I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore by Ethan Mordden Page B

than anyone else I know, all former lovers, for if his erotic appeal is considerable, his gift as sympathetic company is overwhelming. Some men don’t truly love him until after their affair has ended.
    He is perhaps the most “episodic” of my friends in that he would fall hopelessly in crush every year in late fall and fall out again by the following spring. He favored size, age, and the Latin school of charm, and his lovers were so good-natured that they never held it against Carlo when he abandoned them. Except he never did abandon anyone: he simply collected another best friend. And I note that none of them was spectacular, in the Imaginary Lover manner. They were teddy bears, a little coarse but terribly nice, probably fun in bed and even more fun the next morning. They were all alike, yet they had nothing in common; like Carlo, they had not defined themselves in any certain way. After I had known all of them for years, the thing that sprang to mind when they did was not something any one of them had said or done but how large they all felt when I was jammed onto a couch next to them.
    And this is possibly because they did, after all, have one thing in common, something Carlo shared with them: they had jobs but no career. They were gym trainers, or hotel orderlies, or movers. Now and again they hustled. They were the kind of people who never receive junk mail or utter beliefs or yearn for something that happens later than next week. They could be amazingly loyal, even valiant. They just didn’t subscribe to anything.
    Does it matter? I suppose that depends on what set you run with. But I was raised by a couple who urged me to make something notable of myself, and they didn’t mean a banker or a doctor. The world is full of these; artists are ever few. So they sat rapt before my puppet shows (though they were always Punch–and–Judy guignol in which all my brothers were murdered), and gave me piano lessons, and took me to Broadway. And when it was all over I was a little crazy and very smart, and I was bound to regard cool Carlo and his unsophisticated lovers with befuddlement. They lacked a theme. Or I would come back from the Eagle having approached someone because of his charm and deserted him because he was professionally unmotivated, and Dennis Savage would chide me, one of his most enthusiastic activities. “Stop making judgments,” he once said, “and consult Chatty Cock.”
    Well, you know, we have these little talks, and, much as I would enjoy kicking his bum in, he is the dearest thing I own. So I say, “Who is Chatty Cock?”
    “Chatty Cock,” he replies, “is the spirit of the Circuit. He has perfect instincts. He knows what to wear, whom to go with, whether to prevaricate or denude himself—”
    “I’ll bet a piaster on that.”
    “—because he doesn’t agonize over bourgeois ethics. He doesn’t weigh the advantages, as you do. He doesn’t try to comprehend the Circuit. Life is short. Consult Chatty Cock and let a thing happen. You need spontaneity.”
    “You need a muzzle.”
    “When things get tough, you might assume a restorative posture of comic resistance, reducing the Circuit to a vanity.” Dennis Savage doesn’t merely theorize; he dictates a proposal to Yale University Press. This is what comes of letting your children attend small, elite men’s colleges with pungent English departments, like Hamilton, instead of Sensible Preppy Places like Duke. “When comedy is called for, you might turn to Satyricock.” I swear I heard him pronounce the y. “Satyricock doesn’t get much, I admit, but he’s popular and famous.”
    “I visualize President Taft.”
    “He’s not dear to look at, but he has balance. He’ll never figure in disreputable dish, as someone I know so often does.”
    “What if I don’t believe in comic resistance? What if I take everything seriously, including the question of a person’s vocation? What if I want my associates to stand for something? What