My Hustler

"Bitching, bitching, bitching, bitching, queening, fighting..." An acrid whiff of Laclos on a Fire Island weekend, a bet between would-be sophisticates over the Dial-a-Hustler neophyte. The balding Uranist (Ed Hood) lords over the beach house veranda in striped bathrobe and dark glasses, Truman Capote in his own mind, trading arch barbs with the bikini-clad "fag hag" (Genevieve Charbin). The camera pans to the shore and zooms in on their mutual object of desire, the bronzed boy-toy (Paul America), "very pretty but not exactly literate." The wobbly back-and-forth makes for a properly desultory reinvention of champ contre champ, garbled Dante provides the disembodied accompaniment for the contemplation of the vacant blond whittling away at sticks and swatting flies. Enter "the Sugar Plum Fairy himself" (Joe Campbell), another torso in the sandy void. "Oh Jesus, this tough talk! Next we're going to be talking motorcycles and then leather boots and then whips." Not Cocteau's "ennui mortel" but Andy Warhol's, two reels on power dynamics and fleshy commodities. Act Two, the proscenium of a bathroom door equipped with shower towels for the curtain backdrop and a mirror for mocking the lack of reflection. "The most valuable thing you have in this business," appearance, a whole lot of shaving and combing and brushing goes into it. Price of intimacy, question of happiness, cold advice for the slab of beef. "Everybody's out hustling for something." Much groundwork for Paul Morrissey's trilogy, a seamy-lyrical vein mined in Van Sant's Mala Noche. Coup de théâtre, suitors in the shadowy foreground offer travel, money and education, the stud pays no heed. "Meat for meat, my dear." Schlesinger absorbs it for Midnight Cowboy as well as Sunday Bloody Sunday. In black and white.