Tales of the City 03 - Further Tales of the City

movie?” asked Brian.
    Mrs. Madrigal clucked her tongue at him. “Miss Stanwyck, my dear boy, is my heartiest specimen yet.” She pointed to the edge of the courtyard where a sensemilla plant as big as a Christmas tree was undulating softly in the warm spring breeze.
    Brian whistled in appreciation. “That stuff knocks your socks off.”
    The landlady smiled modestly. “I didn’t name her Barbara Stanwyck for nothing.”
They previewed Miss Stanwyck. Then they wandered down the hill to Washington Square and sat on a bench in the sunshine, docile and groggy as a couple of aging house cats.
    After a long silence, Brian said: “Does she ever talk to you about me?”
    “Who? Mrs. Onassis?”
    Brian smiled languidly. “You know.”
    “Well …” Mrs. Madrigal chewed her lower lip. “Only about your extraordinary sexual prowess, that sort of thing … nothing really personal.”
    Brian laughed. “That’s a relief.”
    The landlady’s Wedgwood saucer eyes fixed on him lovingly. “She cares about you a great deal, young man.”
    Brian tore up a tuft of grass and began to shred it. “She told you that, huh?”
    “Well … not in so many words …”
    “It only takes three.” His voice was tinged with doubt, more than he wanted to show. “I don’t know,” he added hastily, “maybe it’s just her work or something. She’s so obsessed with becoming a reporter that nothing else seems to matter. I don’t know. Screw it. It’s no big deal.”
    Mrs. Madrigal smiled wistfully and brushed the hair off his forehead. “But it is, isn’t it? It’s an awfully big deal.”
    “It wasn’t before,” said Brian.
    The landlady’s eyes widened. “Oh, I know how that can be.”
    “I want this to work out, Mrs. Madrigal. I never wanted anything so bad.”
    “Then you shall have it,” said the landlady. “My children always get what they want.” She gave Brian’s knee a friendly shake.
    “But she’s one of your children,” said Brian. “What if it’s not what she wants?”
    “I expect it will be,” said Mrs. Madrigal, “but you must be patient with her. She’s just now learning how to fly.”

Ah, Wilderness
    A T LEAST TWICE A YEAR THE SAN FRANCISCO GAY Men’s Chorus made a point of retreating to the wilds of Northern California for a weekend of intensive rehearsals and camping-around-the-campfire camaraderie.
    The “wilds” were always the same: Camp Eisenblatt, a summer camp for Jewish teenagers which leased its sylvan facilities to the one-hundred-fifty-member homosexual choir during the off-seasons. And this season was about as off as it could get.
    “What a pisser!” groaned Michael as he stared out at the driving rain. “I was gonna start on my tan line this weekend.”
    Ned laughed and clipped an olive drab jockstrap to the clothesline strung across one end of the baritones’ bunkhouse. “Cowboys don’t have tan lines,” he said.
    Since the theme of this year’s retreat was “Spring Roundup,” the western motif was in evidence everywhere. Even their name tags were affixed with swatches of cowboy bandannas: red for the first tenors, tan for the second tenors, dark blue for the baritones, dark brown for the basses and royal blue for the nonmusical “chorus widows” who had come along to make sure that their lovers didn’t have too much fun in the redwoods.
    “Just the same,” said Michael. “I liked it better last fall when we had the luau and the eighty-degree weather.”
    “And the sarongs,” added Ned. “I thought we’d never get you out of that damn thing.”
    Michael inspected his fingernails blithely. “As I recall, there was a first tenor who succeeded.”
    “Well, shift fantasies,” suggested Ned. “Pretend you’re in a real bunkhouse. You’ve just come in from a long, hot cattle drive and the rain is cooling off the livestock.”
    “Right. And my ol’ sidekick Lonesome Ned is about to dry his jockstrap with a blowdryer. Listen, pardner, I don’t know how to break this to you gently, but real bunkhouses don’t have REBECCA is A FAT SLOB written in pink nailpolish on the bathroom wall.”
    Ned smiled lazily. “Jehovah moves in mysterious ways.”
After a long morning of wrestling with Liszt’s Requiem and Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody, the chorus converged on the Camp Eisenblatt dining hall for a lunch of bologna sandwiches and Kool-Aid.
    Later, Michael and Ned and a dozen of their compatriots gossiped jovially around the fireplace. There were so many