Chapter 35
35.
In the Bushes
“Sex is one of the holiest of all the divine ceremonies, second only to dancing.”
—Disco Witch Manifesto #16
That morning Lenny got a call from Max’s partner, Heshy. In addition to the lesions they’d found on Max’s brain, he had contracted PCP pneumonia again. His health had declined to the point where they had to accept the fact that he wasn’t going to make it out to the Pines that summer—or possibly ever again.
When Lenny told Howie, it sent him into one of his it’s-the-end-of-the-world moods. It wasn’t that Lenny wasn’t distraught. He was. He loved Max as much as Howie—as much as anyone. But Lenny simply no longer trusted that maintaining the quorum would do much good anyway. He was still questioning whether their magic really had the power Max said it had. Sure, back in the day, when they were at full force, several unexplainably profound events occurred in the face of their twirling dance ceremonies. But had they really caused all of Manhattan to black out in ’77? Did they really create and send transformative dreams to heal the psyches of the brokenhearted? Did they really protect “chosen ones” from succumbing to the Great Darkness? If the holy magic truly existed, would they have lost so many of their fellowship to AIDS? Would the remedial aphrodisiac 101 recipe Lenny himself had prepared for Joe and Fergal’s date night have resulted in Fergal leaving Joe in bed alone? Would Lenny have lost Lucho, and would Max be days away from …
Pah! Lenny thought. It’s all a bunch of bushwa.
All the confusion and bad news made Lenny’s insides bunch up like a wad of overcooked emotional gnocchi. Since booze and cocaine were no longer tools for him to escape, he tended to fall back on the only spiritual salve left to him—sex.
Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, Lenny had been at his sexual peak. He had been adorable, with tanned smooth muscle, a head of hair like a shoe brush, and that alluring Dead End Kid edge. Manhattan’s Midwest transplants ate him up. Wall Street closet cases would invite him to their suites at the Waldorf to act out On the Waterfront fantasies. They called him Chicken Parmigiana Lenny (a nickname he’d invented for himself).
Alas, on his twenty-fourth birthday those vengeful sisters, Gravity and Time, began their cruel makeover. His twenty-eight-inch waist widened into a giant wheel of Pecorino-Reggiano. His face grew puffy. And then his hair began to fall out—his worst nightmare. He tried endless diets, useless fitness machines, terrible hair loss interventions, and every skin-care product sold with the word rejuvenation on the label. Nothing worked—not even joining a coven of Disco Witches. With each fallen follicle “Chicken Parmigiana Lenny” was turning into “Leftover-Lasagna Lenny.” He felt destined to become one of those creepy old perverts whose hands were always getting slapped away at sex parties.
However, Lenny’s real problem was not getting older. As he’d once read in the Disco Witch Manifesto, their coven’s illustrated bible of wisdom and snappy aphorisms: “Desire among the holy lovers does not follow a simple downward trajectory from young to old, from fit to floppy. The same is true for a disco witch. Aging, of course, will alter the topography of love. To remain on the playground of Eros means knowing one’s niche. Shift your strategy! YOU, exactly as you are at this moment, are desired!” Disco Witch Manifesto #221
Lenny hadn’t fully comprehended this particular nugget of disco witch wisdom until much later in life, when he had hit the bottom that is necessary for all great change. At the age of forty-nine, after years of increasingly numbing his self-hatred with various non-magically-approved substances, Lenny experienced a coke-induced heart attack that left him on the brink of death. Thanks to a spiritual intervention by Howie, Dory, Max, and Saint D’Norman, Lenny got sober and embarked on a new adventure of self-discovery as a proud, older, gay man. He made friends with his Pecorino-Reggiano belly, allowed his eyebrows to grow out, ditched his toupee, got into BDSM, and grew a mustache the color of the darkest night. While he still was rejected by many, an equal number of new play pals began knocking at the door of 44 and ⒈／⒋ Picketty Ruff. Sexy men, young and old, craving an afternoon with the newly christened Leather Daddy Lenny.
From the moment he embraced his aging body, he saw sex, and the pursuit thereof, as pure cleansing joy—physically, intellectually, magically, and most important spiritually. Great sex soothed Lenny’s soul. “Sex,” the Disco Witch Manifesto proclaimed, “is one of the holiest of all the divine ceremonies, second only to dancing.”
And that’s why Lenny, feeling all arrabbiato y depresso, decided to head into the Meat Rack that July afternoon to get a booster shot of sexual healing. He didn’t necessarily intend to have sex himself. (He was, after all, saving up for a rigorous sex date later that weekend with a very motivated power bottom named Calixto.) He was merely going to observe others having sex and make notes—something that also helped to clear his head and relax him. He had long kept detailed field notes of gay male mating practices in bathhouses, public toilets, and extemporaneous outdoor cruising venues. Lenny was, some said, the Margaret Meade of gay cruising.
Unfortunately, that afternoon there was very little going on among the trees and bushes in terms of actual sex. Mostly just a bunch of schlubs stumbling around the bushes with their peckers in their hands, hoping for someone else to make the first move. So much for Lenny’s sexual healing. Since it appeared nothing noteworthy was going to transpire, he decided he probably should head back to work. Dying friends or not, toilets had to be scrubbed. On his way back to the path, he noticed a handful of homo hunters had become activated—someone new and/or hot must have entered the activity zone. Tracking their eyes and peckers, Lenny was able to locate the cause: Ronnie Kaminski, Joe’s muscle-bound friend.
Lenny observed for a moment. Ronnie didn’t appear to be looking for sex; rather, he was spreading out a blanket to sun himself on the dunes naked—a frequent habit of ultra-hot men to enjoy soaking in the sun’s rays while also soaking in the validation that came with fifty lust-filled eyeballs. It was no surprise he’d grab a lot of attention, disrupting the natural migration patterns of the Meat Rack—although, Lenny mused, Ronnie’s presence shouldn’t be causing the level of emotional disturbance Lenny was witnessing in the energy of the forest and its inhabitants. Yes, some of the men were staring at Ronnie, but others looked agitated, wandering about erratically. Even more curious, every single man was featuring a boner harder than Manhattan schist, all pointing to the East. Even his own east-facing willy had become oddly turgid despite not feeling attracted to anything he could see. If he hadn’t been so skeptical, this herd of hyper hard-ons would suggest an otherworldly catalyst was disturbing the sexual ecosystem.
Then Lenny felt something he hadn’t experienced in years—something he’d thought had vanished with the power of his coven and his own belief in magic. His head began to spin, his eyes grew momentarily cloudy, and then his eyesight grew blisteringly sharp—so sharp he could see all the way to the eastern entrance to the Rack. There, pushing through the bushes, was a huge man, the height of a bull, with a beard and wearing a leather harness. No one else would have been able to see him at this distance, but Lenny did.
Despite his wavering beliefs, Lenny felt a surge of terror creep into his loins. His ears filled with banshee screams. His nostrils smelled the putrid scent of burning flesh. His mind’s eye witnessed the countless beautiful young men throughout the centuries, wearing expressions of sacrificial agony at the final moments of their lives, pleading for help. The last of these young men was poor, poor Lucho. Lenny, the vision cried, it’s happening again! Do something!
And suddenly Lenny knew with absolute certainty: this bull-sized god entering the Meat Rack was indeed the egregore sent by the Great Darkness on the hunt for the chosen one. But who? It couldn’t be Ronnie, who was far too old. And Joe had failed the rubric.
Lenny needed to get out of the Rack as quickly as possible and let the others know that Howie’s gut had not been lying to him after all.