After a certain age temptations, like a page, look better every year. Though the price of pleasure may be dear, what good is rank or power if there's no one to excite you in the shower?
I was thinking the other evening of Brian Arthur -- Brian Arthur as he once was -- no less real than he is now, but before he became a nationally-known figure, famous as one of the chief architects of the current administration's military empire, and how we used to make love -- really -- inside the trucks which were parked under the old West Side Highway by the warehouses overlooking the shore of the Hudson River.
He always had a joint ready and a conspiratorial smile. I can picture him now, the way he looked that summer, hotter than most. Brian, of course, was always the hottest, but I mean the summer in that last sentence. Because of the heat his chest was always bare, shirt tucked away into the back pocket of his really short cut-off jeans, and because he loved to scamper along the rocks or jump from one of the gravel barges that lined the shore to another, the only other items of apparel he sported were a pair of high workboots, well-laced and a pair of thick gray socks. We were the same age, twenty-four. It was 1972. We were among the few who were voting for McGovern.
I met him in the gym at Sheridan Square over the West Side Savings Bank and next door to the Greenwich Village Peace Center, where we also hung out. He worked out for tone, not bulk, and was beautifully lithe, nearly hairless of body, and his eyes danced with light and laughter. He always seemed to be having a silent, internal conversation with himself which made him break out in mysterious smiles; it was impossible for him to keep himself from bubbling over.
Hey, he said to me, one morning as we were changing back into street clothes.
Hey yourself, I said with a grin, dumbfounded and shy, wanting to solder the contact but shy and inexperienced at this sort of thing, which was exactly what I was hoping would happen, but when it did, not knowing quite how to negotiate the rapids. Even in my fantasies, I always skipped from seeing my desired object to being on my knees in from of him with his cock in my mouth and my arms round his thighs.
But now I didn't have to say anything. I already sensed it. I was in the hands of a master. Charm was natural to him, and he had a knack for putting people at ease, for bringing them out.
Hey, if you're free, walk down to the pier with me. It's going to be a scorcher. We can get the sun.
Sure, I said.
And right there in the locker room, he took hold of me and gave me the happiest kiss I'd ever felt, a promise of things to come, oblivious of the guy across from us who was getting out of his khakis.
He took a joint out of his right pocket and a Zippo out of his left and we shared the smoke as we walked arm in arm on Christopher Street toward the river. We passed the Theater de Lys where The Three Penny Opera was still playing, and saw Lotte Lenya, with orange hair, going in, a cigarette in one hand, a Styrofoam container of coffee in the other.
What do you do? I asked Brian as we passed One Fifty Two, where Reich's Orgone Institute Press had been located before the Feds busted him and combusted all his books a little north of us on the Gansevoort Pier.
I'm getting a doctorate in Economics and Poly Sci. Right now I play the piano in a bar. You?
I'm writing a doctoral thesis, in psychology.
He leaned over and bit me on the neck. My cock began to dance.
You'll never figure me out, he said.
I don't want to, I said. I want to figure you in.
On the pier we stripped down to our jocks and lay in the sun. He gently traced indecipherable patterns on my chest and kissed my nipples and filled my mouth with his tongue. It was heavenly.
I like when you're passive, he said, gazing into my eyes and caressing my cheek. I can tell how hot you are.
The sky was an intense azure above us, the sun ablaze with happiness. I felt like the end of the world had come, that history had reached its climax, that the rest of my life only needed to be the extension of this minute.
We sat gazing into each other's eyes.
I'm afraid, I said.
Of what? he said.
That this will end, I said.
It will, he said, and it won't.
I waited.
It's inside you forever.
But longing for it afterwards...
...is a mistake. And then he kissed me.
Come on, he said, getting to his feet and lifting me to mine.
At Sheridan Square he said he had to go.
I panicked quietly, but only said. Will we see each other again?
There's a midnight screening of Limelight at the Bleecker Street tomorrow. I'm free. Meet me in front at quarter to.
Ok, I said.
I gotta run, he said, I work tonight. He gave me a quick kiss on the lips. Then, throwing out his arm, seductively, he camped, Till then.
And then he was gone.
I knew his name was Brian; that's all. Not his phone number, not his address, not the bar where he played.
I was elated. But something inside me wondered for how long.
Brian was on the corner when I got to the Bleecker Street. It had cooled off and he was wearing jeans, a white shirt with frills, half unbuttoned, suede moccasins without socks and a tuxedo jacket with a rounded midnight blue satin lapel.
Down Bleecker, right onto MacDougal, left onto West 3rd, across Sixth Avenue, north from the Waverly, west on 4th a bit, then left onto Jones Street, arms round each other after the movie in the still night overhung with the sliver crescent of a silver moon in a clear sky. Lust made our feet unstable. His apartment was in a tall old tenement whose gray marble steps were worn down by a century of trodding.
By candle light we smoked a joint and I slid down out of his arms to his feet and knelt before him and began to lick his ankles until he took me by the hair, guided me up, kissed me deep inside my mouth with his tongue, unbuttoned my shirt and gazed at my bare chest. Then he undid my belt, unbuttoned my jeans and I stood before him naked, hard-cocked and glassy-eyed.
I'm going to hypnotize you, he said, taking hold of my nipples, and turn you into my slave. Do you want to be my slave?
I want to be your slave, I said, shivering as a current of electricity shot through me.
Look into the candle flame, he said, and slowly started drawing me into his orbit.
I don't know if he succeeded in actually hypnotizing me. I certainly was willing, and I couldn't tell the difference between pretending and the real thing.
And, finally, it didn't matter, because, I thought, Brian was the real thing.
Being the real thing is different from being a permanent thing. In fact, I've come to think that the permanent thing never can be the real thing. The permanent thing is stuck too much in accommodations and compromises, and now I think that, on the whole, that's a good thing. I didn't think so then. I believed in phosphorescent intensity, in the drama of overwhelming illumination.
Oh how I wanted him, and every time we got together and he wanted me the earth spun on its axis and the constellations in heaven glowed into explosion.
It was my unease, my doubt, my insecurity, my fear that there would be no next time that made that glorious joy and overwhelming excitement each time there was a next time.
Everyone knew McGovern would lose, yet it came as a shock when he did, because our hearts were young and we believed that the impossible could happen, that reversals were possible, that water might gush out of a rock and the heart might open to gentleness. Suddenly we felt horribly isolated, terribly alone in a dark eternal moment.
For Brian it was a turning point. We spent election night in my apartment on Bedford Street gazing into each other's eyes, cradled in each other's arms. In the morning, he smiled at me with all his soul. Perhaps he even left his soul with me through that smile, for it is an expression of his I never see on television or in the news photos of him now, but it was so much a part of him then.
Now his expressions more closely resemble the three fundamental ones in the president's repertoire of facial expressions: the smirk, the sneer, and the snarl. Each, on a face still handsome, has a peculiar although insidious and even frightening but inescapable charm.
Brian said -- that morning in November 1972 -- after his soul's smile fell from his face, It's never going to be the same again. Remember, I love you. And he kissed me again. Solemnity like a sudden wind blew over his face. He caressed my cheek and looked at me...was it with disappearing eyes? I could find no sure reason for it, but a shiver of uneasiness, of foreboding, coursed through me and was just as quickly gone as he repeated Remember when he turned back momentarily as he descended the stairs.
When I stopped by Crazy Benny's Friday night to hear him play and have a drink with him at the bar before we went home to his place or mine as we did every Friday night, he was distant, hardly even polite, distant, and his focus was on a preppy-looking guy with a military haircut in a double breasted blue jacket with gold buttons, chino slacks, white buck shoes, a burgundy foulard tucked inside his open-collared television blue oxford shirt, and horn-rimmed glasses.
Rather stiffly Brian introduced me to "Dean" as "a Friday night regular," which I was, but not in the sense he was using the term now. And then he excused himself as if he were just talking to a fan, and I saw a look on his face I'd never seen before that made it impossible to say anything more, because even though he was Brian, he wasn't, so whatever I would say would appear unhinged from anything real. He wasn't the guy who kissed me, so how could I remind him of what had become another man's kisses. It was crazy.
They sat at a table in the back and ordered cognac. Dean was leaning in across the small table, and talking with a quiet intensity, and Brian was mesmerized by his gaze. I stayed at the bar, had a beer to try to get some perspective, took a few swallows, but found my throat was closed. I left it three-quarters unfinished and quit the place. I walked home in the chilly November night unable to focus my thoughts or get a read on my feelings.
Brian didn't answer his phone for a few days, and after that there was a recorded announcement informing me (or anyone who called) that the line was no longer in service. Brian wasn't playing at Crazy Benny's anymore, either, and when I asked Alan, one of my favorite bartenders, he said that Brian had just stopped showing up.
Didn't even pick up his last paycheck.
When I inquired at NYU, I found out Brian had moved out of the city and transferred to George Mason in Virginia.
I guess when Brian had tried to hypnotize me, he hadn't really succeeded. I wasn't hung up on him. He went away. He faded away. I got my degree. I've had lots of lovers and one or two for keeps. I have a good practice, and I'm proud to say I've also been in jail a few times for non-violent civil disobedience in the cause of raising consciousness on issues of peace, racial and economic justice, and sexual liberation. The times may seem bleak, but I recognize lots of fellow travelers, and most of them aren't lonesome.
As for Brian, when I see him on television now among the neo-conservative cabal or with the president at a press conference or on Meet the Press defending one indefensible policy or another, rather than being dispirited by the sight of a good looking guy defending brutal atrocities and mesmerizing the Americans with ideological trigger phrases, I see the skull beneath the skin. I know, even if he doesn't, that somewhere inside him, buried deep, he's grinning, not smirking or snarling, stripped of his shirt and making love to some guy on a hot summer afternoon under the West Side Highway in the back of a truck. I remember.
If only he could.
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