3

I DROVE OVER TO MY PLACE ON MORTON. I COULD SEE MY BREATH

in the air in the front room, went to the kitchenette, set the oven at 450, and opened the door. Ten days. Hurlbut the landlord would make steam October fifteenth, the day he left annually for Fort Lauderdale. Then I could grow orchids on the windowsill and fungus on my shoes until the old man reappeared to shut off his rain forest machine on March fifteenth, the first day of Hurlbut's summer.

I set the phone on the kitchen table, propped my feet on the oven door, and phoned three people I knew who'd been involved in the early days of the gay movement in Albany. Each expressed roughly the same opinion about Billy Blount: that he was a decent, likable young man, if slightly pushy and opinionated, who had dropped out of the movement several years earlier because he found the local organizations insufficiently radical in their outlook and tactics. Each man I talked to was skeptical of the official view that Blount had killed a man, but none had any idea where Blount had gone or even who his current friends were. I'd have to find out the hard way.

I flipped on the TV for the six o'clock news. Dick Block, action man for the anchor news team, was squinting into the

camera trying to puzzle out the names and places of the day's calamities. Fresh news on the Kleckner murder was not among them. I stripped to my briefs and did sit-ups while Snort Harrigan grappled disgustedly with the sports report.

I remembered the envelope the Blounts had given me for their son. I dug it out of my jacket lining and slid it into the jacket of Thelma Houston's "I'm Here Again."

I went into the bathroom, showered, and shaved. I spotted a single white hair in my mustache, probed around and got a grip on it, and yanked it out. I checked my armpits, chest, and groin. No change below the neck yet. That was when you'd know it was for real.

I went to the daybed, set the alarm for eight-thirty, pulled the old Hudson Bay blanket over me, and slept.

"Tell me about the Blounts," Timmy said. "I get the impression they aren't exactly Albert and Victoria."

We were heading down Delaware toward Lark in the Rabbit. Timmy was beside me in a Woolrich shirt over a dark blue turtleneck and faded jeans the color of his eyes. I had Disco 101 on the radio—Friday-night pump priming—and they were playing Stargard's "Wear It Out."

"They're more like the duke and duchess of Windsor," I said, "by way of Dartmouth, Sweetbriai, and the Fort Orange Club. I think they might have a few vital parts missing. They talk as if their kid might come out of all this with the Nobel Peace Prize."

"Kissinger got one."

"Yeah, but the Albany County DA's office wasn't consulted."

"I heard they were. It was part of a deal worked out with the mayor, the Swedish Academy, and a vending company in McKownville."

"Ahhh."

We swung onto Lark.

"Even so, they must be upset with all the publicity. People with old Albany names like Blount prefer their names on downtown street signs, not in the newspapers. The social pages are okay, and then eventually a seemly obituary. But the front

page is bad taste, pushy. It's for the Irish and the Jews."

"This is true. The missus especially is not pleased with the gay angle getting bruited about. She thinks that part of it's all a horrid misunderstanding, anyway. She says her boy has 'tendencies.'"

"A phase he's going through."

"The craziest thing is they seem to be looking at all this as some kind of opportunity—make the best of it, the missus said. They've got a weird relationship with their son. There's a lot of tension and bad feeling over the way he lives, yet he seems to keep coming back to them when he needs them or when he wants to embarrass them. They sound like they expect this recent messiness to lead to a big, wonderful final reconciliation. Or something."

"It'll be interesting to get Billy Blount's slant on the relationship."

"It will."

I turned up Central and found a parking place a few doors past the Terminal Bar. We went in.

On weekends the Terminal was misnamed. It was a relatively quiet neighborhood drink-and-talk pub where on weeknights people often dropped in for an hour or two. But on Friday and Saturday nights the bar was where a good number of gay men started out for the evening before ending up at the big shake-your-ass-bust-an-eardrum discos on up Central. Those who hung around the Terminal until four a.m. closing were mostly the "serious drinkers," many of them alcoholics, who sometimes, in moments of clarity, referred to the bar as the Terminal Illness.

We bought fifty-cent draughts and moved through the murk beyond the pool table and the bar to the back of the room, where we knew we'd find friends. One of the five tables was empty—it was just after nine, early yet. Another table was occupied by three theological activists in the gay Happy Days Church, gazing mournfully into their beer, pitched, as they always seemed to be, in medieval gloom. Happy days, glum nights, I guessed. Some fresh-faced SUNY students sat at another table in the company of an older admirer. Timmy and I spotted a couple of the Gay Community Center crowd and went

over to their table as the Rae's "A Little Lovin'" came on.

"Where've you guys been hiding yourselves? Haven't seen you since—last night." Phil Jerrold, a lanky blond with a crooked smile and what Timmy once described as "a winning squint," shoved his chair aside so we could squeeze in around the little table.

"Is it tonight?" Timmy said. "I thought it was still last night. When I'm in here, I get mixed up. What night is it, Calvin?"

Calvin Markham, a young black man with the aquiline features and high forehead of an Ethiopian aristocrat, said, "I really wouldn't know the answer to that. I know it's October, because my hay fever's gone. That's as close as I can get, though. Sorry. What time is it?"

I said, "Nine twenty-six. At nine twenty-seven will you become cheerful and optimistic, or have you just been told you have third-stage syphilis?"

Calvin and Phil looked at each other. They began to laugh. "Clap," Calvin said. "I've got clap. I don't have the test results yet, but I know—I know—that I've got clap."

"Oh," I said.

Timmy said, "Maybe it's something else. Can you get hay fever of the crotch?"

"Not after the first frost," Calvin said.

We laughed, but Calvin didn't. I'm getting another beer." He went to the bar.

"Where'd he pick it up?" Timmy said. "The tubs?"

Phil said, "It was the first time he'd been there in six months. Like Carter said, life is unfair."

"I thought Nixon said that."

"No, it was Carter. To the welfare mothers."

"Yeah, but Ford said it first, to the COs."

Timmy said, "No, I think it was Anne Baxter to Bette Davis, and when she said it, it made Thelma Ritter wince. Hey, can I say that? Are we still allowed to make Bette Davis jokes, or have they become politically incorrect?"

"It is politically acceptable," Phil said, "if you do it once a month, but not if you do it every ten minutes. That is no longer permissible. Thank God."

"Well, these are new times, aren't they? I think I feel an

identity crisis coming on. You know, that's how I found out I was a homosexual. When I was seventeen, I was walking through the park and an older man pulled up beside me, leaned out his car window, and whispered a Bette Davis joke in my ear. I loved it, and all of a sudden I knew."