Strachey's Folly - Stevenson Richard - Страница 26

Timmy said, "Suter sounds perfectly infuriating. Neurotic and nasty and infuriating."

"I despise Jim Suter," Dormer suddenly sputtered, his face red with anger. "I am not a man who holds grudges normally. But I can honestly say I hate Jim Suter now and I will always hate Jim Suter. When I met Jim three years ago, I had just come out of a seven-year relationship. I was lonely and desperate and without hope. I felt like the breakup was my fault. Now I know it was both our faults, but at the time I was convinced I was a worthless piece of shit.

"Then I met Jim. And for exactly one week I felt human again. I was in love, and I felt loved. Until, that is, Jim stopped answering his phone with no explanation. And when I camped outside his door until he came home late one Sunday night— with another guy I recognized as the day-shift supervisor at the Capitol South metro station—Jim just took me aside and said he really didn't appreciate being stalked. Stalked! He said he wasn't comfortable with people who were as obsessive as I was, but he wished me luck finding someone who was into that type of thing."

"Into obsession?" Timmy asked, incredulous. "Yes!"

Vicknicki said, "Martin's story might sound extreme, but mine was similar. Nearly identical, in fact."

"I guess it's safe to conclude," I said, "that Suter has a lot of people in his life whom he's hurt so badly that they might be compelled to get even."

"Revenge-wise," Dormer said, "Peter and I have to be just the tip of the iceberg."

"But you didn't submit the AIDS quilt panel as a kind of macabre joke to embarrass or hurt Suter?"

"Of course not. Don't be ridiculous," Vicknicki said quietly.

He paused and went on, "Martin and I are both HIV-positive. That's where we met, in an HIV support group. And while, yes, there's a lot of sardonic humor about HIV among people who are infected, it's not really a condition that anybody I know of would use against another person, even metaphorically. Oh, Hitler, sure. Or Pol Pot. But not some ordinary piece of shit like Jim Suter. Who, by the way, was not and is not, to the best of my knowledge, infected. Jim was always extremely careful, I think. I was, too, mostly. Mostly but not always."

"Do you know the old Comden and Green song 'Carried Away'?" Dormer asked. " 'Carried away,'" Dormer sang mourn­fully, " 'carried away—I got carried away.'"

Timmy said, "I'm sorry to hear that you're paying such an absurdly high price for such an understandable kind of slip."

Vicknicki smiled ruefully. "Martin and I both have good in­surance coverage. I'm at the Library of Congress and he's in con­gressional liaison at Labor. So we can afford the regimen with the full cocktail. Both our numbers are fair and improving, we feel good, and we're optimistic."

"We're lucky," Dormer said. "We've both lost a lot of friends over the last ten years."

"Us, too," Timmy said. "And the two of us only escaped by the skin of our teeth." He meant the skin of my teeth but was too nice a guy to make the distinction among people who had no need to know of our complex history, and of our sexual philoso­phies that differed in the late seventies and early eighties and then largely merged in the late eighties.

Timmy said, "It sounds as if there must be almost as many Washington gay men eligible for Jim Suter-survivor support groups as there are for HIV support groups."

"As plagues go," Vicknicki said, "Jim's a minor one. And I don't suppose the Suter plague has spread through Asia and Africa."

"Do you have any idea where Jim might have disappeared to?" I asked. "Everyone we've talked to, including Jim's family, seems stumped over his whereabouts."

"I heard back in the early summer that he had a Mexican boyfriend," Dormer said. "So Jim might have gone south of the border to spread heartbreak down there. Maybe it was part of the deal on NAFTA, which Bryant Ulmer and Alan McChesney both worked on: Mexico gets several hundred thousand jobs without having to commit much in the way of environmental protection, and as compensation it has to accept Jim Suter's exile. And when Mexican gay men start to complain about Suter, the government can tell them to go fuck themselves."

"I doubt that that last part would have to be included in any treaty," Vicknicki said.

I asked Dormer and Vicknicki if they thought Suter, who had close connections with former congresswoman Betty Krum-futz, could have been involved in the campaign-finance scandal that had brought her down. They both said they doubted it, that Jim had been closer to Mrs. Krumfutz's staff than to her, and that none of her aides had been implicated in the scam. That had been the dirty work of her shady husband, Nelson.

I told Dormer and Vicknicki that I'd been given the names of three other men—Bill Walker, Jason Leibowicz, and Graham Houston—who were angry ex-lovers of Jim Suter's, and that I'd been having trouble tracking them down.

"I don't know about the other two," Vicknicki said, "but Graham Houston is dead."

"Was he shot?" Timmy asked.

"No, it was AIDS. He died about six months ago. I saw it in the Blade. I thought about him a lot after I read his obituary. I'd slept with Graham once about five years ago, and when I saw that he died, I wondered if maybe he infected me or maybe I in­fected him."

"I know Jason Leibowicz," Dormer said, "but I think I heard that he's in Uzbekistan or somewhere. He's State Department, and I'm pretty sure he was sent out to the ends of the earth a year or two back. As for Bill Walker, I don't know the name."

"If you're looking for people who loathe Jim," Vicknicki said, "the guy at the top of the list really ought to be Carmen LoBello. He was burned by Jim in Jim's characteristic fashion eight or ten months ago, and the last time I saw Carmen the wounds were still raw."

'Who's he?" I asked.

"Carmen's a drag queen and cabaret performer who used to be popular in local clubs. He specialized not in Barbra and Judy and Joan Crawford, but in doing D.C. power queens: Hillary, Nancy Reagan, Meg Greenfield, Liddy Dole. Donna Shalala would never have shown up at a performance, but I heard she got hold of a video of Carmen doing her one night and report­edly the Secretary of Health and Human Services was not amused."

Timmy said, "This is some inside-the-Beltway esoterica I've never heard about."

"Carmen was really brilliant. He had one routine where he did Cokie Roberts, then Nina Totenberg, and Linda Wertheimer."

"I'm truly impressed," Timmy said. "This is not the Wash­ington I knew when I went to school here in the sixties. This Car­men LoBello would have been considered far ahead of his time at the Georgetown Grill."

"But then when his affair with Jim ended last winter," Vick-nicki went on, "something seemed to snap in Carmen. People who know him said sometimes he was enraged—kicking and throwing things and cursing Suter's name. And then other times Carmen was depressed and withdrawn. Anyway, Jim's dumping him apparently left Carmen completely unhinged, and his cabaret act changed almost overnight. He stopped doing Hillary and Cokie and Barbara Boxer, and instead he just did one bizarre character over and over again, a surreal composite of two famous Washington figures that he called G. Gordon Liddy Dole.

"It was basically Liddy Dole, of course—who'd been one of Carmen's audiences' favorites—with the sugarcoated Southern faux-sincerity and the hairsprayed soul and the pretty red power frock. But suddenly Liddy also had a big slab of a mustache and smoked a fat cigar, and she ranted about Vince Foster, and about nuking China. "Carmen never gave a reason, but he absolutely refused to do anybody but this one weird character over and over again. Audiences soon got tired of it, and even Carmen's die-hard fans gave up on him. Carmen was fired from Starkers, the club where he worked, and the last time I heard, he still had his day job at the Bureau of Mines, but he wasn't performing at all anymore. I know that Carmen still explodes into a tirade whenever Jim Suter's name comes up. So if you're looking for people who hate Suter, Carmen should move swiftly to the top of your list." I said, "LoBello can be reached at the Bureau of Mines?" "That's where I'd try first," Vicknicki said. "A friend of Car­men's said his home number's been changed and is now un­listed."