the music was the Turtles.

  "Uh-oh!" I said. "Who put that on?"

  "Take it off!"Alistair rushed in as we heard the record loudly scraped off the turntable. It was replaced by Dr. John's Gris-Gris.

  "Julian lets everyone know his taste in music," I explained.

  "Another reason to...," Cord mumbled. "All stars... selfish!"

  "We are all selfish," I said. "Some of us merely have more reason to be."

  Cord shrugged and to my surprise allowed himself to be led inside by his friends. I almost joined them, eager to see whether he would change his tune once he was face-to-face with an actual rock star. My guess was he wouldn't. Even though I hoped he would. I remained outside, alone with the night.

  I was wondering how to break off with Julian. He'd begun to intuit that—to see he'd been the way in for me to begin to acknowledge my interest in men as sexual/romantic objects—and also to intuit that he was losing me, and to my annoyed surprise, he'd begun to hold onto me all the tighter. It was all ego, I knew. He'd be just as happy to move on to fresh pastures—if only he could dump me first. But it was his very ego that I wanted to get away from.

  I'd hoped Alistair would help with my Julian problem, but his willingness to talk about everything but when I'd brought it up was so strong, I suspected he'd be useless. Why? Because he was in the middle, naturally. But was that really the only answer? Might he be romantically interested in Julian? He seemed to me to be quite the most eligible young gay bachelor in town, yet despite all the guys around him, Alistair still remained strangely unattached.

  I tried patching together bits and pieces of what my second cousin had told me about his life since we'd last seen each other, hoping to discover some telling pattern in the mosaic. Alistair had graduated private school at seventeen, not brilliantly, but not badly either. He'd attended UCLA at Westwood—more or less in his neighborhood—for two years. When the real estate development sold, he'd moved up to Palo Alto and Stanford. He'd taken a variety of business and prelaw courses, and again he'd done well if not brilliantly. He'd connected up with kids from affluent families and managed to get involved in another real estate project, in Fairfax, a "burgeoning" Bay Area suburb, north of San Francisco.

  Alistair made Russian Hill his home when he got out of college. By then Diana and Albert had married and divorced, then gone their own ways: Albert up to Anchorage, Diana with a new man to Hancock Park—old L.A. money! Alistair took up with a well-off gay group on the Hill. He had one boyfriend, Michael Someone or Other from that set, and they went into business together, again in real estate, down the coast at Santa Clara, where the growing university brought a need forprofessional housing. Even though Alistair and Michael broke up; they still spoke often, since the project was incomplete. Figuring backward, I calculated that must have been when Alistair first met Julian Gwynne. From what I knew, they'd had a brief affair and been friends the entire past year. Which of them had done the breaking up?

  "He's asking for you." Alistair meant Julian.

  "In a sec. Tell me about the dark intense one."

  "Cord Shay? Completely edible, isn't he?"

  "Just spit out the toes and fingernails! Is he a homo?"

  "Who knows?" Alistair shrugged. "I know he and Alan are thick in the draft resistance movement. Not SDS but some initials like that."

  "Sounds 'Very Serious Indeed!' They one of your charities?"

  "I guess. Alan wanted me to go to a cell meeting. Could you picture me with all those lean, ultra-macho guys who wear plastique taped around their nuts?" Alistair asked. "All I could think was, Whatever will I wear? And then, What if one of them calls on me?"

  We laughed.

  "Cord is advocating the overthrow of the universe?" I asked.

  "Just the Selective Service."

  "I hope it happens soon."

  Alistair caught something in my ton
e of voice: "You're not in danger of being drafted?"

  "I'm not? Truth is, I've been 2-A forever, but they must have found out I finally graduated, because last week I received 'Greetings' in the mail, along with two tokens to the board downtown."

  "Are you worried?"

  "I'm just being reclassified."

  "I've heard," Alistair tried not to sound alarmist, "the minute they reclassify you, it's off to Fort Dix for basic training."

  "I'm twenty-four years old," I argued. "The tri-state area is filled with eighteen-year-olds. They won't bother with me!"

  "From Fort Dix they're going straight to Southeast Asia, Cord said."

  "They want guys who can't write their names!" I protested, getting more nervous. "Not someone who's been taught via the Socratic method. Can you picture me in a gyrene's haircut, asking, 'But, Sarge, why exactly should I scream "Kill, Kill, Kill"?'"

  "I hope you're right," Alistair said, and despite my factiousness I felt a sudden chill: even if I did manage to get out of going to Southeast Asia, I'd still be drafted, pulled out of my comfy life, forced to take orders from cretins, forced to sleep and shit and shower with a hundred creeps! Yecch! "And you?" I asked Alistair.

  "I took the Queer-Clause so fast pearls rolled all over that draft office."

  "I thought you didn't want it on your record."

  "In case I decide to run for senator?"

  "I'm just repeating what you told me a few years ago."

  Alistair shrugged. "A girl's entitled to change..."

  "Anyway I thought you did all that just to break up your mother's relationship with Albert," I said, my vague "all that" being, I thought, understood to include my cousin's ill-fated relationship with the gardener.

  "Want to know the funny part? As long as I was making trouble, they stayed together. The minute I left, they split."

  I found myself thinking that one way Alistair now differed from how he'd been was his near refusal to talk about his family—partly, I suppose, because he now found them boring, and partly because, like Julian and virtually everyone nowadays, Alistair wanted to be considered sui generis: a complete, distinct individual. The end result was to make him humble, even modest.

  "Ex-cuse me!" Kenny the houseboy was in the doorway. "Our guests are asking for you;"

  Meaning Julian was demanding me.

  "Tell him to keep his falsies on," I blared, which made silly, skinny, unpretty Kenny shiver in delicious anticipation of an incident.

  "When do you go for your physical?" Alistair asked. When I told him the date a few weeks hence, he said, "Don't worry, we'll keep you so doped up the night before, they wouldn't dream of taking you."

  Inside, Iron Butterfly was playing "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" on the stereo, turned low. People were at the table drinking wine, smoking from the bong. Besides playing messenger, Kenny was clearing the table of the picturesque remains of masalla murgh, lamb korma, dal, roti, and various chutneys. Candles in the wrought-iron Mexican candelabra had burned down into grotesqueries. Marijuana smoke filled the air.

  Julian was seated at the center of one long side of the table, approximately where Christ is placed in Da Vinci's mural. When 1 chose my own seat across from him, he glared at me, while continuing to pick at the torn ends of what had been a quite tasty chapati. Then he relented and kissed his fingers at me. I searched for and found Cord—standing against a wall near the kitchen: as far from Julian as he could get.

  The bong was returned to Julian, who began to refill it.

  Having an audience, naturally he played to it. Even without a musical instrument.

  "This Michoacán grass," he began in his whiskey-fuzzy South London accent, "grows in only one place in the world!"

  "Michoacán Province!" someone sassed.

  Unfazed, Julian went on. "But where in that huge and wild province? I'll tell you where! It grows in a valley hidden within a giant underground cavern, fed by mountain streams and illuminated by air vents dangerously eroding the cavern's limestone roof."

  He checked for listeners: most of the group was hooked.

  "Only a hundred people in the world know the location of this miraculous subterranean two acres of farm," Julian went on.

  "They belong to two families: the Figueras and the Modestos. The Figueras and Modestos do everything themselves: plant the grass, harvest it, weigh and wrap and porter the stuff out of the hidden valley.

  "They only sell it clean. Stems are fed to the burros or burned for heat when they're camped at night upon the frigid Mexican plateau, headed toward the U.S. border at Arizona. I've bought kilos of the stuff and never counted more than a dozen seeds. When I unwrapped my first kilo," he paused, "it was so powdery, so rich with buds and flowers, I found myself blinded by a haze of cannabis pollen. Absolutely stoned in seconds without having smoked!"

  He sipped his wine. We all turned to watch the person with the bong. Was it our imagination, or were we getting higher than usual?

  We waited with anticipation. Part and parcel of the experience of smoking grass and calling ourselves "dopers" were the stories of where a particularly good batch had grown, a sort of oral tradition.

  "Eventually," Julian continued, "I persuaded my dealer to bring me to the source of this wondrous bounty! One night, I was taken there.

  We traveled for hours by jeep, then by mule. When we arrived, the blindfold was removed and I was in a dark place surrounded by all these amazing people with faces right off Olmec stone carvings."

  Julian went on to tell how he managed to charm the Figuera-Modesto families—not into giving away their grass or the secret location of the site—but into making him an honorary member of their clan.

  "At first they wanted to cut open my scrotum and take one teste out," Julian said, "since single-balledness is common among male Modestos, but I persuaded them that simple bloodletting would do."

  He showed us a scar on his left thumb that might have come from anything, an accident with a milk bottle.

  "I'm now a co-owner. I plant and reap my own parcel."

  Expressions of "Gee-whiz!" and its variants went around the table.

  I got up to take a piss.

  The story was typical of Julian: far beyond even the legendary stories potheads commonly fabricated or overembroidered, it aimed into the realm of the singularly fantastic. But then, everything in Julian's life was fantastic, one of a kind, unprecedented. Nothing was, or could possibly be, common, nothing ordinary.

  Including the story of how he'd met me, which I'd overheard as: "There he was, virtually naked in the rain, handing out fruit and freshly baked bread to hundreds of starving children at Woodstock. And he was a virgin!"

  Would Julian have bothered with me if we'd met in a more ordinary way?

  I wondered.

  "You really don't see it?" Cord asked when I walked out of the john and looked into the kitchen.

  "See what?" I asked.

  "In him! Oh, never mind!"

  I stopped Cord. "What?"

  "He's so..." Cord searched for the word.

  "Phony?" I asked. "Nah. He's just a big kid. A big deprived kid, enjoying himself for the first time in his life."

  Cord shrugged. "You're more forgiving."

  "Peace. Love. LSD, brother!" I gave the vee sign.

  "But I guess you can afford to be," Cord said.

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  But he'd gone into the dining room, where the group around the table was breaking up, people getting up to dance to the Stones' "19th Nervous Breakdown," and now Cord also was dancing—or rather shaking himself in place—surrounded by his friends. The next thing I knew they were all leaving.

  "You like that bit o' fluff, do you?" Julian said into my ear a second later, as I watched from the sidelines.

  "He's cuter than you are!" I provoked back.

  "Far too serious," Julian pontificated. "He'll get in big trouble being that serious. Especially since he has such a little prick."

  I was getting real
tired of Julian knowing everything. "Who says he has a little prick?"

  "He has. This big." Julian crooked his little finger.

  "He does not!"

  "He does too. And it'll hurt when he uses it on you," Julian said, "because he doesn't know how to use it. That type never does."

  "Want to make a bet?"

  "You would! You'd let him fuck you just to disprove me!"

  Seeing how irritated I'd gotten him, I said, "I'd let him fuck me to irritate you!"

  "You wouldn't dare!" Julian's face said he was joking, but his voice had taken on a certain hysterical edge I now recognized.

  Others recognized it too; they'd turned toward us as a group.

  "Oh, wouldn't I? Watch me!"

  "You fucking little slut!" Julian shouted, as I'd known he would, and grabbed me, as I'd known he would.

  I could just make out Cord Shay's face among the chorus watching as I hauled off to throw the right uppercut punch which would connect terrifically to Julian's jaw, knock him out cold, incite reams of gossip column speculation for weeks to come, and effectively end our romance.

  "You're coming over later, aren't you?" Alistair asked over the phone.

  "I've been at your place all week," I protested.

  "Cord Shay might come," he tempted.

  Cord had been there almost every night since he'd first appeared.

  "You really don't have to baby-sit me, Alistair. I'll survive."

  The truth was I appreciated like hell what I'd just called Alistair's baby-sitting. It was thirteen days since I'd decked Julian Gwynne, almost a week since he and his band had gone on their European tour, a tour I was supposed to have been part of.

  Instead, I was stuck in this pasteboard cubicle again, nine to five, five days a week, my desk covered by pads of yellow legal paper upon which I doodled endlessly; the single manuscript I was supposed to be evaluating was untouched, in truth unread by me save for its ho-hum preface. Naturally I was second-guessing myself, wondering if in shoving off from Julian I'd completely ruined my life. He'd taken it hard at first, then—as I'd intuited—gone on with his life as though I'd never even happened. That hurt. Even worse, with Julian gone, there was little to divert, amuse, or enlighten my otherwise colorless life. Nothing but—now—the wild improbability of maybe later tonight getting close enough to Cord Shay to lay a tentative hand upon one of his perfect thighs, tightly clothed though it would no doubt remain within the unbreakable armor of his steel-gray work pants.