eastside living LA

Talking in Tongues: A Sentiential Education, Pt. 6

 

Talking in Tongues: A Sentiential Education, Pt 6

(you gotta kiss a lotta frogs to get a toad)

by David Anthony Tattu

In traversing this, my rear-view passage into the glass cube I feel all gay men are born into – wherein we are cut off from culturally standardized processes of relating; isolated from the outer world, from objects of love, and saddest of all, from ourselves – it becomes clearer to me that we are trapped from infancy in the atoms and gaps of our families and societies. 

I see how we were taught one language as we scramble to learn and understand another,  our own; constructing, in our airless cubes, a constantly-monitored Self, whose emotional and psychological seeds have no soil to grow in: no sandbox sweethearts, no dates to the prom, no ongoing talks or reassurances from the world, or dad and mom. No room for germane being, if such a thing exists.

And so, as budding boys, we built our masks and played our acts of linguistic and psychic legerdemain; observants of a system whose referents and references were contorted and distorted, and in many ways to us unintelligible. And, as boys growing into men, we learned to live a lateral existence that we clearly understood could turn lethal, should it flip us in its grip, and dare to turn direct.

Certainly, a lot of this has changed, continues to change, but not nearly enough for my liking; and when I think back on my days of Mike-ing, I confess, sometimes anger more than compassion, under-girds my irony.

At any rate, through my “friendship” with Mike I managed to scrape entrance into the exclusive world of Bud McBuddles, whose carefully orchestrated clubhouse was little more than a souped-up version of Howard’s collection of boys. Only in Bud’s world, Bud called the shots. An iron-fisted ringmaster with well-trained lackeys and the instincts of a velvet-rope doorman when it came to enforcing the ever-changing hierarchies of the establishment.  

Bud knew exactly what he was doing. And exactly what he wanted. 

And what he wanted was Mike. 

And Bud knew I knew this. And hated me for it with every fiber of his being. 

No surprise to me. I saw the gambit from a mile away. 

Perhaps I was gaining a handle on the clues and cues of homosexuality?

Anyway, when Bud blew into town and set-up shop in cozy Hermosa Beach, I was just a small-town small fry wrapped around Mike’s finger. Bud, on the other hand, came out of nowhere (correction: Beverly Hills), a full-grown man of twenty two, with his own apartment, expensive leather furniture, the latest electronic equipment, a full refrigerator, tasty cache of drugs, Volkswagen Karman Ghia (with surf racks, despite the fact that Bud couldn’t surf to save his – what seemed to my jaundiced eye – rather puny life), and a seemingly endless supply of cash. 

By no means a beauty himself, Bud promptly set his hat on ingratiating himself with the local surfers, each more handsome than the last. But, as in all Fairy tales, and like all princelings, Bud had to have a Favorite. Someone to lavish his friendship and attention on. 

And of course, his money.

Enter Mike. Seventeen years old, stardust in his smile and master of guile.

A consummate marriage of Grift and Graft; Mike brought in all the “right” people and anointed the place “cool,” and Bud was embraced by the reigning royalty, his pad now the hub of everything happening in teenage surfdom. 

The cunning conundrum though, was why should  I be allowed to partake of such a perfect paradise? 

Mike clearly no longer had a use for me, and Bud made it exquisitely plain (if you’ll pardon the term) that I was persona non grata at chez McBuddles, not to mention the butt of his every feeble-minded joke. 

Looking back, I could take the high road (or perhaps merely the mawkish one?) and say that I was kept on because somewhere in Mike’s reptilian heart there was a simulacrum of fondness for me; but that sort of foolhardy folly is not the fluff of stuff our Mike was made of. 

No, Club McBuddles was a far more complicated place than that; although it was endlessly amusing to know that aside from Bud, Mike and me, none of the Bud’s doting dolts had an iota of an idea of the sort of power vector ripping through the place. 

That was the beauty part. 

Everything was undercover. 

Homosexuality did not exist in the land of surf.

And here was poor rich Bud Graft positively besotted with Mike Grift.

And there was innocent me -the admittedly suspected homosexual- who patently knew the truth, as inconvenient as that might be. 

And, better yet, I knew that both Grift and Graft knew I knew the score. 

Et viola! a power play more akin to all screeds George and Martha than anything you’d find on Peyton Place.

And I loved it. Watching the “boys” push and pull and screech and squirm. 

So, in this little love den, Mike had his uses for me – mostly as his stealth missile; the silent threat to Bud that I had the ammunition to blow the whole thing sky high, and as a useful tool to make his snaky swain writhe with purpled jealousy.  

All Mike had to do was ask me if I wanted to jump on the back of his moped with him to check out the surf, and the remote controls of all that impotent electronic equipment would zing across the room, dunder-headed surfers starting from their sleep, ejaculating, “what the fuck dude, are you crazy or what!?”  

“Shut up and go the fuck back to sleep!” Bud would screech, “the pipe’s over there!” 

And off we’d trot, Mike and I, grinning like Cheshire cats, underscoring the fact the three of us were fully aware that Bud was never invited onto Mike’s mo-ped; to sit behind his sainted ass.

So, blossoming anthro-linguist that I was, I managed to carve out a place for myself as the broker to their pettishness, whether it was needling Bud to buy that Porsche Mike had to have his hands on, or smoothing over the fact that while Bud was at his dealer’s place, Mike had been nailing some surf-chick for two hours in the bathroom: Sheila Blonde, a delightful girl, but naturally considered a slut, as she had the temerity to like sex. Mike, on the other hand, was the undisputed household stud.

Such are the times we lived (and live) in. 

As to whether our vaunted Darling ever gave-it-up to Bud I have neither specific proof nor the mildest of interest. I do know, though, from my own scars and bruises, that the proverbial free brunch is indeed a very rare commodity. 

And, although I like to paint myself as conniving little mercenary (which, if one looks at my “life choices” and my bank account, one can clearly see, alas, I’m not), there were by then larger concerns on my sixteen year old palette. Namely, at this time I was a run-away (what we currently call a “homeless youth”: they have shelters now and everything!) and living by my wits, scrambling for food and shelter, and yet again on the lamb from the law, upon my dropping out of high school. 

So Bud’s was just one horse on the merry-go-round of fillies where I’d cage a meal, a change of clothes or a night’s sleep. And, although I truly found amusement in the game, it was tiring and the stakes for me were pretty high. And, at the end of the day, I knew which way my buns were buttered and exactly how the wind blew; that I could push the limits and insinuate myself into a meal or a spot on the couch,  but my time in paradise was fast approaching its limit.

And that limit hit one morning when Hermosa was blessed with a rare swell and all the surfers of the house were out carving up the waves, and I woke up to find Bud towering over me, smirking serenely, with an orange towel around his waist, which he promptly dropped to reveal his own swell; grabbing my head and shoving into my face the ugliest dick I’ve ever seen.

And, although I’d had my diddles with the men from Either/Or and my flower shop daddy, I was still surprisingly innocent, and decidedly inchoate in my understanding of sex.

And I totally freaked. 

And I ran. 

And I was not seen at Bud McBudddle’s heaven ever again.

 

Next installment:

Talking in Tongues: A Sentiential Education. Pt.7