The bartender was saying, "She asks me why I drink. What can I tell her? I don't know why. Why did you have the monkey on your back? Do you know why? There isn't any why, but try to explain that to someone like Jerri. Try to explain that to any woman." Lee nodded sympathetically. "She says to me, why don't you get more sleep and eat better? She don't understand and I can't explain it. Nobody can explain it."
The bartender moved away to wait on some customers. Dumé came over to Lee. "How do you like this character?" he said, indicating Allerton with a wave of his beer bottle. Allerton was across the room talking to Mary and a chess player from Peru. "He comes to me and says, 'I thought you were one of the Green Lantern boys.' So I said, "Well, I am.' He wants me to take him around to some of the gay places here."
Lee and Allerton went to see Cocteau's Orpheus. In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other's body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes.
When they left the theater, Lee felt exhausted. He fumbled and bumped into things. His voice was toneless with strain. He put his hand up to his head from time to time, an awkward, involuntary gesture of pain. "I need a drink," he said. He pointed to a bar across the street. "There," he said.
He sat down in a booth and ordered a double tequila. Allerton ordered rum and Coke. Lee drank the tequila straight down, listening down into himself for the effect. He ordered another.
"What did you think of the picture?" Lee asked.
"Enjoyed parts of it."
"Yes." Lee nodded, pursing his lips and looking down into his empty glass. "So did I." He pronounced the words very carefully, like an elocution teacher.
"He always gets some innaresting effects." Lee laughed. Euphoria was spreading from his stomach. He drank half the second tequila. "The innaresting thing about Cocteau is his ability to bring the myth alive in modern terms."
"Ain't it the truth?" said Allerton.
They went to a Russian restaurant for dinner. Lee looked through the menu. "By the way," he said, "the law was in putting the bite on the Ship Ahoy again. Vice squad. Two hundred pesos. I can see them in the station house after a hard day shaking down citizens of the Federal District.
One cop says, 'Ah, Gonzalez, you should see what I got today. Oh la la, such a bite!"
"'Aah, you shook down a puto queer for two pesetas in a bus station crapper. We know you, Hernandez, and your cheap tricks. You're the cheapest cop inna Federal District.'"
Lee waved to the waiter. "Hey, Jack. Dos martinis, much dry. Seco. And dos plates Sheeshka Babe. Sabe?n
The waiter nodded. "That's two dry martinis and two orders of shish kebab. Right, gentlemen?"
"Solid, Pops. . . . So how was your evening with Dumé?"
"We went to several bars full of queers. One place a character asked me to dance and propositioned me."
"Take him up?"
"No."
"Dumé is a nice fellow."
Allerton smiled. "Yes, but he is not a person I would confide too much in. That is, anything I wanted to keep private."
"You refer to a specific indiscretion?"
"Frankly, yes."
"I see." Lee thought, "Dumé never misses."
The waiter put two martinis on the table. Lee held his martini up to the candle, looking at it with distaste. "The inevitable watery martini with a decomposing olive," he said.
Lee bought a lottery ticket from a boy of ten or so, who had rushed in when the waiter went to the kitchen. The boy was working the last-ticket routine. Lee paid him expansively, like a drunk American.
"Go buy yourself some marijuana, son," he said. The boy smiled and turned to leave. "Come back in five years and make an easy ten pesos," Lee called after him.
Allerton smiled. "Thank god," Lee thought. "I won't have to contend with middle-class morality."
"Here you are, sir," said the waiter, placing the shish kebab on the table.
Lee ordered two glasses of red wine. "So Dumé told you about my, uh, proclivities?" he said abruptly.
"Yes," said Allerton, his mouth full.
"A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands—the lymph glands that is, of course— when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze, like a man with a light concussion—just a minute, Doctor Kildare, this isn't your script. I might well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen—
Bobo, we called her—who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love.
Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink. . . .
"Poor Bobo came to a sticky end. He was riding in the Duc de Ventre's Hispano-Suiza when his falling piles blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted, leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe-skin upholstery. Even the eyes and the brain went, with a horrible shlupping sound. The Duc says he will carry that ghastly shlup with him to his mausoleum. . . .
"Then I knew the meaning of loneliness. But Bobo's words came back to me from the tomb, the sibilants cracking gently. 'No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.' The difficulty is to convince someone else he is really part of you, so what the hell? Us parts ought to work together. Reet?"
Lee paused, looking at Allerton speculatively. "Just where do I stand with the kid?" he wondered.
He had listened politely, smiling at intervals. "What I mean is, Allerton, we are all parts of a tremendous whole. No use fighting it." Lee was getting tired of the routine. He looked around restlessly for some place to put it down. "Don't these gay bars depress you? Of course, the queer bars here aren't to compare with Stateside queer joints."
"I wouldn't know," said Allerton. "I've never been in any queer joints except those Dumé took me to. I guess there's kicks and kicks."
"You haven't, really?"
"No, never."
Lee paid the bill and they walked out into the cool night. A crescent moon was clear and green in the sky. They walked aimlessly.
"Shall we go to my place for a drink? I have some Napoleon brandy."
"All right," said AUerton.
'This is a completely unpretentious little brandy, you understand, none of this tourist treacle with obvious effects of flavoring, appealing to the mass tongue. My brandy has no need of shoddy devices to shock and coerce the palate. Come along." Lee called a cab.