|
Dancing on the Barricades
a novel by
John Coriolan
GLB PUBLISHERS ® San Francisco
FIRST EDITION
Copyright © 2004
John Coriolan
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or
electronic process, or in the form of an electronic recording, nor may it
be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, translated into another language,
or otherwise copied for public or private use, excepting brief passages quoted
for purposes of review, without the written permission of the publisher.
Published in the United States by
GLB Publishers P.O. Box 78212, San Francisco, CA 94107
www.GLBpubs.com
Cover Design (art figures) by the author and GLB Publishers
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either
the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental
Library of Congress Cataloguing Control Number
2003115489
ISBN 1-879194-48-1
Published April, 2004
|
|
1. RAY VINCENT
The tall beauty in the elegantly cut suit who got on with the mob at Grand
Central is working his way toward me. He spotted me sitting here and will
come stand right in front of me—not to really cruise me but just to
be admired. Of what use is it to go to all the trouble of looking so special
if no one…especially another quean…is not going to notice and be
impressed? Not that others aren't looking too, dear. Overtly. Yes, you are
indeed a Figure to Be Noticed and Envied. Yep, yippee, he has managed very
nicely and here he is, my knees very lightly touching his legs just below
his knees…a little casual human contact never hurt anybody and if this
IRT train was a gay bar…. Now I glance up casually—as if I hadn't
been aware of his slithering-through-the-peasants approach—and look
him up and down, all wide-eyed and desirous, of course, being gay, as he
presumed I was the instant he spotted me. Ah, yes, we "out" queers do recognize
one another and I don't even try to look butch. Not in Eastside New York
I don't! Just slightly tatty,"out of it" but still vigorous and damned adept,
smug but "possible", "the bookish type with a nice lover cozily handy in
the background, I, the "active, prospecting" one….
Jesus, Joseph and Mary! The basket on this fashion-plate
Adonis! And he means me to see it! And to want it. Is he really, at nine-thirty
in the morning, cruising me? Hoping I will go somewhere with him? Or discreetly
try to make a date? No, of course not; he is teasing me, he's addicted to
teasing, he knows he's got a hugie and any quean…. But I, Buster, am
not your run-of-the-gay-mill quean! And I don't care if it's as big as Eric
Anderson's or the legendary Ray Long's, which was the Biggest One on Broadway
for Twenty Years, or Tom Wyeth's or Bill Harrison's or Porfiro Rubirosa's
…. But if it is, I would indeed, just once for the record….
Does he dream I'd be so fascinated by it hanging there,
getting bigger by the minute in those expensive pants, that I couldn't resist
lowering his zipper, hauling it out and going down on it, right here at
nine-thirty AM with everyone in this mob staring aghast? This may be New
York but we have laws…well, ordinances—"blue" ordinances…damnit.
You might display it proudly on stage but here, even in the Twenty-first
Century, man…. Aw, he's getting off at Fourteenth! What can a man hung
like that do at Union Square? Dressed like that? He was just a smart-ass
teaser, another silly quean. A king-among-men, maybe a queen, too, but definitely
a quean.
I'm glad he got off this train and off my case, I mean,
dolled-up…handsome…hung as he undeniably was. Ray Vincent, man,
get ahold of yourself!
I despise queans. I despise the way the good old common
English slang-word "quean", which occurs even in Shakespeare and denotes
"any person, male or female, of light morals, such as a petty thief or a
prostitute or one of queeny Richard the Second's giddy hangers-on", has somehow
been perverted into, conflated with, by some ignoramus, the royal "queen";
so every little Puerto Rican street-quean really believes he is an "infanta"!
I was never a "king" among show-dancers, having neither the technique nor
the requisite basket…although what I had was much admired and
besought…. And I was never a "quean", although one whole season I couldn't
even get into a road company of the "Phantom of the Opera" and was so poor
I considered hustling, peddling my "nice big dick"—-but never my "cute"
ass, for I detested anal sex and so do all my friends and why the public-at-large
supposes all queers fuck each other in the ass is a mystery to me! On the
other hand, I never knew a gay guy who wasn't turned on by a big dick and
most of us, myself included, practically come in our pants at just the mention
of a really big one, much less by a glimpse. So why are the big movies so
mincy-pincy and pretend that no male, not even the most sultry, alluring,
sexy star, has anything "down there"?
Come to think of it: neither have I ever known a guy
who had a really big one who didn't enjoy showing it off. Gay or straight!
The hung dudes in the gym showers are downright immodest, real exhibitionists.
At least they play with their Special Toys twice as much as less lucky men
do. And some obviously like better to play with their own than with another
fellow's or to having someone else play with theirs. That porno star, Johnny
Harden. Rick Donovan I'd bet. Bill Harrison? They say Uncle Milty would let
anybody who wanted to, to take his out and squeeze it. I found out once that
all you had to do was look intently interested in Scott O'Hara's fine lob
and it immediately began to get bigger. How old was I when that naked Black
musician offered me and everyone else in the midnight Meat Rack something
too big for any of us to deal with? And why am I sitting here maundering
over such irrelevancies when I meant to get on with finishing this very important
book about how few living creatures ever procreate, despite the Received
Wisdom that Life Is Being Born, Becoming Mature, Replicating and Dying?
"A big dick is as rare as a four-leaf clover!" What a
thought! I have to put down my book and sit grinning like an idiot in this
clattering, hurtling subway car. It's as rare and just as much a part of
nature…and just about as important in the total scheme of things, in
the Actuality of It All. So why do I ever…why do I all too often…?
And why do I, even in just accidentally happening to think about big dicks,
tend to shy away from naming them as such? I must be as stupidly brainwashed
about sex as everyone else is! And after being somewhat cruised by that elegant
quean, who did swing a whopper, what made me suddenly think of that old
four-leaf-clover thing, true as it may be? Was it possibly my glimpsing little
Timmie Todd on the subway platform as we both ran for this Downtown Local?
I quickly decided not to greet Timmie. I wanted to get
on with my reading, for this new library-book on genetics and morality is
marvelous, even if sometimes the author seems constricted in his imagination
and overlooks some perfectly obvious possibilities, such as the Selfish Morality!
It justified the grabbing and hoarding that the Old Reptilian Brain set in
motion to keep all "animal" life—and all other simple-organism life,
plant, bacterial, fungal or ocean reef—going. Of course in earlier eons,
all forms of life operated selfishly: they had to be totally selfish to stay
alive. Many still have to operate separately and selfishly, Savagely, but
a few have discovered that, to keep themselves and their group going, they
have to cooperate in a symbiotic fashion and limit their conflicting selfish
urges. Only the human line has learned to plan deliberately for future symbiotic
adjustments in a way we call "civilized"—"for the good of all citizens",
a way ever-directed by a relatively new system of values, the Civilized Morality.
The interaction of brains that were bigger and more complex that the "reptile
brain", more retentive, more imaginative than the little selfish
savage-animal-"reptile" brain, evoked the life-assuring and life-enhancing
"moral laws" we now revere. In the shift, the selfish grabbing-and-hoarding
for Self-and-one's-own has become morally Bad.
It's kind of weird that I, apparently the only person
who finds so many of our current laws absurd, do revere the Civilized moral
law—maybe because I see that many of those government-imposed civil
laws are not at all life-assuring or life-enhancing, are not Civilized!
When groups became complex, better memory and a more
detailed, flexible language were needed—to tell about what was remembered,
to deal with current human inter-actions, and to express exactly what changes
might benefit the group. How can any alert, educated human being look around
and not see that, even today, whole masses of human beings are, at one minute
and then another in their lives,or even almost simultaneously, operating
according to two distinctly different and antithetical moralities! How blind
can supposedly bright people go on being? I'm no one-man think-tank nor a
teacher nor a prophet; I'm not "inspired by some ineffable deity". I'm just
an Ordinary Joe, a second-rate dancer than which there is, in popular opinion,
nothing more likely to be dumb and silly, but I do see and I do deplore.
And a lot of good it does me or anyone else.
Timmie Todd, our dear dull, sweet Little Timmie Toddles,
is "civilized" and a fine stage-manager but he is so predictable, so limited
in his imagination, so unadventurous. Gay, of course, but… All during
our affair, which must have lasted about two weeks, until Timmie signed to
take some dull little comedy on the road, Timmie was quietly mourning the
death of his adored Eric. I was just a kind friend who was trying to help
poor Timmie over a bad patch…by gently fucking him every night, as if
I was passionately attracted to him, although I knew I was not. Until Tim
admitted Eric had never fucked him. Was I ever surprised! And Eric hadn't
wanted his cock sucked, either—which Tim doubted he could have done
anyway, 'cause Eric was so big. As I couldn't, the one time I got into the
hay with Eric that summer. Eric Anderson was no relation of the legendary
Cam Anderson of the famous old photo-sets, but he was hung almost as huge.
That summer at Fire Island everybody had had to have at least one good session
with Eric's huge dick, sucking it or trying to or jacking it off or being
fucked by it and Eric, who was essentially only a shy farm boy in "sophisticated"
society, retreated into the arms of Timmie Toddles, much to everyone's amazement.
And they had only kissed and cuddled and played with each other a little!
But were really happy.
In the winter I deliberately befriended poor Timmie and
tried to distract and console him after Eric died of AIDS. A lot of guys
had fucked cute little Timmie, so I assumed that was what he wanted; I guess
he just put up with it, believing he had to, because he was gay and had such
a little peepee. Assumptions! I was as numb as any irresponsible quean-moron.
Was I ever flabbergasted when Timmie finally confessed about his affair with
Eric. Timmie was always very grateful, very polite, about my "nice big one",
but it had always been Eric Timmie had been thinking of, I bet. I finally
had to accept that Timmie was no size-quean; he had adored Eric, maybe mostly
because Eric had spurned all the persistent others and been so loving with
nothing-special Timmie Toddles. Timmie, though, was even back then a really
efficient stage-manager, so it's no surprise that he is one of the first
people that Theo hired for her touring company. I guess I'm glad she did.
I do like Tiny Timmie.
And it's equally logical that Theo wanted to sign me
up too, as one of her supporting dancers. I'm still a good versatile
dancer—at too damned near forty! But I don't look it! Anyway, she's
right at thirty herself and wouldn't want a partner who looked too young.
But one who is sexy, has fine legs, good arms, chest, all that besides a
basket that's more than "nicely plump"—an asset I thank Dame Fortuna
I have always possessed and never been shy about exposing, decently of course,
to public inspection. No amazing Rudi Nureyev nor legendary Freddy Franklyn,
I, but, according to The Gay Authority, Theodora Akrona's own daddy, that
Big Quean Eddie Akrona who grandly "collected" me nearly twenty years ago,
I did always show more onstage than Bob Fosse did or even Ray Long did, Ray
Long who was known as the Biggest One on Broadway .all through the 'Thirties
and 'Forties.
Eddie claimed that he had had Ray Long at the famous
old Mine Shaft make-out club in the 'Seventies, when he was a flaming quean
in his twenties and Ray was probably almost seventy, and that it was indeed
Really Huge! Anyway, Theo's doing a ballet-version of an early, lost, Tennessee
Williams play and that means there's a sexy-stud role, probably a lead role
with solos, and who is more obviously the dancer for the job in her little
company than I, Raymond Vincent? After all, Vera Klementi picked me to partner
her in her last tour and Klementi was a more notorious sex-pot type than
dear Theo can ever hope to be. I thanked Fortuna regularly that dear Vera
was so busy offstage, vamping the critics and screwing local Lotharios, that
I never had to do the real stud-duty everybody took for granted I was
doing.
The grand Klementi tour was a fiasco; we folded in Denver
and never got to the Coast. I pray that Theodora Akrona's name and Eddie
Akrona's management will keep us alive and sailing along safely for the four
months I signed for, despite what looks to me like a pretty routine, maybe
just plain old-fashioned, bill of stuff we're offering a public used to
TV-spectaculars and classic ballet-performances on video-for-rent. Including
the best of Ailey and the Bolshoi and practically all of Martha Graham. Special
afternoon bills for college kids and Theodora Akrona's publicized public
appearances at Q-and-A's afterward certainly won't bring in big bucks. It
seems to me that we ought to do the new Tennessee Williams ballet at the
big evening performances, instead of the big new piece that Philip Osgood's
going to make for Theo—which will probably be just warmed-over Martha
Graham. Phil's kinda hot right now but he's no genius and the one time we
made out, he seemed only Nice Guy Ordinary and his dancing was nothing to
remember either. The piece he made for that French company got rave
reviews—from the French critics. But what do they know? They raved about
"sexy" Jacques Dulac. French sex: cute. Ugh.
The tried-and-true, strictly-ballet piece for both programs'
opener, the sort-of-original jazz and rock pieces Phil will dream up for
the whole company—the rock for the afternoon kids, the jazz for the
evening oldsters, the Tennessee Williams which will probably be more mime
and acting than dancing, the solo or duo show-off piece for Theodora Akrona,
our star known nation-wide, as the big evening climax. So where's the magic?
Where is our Eye-rocking New Stuff that isn't just mechanics and tricks and
verbal-concepts diluted into movements-by-human-bodies? So I want genius,
joy, the whole soul-satisfying, western-civilization -celebrating ritual,
but what will I get, what will we offer the art-hunwht elite? Or just the
chic-hunwht paying customers? With luck and a lot of generous funding, we
may survive through the whole crazy tour she plans. And what am I risking
by going? A few months off from the restaurant and luckily for me, unluckily
for its owner, TV's-famous Tony Jerrico the Puccini-warbling chef and my
boss, Tony's show is off the air and he's free to run Jerrico's Cucina while
I'm off in the wild blue yonder, grandly invading certain college towns of
the no-longer-so-wild West. Hopefully, we'll entrance them with our exotic
expertise and joie de dance. In the flesh. At least we'll be the Real Thing,
not some mechanically achieved Virtual Reality for TV.
Curiously, it seems that Theo's real reason for dreaming
up this slightly half-assed tour is more political-activism than ego-enhancement.
In fact, to be blunt, when she and her ubiquitous Mrs. Spencer came up to
Jerrico's Cucina and had dinner and very openly cornered me and laid out
the whole nationwide tour-bit, plainly eager to have me be one of her Chosen
Five Dancers, Theo seemed more interested in my current intellectual adventures
than in my two-year semi-retirement from show-biz. Of course by then Mrs.
Spencer had already mentioned that they knew I was still taking class twice
a week. Suzann had told them that and Philip had said he'd seen me fairly
often at the Westside Y and I hadn't gone slobby or anything, the way most
dancers do when they give up and go do something else, the Unemployment having
run out and the whole dance business having become, like overnight, a whole
new ball game. I suppose I was honored that they had bothered to check up
on me and maybe I kinda laid on the physical fitness bit a little
ostentatiously…I even bragged a little about how I was turning very
interesting tricks even more often that I did at thirty and they got a kick
out of that. But about my reading and speculating about genetics and morality
and gay rights, I was not exaggerating at all and Theo really picked up on
that. She sounded pretty wise about Stephen Jay Gould and had at least heard
of Dawkins and Rorty and knew the premises of behavioral psychology and genomes
and phenotypes and fetal development-protocols. I think Theo was really impressed
by my personal theory that none of the ten thousand genes which direct human
development ever completely disappear out of a viable genetic-line. And that
the more often any set of genes is summoned into use, without any resistance
at all from the other parent's genome in biological sex-mating—which
is the only genuine "sex" there is, all other so-called "sexual carrying
on" being only so much erotic play, necessary and fun but never at all important
nor, obviously, even implicated in the survival of any genetic-line—which
makes all "gay" single-gender sex totally innocuous. I wish the Stupid Powers
That Be, including the Danc-spiritual anti-sensual Churches, would admit
that, only they probably never will, their excuse for being being based on
Spirituality…which is, au fond, mon chere, ignorant superstition!
Mmm: sexual mating…yeah, well—if one parent's
split-off helix of genes mates up with the other parent's split-off helix
of genes and the two helixes are approximately alike, they being both of
one gene-pool or race so there is no resistance, no battle whatsoever for
Mendelian dominance, the offspring-fetus will of course have a very expectable
set of physical characteristics. But—- if the gene-sets are quite different,
the weaker set will be the set which has never had to fight for dominance.
It will be what scientists call "recessive". Although it will lose that battle,
it will not just disappear, for nothing in science ever just disappears;
it may change its shape and become too tiny to seem potent but it is there,
will always be there, and in the whirligig of Chance it may emerge and effect
an unexpected difference. In mix-mating pure Black-African "blood" with White
or whtlow or Red or Brown which is not pure and has had to contend for dominance
and is therefore strong, exercised, "muscular", the Black will be "recessive"
but it will not just fade away; it will remain around in the gene-line and
may suddenly emerge. Thus a "passing", seemingly quite "White" family may
suddenly, shockingly, produce a Black baby; in the whirligig, that presumably
recessive gene for dark-skin-color has got back into the act and has proved
more potent than its counter-gene! My pure-Shawnee great-grandmother, who
had the usual Indian-black-eyes, married inter-racially, a blue-eyed
Irish-French-Russian man; her children all had gray eyes. My grandmother
was half-Indian but she did have gray eyes.
Theo listened to my rather long-winded theory and latched
avidly onto my Indian-ancestry bit, for her whole project is meant to show
that artificial and usually obsolete boundaries should be done away with,
not just geographical boundaries but ossified customs, "decencies",
laws-on-the-books. Although some are being generally ignored, they can be
used legally to prosecute—persecute!—anyone the Officials disapprove
of, such as a naked male in public or in a dance-piece or dialogue satirizing
a religious practice or a speech advocating abortion or suicide. States have
widely differing laws, some in open conflict with others'. State boundaries
used to be based on natural divisions which are no longer important or even
discernible now.
Theodora has booked her dance-group to perform in Canada
and Mexico as well as in many different states, but Eddie has found that
what is art in one place is "pornography" in another and children couldn't
be admitted. Fifty years after the Sexual Revolution, ridiculous
tabu-restrictions about public exposure of certain sacred-obscene body parts
are still on the books. She thinks that she and her troupe should be free
to perform absolutely naked anywhere they please.
Philip had two nude girls and three nude boys in his
Paris ballet. It toured Europe with no trouble from any body— except
from the featured dancers! Of course Theodora wouldn't strip: she admitted
she's rather prim that way, possibly, as Mrs. Spencer suggested, in expectable
offspring-reaction to her dad's casual unconcern for conventional manners.
We laughed but I promised that I would freely participate in any such defiance
of No More Ridiculous Boundaries! Of course I promised; after all, I've been
flaunting my amazingly youthful physique regularly at certain beaches and
sunbathing venues and in locker-rooms and at the baths all my adult life.
A few times I even considered doing male burlesque stripping.
I always envied people like Theo's dad, Eddie, who were
young and liberated back in the wonderful, revolutionary, "over the barricades"
'Sixties when whole companies appeared naked in musicals like "Hair" and
in straight Broadway plays like "The Changing Room". Somehow, nudity has
again become the province of the kinky or dirty-minded, Theo agreed. We were
so excited about our rights to do as we wanted to with our own bodies that
I even felt an urge to strip bare-balls naked right there in our decorous
Jerrico's Cucina, but of course I didn't. If I had, I might now not have
a job there to come back to. So doth Looming Poverty make cowards of us all,
alas.
Theo had said that Philip Osgood was planning to have
the Poet in the Williams ballet of "Spring Storm" strip and dance naked in
the first scene of it and that he was going to dance that role himself. The
afternoon young audiences would love it! I didn't dare then to ask Theo what
the other male roles were like but I hoped that the Obligatory Stud—after
all, it was an Early-Williams script, would also have occasion to strip and
flaunt.
Phil Osgood comes to the Y but he doesn't have the body
I have. Or the Nice Big One.
The day I signed my contract, Eddie reported that the
composer who was doing the"Spring Storm" score, an old college-teacher of
his, was a little behind schedule and rehearsals would concentrate on the
other group-pieces. Eddie himself was arranging the music for those but he
was going to put together the rock score only after he'd got some idea of
what each of us was best at doing. I could hardly object but it didn't sound
very professional, working out important things in rehearsal. I could only
look amenable and pray it would work out OK. Back when I first knew Eddie
Akrona, he was trying to be a concert pianist, specializing in Debussy. Debussy
is a long jump from jazz or rock.
I had carried on with Eddie months before I found out
he had ever been married, much less had a daughter. When I went to live with
Eddie, there was this ten-year-old Theo! She attended a private school so
I didn't see much of her and we got along. And as a dancer, Theodora Akrona
turned up several years later, in the chorus of a musical that was then known
as "Harpers Ferry" and was later simply referred to as "The Worst Show I
Ever Got Involved In" by quite a number of its victims. We stayed out of
town for weeks and never made Broadway at all. Endless revisions didn't help
audience-reaction but they did keep us all busy trying out new and sillier
routines. Theodora was eighteen or nineteen and already taller than I was.
but no matter what awful stuff they gave her to do, she was wonderful, a
natural dancer who obviously loved every minute she was on. She hypnotized
the customers and the management featured her our last week. I was so
enthusiastic about her dancing that the other chorus kids accused me of being
in love with her and I almost convinced myself that I was. I didn't tell
her but my boyfriend and I became very chummy with her and we taught her
how to bring out the red-gold in her hair and keep it cut off sharply just
before it brushed her shoulders—the Look which became her special iconic
one as she emerged as Really Special and, two years ago, as a Broadway Musical
Star. Before that she had been nominated for Best legit actress in an Off
Broadway revival of the ancient Greek tragedy "Alkestis" and she and Eddie,
who was pretty well-known too in New York, were publicized as being pure
Greek, although Eddie, in a drunken moment during our semi-liaison, had confessed
to me that his mother was pure Bulgarian.
Ah, well, so my middle name was Vincent and my last name
in Boise, Idaho, was Flaherty. If Theo ever learned that, she would insist
on my being Ray Flaherty again, the way Suzann Miller is Suzann Schwartz
again, to show how free our company is of even that tired old Conventional
Boundary of Nice Anglo Names for Persons Desiring Public Adulation. And Lola
Shelby is Lola Quinones again, I hear. Our Philip Osgood, a Princeton graduate,
probably really is one of "those Osgoods". And if he thinks I've got up at
the crack of dawn to hustle my bod down to the depths of the Lower East Side
just so he can watch me boogie around like some demented teenager from Great
Neck, while he steals my best moves for "his" choreography…. At nine-thirty
AM.! Why did I agree to participate in this madness, I who am the respected
manager of a very good little Upper Westside restaurant where smart locals
dine every night and deliberately lie to their chums about it so they won't
flock in and wreck its calm ambience. I am a star in my own orbit; why am
I wandering off into Outer Space—like some maniac in search of El Dorado
if not of Paradise? More like some addict who simply cannot resist dancing
if someone says "Aw, come on, let's show 'em how it's done!"
At twelve I was the fastest tap-dancer in Boy-Z Idaho.
I wonder if, in the jazz piece maybe, my dear chum-ex-loverboy Phil can find
a thirty-second spot for the Oldest ex-Kid Fastest Tap dancer to do his
show-stopping specialty? And how come it's already my station we're pulling
into? I've been day-dreaming instead of doing my reading.
To purchase for download:
for each format, $8.00
$ 1.00 for cover
in
(PDF)(Text)(RTF)(HTML)(MSWord)(WordPerf)(MS
LIT)(PRC) |
|
|
|
