Free Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle by Ethan Mordden Page A

world: this store and Sweden.” Still Cosgrove pondered. Then I said, “Just think, no more than five or six Americans will own that album. This is unique.”
    “I’m coming, Demento!” cried Cosgrove. He blew his bank account on it—double-disc CDs imported from Sweden run to fifty bucks or so. But Demento was content.
    So was I, because collecting is building Cosgrove’s confidence. When he and I first crossed paths, he had no façade, no protection. The slightest challenge dismayed him. Now, when I tell him that the Klondike people package their ice-cream sandwiches in boxes of four so that we can enjoy a treat on four different occasions—as opposed to eating right through the box in a single sitting, then testing one’s bedmate by groaning and holding one’s stomach all night—he says, “Demento lured me on.” He says, “Too much is never enough.” He says, “I suffered, you didn’t.”
    Then there’s his going-to-the-showers gambit—and, while we’re at it, his “Great Moments from Movie Cinema” (as he terms it) act. Looking innocent, Cosgrove will approach the uninitiated, then suddenly wobble his hands about his ears as he writhes and screams, in the James Dean manner, “ ‘You’re
tearing
me
apart
!’ ”
    I’ve told him how disconcerting this can be; but when he feels too deeply chided he marches into the bathroom and turns on the shower. The noise locks out a reproachful world, and he actually gets under the water, washing the difficulty away. Fresh and clean, he comes out as if nothing had happened.
    “Funette,” Dennis Savage muttered, one eye on Cosgrove. “He slips in Funette, and I bought it.”
    Doorbell; enter Roy. Roy merrily says, “Did anyone see the gay porn clips on the sex channel last night? The guy with the whopper dick in the living-room scene? Did you
scope
that?”
    Dennis Savage made a helpless gesture: See what I mean? Cosgrovepointed out his CD display case, Roy called it “nifty,” and within twenty seconds he was going on about veins and how much they add to a “truly elegant dick structure.”
    “Cosgrove already scarfed up the Brie,” I said, presenting the cheese, “but there’s Gruyère and—”
    “Watch out for the Stilton,” Dennis Savage stage-whispered.
    “Now, here’s the true thing,” said Cosgrove. “Should my next purchase be a complete opera, the kind that comes in this box with a booklet like a whole portfolio? Or should I catch up on my rock classics?”
    “There’s so much life here,” Roy observed, as he crackered up some Gruyère. “That’s what I like about you guys.”
    “For instance,” Cosgrove continued. “Should I lay in some Wagner? is the question.”
    “Yes, laying in. The feel of some tightboy’s enormous, jizz-spurting cucumber as it very slowly plays into you,” said Roy, in the serenely reckless tone of the New Waver for whom sex talk, no matter how lurid, is to be taken as a formal element of liberation. “You’re stretched out and ready. Psyched for it. Then . . . first, that delicious trembling as the head presses against your rim. People don’t think of this, but it’s all geometry. The line of your body diagrammed on the bed, the triangular head and its tubular mass generating a logic of—”
    “Where’s Nicky?” Cosgrove asked.
    Well, that stopped him. “How should I know?”
    “You’re always together.”
    “Are we? I hadn’t noticed.”
    Dennis Savage cleared his throat. “You’re more or less inseparable,” he said. “At least, to the naked eye.”
    Roy laughed—a touch nervously, I thought. “Or to two naked cowboys,” he said. “They were dozing, but then they get up and find a pair of thin white-linen drawstring pants. So one of them tries them on, and the other helps him, you know, adjusting the waistband, admiring the jut of his buddy’s behind. So the guy inthe pants gets hot, while his cowboy friend rubs his neck to loosen him up. Then his hands steal around and pull