Everybody Loves You by Ethan Mordden Page A

in Chelsea, and a few fall into very wrong hands. Handsome young men. I’ve wondered what life might have been like if I’d been born when they were. Born, I mean, into this demotic everything-is-possible Stonewall thing, where you go to a gym and grow a mustache for love instead of paying for it. I never mind paying. That’s what money is for. But if I had been younger… ” He slurred out the word with a trace of wonder, as if the concept could scarcely be imagined, much less debated. “If I had been young when everyone else was young … and if I had not been rich and powerful.” He hugged himself, shrugging playfully. “Well. Would I have gone to the weight rooms and worn jeans and frequented orgies just on the basis of who I was or pretended to be? Would I have delicious companionship just because I showed up? I love to ask. But I don’t quite see it. All that effort, all that … handsome running around. It’s so much easier to buy love than hunt for it. And then … even if you find it … don’t you have to deserve it? You have to be as worthy as your partner, don’t you? You have to be a handsome young man! Much, much more fun to buy your love, wouldn’t you?”
    â€œBut can you buy love?” I asked. “Or just sex?”
    â€œWriters are so naïve. You can buy anything, in fact. You can buy murder, don’t doubt me. Don’t. Don’t.”
    The two boys on the beach, spent by their wrestling, lay side by side in the sun. One put his hand on the other’s head.
    â€œAnyway,” he went on, “you can’t necessarily have your love for free, either, so where are you then? Champ, now, dear Champ was certainly one of the elect. Yet he was always falling for men who didn’t respond. He had no love. And my. My, how it rent him. The passion of a boy in love with a boy! The incredible dis regard for the stan dard cau tions!”
    â€œWhy did he die?”
    â€œHe was too sweet to live. He was too sensitive to survive. He fell prey to overwhelming despairs. Choose one. Freshen your drink?”
    The two boys on the beach ran into the ocean and started wrestling again.
    â€œYou mustn’t get into a state about Champ McQuest,” the wise old queen warned me. “There were so many such. So many handsome young men who never even made it to bartender. And Champ was born to doom. Who knew anyone at all as glum as he? Did you? Tom Jones in the Dostoyevski edition, that was Champ McQuest.”
    â€œWhat did he die of, though?”
    â€œOh, he was one of the overdoses, technically. There was quite a lot of that at the time. Many of them simply lay there and gave out the soul, but some actually did themselves in. One went out a window shouting the name of the model agency that had dropped him for galloping debauchery. Alas, he had defied the cautions.”
    â€œAnd Champ?”
    â€œHm … can one recall a specific event, some triggering thing? He had such a greed for agonies, poor boy. It happened in your house, didn’t it?”
    I was speechless.
    â€œAren’t you in the house they call Chinatown? Way over on The Other Side by the cruising park? It used to have a myriad of Oriental gewgaws hanging from the eaves over the deck. Wind chimes and fairy bells and a whole orchestra of gongs. If the breeze was right you could hear ‘Limehouse Blues.’ But you stalwart sprouts of Stonewall have taken all that down, haven’t you? All the … decoration. You want to be your own decorations.”
    â€œChamp McQuest died in our house? Jesus, I knew there had been a suicide, but I—”
    â€œOh, I shouldn’t call that a suicide. I shouldn’t. Such a deliberate word, don’t you? There comes a time in certain lives when one is too miserable to live, so one simply dies. How one dies is of rather small moment. Champ was very mixed up, and very unhappy,