"He spreads out more maps. He pulls over another desk and anchors the maps down with cuspidors. 'Well, they brought in a dry hole, and this map. . . .' He unrolls another one. 'Now if you'll kindly sit on the other end so it don't roll up on us, I'll show you exactly why it was a dry hole and why they should never have drilled there in the first place, 'cause you can see just where this here fault runs smack between Jed's artesian well and the Tex-Mex line over into quadrangle four. Now that block was surveyed last time in 1922. I guess you know the old boy done the job.
Earl Hoot was his name, a good old boy too. He had his home up in Nacogdoches, but his son-in-law owned a place down here, the old Brooks place up north of Tex-Mex, just across the line from. . . .'
"By this time the president is punchy with boredom, and the dust is getting down in his lungs-oilmen are constitutionally immune to the effects of dust—so he says, 'Well, if it's good enough for those boys I guess it's good enough for me. I'll go along.'
"So the oilman goes back and pulls the same routine on his prospects. Then he gets a geologist down from Dallas or somewhere, who talks some gibberish about faults and seepage and intrusions and shale and sand, and selects some place, more or less at random, to start drilling.
"Now the driller. He has to be a real rip-snorting character. They look for him in Boy's Town—the whore district in border towns—and they find him in a room full of empty bottles with three whores. So they bust a bottle over his head and drag him out and sober him up, and he looks at the drilling site and spits and says, 'Well, it's your hole.'
"Now if the well turns out dry the oilman says, 'Well, that's the way it goes. Some holes got lubrication, and some is dry as a whore's cunt on Sunday morning.' There was one oilman, Dry Hole Dutton they called him—all right, Allerton, no cracks about Vaseline—brought in twenty dry holes before he got cured. That means 'get rich,' in the salty lingo of the oil fraternity."
Joe Guidry came in, and Lee slid off his stool to shake hands. He was hoping Joe would bring up the subject of queerness so he could gauge Allerton's reaction. He figured it was time to let Allerton know what the score was—such a thing as playing it too cool.
They sat down at a table. Somebody had stolen Guidry's radio, his riding boots and wrist watch.
"The trouble with me is," said Guidry, "I like the type that robs me."
"Where you make your mistake is bringing them to your apartment," Lee said, "That's what hotels are for."
"You're right there. But half the time I don't have money for a hotel. Besides, I like someone around to cook breakfast and sweep the place out."
"Clean the place out."
"I don't mind the watch and the radio, but it really hurt, losing those boots. They were a thing of beauty and a joy forever." Guidry leaned forward, and glanced at Allerton. "I don't know whether I ought to say things like this in front of Junior here. No offense, kid."
"Go ahead," said Allerton.
"Did I tell you how I made the cop on the beat?
He's the vigilante, the watchman out where I live. Every time he sees the light on in my room, he comes in for a shot of rum. Well, about five nights ago he caught me when I was drunk and horny, and one thing led to another and I ended up showing him how the cow ate the cabbage. . .
.
"So the night after I make him I was walking by the beer joint on the corner and he comes out borracho and says, 'Have a drink.' I said, 'I don't want a drink,' So he takes out his pistola and says, 'Have a drink.' I proceeded to take his pistola away from him, and he goes into the beer joint to phone for reinforcements. So I had to go in and rip the phone off the wall. Now they're billing me for the phone. When I got back to my room, which is on the ground floor, he had written
'El Puto Gringo' on the window with soap. So, instead of wiping it off, I left it there. It pays to advertise."
The drinks kept coming. Allerton went to the W.C. and got in a conversation at the bar when he returned. Guidry was accusing Hyman of being queer and pretending not to be. Lee was trying to explain to Guidry that Hyman wasn't really queer, and Guidry said to him, "He's queer and you aren't, Lee. You just go around pretending you're queer to get in on the act."
"Who wants to get in on your tired old act?" Lee said. He saw Allerton at the bar talking to John Dumé
Dume belonged to a small clique of queers who made their headquarters in a beer joint on Campeche called The Green Lantern. Dumé himself was not an obvious queer, but the other Green Lantern boys were screaming fags who would not have been welcome at the Ship Ahoy.
Lee walked over to the bar and started talking to the bartender. He thought, "I hope Dumé tells him about me." Lee felt uncomfortable in dramatic "something-I-have-to-tell-you" routines and he knew, from unnerving experience, the difficulties of a casual come-on: "I'm queer, you know, by the way." Sometimes they don't hear right and yell, "What?" Or you toss in: "If you were as queer as I am." The other yawns and changes the subject, and you don't know whether he understood or not.
The bartender was saying, "She asks me why I drink. What can I tell her? I don't know why. Why did you have the monkey on your back? Do you know why? There isn't any why, but try to explain that to someone like Jerri. Try to explain that to any woman." Lee nodded sympathetically. "She says to me, why don't you get more sleep and eat better? She don't understand and I can't explain it. Nobody can explain it."
The bartender moved away to wait on some customers. Dumé came over to Lee. "How do you like this character?" he said, indicating Allerton with a wave of his beer bottle. Allerton was across the room talking to Mary and a chess player from Peru. "He comes to me and says, 'I thought you were one of the Green Lantern boys.' So I said, "Well, I am.' He wants me to take him around to some of the gay places here."
Lee and Allerton went to see Cocteau's Orpheus. In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other's body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes.
When they left the theater, Lee felt exhausted. He fumbled and bumped into things. His voice was toneless with strain. He put his hand up to his head from time to time, an awkward, involuntary gesture of pain. "I need a drink," he said. He pointed to a bar across the street. "There," he said.
He sat down in a booth and ordered a double tequila. Allerton ordered rum and Coke. Lee drank the tequila straight down, listening down into himself for the effect. He ordered another.
"What did you think of the picture?" Lee asked.
"Enjoyed parts of it."
"Yes." Lee nodded, pursing his lips and looking down into his empty glass. "So did I." He pronounced the words very carefully, like an elocution teacher.
"He always gets some innaresting effects." Lee laughed. Euphoria was spreading from his stomach. He drank half the second tequila. "The innaresting thing about Cocteau is his ability to bring the myth alive in modern terms."
"Ain't it the truth?" said Allerton.
They went to a Russian restaurant for dinner. Lee looked through the menu. "By the way," he said, "the law was in putting the bite on the Ship Ahoy again. Vice squad. Two hundred pesos. I can see them in the station house after a hard day shaking down citizens of the Federal District.
One cop says, 'Ah, Gonzalez, you should see what I got today. Oh la la, such a bite!"
"'Aah, you shook down a puto queer for two pesetas in a bus station crapper. We know you, Hernandez, and your cheap tricks. You're the cheapest cop inna Federal District.'"
Lee waved to the waiter. "Hey, Jack. Dos martinis, much dry. Seco. And dos plates Sheeshka Babe. Sabe?n
The waiter nodded. "That's two dry martinis and two orders of shish kebab. Right, gentlemen?"
"Solid, Pops. . . . So how was your evening with
Dumé?"
"We went to several bars full of queers. One place a character asked me to dance and propositioned me."
"Take him up?"
"No."
"Dumé is a nice fellow."
Allerton smiled. "Yes, but he is not a person I would confide too much in. That is, anything I wanted to keep private."
"You refer to a specific indiscretion?"
"Frankly, yes."
"I see." Lee thought, "Dumé never misses."
The waiter put two martinis on the table. Lee held his martini up to the candle, looking at it with distaste. "The inevitable watery martini with a decomposing olive," he said.
Lee bought a lottery ticket from a boy of ten or so, who had rushed in when the waiter went to the kitchen. The boy was working the last-ticket routine. Lee paid him expansively, like a drunk American.
"Go buy yourself some marijuana, son," he said. The boy smiled and turned to leave. "Come back in five years and make an easy ten pesos," Lee called after him.
Allerton smiled. "Thank god," Lee thought. "I won't have to contend with middle-class morality."
"Here you are, sir," said the waiter, placing the shish kebab on the table.
Lee ordered two glasses of red wine. "So Dumé told you about my, uh, proclivities?" he said abruptly.
"Yes," said Allerton, his mouth full.
"A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands—the lymph glands that is, of course— when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze, like a man with a light concussion—just a minute, Doctor Kildare, this isn't your script. I might well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen—
Bobo, we called her—who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love.
Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink. . . .
"Poor Bobo came to a sticky end. He was riding in the Duc de Ventre's Hispano-Suiza when his falling piles blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted, leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe-skin upholstery. Even the eyes and the brain went, with a horrible shlupping sound. The Duc says he will carry that ghastly shlup with him to his mausoleum. . . .
"Then I knew the meaning of loneliness. But Bobo's words came back to me from the tomb, the sibilants cracking gently. 'No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.' The difficulty is to convince someone else he is really part of you, so what the hell? Us parts ought to work together. Reet?"
Lee paused, looking at Allerton speculatively. "Just where do I stand with the kid?" he wondered.
He had listened politely, smiling at intervals. "What I mean is, Allerton, we are all parts of a tremendous whole. No use fighting it." Lee was getting tired of the routine. He looked around restlessly for some place to put it down. "Don't these gay bars depress you? Of course, the queer bars here aren't to compare with Stateside queer joints."
"I wouldn't know," said Allerton. "I've never been in any queer joints except those Dumé took me to. I guess there's kicks and kicks."
"You haven't, really?"
"No, never."
Lee paid the bill and they walked out into the cool night. A crescent moon was clear and green in the sky. They walked aimlessly.
"Shall we go to my place for a drink? I have some Napoleon brandy."
"All right," said AUerton.
'This is a completely unpretentious little brandy, you understand, none of this tourist treacle with obvious effects of flavoring, appealing to the mass tongue. My brandy has no need of shoddy devices to shock and coerce the palate. Come along." Lee called a cab.
'Three pesos to Insurgentes and Monterrey," Lee said to the driver in his atrocious Spanish. The driver said four. Lee waved him on. The driver muttered something, and opened the door.
Inside, Lee turned to Allerton. 'The man plainly harbors subversive thoughts. You know, when I was at Princeton, Communism was the thing. To come out flat for private property and a class society, you marked yourself a stupid lout or suspect to be a High Episcopalian pederast. But I held out against the infection—of Communism I mean, of course."
"Aquí." Lee handed three pesos to the driver, who muttered some more and started the car with a vicious clash of gears.
"Sometimes I think they don't like us," said Allerton.
"I don't mind people disliking me," Lee said. "The question is, what are they in a position to do about it? Apparently nothing, at present. They don't have the green light. This driver, for example, hates gringos. But if he kills someone—and very possibly he will—it will not be an American. It will be another Mexican. Maybe his good friend. Friends are less frightening than strangers."
Lee opened the door of his apartment and turned on the light. The apartment was pervaded by seemingly hopeless disorder. Here and there, ineffectual attempts had been made to arrange things in piles. There were no lived-in touches. No pictures, no decorations. Clearly, none of the furniture was his. But Lee's presence permeated the apartment. A coat over the back of a chair and a hat on the table were immediately recognizable as belonging to Lee.
"I'll fix you a drink." Lee got two water glasses from the kitchen and poured two inches of Mexican brandy in each glass.
Allerton tasted the brandy. "Good Lord," he said. "Napoleon must have pissed in this one."
"I was afraid of that. An untutored palate. Your generation has never learned the pleasures that a trained palate confers on the disciplined few."
Lee took a long drink of the brandy. He attempted an ecstatic "aah," inhaled some of the brandy, and began to cough. "It is god-awful," he said when he could talk. "Still, better than California brandy. It has a suggestion of cognac taste."
There was a long silence. Allerton was sitting with his head leaning back against the couch. His eyes were half closed.
"Can I show you over the house?" said Lee, standing up. "In here we have the bedroom."
Allerton got to his feet slowly. They went into the bedroom, and Allerton lay down on the bed and lit a cigarette. Lee sat in the only chair.
"More brandy?" Lee asked. Allerton nodded. Lee sat down on the edge of the bed, and filled his glass and handed it to him. Lee touched his sweater. "Sweet stuff, dearie," he said. "That wasn't made in Mexico."
"I bought it in Scotland," he said. He began to hiccough violently, and got up and rushed for the bathroom.
Lee stood in the doorway. "Too bad," he said.
"What could be the matter? You didn't drink much." He filled a glass with water and handed it to Allerton. "You all right now?" he asked.
"Yes, I think so." Allerton lay down on the bed again.
Lee reached out a hand and touched Allerton's ear, and caressed the side of his face. Allerton reached up and covered one of Lee's hands and squeezed it.
"Let's get this sweater off."
"O.K.," said Allerton. He took off the sweater and then lay down again. Lee took off his own shoes and shirt. He opened Allerton's shirt and ran his hand down Allerton's ribs and stomach, which contracted beneath his fingers. "God, you're skinny," he said.
"I'm pretty small."
Lee took off Allerton's shoes and socks. He loosened Allerton's belt and unbuttoned his trousers.
Allerton arched his body, and Lee pulled the trousers and drawers off. He dropped his own trousers and shorts and lay down beside him. Allerton responded without hostility or disgust, but in his eyes Lee saw a curious detachment, the impersonal ca
lm of an animal or a child.
Later, when they lay side by side smoking, Lee said, "Oh, by the way, you said you had a camera in pawn you were about to lose?" It occurred to Lee that to bring the matter up at this time was not tactful, but he decided the other was not the type to take offense.
"Yes. In for four hundred pesos. The ticket runs out next Wednesday."
"Well, let's go down tomorrow and get it out." Allerton raised one bare shoulder off the sheet.
"O.K.,"he said.
Chapter 4
Friday night Allerton went to work. He was taking his roommate's place proofreading for an English newspaper.
Saturday night Lee met Allerton in the Cuba, a bar with an interior like the set for a surrealist ballet. The walls were covered with murals depicting underwater scenes. Mermaids and mermen in elaborate arrangements with huge goldfish stared at the customers with fixed, identical expressions of pathic dismay. Even the fish were invested with an air of ineffectual alarm. The effect was disquieting, as though these androgynous beings were frightened by something behind or to one side of the customers, who were made uneasy by this inferred presence. Most of them took their business someplace else.
Allerton was somewhat sullen, and Lee felt depressed and ill at ease until he had put down two martinis. "You know, Allerton . . . ," he said after a long silence. Allerton was humming to himself, drumming on the table and looking around restlessly. Now he stopped humming, and raised an eyebrow.
"This punk is getting too smart," Lee thought. He knew he had no way of punishing him for indifference or insolence.
"They have the most incompetent tailors in Mexico I have encountered in all my experience as a traveller. Have you had any work done?" Lee looked pointedly at Allerton's shabby clothes. He was as careless of his clothes as Lee was. "Apparently not. Take this tailor I'm hung up with.
Simple job. I bought a pair of ready-made trousers. Never took time for a fitting. Both of us could get in those pants."
"It wouldn't look right," said Allerton.
Queer Page 4
