Everybody Loves You Read Online Free Page B

that. Something clicks off inside them, see. And like this one has this crazy sense of humor … and that one can get everything organized, which the other can’t. And they just go right for each other, so they have someone to talk to, you know. To talk about things together and set aside the cares of the day. They think about each other all the time, too. But that doesn’t mean they have to fuck together.”
    â€œWe come from the same part of the world in the same era,” I said. “The same house, not to put too fine a point on it. Yet I sound like a metropolitan flâneur and you sound like Zane Grey. How did that happen?”
    He laughed. I don’t know the answer myself and anyway this is not our story. But I am telling it. So let me put my oar in here: I had seen plenty of gay couples very much like Dave and Johnny Boy, usually hanging out on Sunday afternoons outside the Ramrod, their eyes dim after a long post-dancing love scene; or strolling the sand at the Grove to greet a lesbian couple and sit down on their blanket, the two women smiling at each other in memory of their own first years together. The cool man and the keen kid, that bracing union of grace and energy that means money in the straight world and love among gays. I tell you, I have seen gay couples exactly like Dave and Johnny Boy—except if you had plunked those two down in our setting, outside the Ramrod or on the beach at Fire Island, they would have stood out like a cancan ensemble in Middle-earth. Of course, this is a difference of culture, not of sexuality. All those tales of tensely available truckers and butchers that I hear (a little too often) from my midwestern friends similarly takes in what you might call enemies of the parish. Still, were Dave and Johnny Boy uninhibited cutups or was something going on there?
    So what is the story about?
    I mean, was something going on that I should know of for future reference? (Like now.)
    Let me tell you.
    *   *   *
    After Dave aimed the cat and petted it and told it to listen for mice, any time someone came through Jim’s door that cat would run up and lay a dead mouse at his feet.
    â€œDon’t you ever run out of these?” I asked, stepping around the mouse to hand Jim the sweater he had asked me to bring back from our folks’. “What is this, Walt Disney’s Cinderella? ”
    â€œThis is cat heaven,” said Jim, throwing the sweater at the couch.
    Dave, holding a quart of Dewar’s, caught it in the air. “I’ll drink to that,” he said. After taking a swig the size of the wave that obliterated Atlantis, he told me, “Tell Waterloo the cat how your book is coming.”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œHear that, Waterloo?”
    â€œFucking mice bodies,” said Jim, kicking the latest one out into the hall.
    Johnny Boy was still out—as Jim put it—tomcatting on Dave. That means that one of the girls who lined up for him had lucked in and Johnny Boy was bunking with her and only saw Dave by day on the site.
    â€œHere’s a nice sweater,” said Dave, playing with it. “I could use me one of these some time when it gets cold. Where do you get them?”
    â€œAny store,” I told him.
    â€œIt’s a fucking old used sweater,” said Jim.
    â€œNice color,” said Dave. “What color of shade is this?”
    â€œCharcoal grey,” I said.
    â€œThat is a real uptown shade for a sweater on the site, yo Jimbo?”
    Then Dave looked at me because I was staring at him.
    â€œWhat’s on your mind, my friend?” he asked me.
    What was on my mind was what this story is about, but before I could answer we heard a man scream in the hall. Jim pulled the door open, and there was one of his neighbors, in a vested suit and carrying an attaché. He blushed.
    â€œI … I thought I saw a mouse,” he announced.
    â€œWell, now, that mouse belongs to