Read Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle for Free Online

center of the shot who must have been the sexiest hunk ever photographed. I mean, he was just . . . vast truth. Two hundred pounds of original sin.”
    “Sounds like one of Tom Driggers’s boys,” said Carlo.
    “Exactly. I hadn’t taken much money with me, and all I couldafford was standing room. In I go. Two minutes before curtain, this astonishing kid takes the place next to me. Black hair, pure white skin, wide eyes, and slim, slim, slim. He looks like Walt Disney’s Pinocchio just after he turns into a real boy. Well, we start talking, and he’s bashful, which only adds to the attraction. And he’s so busy trying to sound grown-up that he makes himself even younger. He said, ‘I heard this play has a country-western score, so I’m a little skeptical.’
Skeptical
, coming out of that little-boy mouth.”
    Smiling, he shook his head.
    “He’s new in town, so I offer to take him around. And we have a few dates, but he keeps dodging my come-on. He was so fucking sweet I was going crazy. Anyway, I finally got him to Bud’s for dinner, and then I took him upstairs. We spent the weekend together—boating in the Park, bicycling to Brooklyn. Sunday he made breakfast, and everything was burned. The toast was burned, the eggs were burned, the plates and napkins were burned. And he talked in his sleep. I held him in my arms and he held on to me, and out came these confidential non sequiturs about his family. Just strings of . . . of what?”
    “Feelings,” said Carlo.
    “He said, ‘Pop is so nice to me.’ Or ‘Anne will take me to her dance.’ One night he started a story about I don’t know what, something with ‘the anonymous Greeks.’
Anonymous Greeks.”
    “What does that mean?” Carlo asked.
    Dennis Savage began to weep.
    “Oh, no,” I said, “not another crying story.”
    “Everyone cries around you,” said Carlo.
    “Anyway,” said Dennis Savage, wiping his eyes, “I knew he wasn’t an android, didn’t I?”
    The following afternoon, Cosgrove and I picked up his suit, and that evening we went to
Gtterdmmerung
. Cosgrove fretted because he didn’t have the chance to show himself off to Virgil in his virtuous new chic—curtain was at six P.M. —but he brightened when Itold him how much more effective he’d appear to his buddy’s eyes after he had absorbed the grandeur of a Night at the Opera. And, in the event, I have to say that Cosgrove acclimatized himself beautifully.
Ring
audiences tend to be stationary and strictly attentive; and so was Cosgrove. Except for a frantic five minutes during the second intermission, when he insisted that he saw Mr. Popyucork, the Sheriff of Hangtown, “gleaming” at us from the top gallery, Cosgrove moved among the cognoscenti as a native.
    (There are a number of Misters in Cosgrove’s world. Mr. Popyucork inhabits only his nightmares, but Carlo is Mr. Smith and Dennis Savage, not to his knowledge, is Mr. Fee Fo Fum.)
    I have introduced many an associate to a work of art. I took Lionel to
Salò
, and he was so dazzled we sat through it twice; and I took Dennis Savage to
La Strada
. He didn’t care for it, for which he got a slap upside of the head. Till now my protégés have always been coevals—never before had I squired anyone younger than myself to anything. It felt somewhere, I would guess, between going to Weasel’s and listening to someone talk in his sleep: being in charge of an uncontrollable adventure.
    Cosgrove was so eager to exhibit himself to Virgil that after we cabbed home, racing like the wind, Cosgrove went on up to Dennis Savage’s while I got out at the sixth floor to rustle up something from the fridge. Thank God for peanut butter and jelly.
    When I made it upstairs, in mid-sandwich, despair was in season. Cosgrove was crushed, Carlo worried, and Dennis Savage agitated: Virgil had not come home from work, and it was past midnight.
    “I wanted to show him how I could look,” wailed Cosgrove.
    Dennis Savage asked, “Should I