Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle by Ethan Mordden

the bread sticks!”
    “Save some for me!” cried Cosgrove, avoiding my outthrust arm as he charged through the lounge.
    “I don’t mind what he does, but why when I’m right
there?”
Nicky pleaded. “Why, to
torture
me?”
    An employee came in bearing the refilled punch bowl, and Cosgrove asked if he was planning to bring out any chocolate-covered macaroons. “It’s my favorite dessert,” Cosgrove explained.
    “That’s my third favorite,” said Virgil. “My second favoriteis lime Frozfruit and my all-time is tiramisù, which is probably not available here, I would imagine.”
    “You got that right,” said the guy, as Dennis Savage came into the lounge, noting it all in a single look. Roy’s presentations to Theobald appeared to have reached the bottom line: The two were head to head, whispering the intimate details that marry love and money on the fringes of the gay world. Theobald nodded thoughtfully, Roy made a gesture, and away they went without a glance behind them.
    Nicky dropped onto the banquette that lines a wall of the lounge, distraught, beaten, the lover who dared not speak his name—an archetype as basic to gay life as any Theobald in full bloom. Dennis Savage and I flanked him, trying to soothe his pain, reason through it, and, perhaps, find some hope in it somewhere.
    “I’m okay,” Nicky kept saying. “It’s not as if he signed a contract with me.”
    Munching a bread stick, Virgil came up and said, “If he’s mean to you, just throw him away like tomorrow’s sawdust.”
    “Theobald,” Nicky mused. “Turns it on, turns it off.” He shrugged. “Well, that’s the style. They make sex the way a musician makes music.”
    “This ridiculous
collecting
mania of the randy gay male,” Dennis Savage said.
    Now Cosgrove horned in, with a new idea: “Why don’t
you
take someone home, too, Nicky?”
    “Oh, never,” said Nicky. “This revolting trash.”
    “I don’t mean Ragmop. Take home one of the dancers.”
    “You can’t buy love, Cosgrove.”
    “But what if you can’t
have
love? At least you can buy some nice company and not give way to secret tears that all can see.”
    “Oh, was I so . . . I’m sorry for all embarrassing you.”
    “Not at all,” I said.
    “Only a few people saw,” said Virgil.
    “And would you please,” Dennis Savage asked me, “tell that thing to stop calling me Ragmop?”
    “He’s not a thing,” said Virgil.
    “Well, I’m not Ragmop.”
    “I’m not a thing,” Cosgrove mused, “but somehow you are Ragmop.”
    Which got a giggle out of Nicky, at any rate.
    “Let’s get this boy home,” I said.
    “No, I . . . Can I come with you guys? Please?”
    One could hardly have said no. Back on our own turf, as we piled into the elevator, a virile voice called out, “Hold that, please,” and Presto joined us, with a stalwart grin.
    “Could you push fourteen?” he asked.
    Virgil and Cosgrove were very subdued, taking turns gazing up at their mystery love. Presto was not unamused by the attention; he held up his fingers to put donkey ears on the pair. Just then, Nicky burst into tears.
    We all tried to comfort him as Virgil told Presto, “We’re rehearsing a play.”
    “Looks like a real Greek tragedy” was Presto’s opinion.
    “No,
Close Encounters of the Third World,”
said Cosgrove, master of the
fallacia consequentis
.
    Well, we took Nicky to Dennis Savage’s and calmed him down with a V-8. We said all the useless cheer-up things. We pointed out Bauhaus, who appeared at the bathroom door with one of his “Oh, them” looks, raced into the living room, dropped a little treasure upon the carpet, and sauntered into the kitchen. We cast aspersions upon Theobald, though most of us don’t even know what he looks like. Then Roy came in to brag.
    Oh, that Theobald! So wicked, so eager, his whopper flopping hard and ready out of his pants. His power, his readiness to do!
    “This is an entirely different class of people,” Roy told us.