Different extensions were tried. A girl with a suspicious voice said, 'Yes?'
'Lydia Kindle, please,' I said.
'Who's calling, please?' the voice wanted to know. 'This is her floor sister.'
A floor sister? Hanging up, I imagined wall brothers, door fathers, window mothers, and I wrote on the plaster above Benny's urinal, FLORA MACKEY WAS A VIRGIN TO THE END.
In the crapper stall, someone seemed to be in trouble. Under the door peeked thonged sandals, purple socks, a pair of fallen bell-bottoms and obvious grief.
Whoever he was, he was crying.
Well, I know how it can hurt to pee, so I could sympathize. At the same time, I didn't wish to look further into this. Perhaps I could buy a beer from the bar, slip it to him under the door, tell him it's on me and quickly leave.
The urinal flushed - Benny's famous self-flushing urinal. To save the strain on the water pump, it is rumored to be electrically timed to flush semiannually. To think that I was on hand for the rare event!
But in the crapper stall, he heard it too; he felt someone was there; he stopped crying. I tried to tiptoe to the door.
His voice came weakly from the stall, 'Please tell me, is it dark out yet?'
'Yes.'
'Oh, God,' he said. 'Can I leave now? Have they gone?'
A sudden fear was upon me! I looked around for them. Who? Peering under the urinal for strange, wet men lurking there. 'Who's they?' I asked.
The stall door opened and he came out, hitching his bell-bottoms up. It was the thin, dark boy who is a poet and tends to wear lavender clothes; a student who works in Root's Bookstore, he is alternately assumed to be a great lover or a fag or both.
'God, have they gone?' he said. 'Oh, thank you. They told me not to leave until it was dark, but there aren't any windows in here.'
A closer look at him revealed the savage beating he had taken. They had jumped him in the men's room and told him he belonged in the lady's room instead. They proceeded to roll him in the urinal; they scoured his nose with the deodorant cake, which graveled up his face and left him smarting, as if he'd been rubbed with a pee-soaked pumice stone. A terrible confusion of odors clung to him; in his pocket, a bottle of Leopardess toilet water had smashed. If perfume were poured in a privy, it could not smell worse.
'Jesus,' he said. 'They happen to have been right. I am a fag - but I might not have been. I mean, they had no way of knowing I was. I was just taking a leak. That's normal enough, isn't it? I mean, I don't hustle guys in men's rooms. I get all I want.'
'What about the toilet water?'
'They didn't even know I had it,' he said. 'And it's not for me, for Christ's sake. It's for a girl - my sister. I live with her. She called me at work and asked me to pick up some for her on my way home.'
He had trouble walking - they'd really stomped him around - so I said I'd help him out of there.
'I live right around here,' he said. 'You don't have to come with me. They might think you're one.'
But I walked him out of Benny's on my arm, past two leering couples in a booth by the door. See the boyfriends! One of whom drank a bottle of perfume and then pissed his pants.
Benny himself posed with his shining beer steins at the bar in studied, cultivated ignorance of everything.
'Your urinal flushed itself, Benny,' I said. 'Mark the calendar.'
'Goodnight, boys,' said Benny, and a wispy artist at the corner table sank his nose into the head of his beer to drown our passing odor.
'I knew Iowa would be awful,' the fag told me, 'but I never knew it would be this awful.'
We were outside his walk-up on downtown Clinton Street. 'You've been very nice,' he said. 'I'd ask you in, but ... I'm very attached, you understand. I've never been so faithful before, really, but this one ... well, you know, He's just very special.'
'I'm not like you,' I told him. 'I mean, I might have been, but you happen to be wrong.'
He took my hand. 'It's all right,' he said. 'I know. Some other time, we'll see. What's your name?'
'Forget it,' I said. I was walking off, trying to leave his reek behind. There on that shabby street in his bright clothes, he looked like some gay knight just entering a town wiped out by the plague: brave, silly and doomed.