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

many ways.” And he took his arm from behind him to reveal a bowl of M&Ms. We cheered as Kurt stormed out.
    “Well,” Carson remarked. “That’s the end of him, isn’t it?” He meant it, too. When Carson froze on you—he did so, at times, on a whim—he stayed frozen. “Here we go again with the locksmith.”
    “Poor Kurt,” said someone.
    “They always have somewhere to go,” Carson noted. “With the usual check.”
    We made a night of it, repairing to Carson’s apartment for dish therapy and silly acts. Carson celebrated his freedom in the kitchen, heaving out Kurt’s pita bread and bran. “Thank God,” he screamed, “I’ll never have to eat another dish of tofu!”
    In the living room, he surveyed us gloomily. “On the other hand, here I am again: rich, young, and reasonably pretty with no one to pet me. What’s the use of money if it can’t buy love?”
    We wondered.
    “I’ve tried all the kinds, haven’t I?” he went on. “Man dudes, sweet gypsy butt, disco league”—here Kurt slammed in, eyed us with ire, and marched off to his last night in the local bed, as Carson wryly ignored the whole thing. “I even had a preppy once. The summer,” he sighed, “of ’74. So now what?”
    It was time for Dennis Savage to theorize. “You’ve been buying the wrong kind of love,” said he. “You haven’t had hustlers; you’ve had gays who charged money. You need a real hustler, who knows his trade and works at it.”
    Sensation in the room.
    “What is a real hustler?” someone asked.
    “That’s a good gay question,” says Dennis Savage. “What does a hustler have, besides expert love technique?”
    “A hustler doesn’t have anything,” I offered. “A hustler lacks.”
    “Yes!” Carson cried. “Yes!”
    “All your protégés had things—hang-ups, rules, plans. A hustler is the essence of the thing, a poster made flesh.”
    “What doesn’t a hustler have, exactly?” asked Dennis Savage.
    “No background?” Carson suggested.
    “No mind,” someone put in.
    “No ambition,” said another.
    “No interests!” said Dennis Savage, hoping to cap it. But I love to flunk him:
    “A hustler,” I announced climactically, “has no opinions.”
    There was silence; then Carson leaped up ecstatically. “Where do I find someone like that?”
    *   *   *
    As we know, I live on Fifty-third Street between Third and Second, Hustler Alley, and it was there, of course, that Carson would find one, if one could be found. I had doubts. The hustler, after all, is a platonic essence, and real-life humans are less concisely derived.
    “I’m auditioning,” Carson blithely told me when we bumped into each other one summer evening, I with a bag of groceries and he with about nineteen eyes, all going at once, up street and down, to right and left, quick shots, double takes, and pans, swiveling to follow. It’s standard but it’s rude.
    “Aren’t you afraid you’ll catch something?” I asked him.
    “I’m not actually doing them yet. We’re still in the interview stage. To screen out the ones with opinions.”
    He winked and moved on; I’d never seen him so urbane. But then spending power tends to emphasize the suave in the wealthy.
    I took to having the evening cocktail with Dennis Savage. His apartment, two floors above mine, fronts on Fifty-third, so we could sit at the window and watch Carson’s auditions. Actually, he seldom materialized. I gather he spent most of his time in the neighborhood’s several hustler bars. But we did see quite some parade: the most spectacular boys alongside the most atrocious, the latter as confident or druggy or disturbed as the former; hunks and skeletons; outfits and rags; slick buyers in vested suits and hopeless browsers with damp polyester underarms. You’d think the stage had but two character types, the beauty and the beast, and one topic, their encounter. But every viewing brought new themes, startling variations.
    “Is it a microcosm?” I