Some Men Are Lookers: A Continuation of the "Buddies" Cycle by Ethan Mordden

till
Scott
finds out! See, I only just happened to meet this kind of valiant guy at the baths. What a
hero
!” Bert shook his head gently at the fond memory. “He’s going to put me up till I can find a place—and, hang on, his firm is looking for someone with a background in Chinese. Me.”
    “What’s the job?”
    “Who cares? It’s a chance to—”
    “Bert? Just tell me what the job is, okay?”
    “Why should I?”
    “Why won’t you?”
    I waited.
    “Bank teller,” he said, his hands over his ears.
    “Bert, it’s so
sketchy!”
    “What’s so great about being a librarian? Anyway, this San Francisco guy told me I really stand to score out there.”
    “You can score here. That’s—”
    “No,
Scott
is here!”
    “Dump him!”
    “I
can’t!
Don’t you see that? Don’t you see how
amazing
he is? He’s so . . .
Scott
. No one who sees him can . . . I mean, no one can know anything. It’s all Scott. It’s all love. It’s all me. Everything . . . all mixed up. That’s
why
San Francisco. It’s not . . . Listen, okay? Will you listen? San Francisco is not mixed up.”
    That was the last we heard of Bert Hicks. As for Scott, he hit thirty-seven or so and began to slow up. Less gym, fewer parties. He decided to let his body find its natural condition, and he got some light reading done. He thought rain was reason to stay in. He gave up on
GQ:
all that young. He stopped having brunch with people he admired but didn’t like. He ceased to matter, except to himself.
    The interesting thing was, Did he ever miss Bert? But when I asked, people told me I was being ridiculous.
    End of flashback. “Carlo,” Virgil was saying, “you’re just in time to hear Cosgrove and me on the koto.”
    “Do what?”
    They played a selection.
    “Dueling banjos, huh?” Carlo said when they had done.
    “That was ‘Finishing the Hat,’ ” Cosgrove said. “In a way.”
    “I always wondered what was meant by ‘hammer and tongs,’ ” Dennis Savage told us. “Now I know.”
    “Why discourage them?” I asked. “Music blesses any house.”
    “Oh, look who’s playing supportive and benign, with his bunny rabbit ways.”
    “Last night he spanked me,” Cosgrove put in.
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” I said.
    “We see the truth,” Dennis Savage announced. “We take in the world. We learn of corruption.”
    “First of all,” I said, “it was a very light spanking; and, second, he asked me to.”
    Virgil froze Cosgrove with an accusing look.
    “I was depressed,” Cosgrove pleaded.
    “If you’re depressed, you should come to me,” Virgil advised him.
    “Yeah,” said Carlo, imagining who knows what unspeakable filth. “Can you see that?”
    Dennis Savage said, “I may have to write about this.”
    A mild alarm went off in my head.
    “Hold your horses, buster,” I told him. “I patrol this territory.”
    “He thinks he’s so Peter Rabbit,” Cosgrove grumbled, about me. He was annoyed because he’d got in trouble with Virgil.
    “So what do you call that stuff you play?” Carlo asked the kids.
    “Music,” said Cosgrove.
    “No, what’s your outfit? Got to have a name there, for the theatre signs.”
    “The Koto Brothers?” Cosgrove offered.
    “Seems like you should be some kind of
ensemble,”
said Carlo. “Listen, first you got your Symphony Orchestra. Hear that? Then comes your Philharmonic. That’s fancy. But hottest of all is your Ensemble. Like a Baroque Something Ensemble, or the Something Van Beethoven Liquid Ensemble. See?”
    “Oh!” said Cosgrove, seeing it. “The Von Sondheim Koto Ensemble!”
    “Of Manhattan Isle,” I added, as Dennis Savage’s eyes shot darts of molten lead, arrows exquisitely poisoned so your brain jellies as you live, and assorted impatient shrapnel.
    And Virgil said, “Yes!”
    “Why
Von?”
Dennis Savage asked.
    “It sounds like us,” Cosgrove answered.
    Carlo agreed: “It’ll look dandy on the marquee.”
    “For our succeeding selection,”