Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  Alistair's lips were bruised where the tube had been pushed in, and I could make out yellow-and-black marks on his neck where we—the White Woman or Wally and I—had manhandled him tonight. I couldn't stop myself from crying.

  To stop, I checked the connections and located what seemed to be a simple electrical plug. Once that came out, the compressor would simply stop.

  Aloud I said, "I should have suspected you'd have this much clout with the Powers That Be!"

  What I was thinking was, It's your decision now: his life or his death. It's in your hands, yours alone, now.

  "Why is this happening again? Didn't I do it right the first time?"

  "I've had just about enough of this shit! We've all had enough of this shit!" Sal said.

  The others assented, shifting their poses for more menace.

  "Good. Good," Blaise quietly urged them on.

  "This is our bar! Our space!" Sal half pleaded. Then, harder, "You've no business being here. Ever heard of the Constitution?"

  "Ever hear of this, faggot?" Sherman pushed his nightstick into Sal's abdomen, just under where his falsies would jut out. "Suck on this, fairy!" he added, poking harder. He turned to Andy and Big Janet. "Okay, men, let's round up these swishes. What are we waiting for?"

  As they moved to surround the others, grabbing at them with open handcuffs, Sal stood very stiffly where he was. He clicked together his high heels. Then whirled his large purse at Sherman's head, catching him a good cuff, surprising even Sherman, who was poised for it.

  Everyone froze, then the other three clicked their heels together, turned, and slapped Andy and Big Janet upside their heads. Even readier than Sherman, they also fell to the stage.

  "What have we done?" Eric imitated Bambi's hoarse voice.

  "What we're doing," Sal said, beating at the now stumbling Sherman again and again with his purse, "is getting ours, finally!"

  The melee worsened. David M. jumped over the bar and deftly mimicked karate kicking the rising Andy back down to the floor. Big Janet crawled downstage to the left, then aped opening and closing a door. Again everyone froze, this time longer.

  "One of the cops made it to the men's room," Carolyn began, as she moved in front of the tableau vivant, "where he radioed for help. Another cruiser in the area responded, but its occupants were pulled inside the bar and stomped. The cop in the john called for backup, saying he had four men down. By then, a crowd had gathered outside, and some of the drag warriors were leading an assault on the parked cop cars, breaking windows, turning the cars over, as the sirens of more cruisers screamed closer. The event that would change the world for lesbians and gays forever had begun at the Stonewall Inn."

  "And... curtain!" Blaise Bergenfeld announced, standing.

  Those onstage relaxed. Blaise turned to me. "Naturally, Cynthia's sound effects will be top-notch."

  "Naturally."

  "You have a problem?" And when I didn't answer: "You don't like something? I know! The speech at the end is too long."

  I was afraid to say a word. Fear gripped my trachea, stomach, tongue.

  "We'll cut it a little," Blaise agreed. "But it's okay."

  "Blaise," I managed to spit out, "it's not the scene. It's the whole thing. It's... awful!"

  Those onstage caught my words.

  "Not you guys!" I quickly shouted. "You were fine." Dropping my voice, "But, Blaise, the whole play, it's going to be a disaster!"

  "What could possibly be a disaster?" Blaise lighted one of those overly sweet Egyptian cigarettes. "I know. My staging?"

  "Your staging's fine." I used an old program to fan off the stench. "I wish you'd smoke tana leaves somewhere else. It's not your direction, not the acting, Blaise. It's the writing."

  "You wrote it!" Blaise reminded me, unnecessarily.

  "I wrote it and it stinks! I said it would when you first asked me to do the adaptation. Stinks worse than the mummy rags you smoke."

  Blaise raised an eyebrow and a shoulder. "You're just depressed. You'll get over it." He spun around. "Okay, kids, take ten. We reassemble for the Casement trial scene. Sal, you were divine and we think it's sheer perfection that a solidly built hetero like yourself wants to act in drag for the company, but try to control your enthusiasm. You clobbered Sherm!"

  "I'm sorry. Really I am," Sal said. "I apologized twice."

  "You're certain unconscious homophobia isn't emerging?"

  "Jeez, I hope not." Sal raised his hands like an Italian matron witnessing a statue of the Madonna suddenly bleed. "I'll bring it up with my therapist next session."

  As he exited, Blaise said in a voice only I could hear, "One would give a goodly sum of one's teeny paycheck to be a fly on the wallpaper at one of those therapy sessions. To hear how it came about that doctor and patient have managed to arrange it so that ladies' man supreme, Sal Torelli, of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is not only working for the only openly homo theater company in town, but plans to wear full drag in a major role in the gayest theater spectacle of the decade." He sighed. "Rog! Go home!"

  "You really intend to continue this torture?" I asked in a panic.

  "You've been here all day. The theater wasn't meant for authors to sit inside of all day. Go home to your desk and write or jerk off or something!"

  "Why can't you admit it's tacky and melodramatic and it's going to be a disaster?" I was desperate now. "Is that so difficult to admit?"

  "The play's fine. You'll see. The scene's okay. Listen, the last play I directed... we put in this absolutely stupid, if somewhat funny, line a week before opening. During the play's run, no matter what else happened night after night in the audience, that one tacky funny line got a laugh. Moral: never underestimate the audience's intelligence. What may seem tacky ami melodramatic to you is 'moving' to them. Take my word for it." Blaise turned around completely, as though modeling the cigarette-ash-dusted blouson and loose black pants he affected—designed to hide his waistline, I suspected, but actually making him look like a Japanese art student living in Paris. "Thanks, Cyn. Those new blues work just as you said they would. Go home, Rog. Sleep. Get laid. Don't come back until you're in a better mood."

  He pushed me up the aisle of the tiny theater, past the curtain into the minuscule lobby.

  The sudden brightness reminded me that it must still be afternoon. I checked the clock over the ratty sofa. Only 3 P.M.? Couldn't be. I felt I'd been inside the theater for days, weeks!

  Someone stepped down and out of the hole in the wall off the lobby that held lighting controls. A statuesque black man dressed in what looked like a hippie version of buskins. Very statuesque, indeed, with—I saw as he turned toward me—the face of a Xhosa prince. Next out of the booth came the broadly pink-corduroyed bottom of Cynthia Lomax, coming out of her demesne, the control room. She jumped to the floor, grabbed Mr. Africa by his wide shoulders, and her cloud of carrot hair shook as she said, "Deal?"

  "It's a deal," he agreed in a honeyed basso.

  They rubbed noses.

  Cynthia approached me and perched on a sofa arm. "Blasé's right, you know," she said, using the entire company's joke name instead of the real, if pretentious, one our director sported. She spoke in an eternally surprising little-girl voice. "Authors always get jitters." Her almost featureless face looked as though it had been hastily copied off a Raggedy Ann doll: button eyes dragonfly blue, mere pinch of a nose, cartoon-tiny mouth, apple-tinted cheeks. "This is your first play?"

  "And my last! I should never have listened to him when he came to me with that outline. I should have shut the door."

  "Blasé would have gotten it on the stage one way or another. He's had his heart set on turning your book into theater since the day he read it. If you hadn't agreed, he would have stolen the material and written it himself. Then we'd have had a real disaster."

  "You've stage-managed a lot of shows?"

  "My share."

  "And you don't think this one's going to go under?"

  "Nah! It's fun!" Cynthia said,
merrily. "It's always interesting. The next scene they're rehearsing?... The trial scene... I knew nothing about Casement before, and now... well, I adore it! I tell everyone about the show. My girlfriend even read the script."

  I didn't know Cynthia had a girlfriend. The way she seemed to be constantly surrounded by a pickup-truckful of handsome little lesbians clad in overalls, with tool kits on their belts, certainly showed how popular she was. I wondered which baby dyke was her inamorata.

  "I wish I had your faith," I said, but I felt a bit better. Cynthia had that effect on everyone, everything she came into contact with.

  "You'll see," she insisted. "We'll run way past the showcase period, and then Blasé will have to worry about Equity making us pay real salaries and run ads and all that."

  She hugged me so fast I didn't have a chance to push her away. As Cynthia passed through the curtain into the theater, I couldn't help but notice that the guy she'd kissed before was still lingering inside the lobby. He looked as if he would say something to me, spun as though leaving, then turned back.

  "Don't tell me," I said. "You were watching the scene from the control room and you agree it stinks."

  "I was mostly talking with Cynthia. But what I paid attention to in the show seemed fine." Then, "You're Roger Sansarc. The writer."

  "Guilty as charged."

  "Reason I axe is, I think we had a mutual friend? Back a few years in the Bay Area. My name is Bernard. Bernard G. Dixon. The friend's name is..."

  His name had turned a key in a door into 1974. I was on a balcony overlooking Pozzuoli's main floor, looking down at people entering for a vernissage, talking about Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix with...

  "Calvin Ritchie!" We both said the name at the same time.

  "I don't remember any friend of Calvin's named Bernard. I met all Calvin's friends. Most of them were white. Only his boyfriends were... Oh, my God!" I suddenly got it. "You're Bernard!"

  "I just said that."

  "Of Bernard and Antria?"

  "When I wasn't going with Calvin, I.,."

  This vision of Kenyan pulchritude was Calvin's Bernard? No wonder Calvin had gone through such shit.

  "I'm afraid I have bad news about our friend," Bernard said.

  "There's no bad news left," I said, feeling the familiar bitterness sweep over me instantly again. "I was on the Coast last week when he died."

  "You was?" Bernard said. "I was in a show. Couldn't get away. We talked up until a few weeks before... until he couldn't speak anymore on the phone. I should ask how it was."

  "Don't! I don't want to remember the details." But of course I did remember them. "Whatever happened to you and Antria the night of that big party at the bookstore? You know, the night we all quit our jobs and the others got subpoenaed?" I asked.

  Bernard didn't recall.

  "So, you're what now? Living on the East Coast?"

  "East Side. Alphabet City."

  "And you know Cynthia?"

  "From productions. I'm an actor. And dancer. I've worked pretty steadily since I got here. I live with someone. A guy from El Salvador. He's an orphan. Lost his family in right-wing shoot-ups. Came here not knowing anyone or even English. I help him along. You know, Calvin taught me a lot about myself. It took a while to sink in," Bernard admitted. "And it wasn't until recently that I found out who I really am..."

  Imagine Calvin's Bernard being sensitive—sensitive, nurturing, with teak-colored thighs like tree trunks and that face...! No wonder Miss Ritchie had upped and died. Why bother going on? I couldn't help but recall those last few sessions at the hospice, Twin Peaks and its TV-transmitting antennae filling the view through the window, that perfect white California light, Calvin's face shrunken into that of a hundred-year-old—"Miss Jane Pittman as drawn by the artists of Tales from the Crypt," as Calvin accurately, cruelly, described it to my horrified amusement. No lies between us, not ever. His bony, sore-cracked knuckles grasping my hand, his stertorous breathing—even with the tube.

  "...compared to the one out there. Even so," Bernard was saying, "it turns out that Calvin had many friends and even family now in the tri-state area. So, it's tonight. At six."

  "A memorial service?"

  "Just across town." Bernard handed me the invitation.

  The card was dove-gray, with brown ink: classy.

  "It'd be really nice if you came. Bein' how close you were and all," Bernard said. Before I could answer, he was out the door.

  I stared at the invitation, remembering how Calvin's eyes had grown to the size of fucking Crenshaw melons just before...

  "You still here?" Blaise charged through the curtain, headed for the control booth. He climbed up and began doing things with lights, followed by Cynthia, who climbed in behind him.

  A memorial service for Calvin—how many did that make this month?

  Heads peered out of the booth. Together they said, "Roger! Go home!"

  The address on the invitation must be wrong. Could that be die chapel behind the low, wavy fieldstone wall? That tiny building (given what must be prohibitively expensive midtown East Side real estate) shaped like something Le Corbu might have designed late in his senility and curiously sited within the looming shadow of the United Nations' Secretariat Building?

  Must be... Inside, what I could make out of the chapel continued the motif of subliminal grotesquerie: more low, wavy walls in dark tulipwood and "comforting" warm tones. Only a hint of the externally overused fieldstone surrounded what I guessed to be the altar area (little else hinted at it) and around one capriciously rhomboid window that peered into the heart of a stand of ginkgo trees, devoid of leaves this early spring evening. Above was a matching rhomboid skylight. Slabs of yet more tulipwood and teak formed the sides and backs of pews, softly angled, more or less concentric, already filled.

  I signed in and located a seat not too far from center. I squirmed on the cushion, then became aware of piped-in music: the adagio to Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, appropriately dirgelike, if by no means one of Calvin's favorites (Calvin's absolute fave, Bernstein's Candide Overture, was undoubtedly too bubbly for the occasion).

  I concentrated on the program, although I was far more interested in who all the people around me might be. From the cursory glances I had made, they seemed of mixed skin color, age, and gender but on the whole white, professional, thirtyish, and female. Strange. However did they know Calvin Ritchie? From his work with the San Francisco and Santa Fe operas? From the two or three TV programs of those productions? From Calvin's few articles over the years since he'd quit the magazine? From his one small book, Singing—and Acting—Donizetti's "Four Queens"? Unlikely: that densely reasoned monograph (almost doubled in size by footnotes and quirky discography) had been published by a university press somewhere in the Australian outback, released in an edition of no more than a thousand copies, by now unquestionably out of print.

  Perhaps the program might give a clue to the group by indicating how Calvin was to be acknowledged tonight? The copies carefully laid out upon the pews exactly mimed the expensive style of the invitation— who'd paid for it all? On the front cover, along with Calvin's dates, was a photo taken maybe two years ago, in which he looked wonderful— chubby, and balding and happy, his mouth open as though about to make some devastating quip about Gruberova's "Caro Nome."

  Instead of explanation, however, the program seemed to be a cryptic sketch of who would be taking part in the memorial. The only name I recognized was "Signor Dane Biyden-Howard," the pseudonym of a young male countertenor whose career Calvin had pushed at one time. Bryden-Howard was to be one of two "artistes": he was to sing the coloratura aria, "Let the Bright Seraphim" from Handel's Samson, an aria Joan Sutherland had debuted with in the Laserless Dark Ages. Cheeky lad. But Calvin would have loved it, Calvin the greatest Opera Queen on two coasts. Calvin who'd called me many tilings but most often "My vanilla Malibran," after the nineteenth-century diva and whom I had called back "Leontyne!" or on an especially good day simply "Miss
Norman."

  The other "artiste" on the program was listed as "Mademoiselle Francine—'Francie'—Faeces," who would be reading a poem: author, title, and subject unlisted. The rest on the program were Sarah-Anne Schenk, "Miss Upper Peninsula, 1975-1978," and three men: Leonard Barber, Andrew Reese, Jr., and Darius Miller. The host would be the Reverend Mr. Foot, from the Jersey City Ethiopian Church.

  But if none of this program calmed my already serious misgivings, seeing how precisely the Bruckner movement's tempo had been described in the program—"Freierlich langsam: doch nicht schleppend"—relaxed me a bit. I might not know a soul here, but in that listing I sensed the unmistakable hand of a Very Efficient Queen.

  I looked up in time to spot Bernard Dixon entering with a smaller, lighter-skinned man, when there was a general murmuring from those in the pews. Near the altar, a very tall, very bald, wildly mustachioed young African-American had stepped out of some heretofore hidden inner sanctum (the good Reverend Foot?), followed by a pretty, stunningly built young brunette (Ms. Schenk?), whose attempts to "dress down" in a black mourning suit had clashed with her physical prepossessiveness, resulting in an outfit monklike yet form-fitting, her breasts so prominent you expected her to constantly try to flatten them down with her hands. Behind her, an overcosmetized woman dressed as a child, in a too wide and too-short-for-her pale-blue frock, with frizzy Crayola-yellow hair pastelly beribboned into double up-in-the-air pigtails, carrying a dazed-looking teddy bear (Miss Faeces?). Behind her marched three slim and very grim-looking black gentlemen garbed in what looked like ninja assassination outfits, save for spots of red and green color here and there (Messrs. Barber, Reese, and Miller, I assumed), each carrying a differently shaped smallish object, like a fetish or juju I couldn't quite make out, they seemed to be so rapidly, surreptitiously, hidden within the capacious dark folds of their uniforms.

  The five personages quickly sat down in one of the pews nearest the lectern, kept reserved until now, where they were joined by Bernard Dixon and pal. As they too sat down, Bernard's blocky companion turned around, checking me out. He had to be the boyfriend from Central America I had heard about: his facial features so perfectly Mayan he might have been any of a hundred sacrificial victims pictographed on ruined temples vine-encrusted for centuries within the miasmas of the Yucatan.