Page 8 of Disco Witches of Fire Island

“Wow. Are all these photos of you guys?”

“Oh my, no,” Howie said. “These shots go back to the forties. We’re just the most recent in a long line of holy lovers who have occupied 44 and¼Picketty Ruff.”

“Holy lovers?” Joe’s eyes widened in realization. “I was trying to figure out if you two were boyfriends or not.”

Both men did comedically dramatic retching sounds, indicating Joe had horribly missed his mark. “Boyfriends?” Howie laughed. “Of course, we’ve slept together. I mean we’re gay and all. But now we’ve settled into one of those typical Boston marriages by way ofWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

“When Howie says ‘holy lovers,’ he just meanshomos,” Lenny quipped.

“Lenny!” Howie chided. “You know it’s more than that.” He touched the tips of his fingers together under his nose, like a professor. “We use the phrase to mean any person whose identity or desire for love lies outside the commonplace. We believe the Great Goddess Mother has blessed all inverts, queers, sissies, trans folk, dykes, two spirits, asexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals, and what-have-yous with extraordinary gifts and with the preternatural ability to love much more expansively.”

“Oh,” Joe said, pretending it was the most normal thing in the world. “Gotcha. And you two and Max all live and work out here the whole year?”

“Goodness, no,” Howie exclaimed. “Lenny goes to Florida at the first hint of cold, and Max goes back to the city to stay with hisboyfriend, Heshy. I’m the only one who hibernates out here during the offseason. But with the first sniff of spring, I emerge, pretty like a crocus and buzzing like a locust.”

Joe gave a small laugh and wiped the beads of sweat on his forehead.

“You thinkthisis hot?” Lenny warned. “Come midsummer, it’s like a Turkish bath.”

“We have fans he can use,” Howie said. “And at night there’s a wonderful cross breeze. We’ll just need to shuffle things around a little. Lenny, help me.”

They started moving boxes off the shelves, each labeled with their contents: feathers, rhinestones, leather scraps, dolls’ heads, glass eyeballs, and more. At the front of the attic were two old sewing machines on a desk, two mannequins of different sizes, a handmade tree with branches festooned with hundreds of spools of colorful threads, organized by hue and shade—cool colors at the bottom, warm colors at the top. There were piles of lace, big jars of dolls’ body parts, milk crates piled high with vintage fur—animal heads still attached.

“Max and I had been using the attic as our workroom,” Howie said, huffing and puffing after the climb upstairs. “But I think, with a little elbow grease, it could be a very cozy bedroom. Now, if you’ll pardon us, Lenny and I are going to the kitchen for a little tête-à-tête. Hold tight.”

As soon as they were downstairs, Joe heard them bickering. Too nervous to listen, he turned his attention to the old photos covering the walls and beams. On the lower right corner of each was a white slip of paper bearing a handwritten date, location, or event where the photo was taken. Things like “Fire Island Party on the Beach, 1979,” “Provincetown, August 1969,” “Key West, 1962.” Joe, who’d first had sex with a man in 1982, the year after the virus was identified, wondered how much the gay world had changed since the crisis began. How much fun had they had before making love turned into a death threat?

Several of the shots were of a much younger Howie Fishbein in crazy outfits and long brown hair, his head crowned with enormous, ornate hats featuring dioramas or not-so-miniaturemillinery installations. One hat featured an entire castle with an Elizabethan-costumed Barbie doll in the process of being decapitated. Was it? Yes, it was! Geneviève Bujold as Anne Boleyn inAnne of a Thousand Days. Lenny (with more hair) was dressed as the executioner, complete with leather apron and a mask, but otherwise naked. There were always several other men (and a few women) with them, all dressed outlandishly, including a Hispanic-looking man, dressed in beads and crazy headgear, who appeared at the center of every group photo.Is this Max?And why were they all dressed that way?

Joe had never dressed in anything close to flamboyant. Preferring to blend in, he’d get the straightest-looking haircut (no Flock of Seagulls for him), shirts from Sears, khakis from JC Penny. Ronnie was vehemently opposed to doing drag—he said it would destroy his image as a “sexy gay jock.” For Joe, seeing Howie and Lenny wear their gayness with such abandon was both shocking and impressive. How freeing that must feel. For a few minutes he found himself lost in the photos, staring at the faces, searching for … something, but he didn’t know what. It was almost like he could hear the music that must have been playing back then, smell the patchouli, feel the warmth of their vests, the chill of their love beads.

The darkest, hidden corner of the attic was filled with the most risquéphotos of groups of naked men either having sex or just sitting around the house naked. These photos were much older, and all in black and white. But he experienced the same thing, finding himself unable to look away as if the men in the photos were casting a spell on him.

But then Joe heard footsteps on the ladder, and he quickly stepped away from the lurid photos.

“Don’t worry!” Howie poked up his head through the floor hatch. “Those orgies were way before we moved into this house!” Stepping into the attic, he walked over and pointed to one very vivid image. “How nice to capture oneself in the midst of such passion! Sadly, most of those men are gone now … but not all. You’ll meet a few this summer—though you may not recognize them. Such is the brutality of time and deliquescence.”

Joe blinked, confused. “What?”

“Getting old,” Howie clarified.

“Ah, okay,” Joe said. “I love all these old pics … especially that Anne Boleyn one, and these over here.” He gestured to the shots that had entranced him the most. “It’s weird. It’s almost hard to stop looking at them.”

“Is that so?” Howie said, again in that strange, puzzling way.

“Yeah, they’re really great.” Joe pointed to another one of several clothed men jammed onto what looked like a newer version of the downstairs couch. Younger Lenny, sporting a bad comb-over, sat between a younger Howie and that wildly dressed Hispanic man. “Is that Max?” Joe asked.

“Indeed it is,” Howie said. “Maximon Esteban Hieronymus De Laguna. He’s the most important stooge in our Three-Stoogian triumvirate—the Moe of ’mos, we like to joke. You’ll love him, and he’ll love you. That photo is from our first year on the island, when we had dozens staying here. Our orgies, though un-photographed, lasted days. Bliss exploded everywhere, staining everything and everyone with joy.”

“The cleaning bills were a fortune!” Lenny called from the base of the ladder before scampering up into the attic and pointing to a photo of a twenty-something man wearing a thong in a body-builder’s pose. “See that one? I was a hot piece of mortadella, huh?”

“That’syou?” Joe said, sounding far too surprised. Lenny sucked in his cheeks, his eyes narrowed bitterly. “I mean,” Joe nervously added, “that’sobviouslyyou. It’s uncanny … you’ve barely aged.”

Howie then—in an obvious appeasement to Lenny—gently turned Joe’s face to the light. “To be honest, Joseph, you remind me a bit of Lenny when he was your age.”

The thought that he could he ever turn into someone like Lenny, with his bald head, dyed black mustache, and squat bowling-pin body distressed Joe more than a little. But then, when he saw Howie’s wink, he quickly nodded. “Sure,” he said. “I can see what you mean.”

“You think?” Lenny smiled cockily, looking at both himself and Joe in a nearby mirror. “I was a little better looking at your age, of course—”

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