Richard Stevenson - Cockeyed

Hunny decided the way to celebrate this news was with a

“drinky-poo or possibly two,” but Art pointed out that that didn’t make sense since the dead lady’s family might get wind of the celebration on Moth Street and be hurt and offended. Also, Art pointed out, Mrs. Van Horn was still missing.

“Oh, Arthur, girl, you had to go and remind me of that,”

Hunny moaned. “Oh, Mom, poor Mom, where can she be?”

Antoine, Marylou and the twins had all come into the kitchen, and Antoine suggested that they all join hands and pray.

Hunny said, “Antoine, honey, I’ll try anything at this point.”

We all joined hands and bowed our heads, and Hunny said,

“Lord, help get Mom’s wrinkly old butt back to Golden Gardens ASAP, ‘cause this whole dumb lottery thing plus Mom taking off somewhere has just about wrecked my last nerve, and I don’t think I can take much more of this horse doody. In Jesus’ name, amen. Oh, one more thing. Smite the Brienings, okay?”

Then everybody said amen.

“I heard at the office,” Timmy said, “that all kinds of gay organizations are trying to get Hunny to lower his profile, or at least to quit acting like such an obnoxious drunken screaming queen in public. People are upset over — to cite one bloodcurdling example — the anti-gay-marriage forces in Maine running TV ads with pictures of Hunny and his Marylou Whitney impersonator and asking Maine voters if these are the people they want teaching their schoolchildren.”

“Neither Hunny nor Marylou is a teacher. Hunny is newly retired from BJ’s Warehouse, and Marylou is an independently wealthy Palm Beach and Saratoga socialite. So Maine’s schoolchildren are safe.”

“The gay-marriage referendum up there is expected to be close, and it really doesn’t help the image of gay people to have Hunny falling-down drunk on television and yelling into the cameras about some drag queen’s penis.”

“Yes, Hunny behaved very badly on his Focks News debut.

I was embarrassed and ashamed right along with the rest of gay America. But Hunny was goaded into that response by O’Malley, who’s the real problem here. O’Malley and all the homophobic half-wits who watch him and believe whatever nutty stuff comes out of his mouth. Although, Hunny’s perfectly understandable response to O’Malley was strategically unwise, I will concede.”

“It’s more than just strategy. It’s decency. It’s sobriety. It’s sanity. It’s taste.”

We were in the kitchen fixing a quick dinner before I went back up to Moth Street. Timmy had brought home a barbecued chicken from a place on Lark Street, and I had shucked some fresh corn and was making water boil in a pot, my speciality in the kitchen.

I said, “Taste is overrated.”

“Yes, but sanity isn’t. Or sobriety.”

I told Timmy about Quentin Shoemaker and the Rdq and their standing up against assimilationism.

“Assimilationism? Some people would call living the way we do, and the way most of our friends do, having a life. A good life, actually. A life where we can get up in the morning and not have to think about getting called names or arrested or where our next orgasm is coming from. We can just think about the good and bad minutiae of being human, as well as the bigger questions of human affairs, and not be saddled with some desperate quest for endless stimulation or having to make everybody you meet feel like they want to run out of the room.”

“That’s a pretty bleak assessment of the way a lot of gay people have lived for a pretty long time. Basically, people like Hunny are just like us and the people we know. They get up every day and go to work, and at the end of the day and on weekends they want a little comfort and diversion. They just do it with more humor and a cruder style than most gay people do. And most straight people.”

“Much of the trouble has to do mainly with style, yes. I grant you that. It’s not my style, though, and it’s not yours. And it’s a style that causes trouble a-plenty for the rest of us when it turns up in anti-gay TV ads in Maine.”

I said, “Should corn be boiled for three minutes or five?”

“Three is plenty. Aunt Moira always said twenty minutes, but her corn was so tough only her hog could eat it.”

“She kept a hog?”

“My cousin Kevin.”

“Shoemaker talks about Hunny and Art as being natural and free and in touch with their inner child. There’s a lot of truth to this, and I enjoy them and even sort of envy them whenever I’m not cringing.”

“I sometimes find that humor and playfulness refreshing, too, but it’s the relentlessness that gets to me after a while. And the CoCkeyed 153 always sexualizing everything. Give it a break, I always want to say.”

“Maybe they are just more honest than the rest of us.”

“Oh, Donald, please. At this late date, are you going to go hippie on me?”

“I mean honest in the sense that they are in touch not so much with their inner child as their inner Sigmund Freud. Sexuality is always going on, and people like Hunny and Art are just more aware and comfortable with the phenomenon than most of us.

And they’ve learned not to be afraid of it but to have fun with it. They’re more like the Thais in that respect, except in Thailand people are not so crude about it or so insistent.”

“Exactly. They have a sense of proportion. They may be in touch with their inner child, but they are also comfortable with their outer grown-up.”

“Well, Hunny and Art’s way of life is a part of gay culture that I hope never disappears. The self-destructive parts of it I could do without — all the alcohol especially — but the gather-ye-rosebuds-while-ye-may spirit makes a lot of sense for getting people through this…I don’t want to say vale of tears. For most of the lucky ones like you and me, it’s not that at all.”

“‘Cockeyed caravan of life,’” Timmy said. “I think that’s what you mean, especially in Hunny’s case. Preston Sturges in the script for Sullivan’s Travels talks about our passage on this plane of existence as ‘the cockeyed caravan of life.’ The cockeyed caravan does seem to be thriving in one of its most esoteric and at the same time least inhibited forms over on Moth Street.”

“I just hope,” I said, “that Hunny can survive his more-hectic-than-most expressions of unassimilated queerdom. It’s a life that though it has its rewards for some people, it also takes a toll.”

“A price must be paid.”

“I’ve made some mild stabs at getting Hunny to moderate his behavior, but he has a way of making me feel like Aunt Polly to his Tom Sawyer.”

Timmy said, “That corn must be done.”

“Right.”

“Donald, I have a lot of trouble thinking of Hunny as a character out of Twain. Boyd MacDonald maybe. Or William S.

Burroughs.”

“Oh no, not Burroughs. Hunny is alert, alive, and I think I can even say truly happy.”

My cell phone went off, and when I saw that it was Hunny calling I was tempted not to answer it. But I guessed that it was some new awful mess that Hunny had created or stepped in or had land on him, and I was right.

The Brienings were at it again. They had phoned Nelson and told him that they had read on somebody’s Internet blog that Rita Van Horn’s disappearance was a hoax, just as Bill O’Malley suspected it was. Mrs. Van Horn, the blogger reported, had been spotted in a motel in the town of Lake George where she was staying under an assumed name. Obviously, Arletta Briening told Nelson, this was all part of a scheme to delay or even avoid paying the Brienings the half billion dollars they were owed. When Nelson insisted that the Van Horns knew nothing of this, Arletta said she was sure the report was reliable because the information came from one of her fPAAC friends and they were honest people.