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Jacob Lowland Billy and the Banquet: An Episode from an Epic in Progress
Introduction
Chicago, January 1978: I got into the city together with a full-scale blizzard, was so snowbound I couldn't head for the leather bars, had to make do with a book in bed instead of a boy. Kenneth Koch's Duplications, a long poem in a fascinatingly, irritatingly rough kind of ottava rima. I was enthusiastic, not so much about the poem as about the possibilities of the form. Back in Amsterdam in February, I reread the precursor to D., Koch's twenty-year-older Ko, or a Season on Earth. That led me on to getting Byron's Don Juan (surely the greatest ottava rima, & one of the greatest epics, of all time) out of the bookcase & next to my bed. One of the mistakes of my life.
Juan was bedside reading all spring, a spring when I was also trying to translate some sonnets by Komrij, Weemoedt, that ilk. Now I had never thot I'd turn ‘original’ poet, but one day in June I proved to be pregnant from all those Dutch sonneteers, & in a week's time gave birth to twenty-three sonnets later immortalized as The Gay Stud's Guide to Amsterdam. At the end of the week I decided that was enough, brutally aborted all further embryos, & thot: On to other things.
But I was more hooked than I realized. That fall I started playing around with the ottava rima form, and stanzas began shaping together that more & more obviously belonged in some kind of narrative. On a flight to the superstraightness of Moscow, I was fooling with what I had written, making changes, working out a couple of new stanzas, when suddenly it all jelled: I'd write the story of Billy, a gay boy who sets out to explore the world & the universe. With Don Juan as something of a model, it would be a half-romantic, half-picaresque tale that would try to come to grips, & maybe blows, with some of the joys & terrors of being gay in these times. Cantos of around a hundred stanzas each (the standard length ever since Ariosto & Tasso), eight or ten cantos in all. A project to keep me busy & off the streets for years: Billy the Crisco Kid: An Epic for the Eighties.
The title has echoes of Billy the Kid and the Cisco Kid, but Crisco Billy is not a gunslinging cowboy: like me (tho decades younger) he's a farmboy from the Bible Belt of the American Midwest who moves (moved) on to other scenes. Canto One, completed in the spring of 1980, is entitled ‘Billy's Beginnings’. After the usual introductory business of an epic (the invocation to the Muse, that sort of thing), the canto goes on to recount Billy's birth, his childhood in strict Baptist surroundings, his prettiness & his piety, how his cousin brings him out during high school, a raunchy weekend in Des Moines, his few months as a freshman at the University of Iowa, & then, at the end, how he's kicked out of college & hits the road to adventure. Canto Two, which is now at about the three-quarters stage, describes Billy's trip to New York & his arrival there. Cantos Three & Four will stay in New York, where Billy gets into various scenes & scrapes, before he moves on to Europe (with a long stopover in Amsterdam) in later cantos. Then
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finally - if I get that far: Byron's Juan was never finished - the apotheosis, off somewhere on a moon of Jupiter or Saturn, most likely Ganymede.
The episode printed here, consisting of stanzas 51 to 77 of Canto One, takes place in the spring of Billy's last year at a small-town Iowa high school. Billy has always been a good God-fearing boy who shunned the frivolities of this world. But now, as the Senior Banquet approaches, he's faced with a dilemma. His cousin Joey, ever something of a hellion, has instigated a scheme for all the boys to go to the banquet naked; Billy knows that's a sin, on the other hand it's Joey's idea. & suddenly Billy realizes that Joey (with whom he'd been caught in ‘that one slight incident’ of little-boy sex play when he was eight) is more important to him than Jesus ... ‘& if it's sinning, / then Joey's sin will have to win this inning.’ & so, as you, dear reader, will discover if you peruse further, it did.
April's late snows had melted, & with May
suddenly it was summer. ‘What is happening
to spring?’ the folks mumbled every day
as temperatures soared. It was quite dampening
for all the farmers' spirits that no rai-
n came for the corn crop. While, as Mr. Sappeling
(the Super) noted, with a note of sadness,
the kids were all infected with May Madness.
The boys especially. They'd stand out in
the schoolyard, loafing, lazing in the sun
at noon break, unconcerned with things like sin,
studying, schoolwork, even that home run
that Joe'd run yesterday to keep 'em in
the league top running. Nothing much was fun
(except for sex of course) to talk of, plan,
or do, with sun like this. Yet to a man
(or boy) they all could get excited when
someone mentioned the Banquet. Sketching skits,
turning out song texts (Harvey Hiatt's pen
was good at that: they all said they'd be hits
sung by the birthday-suited Village Men) -
that kind of thing could shift their teenage wits
into high gear. But what they really did best
was rules for choosing Mister Naked Midwest.
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B-Day itself arrived. & still such sparsity
of news about the program that the teachers
came inquiring. ‘We'll fix 'em! Turn it arsity-
varsity,’ Joe said, furious. All the features
were shuffled back & forth. First off the farce (witty
but too long), music by the Rock Hard Reachers
(Punk from Des Moines), & then the Village Men.
After which they'd take off their clothes, at ten.
Then Mister Midwest. So they all came dressed
that night. Which made things easier at dinner
(i.e. banquet), an overture of rest
before things started happening. The thin air
was vibrant tho with promise that the best
was yet to come. (Who'll be the Naked Winner,
thot Bill, & Harv: I hope they'll think I'm funky
when they hear me singing my ‘Small-Town Junkie.’
While Joe was thinking: Just so Donna Frame
don't get her hands on Bill before I can.)
The punk group played their sets & split. Their fame
was great in Tallcorn Country, but their fan-
s were disappointed: rhythms all the same,
only their tamest texts, & every man-
jack looking like a too-old, too-late hippy
who'd never made it past the Mississippi.
Then came the Village Men, with Harv falsetto.
They sang two songs & broke the hall up, wave
on wave of laughter & applause for ‘Ghetto
with Pigs & Cornfields’ & for ‘Disco Dave.’
& then it happened, in their second set. To
get the thing moving (& besides to have
the drop on Joe & Jim) Harv started stripping,
just as they moved into ‘Love Is for Tripping.’
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Slowly his tie, his shirt went off, & then
to bumps & grinds his T-shirt. Even slower
his belt unbuckled. Now the other Men
were stripping too. Harv's hands moved lower,
pulling his zipper down, down... till a hem
got caught (or was it skin?). Then, as a rower
trapped high weeds moves in, then out, he jerked
the zip up, down again. On down. It worked!
He sighed relief. He turned around & pushed
his pants (his Sunday best) across his butt
& slowly let them drop. A sharp gasp rushed
around the hall. No shorts! A single nut
dangled below his crotch. Miss P. was crushed,
& Super, red with rage, cried, ‘Stop this smut!’
The stripping Men sang on. Then Harv gyrated
& stopped full-front, First of the Liberated.
The clock struck ten. Clothes flew in all directions.
One minute after ten: the guys all bareass,
& four of every five sporting erections.
The girls were mostly shy, but also curious,
now looked, now looked away, their predelictions
warring with what they thot was proper. Whereas
the grownups just were flabbergasted. Super
sat for three minutes in a kind of stupor
then went to phone the schoolboard & the Mayor.
Meanwhile the Naked Village Men were singing:
‘Lost All My Clothes Blues,’ ‘Back & Sides Go Bare’
(that pacified the English teacher, bringing
thots of Renaissance Man), & ‘Short Short Hair.’
Now tho attention shifted, & went zinging
in on Billy: all of a sudden all
realized: Here's the True & Beautiful.
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Now Iowans are not renowned for taste,
but this time Iowa rose to the occasion.
Or Joe did. Donna after him, he raced
up to the stage &, suave as a profession-
al, he proposed that ‘Charming, Cheerful, Chaste
Billy’ be elected by acclamation
as Mister Midwest. The wild shout brought down
the house & echoed half the way cross town -
even to Super's office, where his sputtering
was now directed at bare Joey's dad,
the schoolboard president. Joe's dad was stuttering
‘Do what you have to: they're not b-b-bad;
it's just these b-b-boys have got a smattering
of w-w-wildness in 'em.’ Super had
to hang up then, to let Mayor Hiatt in.
What can you do about it? You can't win,
Super was thinking. Meanwhile let's go back
& see what's happening in Younkers Hall
(that's where the ball was). Hey! What's this? Alack,
alas (as poets used to cry), they're all
disco dancing, but there is neither track
nor trace of Bill or Joe among the fall
& rise of cocks on unclad bodies. Vanished!
Into the palmiest night that ever man wished.
Let's follow them. Joe's in the lead, Bill after.
& look: on farther back - who's that? It's Donna
there in the shadows! Joe stops &, mid laughter,
grabs at Bill's arms, looks at him, says, ‘I'm gonna
kiss ya.’ Donna can only see it half; her
mind's hackles rise: They're Fairies! Fags! Quite una-
ware of her, Bill & Joe run towards the park,
the place to go to do things in the dark.
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The park is all but empty. Just Lon Laughton,
who drives there every night to ball some chick
picked up out at the junction. Once they've gotten
past his Chivvy & out of sight (The shock
of two bare asses racing past!: he shot, &
it was the wildest cum he'd had all week.)
they stop, they pant, they look at one another.
Then like two drops of oil they roll together,
stop, meld, fuse into one like Plato's dual
souls in Symposium. It'd be romantic
to go on twenty lines & let them do all
the gentle things boys do in Transatlantic
novels, all love & kisses. But their fuel
was too high-octane. All four hands went frantic,
& they exploded. In two minutes flat.
And that, my porn-prone friends, you think, was that.
But no, there's more. Now come the love & kisses.
Their hurry past, they lie down in the grass;
Joe twines his arms round Bill. Bill's finger traces
a line along Joe's arm, his chin, across
his upper lip, his cheek, his ear; it passes
down to his chest, it rubs a tit, & is
softest of messages. Joe gives a shove:
‘O shit! Goddammit Billy, I'm in love!’
O love! How sweet it is, how grand! Particularly
the first time round. Perhaps unconsummated
the proper way (stretched out), or perpendicularly
even, but still that sense that you were mated
by Fate & swung up in a high funicular - we
all know it, even tho our first love's dated
not by its years, but by its scores of years
(and scores of newer loves, with all their tears).
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That first-time, one-time love! It's quite unique,
marked as no other by its constant crises
every half hour, each day, & every week -
& by its tender moments that are twice as
tender as any that come after. Speak
to me of love, & even in my wisest
moments it's that first love that springs to mind:
what finer love can any hope to find?
& so we spend our lives forever after
searching for someone, something to replace it:
thru tears & tragedies, thru smiles & laughter,
that's what we're really looking for, let's face it...
that first-time, full-time love, when we were dafter
than Siamese cats, & we could almost taste it,
we ached so much. O, but that blaze & glory
is long gone, so let's get back to our story.
I won't take time to spell the consequences:
sneaking home naked, Joey getting caught
(& tanned again), the other guys' consensus
that they'd Gone Gay, & Donna being bought
off (Billy had to date her. Twice.). What sense is
it all? Joe'd think sometimes. What hath God wrought?
(That was more Billy's line.) Till they'd remember
& flare up like a furnace in December.
& then their folks caught on. & their solution?
The same as usual: Call In The Pastor.
But there is change, if not quite Evolution,
even in Baptist circles. The new pastor
(old Rev. McNaught had died) had revolution-
ary ideas, had moved farther faster
than mill-run Baptists, fresh from Seminary
where his ethics prof. was a closet fairy.
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‘Our present thinking is, it's not a sin
for two young men like you to love each other.
The Good Book tells us that the Lord loved John.
Just, you should love each other like a brother
& never touch each other, or begin
to do the things a father does a mother.
The sin, you see, is not in the relation,
but in the evil of a consummation.’
The guy was fishy, that they'd known already:
all his slick words & oily understanding.
But this stuff he was feeding them was heady.
Still, Bill could work with it. Joe, undemanding,
helped him to fight temptation & hold steady
almost a week. Then Friday night came, handing
the two a golden chance, and a tempestuous
hour together turned Brother Love incestuous.
The incest they kept secret, but the blessing -
that they could utilize. They were inseparable
from then on. Guys who said ‘You two are messing
around’ got bloody mouths or more irreparable
replies. ‘We ain't! We're Baptist Boys expressing
Brotherly Love!’ & life was spiced with pepper, able
to set them roaring raging rampant, risable
as their two tools, which as you know were sizable.
They kissed & hugged & tugged & sucked thru spring
& deep into the heats of summer. High
School Commencement (unmarred by anything
like Senior B-Day scandals) passed; goodbye
to schooldays, hello to vacationing
(& farmwork) till the fall. They tried to try
not to think about fall... & separation,
their colleges apart by half a nation.
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