Read Online Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle by Ethan Mordden - Free Book Online

apartments, cutting our capers.
    Dennis Savage complained about it: “No one ever wants to go anywhere. Are we waiting for Godot or something? I remember a time when we were heading somewhere
every night
—parties and dancing and crazing around in the Village.” He became keen. “I remember it
vastly.”
    “How about I treat us all to
Grand Hotel?”
    “This already is
Grand Hotel
! Everyone’s all checked in, and no one’s checking out! Every night the kids are
in the house
, rehearsing the Yokohama Harakiri Dozo Band, or whatever it is. And you are
in the house
, playing records. Carlo—who, as I recall, has his own place—is
in the house
, mooching dinner.”
    “You’re in the house, too,” I said.
    “I can’t go out by myself. I’ve forgotten where everything is.”
    “Have you some more pages for me? Of your stories?”
    He did. But no sooner had they landed on my desk than I spotted familiar names in his text, places I intimately knew, things I’d said. Three sentences in, I realized that he had viciously purloined a recherché episode in my past and proposed to bandy it in his fiction. I thought it best to deter him.
    But deftly, deftly. “You know,” I said, “I think the plot slips up a bit here, with the intrusion of these subsidiary—”
    “Down, Rover,” he said. “You’re not finessing me out of my rightful rebuttal.”
    At least I was able to devastate his confidence in the semicolon, pour boiling oil upon his tender ablatives. He was groaning soon.
    “Please,” he begged. “Please.”
    “The price of education,” I observed, “is to see ourselves as we are seen,” as my pencil marked away. I even found a spelling error.
    “What’s the latest on Bert and Scott?” he asked, to throw me off my game.
    “Why don’t you write them into your story?” I replied, chiding a tautology and relishing a failure to follow through with the subject-verb agreement on
neither-nor
constructions.
    “I’ll leave them to you,” he said. “You always love the direst tales. I know how you’ll end it, too—Bert finally hypnotizes the love of his life and finds it a shallow thing after all in this world of vanities. Right?”
    “Too pat. It needs a twist.”
    “Speaking of twists, how are you and Cosgrove doing?”
    I had to think about that one, and put down the pencil. “Well, he knows that Virgil is the side of the bread with the butter on it. But he has to eat the other side, too, doesn’t he?”
    Then Carlo came in with the latest on Bert and Scott. Carlo always knows these things; he keeps up with what’s left of the Life. Like: Bert wore a mesh jock to the Black and Red Party.
Nothing
but a mesh jock. (Dennis Savage said, “Are they still holding Black and Red Parties?”) Or like: Bert and Scott had their hands in each other’s pants during the last twenty minutes of
Labyrinth of Passion
. Rick Conradi was one row behind them and saw the whole thing. (Dennis Savage said, “Why can’t
we
go out to the movies instead of having them in?”) And even: Bert and Scott are starting to look alike. Scott just bought a motorcycle jacket and cut his hair down to but
nothing
. (Dennis Savage said, “Maybe I should get a new haircut,” to which I replied, “What hair?,” only trying to be symmetrical in this screwball comedy sort of way; but you know how huffy he gets.)
    Anyway, the latest was that Bert had moved in with Scott, and Carlo thought there was something wrong with that but he couldn’t figure out what. Dennis Savage said, “No, it’s true love after all theseyears.” And they were looking at me because they knew I didn’t buy the story as it stood.
    “It needs a twist,” I insisted.
    Then the door opened and in poured the rest of us: Virgil and Cosgrove, grinning with their banjos and the Saddam Hussein of dogs, Bauhaus.
    Dennis Savage said, “Just what I need, the Von Suppé Glockenspiel Terrorists.”
    “Here comes movie night!” Cosgrove gloated.
    “What’s