Tales of the City 01 - Tales of the City

for Mary Ann.
    “Brian!”
    “I’m not … interrupting anything?”
    “As a matter of fact, Casey Donovan is languishing in my boudoir.”
    “Oh, I’m …”
    “A joke, Brian. Esoteric. What can I do for you?”
    “Nothing … I … I’ve got some Maui Wowie. I thought you might like to smoke a little and … rap for a while.”
    Such a quaint word, thought Michael. Rap. Straight people still longed for the Summer of Love.
    The grass took hold quickly.
    “Jesus,” said Michael.
    “How much is this stuff, anyway?”
    “Two hundred a lid.”
    “Please!”
    “Swear to God.”
    “My teeth are numb.”
    “Who needs ‘em?”
    Michael laughed. “Damn right! Is this stuff local, Brian?”
    “Uh uh. L.A.”
    “Good ol’ Lah!”
    “Huh?”
    “Lah. L.A…. get it?”
    “Oh … yeah.”
    “L.A. is Lah. S.F. is Sif.”
    “Is it ever!”
    They laughed. “Jesus, Brian. One more toke and I’ll see God.”‘
    “Too late. He moved to Lah.”
    “God’s in Lah?”
    “Who you think sold it to me?”
    “Sometimes,” said Brian, “I get the feeling that the New Morality is over. Know what I mean?”
    “Sorta.”
    “I mean … like … what’s left? You know?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Guys and chicks, chicks and chicks, guys and guys.”
    “Right on.”
    “But now … you know … the pendulum.”
    “Yeah … the fucking pendulum.”
    “I mean, Michael … I think … I think it’s gonna be all over, man.”
    “What?”
    “Everything.”
    “Sodom and Gomorrah, huh?”
    “Maybe not that … dramatic, but something like that. We’re gonna be … I mean people like you and me … we’re gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calviniste.”
    Michael winced. “Lusting in their hearts like Jimmy … but nowhere else.”
    “Yeah … Are you horny?”
    Michael’s heart stopped. “Uh …”
    “Grass always makes me horny.”
    “Yeah … I know what you mean.”
    “Why don’t we … do something about it?”
    The room was so still that Michael could hear the hair growing on Brian’s chest.
    “Brian … that’s kind of … complicated, isn’t it?”
    “Why?”
    “Why?” repeated Michael. “Well, I … you and I aren’t exactly coming from the same place, are we?”
    “So? There must be some place in this fucking city where they’ve got straight chicks and gay guys.”
    “You want us to … go cruising together?”
    “Kind of a kick, huh?”
    Michael looked at him for several seconds, then broke into a slow grin. “You’re really serious, aren’t you?”
    “Fuckin A.”
    “It’s truly twisted.”
    “I knew you’d get into it.”
    “Maybe,” said Michael, turning into Pan again, “we could break up a couple.”

Three Men at the Tubs
    L EAVING THE HAMPTON-GIDDES’, JON FILLED HIS LUNGS with the cleansing fog that had spilled into Seacliff from the bay.
    Collier grinned at him. “I knew you’d OD, sooner or later.”
    “Shut up.”
    “You’re stuck on that Tolliver kid, aren’t you?”
    “I’m not stuck on anybody, Collier. I just get sick of that bitchy talk about twinks. That’s just a queen’s way of being a male chauvinist pig!”
    “Can I send that to Bartlett’s Quotations?”
    “Just drive, will you?”
    “The tubs, right?”
    “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
    “I could drop you off at the twink’s house.”
    “Collier, if you mention that one more …”
    “The tubs it is, milord.”
    Jon kept silent on the long ride to Eighth and Howard. He hated these unsettled moments when the stuffiness of the Hampton-Giddes and the aimlessness of the Michael Tollivers seemed equally inapplicable to his own life.
    At times like this, the tubs was an easy way out.
    Discreet, dispassionate, noncommittal. He could diddle away a frenzied hour or two, then return unblemished to the business of being a doctor.
    It was really his only choice.
    Decorators, hairdressers and selected sheriffs deputies were expected to be gay in San Francisco.
    But who wanted a gay gynecologist?
    Most women, he observed, expected their gynecologist to be detached in dealing with their most intimate specifics. They did not, however, expect detachment to come easy. In their heart of hearts lurked the tiniest hope that they were driving the poor devil mad.
    Gay was not Good in OB/GYN.
    The television lounge of the Club Baths was jammed with terry-cloth Tarzans.
    For once, they were genuinely engrossed in the television.
    “Forget about the orgy room,”