She cocked a moist yellow drawing of an eyebrow. "Course, Bill was here. Nah, we didn't hear nothin'. Hey-where'd you think Bill was? He's my husband, iznee? Think he was out foolin' around with some woman who's younger and better-lookin'?"
"I thought maybe he'd worked late."
"I'll bet you did, ha-ha." She gave me a significant look. "The fact is, Bob," she said in a confidential tone, "my husband don't play around no more. And neither do I. At least… not a whole lot." She eyed me ap-praisingly, the pink tip of her tongue protruding from between lightly clamped teeth. Her leg shifted, and the National Enquirer slid to the floor. She said, "Every wunst in a while, Bob, I do meet a man who finds me quite sexy for an older woman. Somethin' like that Joan Collins on Dynasty. And if that man is someone I myself consider to be attractive.
.. we-l-l-l-l…"
I said, "I'm gay."
"Huh?"
"I'm a homophile."
"What kinda file?
"I go for men. Like Dot Fisher goes for women. I'm a homosexual. 'Gay,' we call it. Even if The New York Times won't. Kay, I'm a fruit."
After a confused couple of seconds, it hit her, and she threw her head back and whooped with laughter. "Oh, shoot, ha! ha! Oh, that's a good one kid, ha! ha! Oh, fer- that's the first time any man ever dropped that one on me!"
She laughed and coughed uproariously for a good minute, then gradually settled down and gave me a sweet, understanding look.
"You don't have to say a thing like that about yourself, Bob. Truly. Shoot, I know I'm not as attractive as I used to be." She tried to smile again.
"None of us is," I said, knowing that some people did age beautifully-Timmy would, I could tell already-and that others, like Kay Wilson, peaked in physical allure at the age of thirty, or twenty, or fourteen.
We spent a not entirely relaxed couple of minutes exchanging cliches on aging, and then I took out from my wallet a photo of Timmy and me, arms entwined, at the 1978 gay-pride parade in New York City. She studied it with lips pursed and kept looking up at me to see if I was really the man in the picture. Finally, satisfied that I was, she relaxed suddenly, grinned, and said, "Ho-boy. You're somethin', Bob. Hyo-boy. Wait'll the girls out at the home hear about this one."
Kay brought us both some potato chips, and then I asked her if she had other family members or friends who might be mad enough at Dot Fisher to harass or threaten her Kay used the opportunity to describe her six grown children, none of whom seemed to be likely suspects.
Two of the Wilson offspring were in Southern California, two lived in Queens, one was a career Army man in Germany, and the youngest, Crystal-Marie, was in a downstate mental hospital.
None had visited Albany recently. As for friends, yes, all of them were sympathetic and put out, Kay said, but she could think of none who'd shown any sign of providing the Wilsons with an un-requested assist in ridding the neighborhood of Dot and Edith.
I thanked her and said I'd return the next day to speak with her husband.
"Sure thing, Bob. Just give us a call first and make sure we're on the premises and ain't stepped out. And you tell Mrs. Fisher I'm real sorry to hear about her trouble. Maybe I'll just traipse down there tomorrow and stick my nose in. And you be sure to say hi to Crane for me, you hear? That Crane, he's quite a guy, quite a guy. And you know, Bob, you're quite a guy, too. Lordy."
I had a quick triple burger at Wendy's. While I ate, I thought a lot about two people: Joey Deem and Bill Wilson.
I headed back down Central through the fuming Friday evening traffic, pulled into Freezer Fresh, and ordered a chocolate cone with sprinkles.
"Joey Deem here tonight? I'd like to talk to him for just a minute."
"Joey? No, he called in sick," I was told by a young black man in a Freezer Fresh paper hat.
"He won't be in at all tonight then?"
"Not if he's sick," the kid said blandly, dipping my cone in a bowl of multicolored specks of dubious digestibility. "Health department wouldn't like it."
From a pay phone I called Dot's place to find out if Lew Morton had arrived. He had, Dot said, 25 as well as a patrolman whom Ned Bowman had left at the house to look after things until Peter Greco got back at midnight. There had been no further threatening letters or phone calls.
I drove on into the city, the sun melting into a gaseous black blanket spread across the sky behind me. As I drove, I thought maybe this whole business was going to be a lot simpler than I had feared it would be. Or maybe, since Crane Trefusis had a hand in it, it wouldn't. On the one hand this, on the other hand that.
5
Word had spread among Albany gays about the incident at Dot Fisher's, and nearly fifty of them who'd seen the six o'clock news showed up at the Gay Community Center to be harangued by Fenton McWhirter. Two hours later, twelve had actually signed up for the gay national strike. Twelve thousand were needed to make an impact locally, but McWhirter took what he could get. Donations for the strike campaign added up to $37.63.
I phoned Dot's house from the center and was told by her that yet another threatening call had been received. "Death to the dykes on Moon Road!" was what the caller had said, then hung up.
Dot and Edith were in the kitchen with Dot's friend Lew Morton seated by the back door and an APD patrolman just outside. Dot sounded shaky but controlled and said she'd be just fine until Peter arrived at midnight to look after things.
At the center, I also picked up a phone message from Timmy. His car had broken down and he'd meet me later, up the avenue, the message said. I thought, For sure.
I looked for Peter Greco, and at ten o'clock I joined him and McWhirter and six other leafleting volunteers as we piled into my car and McWhirter's and headed toward Central Avenue to further signal the revolt.
The sultry streets were alive with sweating crowds, and the bars even hotter and more chaotic, but revolt did not seem imminent. There was a blurry, enervated feeling to the night. I couldn't tell whether this resulted from the suffocating heat or from the simple fact that these were now the eighties, a decade in which, so far, most people, straight and gay, couldn't quite settle on what to do next and so didn't do much of anything at all. It was the fifties all over again, except with Reagan this time, and the New Right, the AIDS epidemic, and the Bomb multiplied ten thousandfold. It was the age of nervously milling around.
The music in the discos that night was no help: cold, sarcastic punk stuff that kept only the dance junkies sporadically on the floor. I'd heard the old funky, sensuous, friendly dance music of the seventies was still alive and well in Manhattan-preserved in West Village private clubs, like family genealogies in a Mormon vault-but on this night Albany didn't even seem to have the energy for nostalgia. The music did seem louder than usual, as if more were better, but the higher volume didn't help either. At Coco-nuts, the ersatz South Seas disco where the Lacoste crowd hung out, even the tropical fish in the aquarium seemed to be clapping little fish hands over their ears.
Nor did Fenton McWhirter's presence anywhere cause enthusiasm to break out. Most people received the flyers and leaflets cordially, then studied them, and you could see their eyebrows shoot up at the point where they got the drift of what the leaflets were asking them to commit themselves to. One person asked McWhirter if he'd lost his marbles, but the rest only thought it.
There was only "incident." At the Watering Hole, McWhirter screwed up the pool shot of a golden-maned, mean-eyed, drugged-up "cowboy"-who could well have been a real one, in town after the drive from Abilene to Schenectady, as he smelled powerfully of the stockyards.
Or, it could have been a new scent, Shitkicker, from the makers of Brut. The cowboy grabbed 26