'The craziest thing is they seem to be looking at all this as some kind of opportunity-make the best of it, the missus said. They've got a weird relationship with their son. There's a lot of tension and bad feeling over the way he lives, yet he seems to keep coming back to them when he needs them or when he wants to embarrass them. They sound like they expect this recent messiness to lead to a big, wonderful final reconciliation. Or something.'
'It'll be interesting to get Billy Blount's slant on the relationship.'
'It will.'
I turned up Central and found a parking place a few doors past the Terminal Bar. We went in.
On weekends the Terminal was misnamed. It was a relatively quiet neighborhood drink-and-talk pub where on weeknights people often dropped in for an hour or two. But on Friday and Saturday nights the bar was where a good number of gay men started out for the evening before ending up at the big shake-your-ass-bust-an-eardrum discos on up Central. Those who hung around the Terminal until four A.M. closing were mostly the 'serious drinkers,' many of them alcoholics, who sometimes, in moments of clarity, referred to the bar as the Terminal Illness.
We bought fifty-cent draughts and moved through the murk beyond the pool table and the bar to the back of the room, where we knew we'd find friends. One of the five tables was empty-it was just after nine, early yet. Another table was occupied by three theological activists in the gay Happy Days Church, gazing mournfully into their beer, pitched, as they always seemed to be, in medieval gloom. Happy days, glum nights, I guessed. Some fresh- faced SUNY students sat at another table in the company of an older admirer. Timmy and I spotted a couple of the Gay Community Center crowd and went over to their table as the Rae's 'A Little Lovin'' came on.
'Where've you guys been hiding yourselves? Haven't seen you since-last night.' Phil Jerrold, a lanky blond with a crooked smile and what Timmy once described as 'a winning squint,' shoved his chair aside so we could squeeze in around the little table.
'Is it tonight?' Timmy said. 'I thought it was still last night. When I'm in here, I get mixed up.
What night is it, Calvin?'
Calvin Markham, a young black man with the aquiline features and high forehead of an Ethiopian aristocrat, said, 'I really wouldn't know the answer to that. I know it's October, because my hay fever's gone. That's as close as I can get, though. Sorry. What time is it?'
I said, 'Nine twenty-six. At nine twenty-seven will you become cheerful and optimistic, or have you just been told you have third-stage syphilis?'
Calvin and Phil looked at each other. They began to laugh. 'Clap,' Calvin said. 'I've got clap. I don't have the test results yet, but I know-I know-that I've got clap.'
'Oh,' I said.
Timmy said, 'Maybe it's something else. Can you get hay fever of the crotch?'
'Not after the first frost,' Calvin said.
We laughed, but Calvin didn't. I'm getting another beer.' He went to the bar.
'Where'd he pick it up?' Timmy said. 'The tubs?'
Phil said, 'It was the first time he'd been there in six months. Like Carter said, life is unfair.'
'I thought Nixon said that.'
'No, it was Carter. To the welfare mothers.'
'Yeah, but Ford said it first, to the COs.'
Timmy said, 'No, I think it was Anne Baxter to Bette Davis, and when she said it, it made Thelma Ritter wince. Hey, can I say that? Are we still allowed to make Bette Davis jokes, or have they become politically incorrect?'
'It is politically acceptable,' Phil said, 'if you do it once a month, but not if you do it every ten minutes. That is no longer permissible. Thank God.'
'Well, these are new times, aren't they? I think I feel an identity crisis coming on. You know, that's how I found out I was a homosexual. When I was seventeen, I was walking through the park and an older man pulled up beside me, leaned out his car window, and whispered a Bette Davis joke in my ear. I loved it, and all of a sudden I knew.'
Phil said, 'That's the most touching coming-out story I've ever heard. Where has sophistication gone?'
'To Schenectady, I think. A man was arrested in the bus station over there last week for impersonating Monica Vitti. Don't get me wrong, I mean I love trendy Albany, but really, I think you have to concede that progress is a very mixed blessing.'
We conceded this unenthusiastically and drank our beer. Calvin came back. The juke box was playing 'Good Times' by Chic.
I asked what anyone had heard about the Kleckner killing.
'Just what's in the papers,' Phil said. 'The cops still haven't found the Blount guy. They sure as hell better catch up with him fast and get him locked up. A lot of people are damn nervous with a gay psychopath running around loose, me included.'
I asked Phil and Calvin if they had known Billy Blount.
'I remember when he used to come to the center,' Calvin said. 'He was kind of snotty and always going around acting like he was better than you were. Most people weren't too crazy about him.'
'A lot of repressed anger,' Phil added.
'Who are Blount's friends? Do you know anybody who knows him?' They thought about this but couldn't come up with any names. I said, I'm looking for him, too. Blount's parents have hired me to find him.'
'Jesus, no kidding. You think he's in Albany?'
'I don't know. I'm just starting.'
'We should have known you'd get mixed up in that one,' Calvin said. 'The weird people you hang around.'
Timmy said, 'Thank you.'
'I mean his customers-clients, or whatever they're called. Who was that one you were following around last month? The one with the pet pigs?'
'He wasn't the client. His wife was the client. She thought he had another woman he was sneaking out to meet. What he had was a small pig farm out in East Greenbush. A secret pig farm. I caught the guy in the act of feeding his pigs one night- got some nice shots with the Leica, too-and then I started feeling sorry for the guy and went over and talked to him. I asked him why he didn't just level with his wife about the secret pigs, and the poor devil began to weep. He said she'd never understand, that it would destroy his marriage.
He was an assistant commissioner in the Department of Mental Health.'
Phil said, 'Well, consensual pig farming is one thing, but getting involuntarily stabbed to death by your trick is definitely something else. A lot of the disco bunnies are scared shitless.
Especially out at Trucky's. Blount is the one who did it, isn't he?'
'I don't know. It looks that way. How's business at Trucky's? Are people coming back? Truckman has had his hard times.'
'Wednesday night was packed,' Calvin said. 'It was two for one. And people aren't going to the Rat's Nest much anymore. Not with the cops still hassling them. I heard on Monday they arrested the bartender and two customers. In the middle of the afternoon they busted in, and there were fifteen people in the back room!'
Timmy said, 'It isn't just for breakfast anymore,' and we groaned obligingly.
The Rat's Nest was a new place on Western Avenue about a mile beyond Trucky's, just outside the Albany city limits in the village of Bergenfield. It was what the papers coyly called controversial and was the Albany area's first 'New York style' gay bar, with black lights, crumpled Reynolds Wrap on the ceiling, and nude go-go boys on a wooden platform that looked like an executioner's scaffolding.
In the back of the Rat's Nest was a separate grope room with a bartender in a dirty jock strap and lighting that would have caused a wildcat strike by any mildly assertive local of the United Mine Workers. The advertising slogan for the Rat's Nest was 'Come in and Act Disgusting,' and when it opened in mid-summer, there were those who predicted the place would be laughed out of existence.
It was not. The Rat's Nest boomed for nearly a month, drawing most of its hundreds of regular customers away from Trucky's, where 'acting disgusting' was much rarer, more random, and not so aggressively institutionalized.
