Faggots by Larry Kramer, Reynolds Price Page B

Grant, unfortunately recently co-joined with the expanding body of W. C. Fields, and many promiscuous years of wonderful memories when the Fields part of him had been more Randolph Scott.
    Irving enjoyed thinking of himself as a modern Renaissance Man. That he was a doctor his many patients would agree; Irving was expert in attending to many a present-day malaise, from smoking to homosexuality, quite often by hypnosis, though lately he’d heard of effective results from brief periods of incarceration, which he thought he might soon be testing; that his credentials came from rather foreign universities bothered them not. But shrinking was only part of his fame and had come after his initial success as a silent backer of heterosexual fuck films. Up Your Lazy River and My Bare Lady had subsidized his medical studies; the firm and forceful personality had forged the psychiatric success. And then had come the logical next step: since so many of his satisfied patients were high on corporate ladders, what more sensible act than to form an advertising agency to promote them and their concerns? Hence, Heiserdiener-Thalberg-Slough, now number seven in international billings, and an even richer, fuller life for Irving.
    “It’s so difficult to know what to wear, Irving,” Hans said. They were in the photo-lined ground floor of Han’s handsome East 68th Street town house, photos of all the glossily gleaming smiling faces of fifty, count fifty, of America’s most handsome young men. And Hans Zoroaster loved all his famous models as if they were his sons. He never ceased looking at them, as he did now, emitting one of his unconscious sighs of prideful paternal pleasure, another fifty-five year-old man, though thin, he’d always kept thin, and immaculately dressed. “The first part of the evening is devoted to the Women’s Wear crowd and then events will obviously turn into more sturdy and nourishing fare and this, for us, requires two outfits.”
    “Stop it, Hans.” Irving was referring to the sighing. “You have never found love from one of your boys. You only allow them to break your heart. When will you cease your foolishness?”
    “Look who is talking! You who put ads in fuck papers! Where is your Dinky and where is his love? Two weeks of trial ‘old-fashioned’ marriage, an exclusive honeymoon, and then, poof!”
    “Yes, Dinky went away,” Irving courageously admitted, “but he has just sent me a postcard from Savannah saying he is returning, and he said to me before he left that he likes me and that we have many similar interests and that the sex is good and that on paper we make sense. So I have hope.”
    “He is twisting your heart, not calling you, disappearing, sticking his thing into you only whenever you order from him another plant or bush.”
    “He is redoing my terraces and he has great talent for beauty in this area.” Irving was not courageously admitting that Dinky had also told him he was additionally seeing a Fred Lemish.
    “Do you know that last year four hundred and nineteen of Fortune magazine’s top five hundred corporations used my boys in their advertising? How is that for market penetration? How is that for bringing beauty to this world? I too bring beauty.”
    Hans said these words from a flat position, looking upward from the long white Bishop’s table, his sheer batiste shirt opened for Irving, who, with a clean, sharp needle, was repiercing for the opening, Hans’s pointed right tit.
    “You know, I too have my chickens,” Irving said, smiling. “I have my Malmouth Chickens, which I have made into the chickens one out of two chicken-eaters eat. I have the Winston Man…I also have Necessa Autos, which put Manila on the map as a major automotive exporter, though perhaps a bit slow in spare parts. I have the Monomain Railroad, the Ivascar Home Deodorant Plan, the Pan-Pacific Group of Companies including Marathon Leisure Time, I have Bronstein Bakeries, I have the fashion empire of