I don't remember that first kiss, really, but I do remember remembering the trend of those jokes while there, in the toilet. Actually, when I had first heard them I hadn't thought them funny. I had been a bit embarrassed in Bill's presence when he talked like that. And they certainly WERE NOT funny when they had meaning. I felt like doing almost anything but laughing. It must have been about that time, too, when I remembered Bill's telling about him and his buddies in the Navy rolling "goddamnqueers" and kicking the whoring hell out of them.

The next thing I remember I was back at the bar. Helen Love was singing "Saint Louis Blues." Wally's leg was pressing mine, under the bar, again. should hit him, I thought. That's what Bill would do.

I drank my drink.

"Where are you staying?"

His tone was casual, though suggestive.

"At the hotel across the street.'

"Want to get a bottle and go up to your room for a drink?"

"Yes," I said. I thought: and I'll hit you across the face with it. I'd remembered that he had implied that I was like he was . . . "It takes one to know one."

And Bill's words came back to me: "We couldn't let those broads get away from us, money or no money. So, you know what we did, Ralph? We found ourselves a goddamnqueer, rolled him and kicked the whoring hell out of him. We got the dough for some genuine ass. Yes, sir, Ralph, that's what we did, all right. That's the only thing that a real, full-blooded he-man can do."

We'll get a bottle and I'll hit him across the god-across the face with it, I told myself. I would be as much of a man as Bill was.

We had gotten out of the elevator on my floor, the seventh, and he had clutched my hand as we walked down the deserted hall before I remembered that we had forgotten the bottle.

Inside my hotel room, I locked the door and he embraced me as he had done in the nightclub restroom.

Only this time it was different. A strangeness came over me in a way that made it seem familiar. At the same time that I was becoming sexually aroused more intensely than I had ever been before, I felt relaxed as though for the first time in my life. An opposing combination, creating satisfaction-no, gratification. A weight that I hadn't known I carried was lifted from my shoulders. and I thought I would burst with an unimaginable, demanding surge of emotions, freshly freed from the captivity of repression. My arms went around him in return and our bodies pressed hard together.

I vaguely thought: what would Bill think! To hell with Bill!

Undressed and in bed, I knew that if there was to be any "hitting" involved it would be that I would hit it off with Wally and, perhaps, with all of the other uninhibited inhabitants of this special society which would be, from that time forward, my world.

BE SURE TO

READ

in March Harper's Magazine, "New York's 'Middle-class' Homosexuals," by William J. Helmer, a fair-minded article with a sociological slant. Full review in April ONE.

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