“Okay,” Hood said, “but anyway I am seriously thinking of backing out of that agreement. A thousand dollars is not gonna do me much good, and I deserve a whole lot more. I heard Mason Doebler is going for the big money and he has a good chance of getting it. Somebody I know saw Mason on TV saying Hunny fucked him when he was an altar boy and Mason wants three million dollars or something. And Hunny wasn’t even a priest, just some horny old troll in the park, so the fuckin’ pope can’t stop Mason from getting recompensed.”
“Recompensed?”
“That’s what I heard from the bartender here, James.”
“Mason isn’t getting a nickel, Stu. He’s deluded. Is he drinking again, by chance?”
“I guess so. I saw him in here last night. He had a beer or three.”
“Hunny never knew Mason when Mason was a boy. They met when Mason was over forty. This is all made up. It’s a nuisance suit. That means he hopes Hunny will settle for less than the three hundred seventy-five million dollars Mason is claiming but more than the thousand Hunny offered him so Mason’s car would pass inspection. Any lawyer who takes the case is doing so just to get on television so that when somebody needs a lawyer they might recognize that name in the yellow pages. It has nothing to do with law or justice. It’s just advertising, and I hope you won’t waste your time and money taking part in a cynical publicity stunt that’ll never amount to anything else.”
CoCkeyed 149
A little silence. I could hear voices and dance music in the background. “You are such a bullshitter, Strachey.”
“Not in this case.”
“I just feel like I’ve been treated like I’m a big nothing.”
“No, Hunny wants to be fair. But you’ve been his trick, not his best friend since kindergarten. A sometime-trick can be a nice friendly thing in life. But it involves few ethical obligations —
beyond the use of condoms when appropriate — and no legal obligations at all. The thousand dollars Hunny offered you —
and still intends to pay you — is actually a very generous amount for someone in your position.”
“No, it’s not. You’re forgetting that Hunny brought me out.”
“Stu, you wouldn’t really want to make that claim in court.
It wouldn’t work. Witnesses with other versions of your sexual history might come forward.”
“Is that what you would call a threat?”
“I guess so, yes.”
“Well, you better keep your fire hose handy.”
“Don’t say that, Stu. You don’t know if this call is being recorded.”
“Is it? Well, maybe I don’t care. Maybe I’m going to get what I deserve for a change, a little respect. And maybe if I don’t, there might be a big hot fire someplace, and somebody will get burnt up in it.”
I knew I’d taken the wrong tack with Hood; threats just set him off. I was about to back off that approach and say some things I hoped he would find soothing when I heard a shriek from inside the house. I told Hood I had to go and would be in touch with him again soon and that I knew where to find him.
I rang off and went into the kitchen where Hunny was howling, not with grief but with joy and relief. Art said Nelson had just called, and the old lady’s body found in Nassau was not Hunny’s mom. It was a woman with Alzheimer’s who had apparently wandered off from her vegetable-farm home nearby 150 Richard Stevenson
and suffered a fatal stroke or heart attack after she strolled into the woods.
Hunny decided the way to celebrate this news was with a
“drinky-poo or possibly two,” but Art pointed out that that didn’t make sense since the dead lady’s family might get wind of the celebration on Moth Street and be hurt and offended. Also, Art pointed out, Mrs. Van Horn was still missing.
“Oh, Arthur, girl, you had to go and remind me of that,”
Hunny moaned. “Oh, Mom, poor Mom, where can she be?”
Antoine, Marylou and the twins had all come into the kitchen, and Antoine suggested that they all join hands and pray.
Hunny said, “Antoine, honey, I’ll try anything at this point.”
We all joined hands and bowed our heads, and Hunny said,
“Lord, help get Mom’s wrinkly old butt back to Golden Gardens ASAP, ‘cause this whole dumb lottery thing plus Mom taking off somewhere has just about wrecked my last nerve, and I don’t think I can take much more of this horse doody. In Jesus’ name, amen. Oh, one more thing. Smite the Brienings, okay?”
Then everybody said amen.
ChAPteR twenty-one
“I heard at the office,” Timmy said, “that all kinds of gay organizations are trying to get Hunny to lower his profile, or at least to quit acting like such an obnoxious drunken screaming queen in public. People are upset over — to cite one bloodcurdling example — the anti-gay-marriage forces in Maine running TV ads with pictures of Hunny and his Marylou Whitney impersonator and asking Maine voters if these are the people they want teaching their schoolchildren.”
“Neither Hunny nor Marylou is a teacher. Hunny is newly retired from BJ’s Warehouse, and Marylou is an independently wealthy Palm Beach and Saratoga socialite. So Maine’s schoolchildren are safe.”
“The gay-marriage referendum up there is expected to be close, and it really doesn’t help the image of gay people to have Hunny falling-down drunk on television and yelling into the cameras about some drag queen’s penis.”
“Yes, Hunny behaved very badly on his Focks News debut.
I was embarrassed and ashamed right along with the rest of gay America. But Hunny was goaded into that response by O’Malley, who’s the real problem here. O’Malley and all the homophobic half-wits who watch him and believe whatever nutty stuff comes out of his mouth. Although, Hunny’s perfectly understandable response to O’Malley was strategically unwise, I will concede.”
“It’s more than just strategy. It’s decency. It’s sobriety. It’s sanity. It’s taste.”
We were in the kitchen fixing a quick dinner before I went back up to Moth Street. Timmy had brought home a barbecued chicken from a place on Lark Street, and I had shucked some fresh corn and was making water boil in a pot, my speciality in the kitchen.
I said, “Taste is overrated.”
152 Richard Stevenson
“Yes, but sanity isn’t. Or sobriety.”
I told Timmy about Quentin Shoemaker and the Rdq and their standing up against assimilationism.
“Assimilationism? Some people would call living the way we do, and the way most of our friends do, having a life. A good life, actually. A life where we can get up in the morning and not have to think about getting called names or arrested or where our next orgasm is coming from. We can just think about the good and bad minutiae of being human, as well as the bigger questions of human affairs, and not be saddled with some desperate quest for endless stimulation or having to make everybody you meet feel like they want to run out of the room.”
“That’s a pretty bleak assessment of the way a lot of gay people have lived for a pretty long time. Basically, people like Hunny are just like us and the people we know. They get up every day and go to work, and at the end of the day and on weekends they want a little comfort and diversion. They just do it with more humor and a cruder style than most gay people do. And most straight people.”
“Much of the trouble has to do mainly with style, yes. I grant you that. It’s not my style, though, and it’s not yours. And it’s a style that causes trouble a-plenty for the rest of us when it turns up in anti-gay TV ads in Maine.”
I said, “Should corn be boiled for three minutes or five?”
“Three is plenty. Aunt Moira always said twenty minutes, but her corn was so tough only her hog could eat it.”
“She kept a hog?”
“My cousin Kevin.”
“Shoemaker talks about Hunny and Art as being natural and free and in touch with their inner child. There’s a lot of truth to this, and I enjoy them and even sort of e
nvy them whenever I’m not cringing.”
“I sometimes find that humor and playfulness refreshing, too, but it’s the relentlessness that gets to me after a while. And the CoCkeyed 153
always sexualizing everything. Give it a break, I always want to say.”
“Maybe they are just more honest than the rest of us.”
“Oh, Donald, please. At this late date, are you going to go hippie on me?”
“I mean honest in the sense that they are in touch not so much with their inner child as their inner Sigmund Freud. Sexuality is always going on, and people like Hunny and Art are just more aware and comfortable with the phenomenon than most of us.
And they’ve learned not to be afraid of it but to have fun with it. They’re more like the Thais in that respect, except in Thailand people are not so crude about it or so insistent.”
“Exactly. They have a sense of proportion. They may be in touch with their inner child, but they are also comfortable with their outer grown-up.”
“Well, Hunny and Art’s way of life is a part of gay culture that I hope never disappears. The self-destructive parts of it I could do without — all the alcohol especially — but the gather-ye-rosebuds-while-ye-may spirit makes a lot of sense for getting people through this…I don’t want to say vale of tears. For most of the lucky ones like you and me, it’s not that at all.”
“‘Cockeyed caravan of life,’” Timmy said. “I think that’s what you mean, especially in Hunny’s case. Preston Sturges in the script for Sullivan’s Travels talks about our passage on this plane of existence as ‘the cockeyed caravan of life.’ The cockeyed caravan does seem to be thriving in one of its most esoteric and at the same time least inhibited forms over on Moth Street.”
“I just hope,” I said, “that Hunny can survive his more-hectic-than-most expressions of unassimilated queerdom. It’s a life that though it has its rewards for some people, it also takes a toll.”
“A price must be paid.”
“I’ve made some mild stabs at getting Hunny to moderate his behavior, but he has a way of making me feel like Aunt Polly to his Tom Sawyer.”
154 Richard Stevenson
Timmy said, “That corn must be done.”
“Right.”
“Donald, I have a lot of trouble thinking of Hunny as a character out of Twain. Boyd MacDonald maybe. Or William S.
Burroughs.”
“Oh no, not Burroughs. Hunny is alert, alive, and I think I can even say truly happy.”
My cell phone went off, and when I saw that it was Hunny calling I was tempted not to answer it. But I guessed that it was some new awful mess that Hunny had created or stepped in or had land on him, and I was right.
ChAPteR twenty-two
The Brienings were at it again. They had phoned Nelson and told him that they had read on somebody’s Internet blog that Rita Van Horn’s disappearance was a hoax, just as Bill O’Malley suspected it was. Mrs. Van Horn, the blogger reported, had been spotted in a motel in the town of Lake George where she was staying under an assumed name. Obviously, Arletta Briening told Nelson, this was all part of a scheme to delay or even avoid paying the Brienings the half billion dollars they were owed. When Nelson insisted that the Van Horns knew nothing of this, Arletta said she was sure the report was reliable because the information came from one of her fPAAC friends and they were honest people.
“Did the blogger give the name of the motel?” I asked Nelson.
I was back at the house on Moth Street, where Nelson and Lawn had arrived in person to deliver news of the new threat from the Brienings.
“No, he didn’t. I asked Arletta and she said no.”
“This is probably somebody’s malicious imagination at work.
Do you have the blog uRL?”
Hunny said, “What’s a uRL? Is that like ‘you are luscious’ in e-mail language?”
“No, Uncle Hunny, it isn’t.”
Nelson had the address at blogspot, and while Lawn sat by the kitchen phone scanning the Financial Times, Art, Hunny, Nelson and I went upstairs to Hunny and Art’s room, where they kept their computer on what might have been somebody’s boyhood desk. Hunny and Art had a double bed with a veneer headboard that looked like Richard Widmark might have slept in it in Kiss of Death. Clothing was heaped around the room and tumbling out of closets. A bookcase contained only a few books — some paperback movie guides and a glossy photo book called Butt Boys of Budapest. The flat-screen TV was nearly identical to the one in 156 Richard Stevenson
the living room downstairs.
Art went online and found the blog called Blood of Tyrants, a right-wing anti-Obama bilge-fest. It was the work of someone calling himself Tom In Paine. In addition to the flag-draped anti-tax and pro-gun screeds, there were stories on “typical” gays as child molesters and links to ex-gay ministries.
A posting from that morning described Bill O’Malley’s
“expose” of “Huntington Van Horn’s gay lifestyle” and the fPAAC
suit against the lottery for spreading “perversion and immorality.”
Tom In Paine credited O’Malley for first revealing that a missing persons report involving Hunny’s mother was actually a publicity stunt concocted to obtain a TV reality show contract, like the recent balloon-boy hoax. The blogger stated that Mrs. Van Horn was in hiding at a Lake George motel. She had been spotted coming and going by an fPAAC member who had seen her photo on the O’Malley show when Hunny was waving it around. The motel was not named.
I said, “There must be dozens of motels in Lake George.
Tom In Paine had to know that this would be hard for us or anybody else to check out and refute.”
“Mom enjoys Lake George,’ Hunny said, “but I think this is just a pack of lies.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Uncle Hunny. Most of the stuff on these right-wing blogs is pure fiction. But I know Mother and Grandma used to go up to Lake George and ride around on a paddleboat and stay at a place near the lake where they liked the stuffed haddock at the restaurant across the street. It might be a good idea if somebody rode up there and just took a look.”
I asked Nelson if he knew the name of the motel.
“No, but Mother would know.”
“Antoine doesn’t go in to work till four o’clock tomorrow, so maybe he and the twins could ride up there. Tyler and Schuyler could work on their homework in the car.”
‘Well, we really have to do everything possible to get Grandma Rita back quickly,” Nelson said. “Arletta reiterated to me that CoCkeyed 157
their deadline is Wednesday for the half billion to be turned over.
In fact, she said noon Wednesday, not a minute later.”
Hunny flicked an ash from his lit cigarette into the ashtray on top of the computer, whose keyboard was brown with nicotine stains. “Oh Lord, all we need is for the Brienings to distribute letters out at Golden Gardens calling Mom a crook right before she walks in the door out there or she is found in a hospital in New Jersey waking up from a coma.”
“Why New Jersey?” I asked.
“Because that’s where Karen Ann Quinlan was in her coma.”
“New Jersey, the coma state,” Art said. “It’s on the license plates.”
“I am thinking more and more,” Hunny said, “that maybe I should just give the Brienings the half a billion dollars. That money isn’t even real to me anyways. I would never miss it. And then we could just concentrate on getting Mom back and not have the Brienings hanging over our heads and breathing down our necks.”
“That is what Mother prefers,” Nelson said. “But that’s easy for her to say, because she and Dad have nice pensions from the county. No, I think you’ve been right, Uncle Hunny, to try to keep the money away from those terrible people. Lawn has some ideas on how you can invest it that he wants to discuss with you, but of course that can easily wait until we have resolved the situation with Grandma Rita.”
“I am just so grateful,” Hunny said, “that that poor ol
d lady over in Nassau wasn’t Mom. I never imagined Mom dying like that. Out in the woods, I mean. She doesn’t like nature as much as she likes comfy and cozy and a good time. She’s always preferred town over country.”
Art said, “That lady who died was a farmer. Maybe she went the way she always wanted to go.”
“I can see Mom keeling over at Applebee’s with a huge plate of nachos in front of her. She would be dying happy.”
158 Richard Stevenson
“Like mother, like son,” Art said. “A fatal helping of Applebee’s nachos sounds like just the ticket for you, dear one.
In fact, include me in. Or would we rather die in the sack with a pair of humpy rugby players sitting on our faces?”
Hunny laughed. “That’s a tough one.”
Nelson shot a glance at me — he badly wanted me to be his ally in disapproving of Hunny and Art’s far-from-Noel-Coward-like sexual humor — but I found myself letting him down, and I was almost sorry I could not oblige. Though I did hope that Hunny could find a way to contain himself in the future when on national television.
“Well, let’s get going then,” Nelson said. “Lawn and I are driving back over to East Greenbush to see how Mother is doing, and I guess you’ll be talking to Antoine. Right, Uncle Hunny? I’ll get the name of the motel.”
“Yes, but I do have to do one thing. My old boss at BJ’s called earlier and said most of the staff had quit because I was going to give them all a million dollars. The managers are having trouble both with stocking and at the checkouts, and Earl asked me if I would urge the gals and guys to come back temporarily and then give a week’s notice after I presented them with their checks.
I said I would do that for the sake of the customers who are apparently waiting an eternity to get out to the parking lot with their three hundred rolls of toilet paper, so I have to make a few phone calls.”
“Okay.”
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