Everybody Loves You by Ethan Mordden

around your neck.”
    â€œCome up and make me,” said Little Kiwi, aiming and snapping his camera.
    â€œLittle’s getting tough,” said Tom.
    â€œI’ll make you but plenty when you come down! And stop taking those pictures!”
    â€œIn one minute,” said Little Kiwi, “this candid photograph will be developed, and then I’ll send it to the Curiosity Section of the New York Times. ”
    â€œThe world’s nuts,” said Dennis Savage, stomping off. “But come dinnertime, let no one complain to me because there’s nothing to eat.”
    â€œThere have to be ghosts,” Little Kiwi mused, “or there couldn’t be Ghost Patrol.”
    â€œWhat is Champ McQuest trying to say to you, Tom?” I asked.
    Tom was quiet for a bit. Then: “He was a very sad guy.”
    They’re out there whether you like it or not.
    â€”A crank on a local television news show, Philadelphia, 1977
    Wise old queens know everything, and it was to a wise old queen that I took The Problem late that afternoon. Not that I fancied asking him how one exorcises a ghost. But this man had been all over the scene for a good thirty years; he was old gay, older than clones and discos and politics. He was not a Circuit rider, but a considerable fortune put him at the very helm of the New York section of Stonewall while protecting his crony ties with the Big Boys at City Hall. He gave some of the greatest parties ever given, yet—and this is considered questionable—he was never to be glimpsed in the center of his dos, prancing and quipping, but far to the edge, talking to a friend or silent and watching. Some men know everyone; this man would have thought them parvenus. This man knew everyone he felt like knowing. There was a good chance that he had known Champ McQuest.
    He is not a showy man. He prances and quips in private, for his personal pleasure. His Pines house is far to the east, on the ocean along the most chic strip of the choice quartier: but this is no palazzo. He doesn’t even have a pool—he uses the Atlantic Ocean. He lives simply, easily, securely. When he throws a party he goes for it; when he lives he just lives.
    He was one of my first clients in my party-tape era, eventually my best one, because his tape commissions turned into a sly challenge match. Not realizing how varied, extensive, and bizarre my record collection is, he kept asking for more and yet more recondite compounds. “Intimate, Brahmsian, a lot ‘cello,” he’d say, or “Honky-tonk, Sophie Tucker and ragtime—make it all sound like a battered upright piano with a broken middle C.” I never failed him, and finally he asked me not only to tape a soiree but attend it, perhaps hoping that I’d at least insult the dress code or fake the politesse. I did neither, and we became friends. I relate all this to underline how necessary it is to understand your associates, for only then can you be sure what you can ask of them, and what they can give you.
    Of course he had known Champ McQuest.
    â€œOne of many such,” he said. “Those chillingly handsome young men who fell into the city in droves in those first years after the Riot. The gates were pulled down,” he recalled, with a somewhat regretful smile. “The citadel was opened up. Champ was not the handsomest or the youngest, but he may well have been the nicest.”
    We were sitting on his back deck, looking at the ocean. This far east, there were few sunbathers; even the beach parade, a routine of Pines afternoons, tended to give out and turn back several houses to the west of us. Two boys were wrestling in the sand. A jogger robustly pumped along the water’s edge. A straight couple laden with grocery bags trudged toward Water Island.
    â€œYoung men, young men, young men,” he sighed. “Some of them place themselves well, others put on stomachs and tend bar to East Siders slumming