The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? by Michael Kearns Page A

sang, blaring from the jukebox, “there’s nothing else to compare.”
    There was nothing else to compare. A dance floor teeming with men, entangled in each other, slow dancing. “You’d be like heaven to touch, I wanna hold you so much.”
    I must have frozen, but my unnamed leader zoomed across the dance floor, ordered a drink, and joined what appeared to be a clique of his compadres .
    Seeing him from the front, I was all at once attracted and repelled. Even at a distance, I could see his meticulously applied pancake makeup and enough mascara for a chorus of batting eyelashes. Completing the contradictory picture was a protrusion in the front of his virtually see-through slacks that was the size of a beer bottle. “Pardon the way that I stare,” Frankie sang, “there’s nothing else to compare.”
    Before I could order a beer (I was seventeen but tall and confident), I realized that the bombshell was motioning me to join him on the dance floor.
    I was slow dancing with a man (“Alex,” he whispered in my ear, in a thick Spanish accent) who smelled like cheap perfume, a contrast to the feel of his massive hard-on grinding into my stiffening dick. “At long last love has arrived,” sang Frankie.
    Later that night, Alex removed his silken shirt and soft pants along with any vestiges of femininity. He rammed his riata into me with the machismo of a bullfighter after a shot of tequila. Or testosterone.
    Traversing between the Palace and the Stonewall became my nightly ritual. There were highlights at both locations. When Joan Crawford appeared one night near the end of the run, bedlam nearly erupted in the theater. Judy, of course, had been tipped off that the imperious Crawford was in the house. A symphony of conspicuous hot pink—hat, gloves, tailored suit and shoes—Crawford looked like an advertisement for Bazooka bubble gum.
    Near what was obviously the end of the performance (“Chicago” followed by “Swanee” followed by “San Francisco”), there was a definite transfer of energy from the stage of the Palace to the audience area where Miss “Think Pink” Crawford had begun her exodus.
    By the time the orchestra began to play the opening strains of “Over the Rainbow,” Crawford was poised in the center aisle at the rear of the theater. “My dear,” her voice boomed grandiosely above the strains of Judy’s signature number, as all eyes shifted to Miss C. “You are the greatest talent in the world.”
    Judy feigned utter surprise and humility as she introduced the legend who remained planted in the aisle, motionless, as Judy sat cross-legged on the edge of the stage in her characteristic pose and dedicated “Over the Rainbow” to “the great Joan Crawford.”
    As if hypnotized, Joan moved toward the stage in slow motion with studied devotion and stood mere feet away from the teary star—a big blob of pink obstructing Judy from most of the audience.
    After Judy’s final night, during which she was pelted with flowers for more than half an hour, my compulsive visits to the Stonewall increased.
    One night when Alex and I were dancing, a short, dark and sinewy number tapped my partner on the shoulder, indicating that he was cutting in. “Joey,” he whispered in my ear, in a thick Italian accent.
    “At long last love has arrived and I thank God I’m alive,” Frankie sang while Joey, as butch as they come, checked out my throbbing cock.
    “Let’s go for a ride,” he said, and almost as an afterthought added, “In my cab.”
    For my second lesson in the vagaries of who’s the fucker and who’s the fuckee, Joey took me to a dark apartment where he lived with his elderly mother, pulled down his pants, got on all fours, stuck his butt up in the air, and ordered me to fuck him as he stuck his head in a brown paper bag full of glue.
    “Let me love you, baby, let me love you.”
    I loved Joey and Alex as the summer unfolded, playing both the passive and aggressive roles, depending on which of