Read Online Faggots by Larry Kramer, Reynolds Price - Free Book Online

thirty-five.”
    “Is he not now thirty-nine?”
    “It will now be easier for him.”
    “Do they get married like people? What shall I get them for their house? Abe, it’s such a sordid life. I must confess something to you.”
    “Confess.”
    “I must confess to you that I’ve read they go and do it in the bushes and on islands and, would you believe, inside of trucks.”
    “Where do you read this?”
    “In the illustrated guidebook Fred gave to you and which you hide from me in your bottom drawer.”
    “Ephra, please. Don’t burden your big heart.”
    “Why would anyone want to make love in a truck?”
    “Love is many things to many people. Love is very complicated. Love is a many-splendored thing.”
    “Stop with the movies. Abe, I can’t believe what you’re telling me.”
    “What am I telling you?”
    “Somebody even, I can’t bring myself to say the word, tinkles on his beloved? Then…then what?”
    “Then what what ?”
    “After they…tinkle?”
    “How should I know?”
    “Do they wash off?”
    “I’m some sort of expert in this matter?”
    “You’re his producer.”
    “Ephra, you are too much concerned with the cleanliness. I do not know the aftermath.”
    “Abe, please…this is not easy for me.”
    “So, who’s forcing you to talk?”
    “Fred wouldn’t do such things.”
    “Maybe. Maybe not. Ephra, don’t you, in your wildest imagination, have strange thoughts?”
    “Never!”
    “Of course you do.”
    “I swear, nimmer .”
    “I tell you, you do. Ephra, it’s healthy that you do. Even the Magazine Section of The New York Times says so. Think of the last time we made love. I know it was a long time ago, but try to remember what you were thinking…”
    “Roosevelt was President…”
    “…what you maybe wanted me to do to you or somebody else to do to you…”
    “Somebody else !”
    “It’s all right, Ephra. I’m told that women in particular have very strong sexual fantasies, maybe like a tall man on a white horse should come along and carry you away, after maybe the horse is seen doing exciting things to another horse.”
    “Who is telling you these things about horses!? Never, never in a thousand years would I want to see horses, any kind of horses! Abe, I don’t know anymore the man I once was married to. All your Misses Non-Kosher have made you into a tinkler! Abe, Jewish people do not tinkle on horses! Abe…Abe…where are you going?”
    “I have an appointment.”
    “Always the appointments! Do not forget that tomorrow you and Fred are taking me to the grand opening. I have read about it in Women’s Wear Daily by the Divine Bella. I want to see it with my own two eyes…”
    And he was gone.
    After his departure, feeling sorry for herself, then and now, for her abandonment, then and now, and trying to drown her sorrows in her favorite banana yogurt from Dannon’s, she finally wailed out to nobody in particular and the walls (hung with two Picassos and fifteen of that nice Jewish painter, Chagall, all of which she had received in the settlement, settling what, she wanted to know) in general: “Men! I am hating you all. And my mother, who was not a woman with a smile, had good reason to warn me from all of you. You think of no one, Abe, and you never have, not me or not even your own two sons and heirs, Richard and Stephen, to whom I have given so much love and sacrifice and pain and anguish and hope and tenderness and who, both of them, are not even calling to say thank you.”
     
     
     
    The thankless younger son and heir was now back in his Soho loft and deep into bodily communication. Boo Boo Bronstein was performing, along with most of our other leading faggots, that necessary ritual preparatory to every weekend’s outings known as the “pump-up,” as he did his daily two hundred push-ups and five hundred sit-ups and four sets of twenty-five each of his bench presses, tricep presses, chin-ups, seated curls, and shrugs on the extensive set of home