I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore by Ethan Mordden Page A

listened to the ocean pound out its rhythm in the great empty dark of the place where all men are forms of lover because they hunger so, the gayest place on earth, all ours.
    “This is the magic of the Island,” he said. He lay his head on my shoulder and closed his eyes, listening.

Three Infatuations
    All gay is divided into three parts: looks, money, and wit, in that (descending) order, and my friend Carson had some of each—decent looks, tons of money, and competent wit. He’d get by. Perhaps he expected too much. He was always casing men—not cruising them as much as considering how they might figure in his plot. Let a waiter come to our table happy with menus, or a truck driver ask the time, or an actor cross a stage, and Carson would be wondering what he would be like to live with. Later, he would ask you where you thought the waiter went, or whom the trucker knew, or what the actor thought.
    “I could buy all the men in the world, I expect,” he told me. “I could rent the Colt stable, one after the other, night of my nights. But then what happens? What is life without mystery?”
    Let the rest of us buddy up with persons very much like ourselves, clone for clone; not Carson. He craved the ad, the rendezvous by graffito, the remote, posed photo. Yet all his archetypes ordered out of the catalogue kept turning into real people. There was the weightlifter Carson met in his gym, an agreeable, speechless hunk who fascinated Carson till the night he returned early from a family trip to find the weightlifter dancing around the room in a picture hat to Carol Channing records. Or there was the swimming champ from Rutgers who used to wake up screaming from unspeakable dreams (but he spoke of them); or the vocal coach with the wonderful beard who suffered temporary impotence every time he heard Leonie Rysanek mentioned. There was another weightlifter, a German who knew no English and was turning out great till Carson took him to Fire Island and he went crazy at the quality of the competition and wrecked the house they were staying in.
    My favorite was Kurt, a trim dark kid Carson picked up on Christopher Street and took—and kept—home. Carson’s term for Kurt’s type, for reasons that I’m glad to say were kept obscure, was “sweet gypsy butt.” Yet, overnight, Kurt turned into what is generally termed a wife. Carson said Kurt was incredible in the lay, but, underneath Kurt’s “I will do anything and I’ll do it better than anyone and what’s more I’ll scream while we’re doing it” façade, this kid was against (1) good food, (2) whizz entertainment, (3) hot dancing, and, generally, (4) life. Carson had a tendency to stomach, so Kurt put him on a diet of what looked like hay, and went on to institute farm yard bedtimes and reveilles and refused to go anywhere that held more than eight people.
    The night Kern Loften turned forty he threw a stupendous party, and Carson somehow sneaked away from Kurt, arrived early, and dug into his first real food in months. He ate like the Cowardly Lion, ravenously but with a fearful eye over his shoulder watching for Kurt. Remember, this was a kept boy, living with Carson rent-free, board taken care of, pocket money discreetly supplied. And listen to how he carried on with his master:
    “What’s that in your mouth?” he cried, suddenly upon us and eyes blazing.
    “Carrots,” said Carson, shooting cookie crumbs all over the place.
    “What do you have behind your back?”
    “The wall,” I whispered.
    “You’ve got pastries and tarts there, haven’t you?”
    “No,” Carson replied. “Celery sticks!”
    “Why are they hiding from me?”
    “They’re afraid you’ll gobble them up,” I told him. “They want to live.”
    Kurt regarded me balefully. “I know about you,” he said—he always said this when one of Carson’s friends picked on him. God, was he cute; but what a bore. “We’re leaving right now!” he told Carson.
    “ You’re leaving. In