Floridian nights, p.30
Floridian Nights, page 30
“Uh-oh,” Gary said as flashing red lights appeared in their rear-view mirror. If the cops had been watching, it sure looked suspicious: a car picking up a hooker and depositing her a few hundred yards or so later. Maybe they were cracking down on johns.
Gary and Rick watched tensely as the flashing lights pulled up behind them…then sped on by. Gary exhaled in relief, but Rick still drove as if his life depended on clutching the wheel.
“Calm down,” Gary finally said, “or we’ll have a crash.”
“That was rotten, Gary. Really, really rotten. You knew what she wanted, didn’t you?”
“As you said, you were in charge. You told me to shut up. Twice.”
“Why did you let her in the front seat?”
“I guess that part was a little perverse, and it certainly wasn’t fair to her. But I was pissed at you and your holier-than-thou attitude.”
“I thought she wanted a ride!”
“Will you slow down?”
Rick still looked furious, but he obeyed. “It was a rotten thing to do,” he repeated, “to her and to me.”
Gary did feel guilty about her, and he rationalized it: “She’ll forget about it by tomorrow. I would have given her some money if you’d let me. At least she was of age.”
They drove on in silence until they got back to their hotel. “Can we go for a walk along the beach?” Rick asked as they turned their car over to the valet. “I need a walk.”
“Fine. I wouldn’t mind it myself.”
A wide wooden boardwalk stretched along Miami Beach, between the sand and the big hotels, for tens of blocks. It was well-kept and well-lit, and walking on it after midnight seemed perfectly safe. The breeze along the ocean, stirring the palms, brought home to Gary what a warm night it had been further inland. As they walked along, keeping their distance from each other, Gary started to move his arms from side to side, taking in the night.
Finally Rick spoke in a bewildered tone: “Can you tell me what happened tonight, Gare?”
Gary stopped walking and stood there still swaying, and not from drunkenness. “We had a hell of a time in Miami.”
“Do you just like to humiliate me, or what?”
“Oh, c’mon. I apologized for the incident with the lady of the night. And you have to admit, you did help bring that on yourself.”
“So what was that bullshit at the bar? Why did you lead that girl on?”
“I didn’t lead her on. I just wasn’t gonna be the one to tell her we were together-together.”
“Why not?”
“Rick, you had half the women in that room falling for you. Who knows what would’ve happened if I’d’ve told her? Word might’ve gotten around, and your fan club would’ve disappeared real quick.”
His lover stared at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Dead serious, about that. I have been ever since your big night in the East Village. Christ, Rick, you can’t tell me that you haven’t even thought about it–”
“But – I haven’t. My career’s nowhere near that point–”
“Well, you’d better start thinking about it. You’re good enough to make a living at this – good enough to make it big. What did you think, you were gonna be the world’s first matter-of-fact, openly gay pop singer?”
“I–” He really hadn’t thought about it, clearly, and now it was bothering him. “What did you and Becker do?”
“BB and I worked at banks in New York City, Rick. It’s hardly the same situation.”
“You’ve been thinking about this all along?”
“Off and on.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“I don’t know, kid. It’s your decision.”
“Why do we have to decide this right now?”
Gary leaned into him for emphasis. “It wouldn’t matter if I was sure we were a temporary thing.”
They were sitting on a bench now, facing out to sea, where a few ships, anchored out beyond the legal limit where they could conduct gambling, twinkled on the horizon. Gary was quite confident that Rick didn’t want them to be a temporary thing, either. After a silence, Rick said, “How can you say you feel that way after a night like tonight?”
“Don’t you?”
“I asked you first.”
“Okay. Okay. Don’t you realize, Rick, how dull and predictable my life has been since Becker died?”
“But you came down here–”
“No. No, you don’t get it. Look at, look at today. As I see it, this is what has happened to me since I got to Miami. I took your cherry, in the best sex I’ve had in years–”
“Will you cut the superior attitude on that? I really hate it when you–”
“–and you had me with a condom, which nobody in my life, not even Becker, has ever done, and it was great, okay? Then we went to see a movie I wouldn’t ordinarily have seen, heard some music I wouldn’t ordinarily have really listened to, and I liked them both, a lot. Then I had coffee and doughnuts in a place I wouldn’t ordinarily have gone to, then we went to a bar I wouldn’t ordinarily have gone to, where a pretty woman tried to pick me up, and everybody was falling all over my boyfriend because he’s sexy and a great singer. Then we had a hundred-dollar misunderstanding with a prostitute–”
“Huh? You gave her a hun–”
“It’s a literary reference, Rick. I wish you and I had read at least some of the same books.” (Actually, he thought, I wish you read, period.) “Anyway, I got caught in the middle of that scene, and I almost got arrested again, because that same boyfriend of mine is so stubborn that he wouldn’t let me warn him about what was going on, and he’s so sweet and innocent that he really believed this girl just wanted a ride across the causeway at midnight.” Rick simply looked at Gary, his mouth agape at this oration. “Now, here I am, sitting with you beneath the stars on this gorgeous night in Miami, and you’re asking me what went wrong with this evening, and I’m telling you, nothing! I’ll admit, I couldn’t have one like it every night, but it’s been so long, Rick, since I’ve had anything remotely like it. Two months ago I couldn’t have imagined it. And you did it.”
At last he stopped talking, and the only sounds were the waves hitting the beach, and the wind, which had picked up, whipping through the palms. Rick, apparently wanting to be sure Gary’s speech was really over, swallowed hard. “God, I love you, Gary,” he said after a while, barely more than whispering. “I love you so much.”
“How come?”
“Lots of reasons. Like, you show me things I’ve never seen before. You think this was something special for you? Remember, I’ve never been anywhere but the Midwest and New York before this–”
“I can’t promise you a life together would always be quite like this–”
“I know. But I’d sure like to try it. I just get so scared you don’t want something permanent.”
“I’m the kind of boy who settles down, remember? But what’s in it for you? I’m middle-aged. You haven’t even looked that hard–”
“Why should I? I found what I wanted. And you and Becker didn’t look that hard.”
Forever back to Becker. “Okay. So what are you going to do about your singing career?”
“You want me to drop it?”
“Absolutely not. I forbid it.”
“That’s not your decision.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“That sounds good to me.”
“I don’t mean, don’t think about how you’re gonna handle it. I mean, don’t you even think about dropping your career just because of me.”
“That’s for me to decide. And I say I don’t have to decide right now. I might never have to.”
Gary regarded him at length, then said, “You’re a remarkable young man, Rick the waiter.”
“And you’re a remarkable middle-aged man, Gary the customer.”
Gary laughed. “Fuck you.”
“That’s negotiable.”
“God. I don’t know if I can keep up with you.”
“You can try. Or I’ll slow down.”
“All right, you whippersnapper,” Gary said, rising at last. “Let’s go back to our room.”
“I’m having a great time, Gare,” Rick said simply as they strolled along.
“Yeah. Me too.”
20.
Their energy was not, after all, limitless, and when they got back to their hotel, what they actually did was sleep, very soundly, both of them. So refreshing was their rest that they did not need to sleep late, not even Rick, and they were both up bright and early. They decided to take breakfast at Wolfie’s, a landmark delicatessen near their hotel.
“I like this place, but it’s overpriced,” Rick commented as Gary returned to their booth from using the public phone.
So it was, but Gary said, “Forget about overpriced. Just enjoy it. But we’ve got a little bit of a problem here.”
“How come?”
“Practically every place I called in Key West was full. And those that aren’t are asking for a three-night minimum this weekend – and they ain’t cheap.” Part of forgetting about the working world was forgetting about holiday weekends. Gary had failed to remember that Monday was, as calendars tended to put it, “Columbus Day Observed.”
“How much is ‘ain’t cheap’?” Rick asked. Gary quoted the figures, and he whistled. “We could just stay around here.”
“No. I wanna go to Key West.”
“We don’t have to on my account–”
“I said, I wanna go to Key West. With you.”
Rick looked thoughtful, then said, “Okay. You got a credit card?”
“Several.”
“So charge it. And I’ll chip in. I’ll work some extra shifts when I get back to New York.”
“When we get back to New York.”
“You’re coming with me?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Rick looked pleased, but said nothing more. “The immediate problem,” Gary added, “is more than just money.”
“What else?”
“Time. I promised Mom we’d be back by Tuesday night. If we stay three nights in Key West, we’ll have to go 600 miles to Sunbury and 300 miles back to St. Pete in just two days.”
“So we’ll do a marathon. Get up and out at the crack of dawn on Monday.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Didn’t you say we were on this trip to be crazy?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, close.”
Gary regarded his coffee cup as it was refilled. “There is one other option.”
“What?”
“Skip Sunbury.”
“No way, Gary. What did Bush say? ‘Read my lips.’ No way.”
They held each other’s eyes for a long minute, until Gary conceded. “Should I call back this one place in Key West, then? I hate to have you work extra shifts–”
“Will I be coming home to you after I work them?”
Gary literally squirmed. “Look, it might be…just a little early for us to talk about moving in together.”
“Might not. But all I meant was, I wouldn’t have to go all the way back to Brooklyn all those nights, would I?”
Gary raised an eyebrow. “I guess it’s the least I can do. Since I’m the one who’s insisting we don’t miss Key West.”
“So call the place.”
•
Driving along Highway 1 as it alternated between island and sea, Gary endured Rick’s remarks about the tackiness of the Upper Keys until they had passed Marathon and reached the more visually enticing Lower Keys. There, as they traversed long stretches of highway between turquoise and blue waters, the kid grew respectfully silent.
“What are you thinking?”
“How much my life has changed these past few months.”
“It’s all to your credit. You’re the one who made the move to New York.”
“I guess I did, didn’t I?”
Gary, driving, looked over at Rick, who remained pensive. “What finally got you to do it?”
“I was just so lonely deep inside.”
“Didn’t you have any friends?”
“I always had friends. Plenty of friends. But a lot of them scattered after high school. I liked some of the people I met at college–”
Gary was impressed by his own control. This bit of information should have been sufficient to cause him to swerve the car. Given there was nowhere to go but into the drink, he was glad he had turned out to be so self-possessed. “Wait a minute! You went to college?–”
“Community college. Three semesters.”
“You never told me that–”
“You never asked, Gare.”
“When was this?”
“When I was nineteen and twenty. Then I ran out of money. I worked a year or so to save up the money to go back, then I thought, what am I doing. Lemme get outta here.”
“But you said you’d made friends–”
“It seemed like they were all getting married. I liked my friends, and they liked me. But I couldn’t talk to them about – you know.” There was quiet in the car, and then Rick looked over at Gary. “You look depressed.”
“I am.”
“Why? The story has a happy ending.”
“Because it all sounds too familiar. BB and I both had the same kind of experience until we were lucky enough to find each other. Feeling so alone, thinking you’re the only one in the world–”
“I didn’t say that. I didn’t think that. I mean, I saw gay people on TV. But I guess I thought I was the only one in my neck of the woods.”
“Damn!”
“What? Maybe we should be glad. It’s something we have in common, at least. Why are you having this kinda reaction?”
“Because it wasn’t supposed to be this way anymore. It was supposed to have gotten better. That was part of the reason Becker and I and people like us marched in all those Pride Parades. So that kids like you wouldn’t have to grow up feeling so alone, like we did.”
Rick didn’t even bother to take umbrage at being lumped with “kids like you.” Instead he paused, apparently wanting to choose his words carefully. “I probably was luckier than you and Becker. At least I saw things on the TV. At least I knew early on that I’d be better off if I came to a place like New York–”
“But that doesn’t solve it! Things won’t be okay until they’re okay in places like New Swiss, and Sunbury, and St. Trier – not just New York and San Francisco. You said yourself, the loneliness was still there, despite the TV.”
“Yeah, I guess it was. I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who should be telling you he’s sorry. We failed you–”
“Don’t say that. You did not. I made it to New York – and you. Okay?”
Gary shook his head vigorously. “Not really.”
Rick looked at him as if he were a stranger. “I’ve never heard you talk like this before, Gary.”
“You never asked, Rick.”
“I didn’t think you were into, like, politics.”
“I’m not. This is just basic. Survival stuff.”
“I don’t like politics. So many of the guys my age in the East Village, they go to these ACT-UP meetings–”
“There are other kinds of politics than that.”
“You and Becker marched in the parade?”
“Not at first. But later on, every year.”
“Were you scared?”
“Sure, the first time. After that, it was easy, then a joy. Especially after Marty met Roger.”
“Marty with the glasses? Roger was his lover that died?”
“Good memory, kid. Roger was super-political. He could be a total pain in the ass. But on Pride Day it made it nice, ’cause we’d always have a group to march with.” Gary looked over to Rick. “You were in New York this June. Didn’t you march?”
“Laurel and Gina asked me if I wanted to go. That was sorta the first time we acknowledged we, uh, had something in common. I said, can I just watch, and they said, sure.”
“So you went?” The kid nodded. “What’d you think?”
“What I could see was mostly beautiful. Exciting. We were down near Washington Square, and it was pretty crowded. I missed a lot.”
“So. Next year you can march.”
“I told you, Gary, I don’t like politics.”
“You don’t have to. Just do it for all the other Ricks out there in all the other St. Triers, who can’t. Don’t even think of it as politics, if you want. It’s like you’re Irish or Italian, and you’re marching in the St. Patrick’s or the Columbus Day parade. It’s your heritage.”
Rick stared at him in wide-eyed wonder. “I just can’t believe this, Gare. You, into politics–”
“I am not into politics! Roger was into politics. You should have met him. And anyway, I can’t believe you went to college, and all this time I was thinking…”
Gary let his voice trail off, and they smiled at each other and rode on for a while in silence, until Rick asked, “Are you and Marty mad at each other?”
“What makes you say that?”
“I dunno. Just the way you both reacted when I mentioned your names.”
Gary didn’t respond at first. Eventually he said, “When I thought I was sick – when I thought I might be getting AIDS – Marty told me he hoped I did.”
Now it was Rick who failed to respond, until Gary looked his way. “That’s – awful! I can’t believe that! That’s disgusting!”
“Precisely.”
“Why would he do that? Did he just – say that, out of the blue?”
“No, he had already been telling me off. About how jealous he was that Becker died of a heart attack while Roger died of AIDS. And I was saying as far as I’m concerned, it’s because BB didn’t die of AIDS that people thought it didn’t count–”
“God. That all sounds so ugly.”
“It was.”
There was more silence, but Rick couldn’t let it go. “I could see why you’d really be pissed at him. But he’s your friend. He couldn’t have meant it. I mean, you’ve been through so much together–”
“Rick, I know you mean well, but you should really mind your own business on this one.”
