by Larry Kramer
Irving coldly returned from his fantasies to reply: “I am not too old. I do not feel old.”
Since there was a sinister finality to his icy tone, Hans only shrugged and pressed no further.
And Irving decided that now was the moment: “Hans, I must tell you, and I am sorry to bring to you, my old friend, such news, but we must now commence a search for a new Winston Man. Winnie Heinz, he is too old.”
“What! My biggest star! My reigning beauty! What are you doing to him? He is not even forty!”
“You must realize it is not me. It is the client.”
“Ah, yes, it is always the client.”
“A younger image is desired. We must find a new model.”
So Hans packaged Irving’s leather borrowing in a Bergdorf’s box, lest a doorman be suspicious, and he handed it over silently, and silently as well they descended, down the many stairs, no ephemeral questions going down, until, at the bottom, at the front door, out of old habit, they kissed each other, as do the Europeans, on both cheeks.
“Good-bye, Hans, I shall pick you up tomorrow for The Toilet Bowl.”
Anthony Montano stepped out of his cab at Sheridan Square and faced the gauntlet of Christopher Street, overrun this late afternoon with thousands, bodies on the prowl, pieces of meat, exhibitionists all, things, faceless faces, all in uniform, what am I doing here?, Gatsby was right: “Nothing has changed since the Tenth Floor, the music hasn’t changed, the look hasn’t changed, drugs haven’t changed, and bodies haven’t changed.” Everyone’s been to the gym. Even the uglies have muscles. If I wanted to be rich, I’d be in the gym business. I can’t compete with this. My forty-three-year-old body won’t muscle up like that. I’m out of it. I worked four hundred hours last week, in fucking bondage to cigarettes and Irving Slough. Poor gorgeous Winnie. I hope I don’t have to break the news. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, Poppa. Are you proud of your Anthony yet? “Hello, there!” Haven’t seen that one in years. He got fat. Now who is that one? And over there? Jesus, the Sisterhood walks the streets. World hates faggots. Want my cock sucked. Frigger said to hit the docks. I must be out of my mind. Häagen Dazs up to a buck a cone at the pot-bellied gouger’s. Milk the faggots dry. Must write to Mimi Sheraton. Only one protecting us from what we’re putting in our mouths. I’m in love with Mimi Sheraton. Would she marry me? Oi. What have I done with my life? Who wants to be in this? Boring me. Boring Sprinkle. I am going to die. Without ever having lived in Hollywood. I should have been the reigning wit of Hollywood. I’m funny. I would have brought back madcap comedy. Great career wasted. Thrown away. Mary Tyler Moore needed me. She’s gone now, too. I’ll compose an Ode to These Streets…
Ah, the streets, the Streets, the streets, let us pause for an Ode to The Streets, Gay Ghetto, homo away from home, the hierarchy and ritual of The Streets, incessant, insinuating, impossible Streets, addictive, the herb superb, can’t keep away from you, always drawn to you, STREETS, speak of them singularly in the plural, like Sheep, Kleenex, Jell-o, blending, coalescing, oozing, all into one, all for us, how dramatic, how important, how depressing, fucking loneliness of walking alone and looking, displaying, on the streets—where so much time is spent, summer and winter, cold and HOT, You Can’t Go Home Again, anyway you can’t go home, who wants to go home, no cock suckers at home, dreary home, how many nights, hours, days, weeks, months, years, who’s counting, do these fellows, not me!, walk The Streets: Christopher Washington Greenwich Hudson West and Sheridan Square, such a parade, everyone dressed alike!, Hitler could recruit right here, the Gay White Way, Black, too, and Spanish, French, German, Italian, for Christ’s sake, Icelandic, those firemen really visit, every guidebook advises Hit Those Streets!, Mary, Show Them Pecs, Strut Them Buns, Pad That Crotch, Visit Them Bars: Keller’s, Ty’s, Cell Block, Ramrod, Stud, International, Peter Rabbit, Bunkhouse, Rawhide, Badlands, Tulip’s, Boots and Saddle, Cynthia’s, Tubie’s, Mine Shaft, Glory Hole, Pits, Anvil, Cock Ring, tomorrow night the new one: THE TOILET BOWL, oi!…
Anthony then hitched up his Levi’s, which carried the wonderful nine inches of his cock, coiled and ready, recollected that the Pope, God bless Her, had just come out, yet again, against the faggots, “indecorous and sacrilegious,” who could blame Him, Toilet Bowl indeed!, wished his best friend, Fred, were with him to throw down these gauntlets together, pocketed the small Oxford volume of Classic British Short Stories he had thought might be useful in luring a fellow of like-minded intelligence, wondered, again, why he was having so much difficulty getting it up of late, was this his Change of Life?, must come from working too hard, don’t like doing this trip, but have to do it, got to get it off, medical emergency, psychiatric one, too, and plunged across the highway toward the River. Somewhere, over there, in that big former shipping palace, must be a savior to put a poor man out of his misery and in some nook or cranny suck my cock.
In a handsome apartment of English and French antiques, deftly combined with American Ward Bennett, on East 66th Street, between Madison and Park, lives the Winston Man. Yes, Virginia, there is a Winston Man.
It is unfortunate that his personality is so submerged in this nefarious product, but the fact remains that to his friends and to his fellow models at the Hans Zoroaster Agency he is known, not by his given name, which is Duncan Heinz (his father is a very distant and almost as rich cousin to the pickle-soup-ketchup family, though devoted not to foodstuffs in his own financial empire but to the manufacture of rubber goods for home and farm, more specifically, though naturally the family does not spread this about, the production of items of “prophylaxis” for the conduct of sexual intercourse, their Model B-12 widely used in animal husbandry, particularly suited for well-endowed bulls), but as Winnie.
Winnie’s is the true beauty of our moment in time, the face that, years from now, when we remember, and we shall remember, will be looked back upon as representing our era. His glacially green eyes, his perfect classical nose, his hay hair, his skin of an overall perfection that could sell cream to cows or butter to Danes, all represent today’s desirability and have served to make him not only America’s highest-paid male model but also the ideal god every faggot looks up to as what he’d choose to look like if he could choose to look like anyone.
Winnie’s Philadelphia Main Line background was evident in the tweed and flannel button-downed and Shetlanded aura he had maintained ever since being expelled from the University of Virginia for a disinclination to read. He still looked thirty, claimed to forty, and still didn’t have to work, his father’s “health products” fortune more than ample to provide for him. But a Master of Winnie’s at the Hill School in Pottstown had encouraged in him a lifelong desire to go his own way, be his own man, when he had taken the then thirteen-year-old lad aside after a particularly clumsy dropping of a right-field fly and told him point-blank that he was going to be a fairy when he grew up.
Winnie, or more correctly, Dunnie, as he was then called, didn’t know what a fairy was, such being the insularity of Main Line education even then. So calmly, that same night, with that quest for curiosity, that vigor for knowledge which deserted him at some point between Hill and U. Va., he asked one of his classmates, a cute Jewish scholarship student from Shreveport named Sammy Rosen, whom Dunnie had been spending a lot of time with because Sammy was well-versed and hence helpful in time of test and trial, and as luck would have it, Sammy knew, as Dunnie knew he would. Sammy also shivered as he dispensed the knowledge, so both of them realized, at precisely this moment in time, that they were about to learn even more comprehensively what a fairy was.
“Want to come to my room and have some of my Mama’s brownies?” Sammy began haltingly.
It was as simple as that.
“What will you do when you finish college?” Sammy asked, trying to keep the conversation light, even though he’d been wet dreaming for several months about such an opportunity as was obviously now creeping up on both of them, as they sat on his bed munching away at Mrs. Rosen’s
brown squares and waiting for whatever was going to happen to happen.
“I think I’m very handsome,” Dunnie said quite matter-of-factly, in response to the question. Was this not a Future Great Model in embryo even then? “Don’t you?”
“…Yes…,” Sammy replied, wondering what one thing had to do with another.
“I wish to do something that will allow the world to appreciate my handsomeness.”
“Oh. Like be a movie star?”
“Heavens, no. I don’t want to have to talk. I just want to be seen.” And to illustrate his point, he cast a long look at himself in Sammy’s bureau mirror, which was tilted just his way. “And, of course, to be talked about. And worshipped and adored.”
“Oh.”
“I guess that means I have to be a famous model, though even that’s less than perfect. I really don’t want to be associated with any product. But I guess that can’t be helped. But I’ll see to it that my picture is large and no one will pay any attention to whatever it is I’m selling.”
This news hung in the air for moments as the two boys—like cute animals in Walt Disney cartoons, which, when confronted with anything intractable, simply engorge it whole—stuffed huge brownies into their mouths. Dunnie was pleased that his future was clear and Sammy was impressed with such direction.
Then Dunnie prophesied again: “I’ll tell you something else. I don’t want to get married. Ever.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know it. My parents are married, so I just know it.”
“I…I know it, too.” Sammy continued to marvel at such common sense. Then he recollected the fairy business and asked: “Do you…do you look at me in the showers as much as I look at you?”
“Yes. I do.” And Dunnie, again giving himself the look of the loved in that tilted mirror, further said: “I think sometimes we’re lucky to know certain things early, like being shown what’s in the crystal ball at the beginning of your life instead of at the end. I know I want to be looked at by everybody and to pass around my beauty…,” at this point he took Sammy’s damp hand and used it to make his further illustrative point, “…and have everybody touching me all over and letting me do the same to them and…maybe we better not tell anybody about this…”
Poor Sammy. He was not only on scholarship but was also getting very excited. His schoolmate, between reaching for the maternal brownies, was massaging his penis, now bulging mightily within Sammy’s only pair of gray-flannel trousers, which he had begged his mother and father to buy for him on the trip to Philadelphia at the start of term and he had summoned up all his courage to ask for them and to say that every boy in class had at least one pair except him and his dad had mumbled something about how the fucking scholarship Sammy had should include a gray-flannel-pants allowance but had bought them for the boy anyway and Sammy had never been able to wear them without a slight tinge of guilt and if Dunnie rubbed him anymore he might explode white stuff all over the gray and then he’d have to throw the pants away.
“Please, Dunnie, could I…please…take off my gray flannels?”
And that of course had been the beginning of the end, or of the beginning. It was only seconds before both boys were completely naked and opening themselves to the joys and conflicts redolent in this early tender moment of exploring themselves in the body of another, holding on to each other’s dickies as if they were holding on to their own. It was as if each were rather hungry from some already precocious deprivation now being at last fulfilled, their little hands grabbing their little things, Dunnie even returning kisses and not worrying that the lips, too, were Jewish. Unfortunately, Sammy could not contain his involuntary reflexes for too long and his little load of white stuff melded not with the gray flannels from the Brothers Brooks but with the brownies from the Mother Rosen. It came so suddenly, the spurt of liquid, that he looked down upon himself as it quivered out, then just sat there studying the improbable combination of semen and chocolate.
Dunnie was also looking at the brownies rather strangely. Suddenly he smiled, and finished himself off with his own hand, directing his own whipped cream to make the dessert before them even classier. Sammy then watched him pick up a creamed-upon square and eat it. But Dunnie, as he ate, did not look at what he was eating. He looked at Sammy. And without saying a word, he held another brownie a la mode in front of Sammy’s mouth and Sammy opened his mouth and ate it, too.
With such sweetness did both lads gain their practical introduction into what a fairy was.
It was at this moment, too, that Duncan Heinz IV learned that he could use his body to get anybody to do anything for him that he wanted. To please him. To test his new insight he reached down and pulled up Sammy’s dirty white sneakers. “Put these on,” he said.
Sammy, as if hypnotized, did so.
“Walk all over me.” Dunnie said the first thing that came into his head.
Sammy got up on the sagging mattress and walked all over Dunnie as best he could, finally falling helplessly into his classmate’s arms. Then they held each other close, felt each other’s soft (both mothers had raised Ivory babies), teen-aged skin, and fell asleep.
This shoe experience stimulated in Dunnie a lifelong fascination with items for the feet. Winnie now has a full wardrobe of shoes and boots and loafers and rubbers and galoshes and waders and sneakers, high-top and low, for police and army and infantry and paratroopers and navy and fishermen and cowboys and chefs and stevedores and linemen, garbage collectors, Indians, postmen, wardens, tractor operators, loggers, engineers, so many refinements within a major category! He also has them in assorted sizes. One never knew. And not only did he seek for sex with young boys, but he also much preferred young Jewish boys. If he couldn’t get a former, he’d settle for a latter, even an older Jew. For, after all, wasn’t his father one of America’s leading anti-Semites?
He is now, as we have discovered, the Winston Man. The true symbol of America’s masculinity, at two hundred thousand dollars per symbolic year. There he poses, Winnie does, in front of all America, nay, the World, on billboards and in magazines and newspapers, from Albuquerque to Auckland, and from Zanzibar to Zaire, which come to think of it is not all that far, in his washed-out denim shirt, daringly opened one button too many, staring straight out at you, honest, direct, green-eyed, wonderfully virile, in that confrontation which Hans and Irving, Anthony, Troy Mommser, all such good and supportive friends and helpmates, fellow toilers in the tobacco fields, have helped him to refine and make profitable, and which has made him into the man whom millions of women consciously and as many men unconsciously inhale as they inhale.
He is, of course, worshipped and adored by his brothers. He is looked at, pointed to, touched, walked near, on streets, in bars and baths and discos, in stores, in crowds, at the Gay Synagogue, wherever our crowd gathers, by his brother faggots. “He is the most beautiful man we have ever given birth to,” Blaze Sorority wrote in his Avocado column. “He is divine, divine, devoon!,” the Divine Bella wrote in Women’s Wear, continuing with: “Long Reign King Winnie!”
King Winnie, twenty-five odd years later, still looking in the mirror, albeit now one of Regency ormolu, studied his lines and thought perhaps he needed a nap before tonight’s orgy at Garfield’s.
Dare I enter this building? Anthony stopped to light his first joint. Do I really want to get laid in an abandoned warehouse? What will they think of me at the office? The Great Creative Leader in this kind of a scene? I disapprove of this place. I disapprove! It is mindless and destructive and ugly and I have always tried to live my life in a special and discreet way. And what about the danger! The rip-off while being sucked by the ambidexterously adept. And the Ultimate Danger! De-cockization! Oi. Go home, Anthony. Read an important book on the British Empire. I want to get laid. Get it off. I need to come. ok, ok, NONONO, go home, kill yourself, get out of the Ghetto, My Life in the Warsaw Ghetto starring Sister Mary Montano in Carcere, why doesn’t Sprinkle come back?, why am I, a forty-th
ree-year-old grown man, involved with a twenty-three-year-old who loves not only me but twenty other guys as well? Plus a few girls. He does it with ladies. I can’t do it with ladies. Are they learning something in school today that I didn’t learn? Fred hates him. Fred wrote me: “I note that Sprinkle’s thinking has recently been guided by the mystic calculations of a former used-car salesman and convicted thief whose philosophy is propagated via a nationwide chain of assemblages, much like Dunkin’ Donuts.” Gain a lover, lose a friend. And what has Fred got that’s any better? A lover who’s disappeared!
Frigger crawled out through the small doorway and stretched his rocky body in pleasure. He was wearing his cruising outfit, clipped-off T-shirt and one half inch of visible Jockey short revealed above his jeans. While he made his living decorating the homes of movie stars in California, he came East occasionally to do the odd p.r. job, thus allowing himself to claim Bi-Coastialty, AC-PC, and to stay at the 63rd Street Y where there were so many cocks to suck.
“Would you believe ten inches and he’s still in high school?” Frigger said, wiping his mouth, his cruising wardrobe evidently having proven most alluring.
“What’s the rest of him look like?” Anthony asked.
“Nice. He’ll go to the gym soon. He wants to be a trampolinist. He’s going to go places.”
“Yeah. Down the sewers.”
“Want me to come in there and hold your hand?”
“Sure.”
“Want me to come in there and suck your cock?”
“Of course not. You’re a friend. You’re family.”
“So what. You’ve got a big cock.”
“How do you know?”
“Important news travels.”
“You’re insatiable. How many times have you done it today?”
