I started my quest for Blonds
the day I discovered I wasn’t one.
By Blonds Obsessed
Hollywood Tower Hotel 1981
Tadzio’s Story
1
California Dreamin’
Hollywood. 5 AM. The Ides of March. This is what it is. After a hard day’s night under red light doing standup sex at the Meat Rack. A soak in a steaming bathtub in a white-tiled room in the Hollywood Tower Hotel that in better days catered to movie stars in the Roaring Twenties. Vacationing in my dear old friend O’Riley’s apartment. The steaming hot water running from the tap. Like life blood. The authority of my sexuality, natural as breathing, guiding me. Enough of my life lived to intuit the rest. I flew PSA down from San Francisco to Hollywood/Burbank three days ago. LA plays itself and I play it as it lays. I am a hunter born to the hunt. Cruising is sex without a return address. Incognito sex is always fresh. In all of gay LA, there isn’t a load of cum more than eight hours old.
Tonight I am the night porter. I’ve learned life lessons since I came out at sixteen, fifteen years ago. All my lovers gone. Asleep in other beds. Having their own private dreams which they always had anyway. Me soaking alone stoned and far from lonely on the remains of a gay cocktail: a little half hit of lovely sweet ecstasy. All this brings the cold sweat of clarity cuz I got dem ol’ Cavafy Blues. For blond men.
My Tadzio. My blond Tadzio dead, dead, and dead. Young men aren’t supposed to die and miss the joys of gay life in full. The tub comforts me. Warms me in these last hours before dawn. The last of the night Ingmar Bergman called The Hour of the Wolf. Gay life is pretending everything’s fine while the world hates you and holds you hostage by law, and you still lick your plate.
This is the vintage hotel founded as “La Belle Tour” where La Belle Judy Garland on the skids in the Sixties hustled her rough-trade fucks up the elevator to the penthouse. On its roof at 6200 Franklin its famous neon “Hollywood Tower” sign overlooks the northbound Hollywood Freeway that runs rushing like a river rapids outside the window six stories below, deathly silent now this early Sunday morning. This place. This hour. This darkness. This isn’t the bottom. Far from it. It’s the bottom line. A perfect morose delectation to start the new day. Coming down and heading toward daylight faces you toward truth. You can’t have sex with close to 13,000 men you trusted with your body and not know more about yourself than your parents who only fucked each other.
I pull the white-rubber plug with my toe. The sudsy water sinks slow ebb tide around the continent of my body. Steam rises from the islands of my pecs and belly and knees. My fanatic heart pumps up visions of blonds rising in the steam. An ancient diaspora of First Blonds, Eurasian nomads, migrants cruising out from Siberia with sword and seed and song siring long lines of intercontinental blonds like the results of evolution I played with last night My dick whacked to a night’s pulp remembers those wild Hollywood gods and starts and throbs once, twice. The peninsula of my penis rolling in the surf of the receding water.
Gentlemen who prefer blonds embrace their vocation without borders. Walt Whitman whose flesh was his poem loved men of “every hue and caste.” I’m a sucker for rainbow blonds. The whiter-shade of pale Viking blonds.The surprise of dusky Black blonds. The hot corona of Latin blonds. The unicorn of Asian blonds. I read in The New Yorker that blondness evolved eons ago and spread like the red hair of marauding Vikings.
When manliness is there in blonds, it’s all right there in front of you. Carnal sex, Divine eros. The fetish for a blond Platonic Ideal is heaven to anyone obsessed like Edmund White writing about blonds and to anyone obsessed with other complexions like Andrew Holleran writing about Puerto Ricans and Robert Mapplethorpe filming Blacks while the cast of Hair was singing, “Black boys are delicious.” It hardly matters if a blond has a body like a Greek god or a Greek salad. We each color our blond rainbow blank with what captivates our desire. Fate drafts you. The heart wants what the heart wants. To thine own self be true is revolutionary.
It’s as impossible to reconcile my song of myself to politically correct fundamentalist gays perpetually at odds with their bodies as it was to reconcile science and religion at the Scopes Monkey Trial. Do I hear banjos? My deliverance, my first blond orgasm, was a teenage religious experience, cuming in my popcorn box in the balcony of a second-run discount fleapit watching the blond Tab Hunter lead a squadron of World War I blond airmen to love and death and glory in Lafayette Escadrille.
I wrap myself in O’Riley’s big terrycloth beach towels. He’s asleep with one of the flotsam and jetsam of vagabond hustlers floating day and night through his apartment where he films them lunging at his camera for his Old Reliable video company. Yesterday afternoon I bedded the latest of his models, a blond dish of seafood delivered fresh from the Navy at San Diego. Playful in bed. Affectionate. Wild blue eyes. Stunning white teeth. Role-playing gay for pay. My coxswain made me feel like a veteran Master-at-Arms on the SS Herman Melville fucking sailor-boy Billy Budd’s butt to full-blown rose.
Who doesn’t run movies in their head while they fuck to fill in the blanks of empty tricks? Yesterday I imagined my Billy’s shotgun conception years ago. A condom breaking in a pickup truck at a drive-in movie in Oklahoma. Lightning flashing. Thunder crashing. Shotsie and Jake. Okie teens hot in the humid rain. Ignoring Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. Accidental parents baking this bouncing Billy’s babycakes — at the same moment I was marching on Washington that August of ’63, that last summer of Camelot, cheering JFK, and King having his dream.
I figure this blond sailor is the first man I’ve fucked who wasn’t born when Jack Kennedy was shot. He touched my moustache, and then touched his own cookie duster. “I want mine,” he said, “big and thick like yours.” I gave him forty dollars. Including a tip for the flattery. More than the minimum wage for hustler meat at the Spotlight dive bar on Cahuenga in Hollywood. Just stuck it in his shoe. So he could go out later this morning for breakfast with his new girlfriend.
I traipse off barefoot to the dark living room where the VCR reads 5:44. Too horny to sleep. Too full of my straight seaman. Too full of that kickline of leg-lifting blond LA leather hunks I balled at the Meat Rack on Santa Monica Boulevard. Too full of the sandy-blond San Francisco cop I told last week I could never again be exclusive. But not too full to drive the Sunday morning freeways with mucho gusto to Muscle Beach in Venice. Blonds are French fries and potato chips. You can’t eat just one.
If space aliens looked only at my photo collection to calculate what Earth males look like, they’d gabble: “Blonds? Blonds? What’s with blonds?” I’m willing victim of this passion for blond men ancient tribes sacrificed to the Sun. Out of the armies that have marched over me, blonds lead the charge. No man should fear to admit the basic truth of his life in the dawn’s early light. In fact, it’s quite monastic and rather romantic to pare one’s life and taste down to its erotic simplicity.
I’ve romanced blonds as far as a non-blond can crash a blond party. We’re from different planets, but our gravity aligns because homosexuality exists across the universe. Oddly, some blonds reflect very little on their blondness, or, don’t like other blonds. I started my quest for blonds the day I discovered they were what I wasn’t. A stiff dick has no conscience, but from my passion I’ve deduced a certain ethic. Is it okay to make a fetish out of one sexy trait? Blondness? Blackness? Of a part representing the whole? Without reducing the man who may indeed be “a dick” to something less than a whole person? What a song and dance. Sort of like Bette Midler in The Rose, I live my life for blond men who spin me into vertigo and qucken my blood.
O’Riley’s video-recorder reads 6:12 AM. Outside, a new dawn rises in the orange smog spewing from tailpipes. Hardly any traffic cruises up the Hollywood Freeway except maybe for little old ladies who swear they only drive their car to church on Sundays. From the bedroom down the hall, I hear the sighing of my sleeping sailor whose scent is damp in his white cotton T-shirt tossed on the couch. I sniff and laugh at myself. I’m wired, awake, alone, and alive in LA, down from Folsom Street and Castro Street, to scout new talent among Southern California blonds. I take a hit from the T-shirt pits. Better than popper. Am I too hungry? Like Sebastian Venable. Tired of dark meat? Try light. Try blonds. Doesn’t everybody have a hungry heart? For something inexplicable.
I don’t try to understand this passion, this magical thinking of masturbation that puts me in thrall to blonds who can hustle me for anything they want. And they have done because I let them. Blonds have more fun because gentlemen grant everything the fair-haired boys assume is their gay birthright. Without any visible means of support, dropdead blonds drive Corvettes, and fly off to Puerto Vallarta. All expenses paid. As if by magic.
Blonds live different lives. Are different people. Are treated differently from boyhood. Blonds tell me how blond men passing in the street acknowledge their fraternity exchanging glances like a tip of the hat. Blond men dazzle, reflecting more light than they absorb. Atomic blond bombshells radiate nuclear energy. They move through the world with the Dionysian grace of young satyrs seeing themselves reflected in other men’s eyes. The cynical O’Riley says blonds are erotic fascists with notions of superiority just like all the bad-boy ex-con delinquents he hires and his customers jerk off to.
Is it narcissism for a blond to groom his gift? To cum studying his own looks? Because the gift of blondness is fragile, and needs balanced tending, a blond can nose dive from beauty to beast, can fall very fast from grace with the sea if he is not very careful in his attitude about his gift. Narcissism is a blond’s fatal flaw, his Kyrptonite. As long as he tends his gift without vanity, he is the kind of Blond Adonis who reminds us in these post-hippie punk days of the way for good or for bad that blond men, military or athletic or redneck or collegiate were once the ideal American Dream of the homophobic 1950s — when Edward Albee made a god of a midwestern beauty he described as an All-American blond “type,” a muscular hustler starring as “The Young Man” who is called “the American Dream” in his play The American Dream.
Like Melville’s beatific Billy Budd, blond men are mythic reminders of Adam before the Fall. Like Melville, Whitman, and Tennessee Williams, I’m a sucker for the magnetic pull of blonds who steal scenes they’re not even in. I ache for their ancient male innocence, integrity, and virtue.
I feel at one with Walt Whitman before the Civil War sitting in Pfaff’s gay bar in Greenwich Village, oggling blonds, juggling his homomasculine Calamus emotions at the corner of Broadway at Bleeker, ten minutes from our wild West Side Piers, describing a blond man like my Tadzio and a dark Irish man like me.
“We two boys together clinging,” parting for a journey or forever: “What think you I take my pen in hand to record?” Walt asked.
As I ask now.
“I record two simple men I saw to-day, on the pier, in the midst of the crowd, parting the parting of dear friends; The [dark] one to remain hung on the other’s neck, and passionately kiss’d him, While the [blond] one to depart, tightly prest the one to remain in his arms.”
I remember my Tadzio not for his disappearance but for his presence.
The terrycloth towels have cooled in the predawn chill. I’m wrapped now in a large baby-blue thermal blanket thinking of fresh white jockstraps bulging tight against tanned blond skin photographers pay extra to shoot for gay magazines and movies. Ask O’Riley. Blonds attract cameras, cash, and cum.
In this Matins vigil, in this twilight of the male gods pushing dawn, my head speeds, mind races, heart pounds, dick hardens. I may have to jerk off, may have to take care of saluting blondness right now, meditating in this apartment of beautiful Santa Monica Boulevard hustlers, because an aching nostalgia lurking in my soul impels me to indulge myself in shivers of sweet grief and sorrow and joy over my dear dead Tadzio and all my blonds who have come and gone with the wind the way the tornado blew Judy Garland over the rainbow to the Hollywood Tower Hotel.
2
Tadzio
Of all the blonds, there was one singular sensation, my Tadzio, who for three brief years at the high end of the 1970s was my Blond Lover. I listened to him because no one ever asks all the dropdead Tadzios pursued around the world to tell their side of the story. In late-night pillow talk, my Tadzio confessed everything: how he benefited from blondness, lived off it, and was lost because its temptations had spoiled him. He told me he grew up like an actor forced into street theater by a sidewalk audience looking at him the way the dark Streisand drooled buckets over the blond Redford in The Way We Were.
He knew how to pose on stage and off. Self-defense made him fluent in dramatic gestures from a beckoning finger to a come-hither grin, a squint of blue eye, a turn of sculpted head, a curl of lip, a rub of thumb over the grin of his moustache. In the theater of our bedroom of lights and mirrors and cameras and projectors, he revealed how he could change looks from college jock to Marine captain to California Highway Patrol trooper to every look that always looks good on a man, but always looks better on a blond. Some nights, he who could have anyone he wanted, invited another hot blond in to role play Lucky Pierre, and we three would put on a show.
My Tadzio was, I think, in this hour before dawn, too infinitely perfect to last in an imperfectly finite world. Last summer his brilliant blond body suddenly turned on him, cancerous, metastasizing, and he shrank away last fall like a spent harvest Sun sinking in a smooth sea of white hospital sheets. “I’ll never leave you but once,” he said last Christmas, gone before New Year’s Eve two months ago.
I’m grieving still, jonesing like an addict for blonds, like a hard-boiled detective in a Raymond Chandler novel: “The blonde was enough to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” But I can’t be sad, not forever, because while we balled, we loved. He took me to his heart of blondness. I held his hand and told him, “I’d die for you.” He said, “Live for me.”
During our affair, my Tadzio told me about his boyhood, about being a closeted blond teenager, about the girl who worshiped his high-school muscles and threw herself from his moving car when he told her he was gay. He gave me snapshots from his life to add to the photos I shot of him: his white towhead at age two in his red Radio Flyer wagon; at nine, with the fall of blond hair wet on his forehead as he climbs into an old wooden rowboat, smiling into his father’s camera; at eleven, sitting in a Sunday School suit, all blond seriousness, with a Bible in his lap; at twenty-two, as a blond Marine PT instructor; at thirty, in an LAPD motorcop’s high-booted breeches uniform that was his fetish; at thirty-two, in the first of the five physique contests he entered, introducing me as his coach with a wink to the judges who were mostly meek closeted men in their fifties or sixties.
Audiences went berserk for his radiant Command Presence. Straight men cheered knowing-not-knowing what they cheered. Women called out his name. We drove home four out of the five contests in his maroon Corvette Stingray crowded full of First Place and Most Muscular trophies. I treasure the photos and the movies I shot. If man is created in the image of God, then images of man are images of God. Now he’s dead I’ve made a bedroom altar of my holy pictures of him surrounded by flowers and candles and his championship trophies.
As he lay dying with his looks slipping away, going, gone, in time-lapse, lost, erased even before our last Christmas eleven weeks ago, he reckoned his blondness. I heard his Last Confession. How sex was sacramental human connection for him. How he handled his sex appeal without doing harm. How he was always grateful for the gift. Many a night in his life before me, my Tadzio said, when he was home alone posing under spots into mirrors, he would jerk off in salute to a greater Blond Entity he worshiped beyond himself.
“And when I’d cum,” he said, holding my hand in his hand flat over his beating failing heart, “when I was alone and cuming and looking in the mirror at all this me that was not me, all I could say to God, or whoever, is, ‘Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!’”
His beauty was his vocation. Over and over, so many nights in our bedroom, he kept perspective and said “Thank you” to me like a god thanking an adoring priest. I had more sex with him than with any other man. Not just sex. Hundreds of nights of ritual blondness. Palming the clipped nape of his neck. Sniffing his face. Studying the golden fur on his vascular forearms. Rubbing the animal pelt of his washboard belly. Licking his blond armpits and sweet blond asshole. Jerking in rhythm to match his long strokes on his dick. He was an iconic blond to me.
He had Universal Appeal. On Castro Street, cars rear-ended each other. Men fell up stairs. Restaurants grew silent when we entered. One Sunday afternoon walking south with Tadzio on the narrow Castro sidewalk, we watched Rudolf Nureyev walking with friends north toward us, passing us by inches, turning around doing a vaudeville double-take looking back at my Tadzio who was too cool to pirouette.
“You want Rudy? I can disappear for a couple hours.”
Because Tadzio was all men to me, I offered all men to him.
“No,” he said, and kissed my fingers. “Not now.”
I’m not sure he really died. Like a first love, he’ll never be dead to me. A man’s Tadzio never dies. I soaked up his body and soul, blood and seed, in my body, heart, and soul. He was from another star. He was to me a god sent to me, and gods never die. They transcend. They rise from the dead like day from dark. As he lay disappearing in that ICU in San Francisco General, perhaps whoever sent him to Earth was beaming him back up to the heavens he came from.
It’s 6:36. All quiet on the Western Front of good old La Belle Tour. I’m awake the way gay men wake glad to be gay. If I close my eyes, is it possible I might die and, like Old Souls, join my Tadzio? Everyone lies slugabed knocked out asleep. O’Riley tangled in his sheets with that tattooed Alabama hustler whose brother is arriving later today. A young Mexican boxer out cold snoring naked on the couch. The casting couch. By 3 PM, O’Riley will pay him to jerk off on camera for his Old Reliable mail-order video company. Tonight the boxing campeón will use the cash to treat his slag punk girlfriend at McDonald’s and brag he’s a porn star.
Outside, the freeway traffic will soon rouse them.
Sometimes I wonder if my Tadzio really existed at all. Maybe I was just tripping out on sex and drugs and rock-n-roll for the last three years. But I have all his letters, a thousand photographs, three hours of the Super-8 Technicolor movies I shot of him posing nude, his clothes still smelling like him, his brass cock ring, his uniforms, his physique trophies and posing trunks. And always, sad dreams of him. I also have a small wooden reliquary box full of the soft hair I dry-shaved from his body to make him smooth for physique contests. Fine, silky, fragrant. I sometimes want to spin the straw of that hair into masturbatory gold, touch it, sniff it, brew it, steep it, sip it. My cum and cup runneth over all those beautiful blond clippings. My God, can a man ever know how much a man loves him and misses him?
Being blond did not always make him happy. Queer cannibals accosted him, presumed he hustled, grabbed at him. Gay bodybuilders jealous of his build punched at his muscles out of aggression mixed with lust. Big-budget porn directors bedeviled him.
I’m not responsible for their happiness,” he said, “but I don’t want to make them unhappy.”
Even if he hadn’t been blond, he was astonishingly hot. Street photographers and vacationing families on Walking Tours of the Castro took aim at him. Flash units. Super-8 cameras. Sex-tourist boys from the midwest shot from the hip, and ran, flying back to Kansas jerking off to their vacation pictures. He was determined to be pleasant to them all. He was amused by the attention. He never grew cynical. Even when one local paparazzo turned a picture of him and me into a postcard for sale for a buck in boutiques and bookstores on Castro Street.
Hardly anyone ever told him the truth. Men who couldn’t believe their eyes told him what they thought he wanted to hear to please him to get him into the sack because they wanted to bag a Trophy Blond who would give them a Blond Fix to die for. Hardly anyone wanted him for his self. I had to work to get around his sex appeal, had to discount it, had to pretend it did not exist. In order to love him for himself, and not just for his looks, or for my reflected glory standing next to him on the streets, in gyms, in bars, in threeways, and on postcards. I examined my conscience and worked my way around the vivifying virility of his homomasculine identity. And loved him even more. He was a handsome man with a handsome soul and handsome is as handsome does.
He was the Sun. I was the Moon. I’m left eclipsed, aching for my Tadzio the way the dark Thomas Mann and the darker Dirk Bogarde mooned over the sunny blond Tadzio in Death in Venice. No one ever suspects the burden of tension and terror, the anxiety and sadness closeted inside men of great beauty. The Tadzio’s, the great beauties of the gay world, suffer insults and eros silently. Some nights my vocation was to hold my Tadzio to comfort him, this brawny hunk the cocksuckers pursued as an object to be blown and thrown away like a cumrag.
For his sake, because of his bewildered pain at finding the dark side of existence, I’m glad-not-glad he’s dead. He was an innocent who wanted the world to be bright and light for everyone. Quentin Crisp said, “There is no great dark man.” Poor Quentin. Would it console him that there was a great blond man.
Thank the gods blondness lives on in other men where it finds its Platonic Ideal, this season in one Tadzio, next season in another. Any man can stay in bloom for many decades if he tends his gifts. O’Riley’s urban legend about blond fascism often damns blonds. Our nasty world of race wars suspects Nazis lurk everywhere, even in the erotic drawings of fascists by Rex and Tom of Finland, and in the close-up of the apple-cheeked Hitler Youth in Cabaret exploiting his blondness to transform his simple folk song about landscape, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” into a singalong Nazi anthem with a “Sieg Heil” finale.
This early morning Sun sucks the dark from my soul. I’m feelin’ groovy. California dreamin’ on such a winter’s day. For a week, the Santa Ana winds have blown hot at the beaches. I slip a cassette into the video player and watch electronic blonds in a collage of blonds filmed by O’Riley in this apartment. It reveals why the Marine Corps recruits teens with aspirational posters of manly blond archetypes gung-ho with predatory blond chins. I grease up my hand. I put my hand on my morning wood. I fold tender blonds to myself. I hold twinkie blonds and big chunky balding beefy blonds tight in my arms. I know that Death will be a Big Blond. I know that Charon ferrying souls like my Tadzio and me and men like us across the Styx must be a blond. I ache for the best blond muscleman I ever fed and clothed and housed and fucked and loved, and hope his soul rests blond-bright with light forever.
In years to come, the mournful surge of Mahler’s Adagio from his Fifth Symphony will bring tears to my rheumy old eyes in San Francisco where my face will melt like Gustav von Aschenbach’s face besotted with the blond Tadzio he never touched at the Grand Hotel des Bains in Venice. I’ll stare wistfully into the eyes of ever younger blonds, hoping to see my Tadzio’s blue eyes looking back, an Old Soul reincarnated. “Come back, Tadzio. Come back.” Old Souls destined to meet and meet again.
Ritual smoke and bud sacred to native peoples and acid can in one night raise consciousness higher than a lifetime of meditation and analysis. So I hit my madeleine of Proustian poppers. Harold Pinter answered everyone’s question about searching for Lost Time in his Proust Screenplay: “Time that was lost is found and fixed for ever in art.” And in the magical thinking of masturbation.
Raising my Tadzio from the dead, I palm my cock with my right hand. With my left had, I feel the sumptuous curves of Tadzio’s body memorized in the palm of that hand that I wave through mid-air imitating Picasso drawing one of his luminous light paintings in thin air with a pen light in a dark room. When I was a boy, I used my Fourth of July sparklers to trace glowing wire outlines of stick figures hanging — come alive for a blinding moment — in the dark night air, burning into my eyes for a fleeting minute. I draw Tadzio flowing in the fiery outline of Transfiguration from the fingers of my left hand, posing in the dark air of my dark room, burning bright, loving me, gracing me in a fall of sparks like stars. I begin incanting my ritual masturbation chants. Blonds contain multitudes. I invoke a Litany of Blond Saints to raise my cone of power.
Introibo ad Altare Deorum
Beach blonds..Gym blonds.
Ora pro nobis.
Puppy blonds. Preppie blonds.
Married Baby Daddy blonds.
Ora pro nobis.
Tattooed blonds. Trucker blonds.
Carnival Blonds. Clergyman blonds.
Southern blonds with southern drawls.
Ora pro nobis.
Harley blonds. Redneck blonds.
Cigar blonds. Cop blonds.
Leather blonds. Bear blonds.
Homomasculine blonds.
Ora pro nobis.
All-American fading blonds
who played a little ball in college.
Teabagging perversatile blonds.
Bristled square-jaw blonds
sanding me smooth with raspy blond stubble.
Deo gratias.
Yesterday’s able-bodied seaman was one of the most sparkling champagne blonds from all the blonds O’Riley gift wraps for my birthdays and holidays. O’Riley is sophisticated. Civilized. Generous. He feeds my obsession. He gets off giving me blonds. The first gift years ago was a twenty-two-year-old strawberry-blond fireman from Travis Air Force Base outside San Francisco: a young husband, the daddy of a two-year-old chip off the old block. He was my first pay for play. I had stage fright. At a loss what to do.
“Hustlers are minimalists.” O’Riley said, “You have to direct the mattress-movie you paid for and he agreed to.”
Like everyone in LA, I always wanted to direct. So I focused and fucked the way blond sacrifices should be fucked into manhood. I fucked that little Air Force dream of a daddy face to face, his legs on my shoulders, his eyes locked on mine, me cupping the nape of his strong blond neck in my clasped hands as I popped his cherry (he swore), kissing tonguing sniffing his hay-fever breath through the straw of his blond moustache.
Beware of blonds who will cash in and drive you crazy. You give them your money. You give them your hungry heart. They look at you curiously. The subtle ways only a blond can give attitude to a non-blond. As hot as blonds get, even as hot as my Tadzio, there’s always that icy cold blond Center of Solitude. Of privacy. Where no non-blond can go. Alfred Hitchcock, jerking off to the blond mystique, tormented blonde actresses on screen, and Franz Kafka, a true hunger artist, was so hungry he liked to lick the legs of tall blond Swedish boys.
Two years ago, Bette Midler in The Rose, the movie Tadzio loved, was obsessed, driven, fucked, killed by blond men. Haunted by an iconic poster of the blond James Dean, Rose is gangbanged on the fifty-yard line by the southern blond football team. She takes up with a brown-blond chauffeur, and then with a young blond soldier. During her concerts, the young security roadie at the lip of the stage repeatedly parades his protective blondness into her close-ups. His constant presence is like some bright guardian angel between Rose and the dark crush of her fans.
Finally, a paunchy blond leftover from the football team sells Rose bad dope that kills her while a new generation of football blonds practices in the background. The Rose could die for blonds. And does. In the end, the young blond soldier turns into the Blond Angel of Death who switches out the naked lightbulb in Rose’s garage, dimming out the last fading image of James Dean’s tousled blond head.
It’s 6:54 on the VCR. What light through yonder window breaks is brighter than the lamplight I’m burning. It’s the east and Tadzio is the Sun. The traffic on the Hollywood Freeway is picking up. Sunday morning rush. Church. Brunch. Beach. Soon my sailor asleep in the other room will awaken, stretch, and walk naked toward me, dick ahoy, like a sleepy young god rising from the sea with vine leaves in his hair. We bonded in bed, but years from now, next week, this lonely sailor telling fish stories to his buddies will turn me into one of his girls in every port. If by port, he means his ass.
Because of blonds, I thank Dellingr, the blond Norse God of Dawn, that all across Los Angeles, blond wannabe studs are waking up with morning hardons, pissing, shaving, showering, powering out nude push-ups, packing their dicks and butts into their tight 501 Button Fly Levi’s, leaving the top two buttons undone as an invitation to the dance.
I’ve cum once more at O’Riley’s kitchen table jotting these ramblings. That’s how I write in my journal recalling good times, stroking a hardon. I write a scene of pastness and then jerk off to conjure more remembered visions. I live it up to write it down. I know I’m done writing when I cum.
One thing I know for sure is blonds can break your heart. My Tadzio left me because of cancer he caused in himself. With poisonous steroids that make blond muscle bigger and harder. But with terrible side effects. His immune system crashed. His liver turned to pudding. If only I’d known.
“The steroids,” his ICU doctor told me, “are an insult to the body, but this is something else. We’ve never seen,” she said, “a patient so distressed.”
Sometimes a blond will sell his soul to be more of what he is. I worshiped him down to the fatal flaw of his vanity. He wanted more of what he had too much of.
That was the rise and fall of my Tadzio’s story.
It’s a little after 7 AM. I could eat.
O’Riley’s automatic coffee pot perks bubbling and brewing. The drifting aroma from the kitchen will soon wake all the sleeping dudes to the gorgeous gay morning after the gorgeous gay night before, and we will Begin the Beguine all over again. We’ll play it as it lays. While alive, we live.
“Good Morning, LA!” Down the hall, O’Riley’s bedside clock-radio sounds reveille. “It’s 7:15 on a glorious Sunday morning. The National Weather Service forecasts mild Santa Ana winds bringing unseasonable heat and low humidity. Expect 85 smoggy degrees in downtown LA and 80 and clear at the beaches in Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu. Stay tuned to KIIS-FM for all the latest hits, news, weather, and sports. Now number one on the charts, here’s ABBA, ‘The Winner Takes It All.’”
Outside the Hollywood Tower on the Hollywood Freeway, Hollywood horns honk streaming by in the Hollywood dawn. Today I’ll buy two more bottles of Visine eyedrops so I can see to drive my rental car back through the burning smog to the fresh air at Venice Beach where the boys are. Biking. Pumping weights. Posing in the Iron Pit. Flying like its the Olympic Games on the Muscle Beach arena of rings, parallel bars, ropes, and swings. I do not speak to them. I let the exhibitionists slowly discover me as the voyeur they need. I video them without invading their privacy. They pretend they are not performing for my camera.
I’m in awe but not afraid of cornering straight beauty for art and pleasure. Straight men do not scare me the way heterophobe gays fear them. I am a camera. I’m not Gustav von Aschenbach dying on the beach. I’m not Sebastian Venable eaten alive on the beach. My sunscreen never runs — like a dying old queen’s mascara and hair dye — down my face at the beach.
Because LA is lights-camera-action and everyone is a star, my relentless camera invites show-off blonds in Speedos to perform gymnastic tricks with chalked hands on the still rings powering out Planche and Iron Cross positions cruciform like hunky Jesus himself because I could be a talent scout for Paramount’s sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Mortals can’t resist the catnip of these brand-new home-video cameras that make them immortal.
Shirtless beach boys, always auditioning, performing acrobat flips and dips on the parallel bars try to pull my camera to them jumping up to the horizontal high bars, spinning round and round, gaining speed, doing a flyaway, letting go, twisting, arch and snap, no hands, taking visible free flight, angels defying gravity for a heartbeat moment, flipping up to a divine salto, then down, dismounting, sticking perfect layout landings in the hot burning sand.
I can’t have them, but I can have them later that night — summoning their bodies with the planchette of my remote control commanding the Ouija board of my video screen, conjuring the ghost of my Tadzio on their magical blondness because there’s more than one way to raise one’s lover from the dead.
“Live for me.”
Monday: Disneyland.
“Live for me.”
Tuesday: Saint Paddy’s Day! Slainte, Baby!
I love the game of the game. I’ll drive once again to Muscle Beach, bewitched, bothered, bedazzled on the Ocean Front boardwalk, standing with the lads outside O’Brien’s Pub on the strand, sharing rounds of pints with blond Danny Boys, cruising to find my Tadzio alive and well.
On the Promenade, I’ll seek my lover standing among the spirited blond surfers with six-hour loads playing life as it lays, feeling young and immortal with no thought yet of death in Venice.