Moon of Monakoora

by Kevin Bentley

The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.

óVirginia Woolf

Well, at my age you canít lean against a palm tree and sing ìMoon of Monakoora.î

óDorothy Lamour, on her appearance as a sloppily dressed
housewife who gets murdered in Creepshow 2, quoted in her obituary.

      In the early eighties I used to see this older guy dancing by himself at The End Up. He was oldówhite hair; wrinkled, leathery skinóand wore only a leather vest and a ripped pair of cutoffs. Heíd be waving two large Japanese fans, entirely at odds with the disco beat. Heíd stop now and then to open and inhale from a bottle of poppers, or to blow inanely on a whistle. Dancing Bear, we called him, snickering, recalling the stiff-legged character in a furry suit whoíd come out periodically and shuffle wordlessly to some cracked polka on ìCaptain Kangaroo.î
      ìShoot me if I ever come to that, will you?î my friend Michael would sayópretty, boyish, shaggy-blond-haired Michael, dubbed Little Michael, because of his diminutive height and appearance on Polk Street when he was only 16. Or heíd croon in his best Peggy Lee manner, ìShe stayed too long at the fair.î
      ìI hope to God I have something better to do by then,î Iíd say to myself.
      Something better meaning, presumably, a devoted lover, a real job, and a nice apartment with room for a big rolltop desk at which Iíd sit typing out poems and stories, too happy and satisfied for drunken ennui in dance bars.
      ìI just hate it that youíve chosen such an unhappy lifestyle,î my mother would groan each Saturday, when she phoned from Texas. Marrying my childish father and bearing three sons hadnít been such a jolly lifestyle-choice for her, as it happenedómy parents bickered, and each son disappointed, or worse. My older brother took lots of drugs, grew paranoid, shot his wife, and went to prison. I took slightly fewer drugs, and fled to San Francisco to be a professional homosexual. My younger brother skipped the drugs, but refused to go to college or stay married. My mother counted the days till she could retire from elementary-school teaching, where she hated the kids, and then hunkered down in misery with my half-mad father behind the bars heíd installed on the windows and doors of their ranch house.
      My thoughts fall into elementary-school addition and subtraction: Twenty years since I came to San Francisco; nine years since Jack died; five years since Richard died. Fifteen years since I seroconverted.
      The ìolderî men I went with in my first years out are now, if theyíre still alive, in their late fifties. I tote up their ages: 55, 59. Before long, I will be older than either of my two lovers were when they died. Theyíll morph into younger men smiling out at me from the photos, as if theyíd taken off on one of those light-years-long space missions and come back still in their primes to find me grown grandfatherly in gravity-driven earth-years. A man I had an affairette with at 22, a handsome, urbane New York Jewish photographer, whose age awed meó39óused to say wistfully of the gay bike- messenger boys pogoing at The Stud on Punk Night, ìThey just donít see me. Iím invisible.î
      ìWhat am I, a potato?î Iíd ask myself, bitterly. Doug came to meet me once at the bookstore where I worked, dressed for a job interview in black jeans, a vest and tie, a vintage sports jacket, and a rather alpine hat. ìYour boyfriendís out front,î a woman I worked with told me. ìHeís cute. Very dapper.î The word lodged: One could be middle-aged, and yet dapper.

      On my first trip to a gay ghetto, in Dallas, Texas, at 19, I went home not with the hunky young truck driver beside whom Iíd stood most of the evening (whoíd muttered to me smuttily about whether I wanted to come out to his rig and try some of the things heíd heard queers were willing to do), but with a fussy, skinny, hand-cream-scented older gentleman who had swooped down on me as I started out of the bar. His house was a prettily restored Edwardian; glass tinkled from curio cabinets and tasseled lamps swayed like seaweed in a current as we stepped through the door and onto the echoing hardwood floor. I inhaled mildew and furniture polish. Were these the odors of forbidden sex? He wanted the lights out before he whisked off his clothes. He dove under the sheets. I slowly pulled off my dingo boots and tight jeans and turned toward the bed. Standing in the moonlight that poured through the high, lace-curtained windows, dick sticking straight up, I trembled with excitement at my first trick.
      ìStay there a minute,î he said. ìLet me just look at you. Youíre like a Beardsley satyr.î He began to explain who Beardsley was, assuming I didnít know, and I accepted my role: young and dumb. His penis was small and only partially erect. Motionless, he ejaculated with a sigh, when I bent to take it in my mouth. ìSorry,î he said. ìI have a very short fuse.î Then I lay back with my arms behind my head, while he blew me till I came.

      Fifty: I picture gray-mustached men with that matronly roundness continuing below their belts, cheeks and noses ruddy with broken blood vessels, peering over their cocktail glasses behind the plate glass of The Twin Peaks (a.k.a. The Glass Coffin). Sure, Ned Rorem goes on looking great, but look what he started with.
      You can get fat, or stop thinking of your choice of clothing each morning as ìoutfits,î but if you never were a heart-stopping beauty in the first place, if you were never an Alan Helms or AMG model, you donít really have to worry about losing your looks.
      For an oral history project I once spoke with a 77-year-old gay man about his experiences in Nebraska in the late thirties. He told me about a cabal of ìstraightî pillars of the communityómarried doctors and lawyersówho used to rent hotel rooms in Omaha on weekends to entertain college boysóincluding my subject, Franklinóand street trade. The older men played poker and drank; the boys drank the free liquor and stripped down to their underwear in the summer heat. Late in the evening, the youths would have sex with each other on a couch pulled into the center of the room, while the men drank and watched, shouting encouragement, as if ringside at a fight. Then the hosts would each choose a student or farm boy or street tough with a pretty uncut dick and suck him off.
      Franklin soon ceased to be trade (ìThis yearís jam is next yearís jellyóî), but he continued to introduce curious and comely young men from his circle to the weekend bacchanals. Certain ìtraditionsî were insisted on. He was taught how to mix a proper scotch and soda. He was never allowed to pay for a drink or dinner. ìOh, no,î the older gentlemen would say, covering his hand as he reached for his wallet. ìYouíll do that later.î

      1977: Attending a fundraiser dance at California Hall, I wandered with my pal David into a dark room where porn movies were being screened. We squeezed down an aisle and sat on a rickety bench. I hadnít yet seen much homoerotic film, and I was mesmerized. The person on the other side of me moved right up close. I scrunched nearer to David, hissing ìMove down!î in his ear. The unwelcome suitor followed. I glared at him: an elderly Latino fellow, wearing his black windbreaker over his head like a mantilla. When his hand darted into my crotch, I leapt to my feet in outrage. ìKeep your fucking hands off me!î I shouted, and pushed my way angrily out of the room. David caught up with me at the bar where I was shakily ordering a Bud.
      ìDo you have any idea who that was?î he asked. David had just started his first bartending job at a sad little Tenderloin dive called Googieís, and heíd undergone a crash course in Royal Court genealogy. ìThat just so happens to have been The Dowager Empress Manuel!î He was aghast at my breach of court etiquette.
      ìI donít care if it was Princess Matchabelli, he had no right to grab my dick!î
      David, ten years older, gave me his patient, youíre-so-young look. ìYouíll be old one day yourself, you know.î
      ìYeah, well, I wonít be going around assaulting 21-year-olds and expecting them to put up with it!î I said irately.

      When I was 18, I wrote a fan letter to John Rechy after reading City of Night. Rechy was from my home town, El Paso, and he graduated in the same class at El Paso High as my mother. I was six when, on our weekly visit to the neighborhood library branch, she hurried me past a display stack of City of Night, murmuring, ìI knew him in school. He was strange.î The jacket art showed a slender man silhouetted against a wet, midnight street, neon and car lights reflected in the puddles like Christmas tree lights in a poorly exposed color slide. My mother didnít say the word homosexual then, and I wouldnít have known what it meant, but the book and the image on its cover reached out to me. Later, when I bought and read a worn Grove paperback with an enigmatic phone number penned inside the back cover, I knew, despite the dated and grim scenario, I was reading about a place I meant to go. The phone number was disconnected when I screwed up my nerve to call. So I wrote the author, thinking he might be pleased to hear that one of his ridiculers, my mother, had borne him an heir; I enclosed some giddy poems. He answered with a friendly letter, informing me that he was hard at work on the screenplay for City, and inviting me to drop by his L.A. home should I find myself in the neighborhood. I saw him not long ago in an Advocate spread, still in his Black Bart garbótight black jeans, open black shirt, and cowboy bootsófragile- looking, like the Diane Arbus shot of Mae West in her negligee. When will my Leviís and Gap T-shirts and high-tops render me as anachronistic as an elderly flapper?

      Tradition provides a number of appropriate names for middle- aged gay men to use when addressing their juniors: Lochinvar, Youngman, Handsome, Apollo, Sport, Paolo.

      ìYouíre 37? Iím 32. That makes me the younger oneóso I guess Iíll be getting my way.î This was uttered with a weary sigh and the first of many shrugs. We were lying on the rug in my living room, books, photos, and glasses of wine spread around us. In the breaks between our kissing and rolling around the floor, I was trying to talk Nick into having sex on this, our first solo date. ìOf course, Iím attracted to you, but maybe this isnít a good idea.î His show of reluctance, his insistence on the predictable sameness of all romances, ought to have alerted me, along with his conviction that five yearsí age difference gave him a perpetual trump, but the possibility of having sex again after four months of celibacy was irresistible. I knew from past experience that nothing helped put loss into perspective faster than a good dose of sex. Iíd endured one very miserable year between Jackís dying and my meeting Richard, and I felt no compunction about skipping a semester at misery school this time. I didnít want to be like my friend Rickís neighbor Sal, whose new lover everyone referred to as Sea Monkey Boyfriend (recalling those add-water seahorses advertised in comic books), because Sal met and moved in with him only weeks after Andy died. Still, a week, a month, a yearówhen youíve watched lovers die, when youíre infected and asymptomatic with no idea when HIV may dissolve the earth beneath your feet and suck you underówhatís the difference, really?
      Three months and innumerable Dark Shadows videos later, when Nick, cigarette drooping from the corner of his downturned mouth, shrugged and lectured me one more time about sex being merely another bodily function, like going to the bathroom, I realized heíd been right: this wasnít a good idea. I walked away and steeled myself for the long haul.
      It was a tough wait for the next good thing. Attending a revival of West Side Story on my 40th birthday, quoting a maddening passage from French feminist deconstructionist Luce Irigaray that cast my penis obsession in a sickly light, I wept when Tony and Maria sang ìTonight.î It dawned on me then that for as long as I could remember, when I read about or saw young lovers, one of them was always me. But now an unpleasant little voice inside me was saying, Thatís never going to be you again, honey.
      ìI canít picture the kinds of things you say now, coming out of his mouth,î my current boyfriend says of me in my twenties, after perusing my old photo albums. Iíd packed all the albums and diaries into one big carton and lugged it over to his loft in the first stage of moving in. Although Iíd already boxed up everything twice before when lovers died, the sight of my recorded transit gathered into one pile gave me pause. Because Iíve stayed put these 20 years in San Francisco, because I regularly leaf back through previous journals, for me the past and present are fluid, permeable. Other than the up- close arrival of HIV in the mid-eighties, thereís no obvious demarcation separating young from young-no-more. I am that boy, give or take ten bongs and a six-pack.
      Something better to do did come along, and I tired of drinking in bars or seeing how high I could make myself and still maintain, without having to bottom out and reduce my surname to an initial. The pre-AIDS diaries do seem engineered to excite and insult me now, in my more sober domesticity, with their sheer volume of sexual contacts and offhand slurs against those past 35 or 40. Yet Iím precluded from fretting about middle age by the very horror itself: How can I carp about turning 40, when every day I live, whole and healthy, cheating HIV out of its next meal?
      Fifteen years of asymptomatic infection, and the good news is: You may grow old.
      Am I dapper yet? Do I drool over younger men? Will I Do That Later? Will I one day pass a poster for Spiritual Retreats for Gay Men Over 40 without laughing? Does childlessness, sexual voracity, and a fondness for small dogs invariably lead to Wallis Simpson? Can one be elderly and masculine without a past in the merchant marine? Will my tumultuous puberty ever end? If it does, will I have Something Better to Do? I intend to find out.
      My forties are proving very sweet. I placed an ad and he answered it, responding, it seemed, as much to the series of more confessional texts I wrote and tore up as to the one that actually ran. Spit-spot; I'm moving in with him, after a year, leaving the apartment I've lived in for six years, where my last lover died five years ago. And 41 is a winning lotto number, 15 bonus years, the man behind door number three.

      Little Michael, who died young and stayed pretty--I wasn't asked to shoot him, as it turned out; he did it himself when he started to get sick--came to me in a dream a few nights ago. Putting his arm chummily over my shoulder, he told me about the rest of my life, smiling and teasing. "So don't worry," he said. "Of course, you know you can't remember any of this future stuff when you wake up. I'm not going to be coming back to talk to you anymore after this, either. I'm moving on."
      He said it like he was heading to a bar for which I was neither attractive nor young enough. But he was laughing, affectionately.

Kevin Bentley has published in several magazines and is a frequent
contributor to "Diseased Pariah News." He once wrote a fan letter to
P. L. Travers, author of "Mary Poppins," but he couldn't find a way
to work her reply into his pieces. Email: bentlek@aol.com