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

house from a hotel!”
    He looked pensive. “Who knows less about love than you? The Wicked Witch of the West?”
    “All right, what happens now? Is Mac’s life ruined because that slimy hustler busted his heart? No doubt you know much of one, true, life-long love—no one I know has been in and out of it more variously than you.”
    “Jeers from a left-out.”
    “So tell me: can it destroy as surely as it exhilarates?”
    “We must watch developments,” he replied. “We must see and know.”
    Developments proved invisible, for Mac gave up his apartment and resettled in Wisconsin. Odd letters trickled back, drab ones now. Mac’s mail used to soar. He never mentioned Nick, though there were what I took as oblique references, in phrases like “the fantasies of Manhattan” or “the grip of wishes.” I would respond with carefree dish and, perhaps two months later, back would come another feeble laudamus of rustic places. “More and more,” he wrote, “I have come to appreciate the plain heart of the midwest.” I felt as if he had spit on me.
    I continued to write, as breezily as I could manage. There was pleasant news: Lionel was teaching at the New School, Carlo lucked into a job at a ritzy boutique and became solvent for the first time since grade school, Eric sold his first novel to a major house, Dennis Savage had met a dazzling young man in, of all places, the Forty-Sixth Street Theatre, and the boy was so pure it took our Circuit paragon four dates to bed him. Are Manhattan’s fantasies so blameful, then? We were all pushing thirty, and great dreams were slipping within our reach. And so I said to Mac, straight out: “Some fantasies must be shared.”
    Mac never answered; his wife did, enclosing photographs of the wedding. Her name was Patricia; she had known Mac all their lives, and had married Mac’s high-school buddy, one of the last American casualties in Vietnam. Shortly after his death, Patricia had given birth to their son, Ty. A very mid-western story. I saw them all in the pictures: Pat quite pretty, Ty a handsome and sombre little boy, and the Mac I had known in New York, glad and lively. And still believing in fantasy. A thousand McNallys surrounded them, held them, admired them. There was even a tiny Ty with the model couple atop the festive cake. “And Mac,” Patricia ended, “is a natural-born father. We put on a record of ‘The Parade of the Tin Soldiers’ and Mac and Ty march around the room. You should see little Ty, how seriously he takes it. There is so much love in the world, I cannot know why I have been so lucky.” And she closed with, “Your friend, Patricia McNally.”
    I never heard from Mac again.
    *   *   *
    I did see Nick, though, some years later, in some other spread in some other magazine. What, Cockstorm? Bullstick? And the spread—“Fantasy Boys”? It might as well have been. Nick was fondling a younger man, who gazed up at him in tender terror. No doubt Nick was making him dance. I was in a room full of men at party, and they passed the magazine from hand to hand to see.
    “My God, that one’s hot!” someone exclaimed.
    “How … hot … is he?” said another, in the cue-up style of Ed McMahon.
    “He’s so hot,” said the jester, “he could make a straight turn gay.”
    I let it pass.

The Homogay
    These stories, reader, are meant as mine in particular, not as gay stories in general—not depictions per se. Each life bears its own tales. Still, I am concerned at how often people cry in these pages. Life is not that sad. I’ve made up my mind that there will be no crying in this one.
    *   *   *
    I come from a town so small that every mother’s son is born at home in mother’s bed. So small the school bus made but three stops. So small the bully had to double as the sissy.
    His name was Harvey Jonas. He had a high-pitched voice, his frame carried a pudding of blubber, and he was a fiasco at sports: the classic adolescent queer. Yet he