More Tales of the City Read online

  MORE

  TALES

  OF THE

  CITY

  Armistead Maupin

  Dediction

  For Ken Maley

  Epigraph

  As the poets have mournfully sung,

  Death takes the innocent young,

  The rolling in money,

  The screamingly funny,

  And those who are very well hung.

  W. H. AUDEN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Hearts and Flowers

  Fresh Start

  Widow’s Weeds

  Sisters with a Secret

  Down on the Roof

  Father of the Year

  Letter from Mama

  The Getaway

  Mona Flees

  Animal Magnetism

  The Kindest Cut

  The Cruise Begins

  Mother Mucca’s Proposition

  Life Among the A-Gays

  Fantasy on the Fantail

  The Superman Building

  The House

  Land Ho!

  Baby Talk

  The Landlady’s Lesson

  Bobbi

  Day of the Iguana

  Desperate Straights

  Lady Eleven

  On-the-Job Training

  Cravings

  Vita Saves the Day

  Looking for a Lady

  Company’s Coming

  This Year’s Song

  Family Planning

  Mrs. Madrigal’s Confession

  Once in a Blue Moon

  Interrupted Idyll

  Douchebag

  A Changed Man

  Love on a Rooftop

  The Slumber Party

  Temper, Temper

  The Mysteries of Pinus

  Mona Times Two

  Acapulco Blues

  The Man in White

  Playing Games

  Kinfolks

  Falling in Love Again

  The Trouble with Burke

  Try to Remember

  Back to Babylon

  Key to Her Heart

  DeDe on the Town

  Mama’s Boy

  Table for Five

  Eccentric Old Bachelors

  Reunion on Barbary Lane

  The Road to Ruin

  Mona’s Law

  Heroic Couplets

  To Market, to Market

  The Emergency Room

  Inside Pinus

  Bedside Manner

  The Last Straw

  Bruno Comes Through

  The Girl with Green Hair

  Thinking Out Loud

  Saving the Children

  Letter to Mama

  The End

  Sixty at Last

  The Last of Beauchamp

  Burke’s Bad Dream

  The Proposal

  Ashes to Ashes

  Voice from the Past

  Minor Miracles

  The Shop at St. Sebastian’s

  Meat Loaf at Wounded Knee

  A Poem to Ponder

  Penance

  Riddle at Dawn

  Michael’s Theory

  Father Knows Best

  Burke Explodes

  The Freak Beat

  Homecoming

  The Mountain of the Flood

  Betty

  The Rose Incarnate

  Labor of Love

  Back to Nantucket?

  Questions and Answers

  The Sacred Rock

  Showdown

  The Man Who Wasn’t There

  Tears at the Tivoli

  Descent into Nowhere

  The Way Out

  The Cooler

  The Cult

  Walking Alone

  A Rose Is a Rose

  The Anagram

  Happy Ending

  About the Author

  Praise for More Tales of the City

  BY ARMISTEAD MAUPIN

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Hearts and Flowers

  THE VALENTINE WAS A HANDMADE PASTICHE OF VICTORIAN cherubs, pressed flowers and red glitter. Mary Ann Singleton took one look at it and squealed delightedly.

  “Mouse! It’s magnificent. Where in the world did you find those precious little …?”

  “Open it.” He grinned.

  She turned to the inside of the magazine-size card, revealing a message in Art Nouveau script: MY VALENTINES RESOLUTIONS. Underneath were ten numbered spaces.

  “See,” said Michael, “you’re supposed to fill it in yourself.”

  Mary Ann leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. “I’m that screwed up, huh?”

  “You bet. I don’t waste time with well-adjusted people. Wanna see my list?”

  “Aren’t you mixing this up with New Year’s?”

  “Nah. That’s nickel-dime stuff. Smoking-eating-drinking resolutions. These are the—you know—the hardcore, maybe-this-time, kiss-today-goodbye, some-enchanted-evening resolutions.”

  He reached into the pocket of his Pendleton and handed her a sheet of paper:

  MICHAEL TOLLIVER’S DIRTY THIRTY FOR ‘77

  1. I will not call anyone nellie or butch, unless that is his name.

  2. I will not assume that women who like me are fag hags.

  3. I will stop expecting to meet Jan-Michael Vincent at the tubs.

  4. I will inhale poppers only through the mouth.

  5. I will not spend more than half an hour in the shower at the Y.

  6. I will stop trying to figure out what color my handkerchief would be if I wore one.

  7. I will buy a drink for a Fifties Queen sometime.

  8. I will not persist in hoping that attractive men will turn out to be brainless and boring.

  9. I will sign my real name at The Glory Holes.

  10. I will ease back into religion by attending concerts at Grace Cathedral.

  11. I will not cruise at Grace Cathedral.

  12. I will not vote for anyone for Empress.

  13. I will make friends with a straight man.

  14. I will not make fun of the way he walks.

  15. I will not tell him about Alexander the Great, Walt Whitman or Leonardo da Vinci.

  16. I will not vote for politicians who use the term “Gay Community.”

  17. I will not cry when Mary Tyler Moore goes off the air.

  18. I will not measure it, no matter who asks.

  19. I will not hide the A-200.

  20. I will not buy a Lacoste shirt, a Marimekko pillow, a secondhand letterman’s jacket, an All-American Boy T-shirt, a razor blade necklace or a denim accessory of any kind.

  21. I will learn to eat alone and like it.

  22. I will not fantasize about firemen.

  23. I will not tell anyone at home that I just haven’t found the right girl yet.

  24. I will wear a suit on Castro Street and feel comfortable about it.

  25. I will not do impressions of Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Mae West or Paul Lynde.

  26. I will not eat more than one It’s-It in a single evening.

  27. I will find myself acceptable.

  28. I will meet somebody nice, away from a bar or the tubs or a roller-skating rink, and I will fall hopelessly but conventionally in love.

  29. But I won’t say I love you before he does.

  30. The hell I won’t.

  Mary Ann put down the paper and looked at Michael. “You’ve got thirty resolutions. How come you only gave me ten?”

  He grinned. “Things aren’t so tough for you.”

  “Is that right, Mr. Gay Chauvinist Pig!”

  She attacked the valentine with a
Flair, filling in the first four blanks. “Try that for starters!”

  1. I will meet Mr. Right this year.

  2. He won’t be married.

  3. He won’t be gay.

  4. He won’t be a child pornographer.

  “I see,” said Michael, smiling slyly. “Moving back to Cleveland, huh?”

  Fresh Start

  SHE WAS NOT MOVING BACK TO CLEVELAND. SHE WAS NOT running home to Mommy and Daddy. She knew that much, anyway. For all her trials, she loved it here in San Francisco, and she loved her makeshift family at Mrs. Madrigal’s comfy old apartment house on Barbary Lane.

  So what if she was still a secretary?

  So what if she had not met Mr. Right … or even Mr. Adequate?

  So what if Norman Neal Williams, the one semi-romance of her first six months in the city, had turned out to be a private eye moonlighting as a child pornographer who eventually fell to his death off a seaside cliff on Christmas Eve?

  And so what if she had never worked up the nerve to tell anyone but Mouse about Norman’s death?

  As Mouse would say: “Almost anything beats the fuck out of Cleveland!”

  Mouse, she realized, had become her best friend. He and his spacy-but-sweet roommate, Mona Ramsey, had been Mary Ann’s mentors and sidekicks throughout her sometimes glorious, sometimes harrowing initiation into the netherworld of San Francisco.

  Even Brian Hawkins, an oversexed waiter whose advances had once annoyed Mary Ann, had lately begun to make clumsy yet endearing overtures of friendship.

  This was home now—this crumbling, ivy-entwined relic called 28 Barbary Lane—and the only parental figure in Mary Ann’s day-to-day existence was Anna Madrigal, a landlady whose fey charm and eccentric ways were legendary on Russian Hill.

  Mrs. Madrigal was the true mother of them all. She would counsel them, scold them and listen unflinchingly to their tales of amatory disaster. When all else failed (and even when it didn’t), she would reward her “children” by taping joints of home-grown grass to the doors of their apartments.

  Mary Ann had learned to smoke grass like a seasoned head. Recently, in fact, she had given serious thought to the idea of smoking on her lunch hour at Halcyon Communications. Such was the agony she suffered under the new regime of Beauchamp Day, the brash young socialite who had assumed the presidency of the ad agency upon the death of his father-in-law, Edgar Halcyon.

  Mary Ann had loved Mr. Halcyon a great deal.

  And two weeks after his untimely passing (on Christmas Eve), she learned how much he had loved her.

  “You stay put,” she told Michael gleefully. “I’ve got a valentine for you!”

  She disappeared into the bedroom, emerging several seconds later with an envelope. Mary Ann’s name was scrawled on the front in an assertive hand. The message inside was also hand written:

  Dear Mary Ann,

  By now, you must need a little

  fun. The enclosed is for you

  and a friend. Head for some

  place sunny. And don’t let

  that little bastard give you any trouble.

  Always,

  EH

  “I don’t get it,” said Michael. “Who’s EH? And what was in the envelope?”

  Mary Ann was about to burst. “Five thousand dollars, Mouse! From my old boss, Mr. Halcyon! His lawyer gave it to me last month.”

  “And this ‘little bastard’?”

  Mary Ann smiled. “My new boss, Beauchamp Day. Mouse, look: I’ve got two tickets for a cruise to Mexico on the Pacific Princess. Would you like to go with me?”

  Michael stared at her, slack-mouthed. “You’re shittin’ me?”

  “No.” She giggled.

  “Goddamn!”

  “You’ll go?”

  “Will I go? When? How long?”

  “In a week—for eleven days. We’d have to share a cabin, Mouse.”

  Michael leaped to his feet and flung his arms around her. “Hell, we’ll seduce people in shifts!”

  “Or find a nice bisexual.”

  “Mary Ann! I’m shocked!”

  “Oh, good!”

  Michael lifted her off the floor. “We’ll get brown as a goddamn berry, and find you a lover—”

  “And one for you.”

  He dropped her. “One miracle at a time, please.”

  “Now, Mouse, don’t be negative.”

  “Just realistic.” He was still stinging from a brief affairette with Dr. Jon Fielding, a handsome blond gynecologist who had eliminated Michael as lover material when he discovered him participating in the jockey shorts dance contest at The Endup.

  “Look,” said Mary Ann evenly, “if I think you’re really attractive, there must be plenty of men in this town who feel the same way.”

  “Yeah,” said Michael ruefully. “Size queens.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly!”

  Sometimes Michael was sensitive about the dumbest things. He’s at least five nine, thought Mary Ann. That’s tall enough for anybody.

  Widow’s Weeds

  FRANNIE HALCYON WAS AN ABSOLUTE WRECK. EIGHT weeks after the death of her husband, she still dragged around their cavernous old house in Hillsborough, wondering bleakly if it was finally time to apply for her real estate license.

  Oh, God, how life had changed!

  She was rising later now, sometimes as late as noon, in the futile hope that a shorter day might somehow seem fuller. Her languorous morning coffees on the terrace were a thing of the past, a defunct ritual that had failed her as surely and swiftly as Edgar’s diseased kidneys had failed her.

  Now she made do with a languorous afternoon Mai Tai.

  Sometimes, of course, she drew a glimmer of comfort from the knowledge that she was soon to be a grandmother. Twice a grandmother, actually. Her daughter DeDe—the wife of Halcyon Communications’ new president, Beauchamp Day—was about to give birth to twins.

  That had been the latest report from Dr. Jon Fielding, DeDe’s charming young gynecologist.

  DeDe, however, begrudged her mother the simple indulgence of even discussing her new heirs. She was downright sullen on the subject, Frannie observed. And that struck the matriarch as very strange indeed.

  “And why can’t I dote a little, DeDe?”

  “Because you’re using it, Mother.”

  “Oh, piffle!”

  “You’re using it as an excuse to—I don’t know—an excuse to keep from living your own life again.”

  “I’m half a person, DeDe.”

  “Daddy’s gone, Mother. You’ve got to get it together.”

  “Then let me start shopping for the babies. There’s a precious place called Bebe Pierrot in Ghirardelli Square, and I’m sure I could—”

  “We don’t even know their sexes yet.”

  “Yellow would be darling, then.”

  DeDe frowned. “I loathe yellow.”

  “You love yellow. You’ve always loved yellow. DeDe, darling, what is the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You can’t lie to me, DeDe.”

  “Mother, please … can’t we just …?”

  “I have to feel needed, darling. Can’t you see that? No one needs me anymore.” The matriarch began to sniffle.

  DeDe reached out and took her hand. “The deYoung needs you. The Legion of Honor needs you.”

  Frannie smiled bitterly. “So that’s how it goes, then. When you’re young, it’s your family that needs you. When you’re old, it’s museums.”

  DeDe rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Look, if you’re determined to wallow in self-pity, there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. It’s just such waste, that’s all.”

  Frannie’s eyes were full of tears now. “What in God’s name do you expect me to do?”

  “I expect you …” DeDe softened her tone to one of daughterly concern. “I expect you to start being good to yourself again. Live it up a little. Join a backgammon club. Enroll in Janet Sassoon’s exercise class. Get Kevin Matthews to take you to
the symphony, for heaven’s sake! His boyfriend is on Hydra until June.”

  “I know you’re right, but I—”

  “Look at yourself, Mother! You’ve got the money … you ought to be taking tucks in everywhere!”

  “DeDe!” Her daughter’s impertinence overwhelmed her.

  “Well, I mean it! Why not, for God’s sake? Face, boobies, fanny—the full catastrophe! What in the world have you got to lose?”

  “I simply don’t think it’s very dignified for a woman of my—”

  “Dignified? Mother, have you seen Mabel Sussman lately? Her face is as smooth as a baby’s fanny! Shugie says she found this marvelous man in Geneva who did it all with hypnosis!”

  Frannie blinked in disbelief. “There had to be some sort of surgery.”

  “Nope. All hypnosis—or so Shugie swears on a stack of Town and Countrys.” DeDe giggled wickedly. “Wouldn’t you just die if one of these days somebody clapped their hands or said the secret word or something and the whole damn thing fell like a soufflé!”

  Frannie couldn’t help but laugh.

  And later that afternoon, feeling curiously clandestine, she drove into town to wander through F. A. O. Schwarz in search of a Steiff creature for the twins.

  She felt better now, so she toyed with the idea that maybe DeDe was right. Maybe she had moped too long, longer than was healthy, longer than Edgar himself would have wanted.

  As she left the store, she caught her reflection in the window of Mark Cross. She stopped in her tracks long enough to grasp the flesh under her ears and pull it tight across her cheekbones.

  “All right,” she said out loud. “All right!”

  Sisters with a Secret

  MONA RAMSEY’S LIFE WAS—IN HER OWN WORDS—down to the seeds and stems.

  Once a $25,000-a-year copywriter for Halcyon Communications, she had been relieved of that position following a brief, but satisfying, feminist tirade against the president of Adorable Pantyhose, the ad agency’s biggest client.

  Her subsequent days of leisure as Michael Tolliver’s roommate had been pleasant on a superficial level, but in the long run, emotionally unfulfilled. It was permanence she craved. Or so she had told herself when she moved out of 28 Barbary Lane to take up residence in D’orothea Wilson’s elegant Victorian house in Pacific Heights.

  D’orothea was a Halcyon model, perhaps the highest-paid black model on the West Coast. She and Mona had once been lovers in New York. Their San Francisco arrangement, however, had been devoid of passion, a bloodless pact designed to alleviate the loneliness that had begun to engulf both women.