Dancing With Fans - 1. Brent & Jack

DANCING WITH FANS

By S Carlin Long

Brent & Jack

Gabriel had introduced him to Jack and Brent at The Eagle. From its opening in 1970, the Eagle’s Nest Bar became the definitive leather/Levi gay bar in New York City. At 21^stStreetand 11^thAvenue, located in a building previously a longshoreman’s pub called Eagle Open Kitchen (1931-1970), this prototype of the pants-pocket dark, cigars smoke-choked, excitingly masculine and enticingly creepy Eagles which would pop up all over the country, bordered the still-covered Westside Highway. While chances were about even for giving/getting a blowjob and getting the crap beat out of you – or both – between the rows of hulking semi trailers parked in the median dividing northbound and southbound lanes of traffic, The Eagle was downright gentrified in the early evening (say 10-ish?) – Jersey boys buying their “Breeder” girlfriends (of either sex) their last gay-bar-coming-out cocktail before packing them back through the tunnel from which they had come, vying for space along the long oval bar with Gym Bunnies clad in sports gear that had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual games being played. And by 1982, add in the members-only Saint crowd buying time and frequently their party favors for later, over top-shelf shots. This all took place under the amused, if slightly impatient gaze of leather-clad “daddies” and “boys” before whom many of the above-mentioned would return to pace until closing, with feigned indifference, the elliptical gauntlet of males lining bar and walls – hoping against hope for that one grope that would stop them dead in their tracks and turn in to the Love Of Their Lives, well, at least until morning.

Blond and blue-eyed, with fair skin plumping over muscles like raised dough, Jack struck him as a composite of genetically sculpted, repeating, squares. Bulging denim-clad thighs squared off over perfectly shaped knee caps. A slab-flat square torso crowned by pectorals squared under straining white cotton jersey in that just-a-little-too-pumped New York way of the time, each adorned with a tight, discretely raised nipple. Even Jack’s face ended in a squared jaw. The only apparent anomaly to Jack’s squareness appeared to be his rounded glutes and, presumably his balls. Jack was short, Jewish, professional and controlling. Gabriel and Jack had been what today are called friends with benefits until Jack met The Love of His Life, Brent, who was tall, Christian and easy going, an artist with olive skin stretched over an efficient, amazingly defined, musculature that served him well in the construction trade with which he subsidized his passion for sculpting. Everything about Brent was long – his arms, his legs, his feet, his fingers and very apparently, the unit he was free-balling in the black 501’s he wore. He was drawn to Brent’s clumsy shyness and lanky physicality, but Gabriel had warned that Jack was very “protective,” having banished long-standing friends for even the hint of harbored feelings so he quickly transformed attraction to guilt – something any gay man is master at doing. The four socialized regularly. But there was uneasiness. Jack knew, he thought to himself, and worse, so did Brent.

“They can’t go out tonight. Jack’s been sick all week and Brent’s staying home to take care of him.”

There was no mistaking his best friend’s incredibly nasal lohhhhng-eye-land twang coming from the receiver. A huge irony seeing that his sister was a speech therapist for crissake!

“OK,” he said, at once relieved to be spared Jack’s skank-eye for the evening but concerned for Kent, wanting to comfort him – strike that thought – guilt – “so meet at Clyde’s around eight?”

“Ty’s will be dead if we get there anytime before ten. Meet me at The Monster first for a drink, Randy’s playing.”

He hated The Monster. The Fire Island location in Cherry Grove was fun in the early Spring and late Summer when everything else was closed, but the Village location at 88 Grove Street on Sheridan Square was his idea of what a 1950s gay bar would be like if there had been such a thing – sad old queens draping trench coats and themselves over barstools crooning show tunes, where the drinks were over-priced and the men over-fed and where there was no competing with the grand piano for attention. But Gabriel loved the place and he didn’t want to begin the evening with a, “get over yourself,” lecture from his best friend so he’d go.

Anyways, the whole conversation had been shorthand between two friends thinking with the smaller of their heads. Their itinerary was simply a way to bide time until getting down to the real business of finding The Love of Their Lives, or at least a trick for the night. He knew from experience that there was a better than equal chance they’d skip dinner at Clyde’s altogether. Maybe because they had fucked once and been boyfriends in Gabriel’s eyes for much longer, the two never felt comfortable “working” the same bar at the same time. So he’d hang out with Gabe at Ty’s until his friend got someone in his sights and then he would bar hop down Christopher Street, catch a cab up 10^thAvenue, hit Rawhide, walk across 21^stStreet to check out The Spike and well, see from there. There was always The Anvil.

Jack got better, but not completely, not really.

He and Brent never wanted to go out anymore. Gabriel told him Jack was obsessing on some health food diet that made it hard to eat out. He, of course, figured the jig was up and Jack had discovered his coveting. Brent had taken to calling him from time to time, with short updates, always when Jack was out.

“He had pneumonia, some weird strain called pneumocystis carinii.”

“He’s better this week; he went back to the gym today.”

“His doctors are fucking idiots.”

“He’s taken a leave of absence from work.”

“He’s losing so much weight.”

“I’m scared.”

He saw Jack for the last time on December 30, 1983. Gabriel’s “Second Annual Pre- New Years Eve Gala” had become a tradition of his own creation and the RSVP directive was a mere formality. You showed that night or you never showed again in his life, period. Enough people had arrived to fill every seat in Gabe’s Bleecker Street apartment by the time they made their entrance, Brent his disarmingly goofy self but Jack, this emaciated little doll, this couldn’t be Jack. Someone jumped up immediately to offer him a seat which he acknowledged, but didn’t take until he had crept around the entire room greeting each individual eye to eye, introducing himself to those he didn’t know. Brent, the gallant, gangly goofball stood at the kitchen doorway eyes wet with pride in being squire to this frail Don tipping at windmills. “Well, first I ride behind him. Then he fights. And then I pick him up off the ground,” says the fiercely loyal Sancho Panza of the Don Quixote.

It wasn’t but a few months before the phone rang.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“What’re you doing tonight? Can you meet for a drink?” asked the high-pitched nasal fog horn on the other end of the line.

“No, I have to work, why?”

“I have to tell you something, but it has to be in person.”

“God damn it Gabriel, I have to work. Stop being such a drama queen and tell me what’s going on.”

“Jack’s gone.”

Before his brain could wrap itself around the words, he blurted, “What do you mean he’s ‘gone,’ where?”

“Jack’s gone, he’s dead, Jack’s dead.”

“Oh my God, Brent,” he thought. “Gabriel, I’m so sorry. Are there, uh, arrangements?’ he said.

“No, um, I don’t know. Saint Vincent’s took the body directly to Redden’s. He’s been cremated. His sister is coming in. I don’t know. I’ll call you when I know more.”

In spite of being grandson, nephew and cousin to funeral directors, he hadn’t actually attended many funerals. As a toddler, being watched by his paternal Grandfather, he had once climbed up into an open casket, straddled a prepared corpse and been found gleefully bouncing up and down on the deceased’s chest squealing, “Horsey.” The family decided not to risk his six-year-old presence at his Grandmother’s services. She had been collateral damage to her husband’s inebriated joy ride that ended on the wrong side of a two-lane highway in on July 5, 1956 leaving one of his Aunts in a coma for weeks and the old man at death’s door for months. The carnage included the deaths of all occupants of the vehicle he hit head-on; a pregnant woman found with the car’s engine in her collapsed belly, her husband and her mother. Two children, presumed to have been standing in the back seat, were projected out the windshield of the vehicle and found several yards away with the tops of their heads approximately level with their shoulders. His father’s family had had enough prominence in the big-frog-small-pond way of the Midwest to have the vehicular homicide swept under the table. It simply went away, just as his father was soon asked to do by his family when his wife filed the divorce papers already signed, but humanely withheld, until he had been able to morn his mother’s loss. “Divorce isn’t right in a Catholic family, Richard,” opined the haughty tramps who had married his brothers. His father left and returned after the divorce to claim his only son in a custody feat of intrigue and legalities fit for the movies.

He had attended his Grandfather’s funeral in spite of the fact that it fell in the middle of finals his senior year of college. Having only returned to his hometown for court-ordered visits with his mother, he had little connection to any of his family so he had been happy to find common ground with a first cousin during the quick trip between tests. Trey was two years his senior, had entered the family mortuary business, held political aspirations and was engaged to marry a girl he called, “The right one for me to marry,” making his betrothal sound more like a wise purchase than the Love of His Life. He had insistent that his “little” cousin, “Come back soon and drink Mint Juleps with me on my front porch.” Within the year, Trey would be dead, killed in a single car accident just two weeks before his wedding. The funeral was a macabre event of the highest order. His Uncle, the funeral director, had insisted on an open casket, “Because it’s difficult for young people to grasp the finality of death.” Everyone was hysterical, they said it was because it had caught the family off guard and they were reliving the loss of their parents. It would be decades before he could honestly look into the rear view mirror of his life, remembering just how much going swimming with Trey had meant to him when they were boys, to ask if that were the real reason he stole away from the others, seeking the solace of an overgrown empty lot, falling to his knees, his chest heaving, gasping for air as a rage of tears released from his body for this boy his father had once quipped might be “a little light in the loafers.”

Funerals for G.R.I. D. (Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease) victims were strange affairs. Airlines would not transport bodies, there was only one small Funeral Home on 14^thStreetthat would deal with remains and they only provided incineration services. Distant, if not estranged, families would swoop into town to collect ashes, strip residences of valuables, be dismissive, at best, to Lovers and depart. It would all happen so quickly. There hardly was time to morn and none to process the inhumanity of it all.

Jack was gone. His ashes were already on a plane with his sister who had spoken for an uncharacteristically respectful family of the time, saying they recognized Jack’s will and would not fight Brent for his co-op. His friends mumbled into telephones that there should be some kind of memorial or tribute. Finally someone decided on doing dinner at an East Village restaurant. He instinctively shrank from attending, but did the “adult” thing and went and of course it rained like hell. The place was packed and noisy. Everyone arrived damp and smelling of wet wool. They were all crowded along a narrow table, being “adult” and talking about the good times and being, you know, fluffy and light. Suddenly he saw Brent hunch-shouldered, mouth distorted, tears streaming down his silent face. He recognized that agony. It was something real and clean and good amidst all this posturing. In a visceral lunge he grabbed hold of Brent by his leather jacket and dragged his friend outside, away from the proper and the grown up and acceptable, out into the dark, wet torrent. And there they stood, face-to-face. Oblivious to passersby, they clung to each other in a white-knuckled embrace, sobbing, deluged in unspoken rage. There was not another fucking thing they could do.

He and Brent had dinner together frequently in the year after Jack’s death, usually they’d eat at Brent’s and talk long into the night. They discovered a shared secret love of classical music, traveled together some, sharing the same bed but never as lovers. They had sex once, sort of, out on Fire Island. Brent played at his sculpting and had started redoing the apartment but when it was finished, sold it and moved to Rehoboth. While he hadn’t wanted to lose Brent, he had encouraged him to go somewhere he could be “Brent,” rather than the surviving half of Jack and Brent.

Shortly after the move, Brent met The Love of His Life, a ruddy landscape architect with a gentle heart, a handsome weathered face and wild hair the color and texture of hay. Together they turned their property into rolling gardens blending sculpture and nature. Because it had the best view of the gardens, when Brent got really sick, his lover moved the table out of their dining room replacing it with a hospital bed. Brent died looking out over the beauty he had created, holding the hand of the man he loved, listening to his favorite classical music. No one even tried topping that with a “memorial service.”

“Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?”

Rose Elizabeth Kennedy