Sword and Sandal Read online

  The boxes were sealed with what looked like comparatively new strips of shipping tape. I slit them open; and, between sips of the wine, Carlo and I began to inspect their contents.

  They turned out to contain a treasure trove of mementos of Gino’s bodybuilding and acting careers. There were scrapbooks, with clippings. There were physique contest trophies, and copies of old bodybuilding magazines, with Gino’s photo on the covers, or with articles about him. There were hundreds of photos—not only of him, but of other bodybuilders, and of actors and other celebrities. Many of these were autographed. There were scripts from Gino’s movies, with his own penciled marginal notations. There were copies of contracts, for films and personal appearances. Most astonishing of all, there were bundles of letters, written to Gino not only by fans, but by some of his friends—and by his lovers. Some of them could only be described as love letters; they were extremely passionate in tone, and often sexually explicit. And the names of a few of these enamored correspondents took me and Carlo completely by surprise.

  “Wow! Uncle Gino really got around,” Carlo exclaimed.

  “This—all of this—it should really go to your family, Carlo,” I suggested.

  “No,” he replied. “If Uncle Gino wanted you to have these things, he must’ve had his reasons. And it’s no surprise to me. You were his one really close friend. You were the one who was here for him, these last few years. Oh, he stayed in touch with us, but he didn’t rely on us. He never asked any of us for any help. He never wanted to be a burden on anybody, you know. He was so damn stubborn and independent.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “If you’d like to have anything else from his apartment, Roland—any of his furniture, or the other things—you can have it, you know. We’ll probably just keep a few of the small items, as remembrances, and auction off the rest, or give it away to charity.”

  “No. What I have right here is fine. It’s more than enough.”

  Upon reflection, I really didn’t have to ask myself why Gino had chosen to leave me the material in those boxes. He knew that I’d be interested in it, and that I’d preserve it. (And so I have, taking my role as custodian very seriously.) I was touched, and honored.

  In the very bottom of the second box, we found the most interesting item of all—a real treasure.

  This was a cardboard box, the kind in which blank paper is sold in office supply stores—twenty-four pound white paper, in this case; five hundred sheets.

  The box contained paper, all right. But the paper had been typed on, using a manual typewriter. The typescript was double spaced. Here and there, corrections and notes had been written, in pencil. Sword and Sandal, the first page read. A memoir by Gene Dagaust.

  There was an envelope, lying on top of this title page. For Roland, was handwritten on it.

  I opened the envelope, which wasn’t sealed, and I pulled out the piece of paper it contained.

  Dear Roland, the handwritten note began. You’ve been kind enough to show some interest in the old man’s movie career. I can’t imagine why. It all took place so long ago. Talk about ancient history! Well, here are some autobiographical reminiscences which I wrote out to amuse myself some time ago, long before you and I met. I thought, at the time, that they might be worth publishing. But then I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t want to risk embarrassing some of the people who are mentioned in the manuscript. So I put the pages away in this box. Well, here they still are, gathering dust. You may find them interesting. Do with them whatever you want. Keep them as a souvenir, publish them, or destroy them—I leave it entirely up to you. How I have enjoyed our friendship, over the past few years. I am so very grateful to you. All my love—your pal, Gino.

  But, typically of Gino, there was a wry postscript. I thought that “Sword and Sandal” would be an appropriate title. Those old “gladiator” movies are what I’m best known for, after all. Feel free to change it if you can come up with something better. Just don’t call it something vulgar like “Is That a Sock Stuffed in Your Peplum, or Are You Just Glad to See Me?” I wouldn’t put that past you—you young scamp. You bad boy.

  This note wasn’t dated. At some point after he and I met—exactly when, I had no way of knowing—Gino had gone to the storage place, rummaged through his belongings, and he’d added his manuscript and the envelope to the contents of box 10B, which he’d resealed. Only later, at the last moment, when he was in the hospital, had he amended his will, to bequeath me the document, along with the other items.

  I admit it—I got a little teary-eyed, as I put the note aside and I started to read through the typescript.

  But I realized at once that this was a document which needed to be not only preserved, but shared. Gino D’Agostino, better known as Gene Dagaust, was a true pioneer. Back in the Sixties, long before Stonewall, he was openly and unapologetically gay. He was a pro bodybuilder. He was a successful actor. Above all, he was a gentleman. Gay men today could do worse in search of a role model.

  And so I determined that his manuscript was worthy of publication.

  Carlo, when I discussed the matter with him, agreed.

  “Print it,” he told me, succinctly.

  “Your family might be embarrassed,” I pointed out.

  “By what? By the fact that Uncle Gino was gay? Trust me, that ship sailed, long ago. We’re proud of who he was, and what he was.”

  “Good for you. Still … some of these sex scenes he describes are kind of on the explicit side.”

  “Look who’s talking.” (Carlo had been interested enough in me to read some samples of my work.) “So—a good-looking guy like Uncle Gino, a real stud, which is what he sure was back in his day—he liked sex, and he had a lot of lovers. Another stunning revelation,” Carlo said, sarcastically. “Nobody cares that a man’s gay, today. Nobody with any brains, at least. Print the damn thing,” he told me, again. “It’s interesting. And it’s true. It’s—him,” he added, finally, as though he was at a loss for other words. “It’s him all over.”

  Gino wasn’t the most accurate typist. I have corrected what seemed to me to be obvious mistakes in his typescript. I have also taken the liberty of changing his often erratic punctuation, where it seemed ambiguous.

  More problematic was the fact that Gino didn’t hesitate to name names. Where he identified persons who are still living by their real names, I haven’t hesitated to substitute fictional names for these individuals, in the interests of discretion (and to avoid possible litigation!).

  Otherwise, his manuscript is presented here exactly as he wrote it. His narrative breaks off after two episodes. The first one takes place while he is preparing to start filming Il Prode Gladiatore di Roma—an odd coincidence, given the role that movie played in our relationship.

  The second episode describes Gino’s unexpected reunion with a character who plays a vital role, early on in his narrative. In a sense, it does bring the story full circle.

  Why Gino didn’t continue his memoirs past that point, though, I have no idea. Maybe he intended to, but procrastinated, and simply didn’t get around to writing down the rest of his reminiscences. Or maybe, as he’d once remarked to me about his acting career, he simply decided to quit while he was ahead, on a positive note.

  Ave atque vale, brave gladiator, my dear friend. I had the great privilege of knowing you. And I loved you. I still do.

  Chapter One: A Birthday Celebration

  My mother wanted me to become a priest.

  I come from a big Italian-American family. My parents had five children, three boys and two girls. I was the youngest, and as such, I was probably spoiled.

  Growing up in a small industrial town in New Jersey wasn’t always easy. We weren’t well off. At home, we spoke both English and Italian. My fluency in the latter language came in handy later on in my life.

  I didn’t do very well in school. The only thing I excelled at was sports. I was good at football, decent at basketball, and I was an excellent swimmer. I never had any trouble
getting hired as a lifeguard, either at the beach during the summers, or year-round, working in indoor pools.

  Not so incidentally, I also began training with free weights. That was my football coach’s idea. He encouraged me to bulk up and to put on some muscle. I do believe that I was blessed with what bodybuilders call “good genes.” The very first time I lifted a weight, something clicked inside me. I just seemed to take to it, naturally. And I obtained fast, visible results. Little did I suspect that I had embarked upon what would become a lifelong obsession.

  My parents were disappointed by my lack of academic prowess, but they eventually became resigned to it. And my mother had other plans for me.

  “Listen,” she told my father, on more than one occasion. “The two older boys will go to college and be smart and earn a lot of money. When we’re old, they’ll be able to help us out. The baby will be a priest and he’ll be poor all his life, but he will serve the Good Lord.”

  Unfortunately, the closest I ever came to fulfilling this lofty ambition was serving the obligatory stint as an altar boy—which I hated.

  Against all odds, I did manage to graduate from high school. Then, to bolster my unimpressive academic credentials, I enrolled in a vocational school. I took my classes during the day, and I got a part-time job working in a garage. I was stuck with the late-night shift, which was considered highly undesirable because it interfered with a guy’s social life. But I was still living at home, and for all practical purposes I didn’t have much of a social life. The garage job did have one advantage. I’d bought a rusty old heap of a car, and when I wasn’t busy at work I could use the tools and other equipment at the garage to keep the wreck running.

  The garage was dirty work, and late at night, when there could be long lapses between customers pulling up to the gas pumps, it could be boring. But I didn’t mind. I guess I had inherited a decent enough work ethic. A job was a job, after all.

  The owner of the garage, Mr. Perotti, had a son named Lorenzo, who’d gotten into some sort of trouble with the law. He’d supposedly done some jail time, and when he got out, his family decided that a suitable additional punishment would be to make him work at the garage—on the night shift, of course. So he shared it with me, even though there really wasn’t enough work to keep two guys busy. I suppose I was lucky I wasn’t simply fired and replaced by him.

  Renzo—nobody ever called him by his full name—and I got along well, right from the beginning. Maybe it was because I didn’t pay much attention to the gossip about him, but withheld judgment until I’d had a chance to make up my own mind. After all, it seemed that most of the young men in our neighborhood had their run-ins with the police, sooner or later. Getting busted was virtually a rite of passage. As for Renzo, he may have been named after St. Lawrence, but trust me, he was no saint. He was a tough guy, the kind my parents described as a “hood” or a “punk.”

  On the job, at least, he was no slacker. He worked. And, like me, he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.

  He was good and dirty the first time I met him. I’d been told in advance that he’d be sharing my shift. When I reported to the garage that evening, I couldn’t help feeling a little wary. This guy was an interloper on what I thought of as my turf, after all. He could either make my job easier for me, or more difficult. If he wasn’t willing to pull his own weight, I sure as hell wasn’t looking forward to the possibility of having to do his work in addition to my own.

  I walked into the garage and found him working on a customer’s car.

  “You must be Renzo,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s right. And you must be—shit, they told me your name, but I forgot it.”

  “Gino. Gino D’Agostino.”

  “Oh, yeah. Glad to meet you.”

  He stuck out a greasy hand, and I took it without hesitation and gave it a firm shake.

  I got my first good look at him. He’d been working on that car long enough to get quite filthy. His shirt had its sleeves rolled up to above the elbows and it was open halfway down the front. He had grease and oil smeared all over his chest and his neck, up onto his forehead and even into his hair, which was cut short, except in the front, where it flopped down a bit over his dark eyebrows. He was my height, but he was bigger-boned and sinewy, with a well-developed chest and bulging biceps.

  He turned his attention back to the engine for a moment, but then he tossed his rag aside and ran his hand through his hair.

  He looked me up and down—as openly, as appraisingly, as I’d no doubt been staring at him a moment before.

  “Huh,” he grunted, as though something about me wasn’t quite what he’d anticipated. He had a good poker face. I couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed, or pleasantly surprised.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I was just thinking out loud.” But he smiled, in way that was rather disarming.

  Before I could say anything else, there was the sound of a car pulling up at the pumps. The driver blew his horn.

  “I’ll take it,” Renzo said. He swaggered out of the garage, taking his time. I watched him take care of the customer. He pumped the gas and cleaned the windshield. He was polite, but I could sense a cool detachment and veiled contempt lurking underneath his civility.

  We took turns waiting on the customers as they drove in, and in between I helped him work on the engine. We didn’t talk much.

  On one of the few occasions when Renzo did break the silence, on that first night, he paid me a compliment.

  “You’ve got a nice body,” he remarked.

  “Thanks. So do you.”

  “You lift.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me, too. Where do you work out?” he asked me.

  “I belong to Salvatore’s, that gym over on Third Avenue.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve driven past that place. What’s it like?”

  “It’s nothing fancy. Just your basic grunt-and-sweat iron pit. But you can put in a good workout there. Some big guys go there.”

  “I can’t afford a gym membership, yet. Not until I’ve saved up some money. In the meantime—I have a pretty decent set of weights and equipment at home. All second-hand. I bought it cheap from this guy who got a job in New York City. He knew he could only afford a small apartment there, where he wouldn’t have room for all his weights. And he was planning on joining a gym there in Manhattan. So I got a good deal. Hey, maybe we can work out together, some time,” he added, casually. “At my place.”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  We lapsed into silence again. At last we took a break. It was a quiet night, and the stars were out in a clear sky.

  “You want a drink?” Renzo asked. “My treat.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  He went toward the soft drink vending machine, and he had already pulled a handful of loose change from his pants pocket, when he seemed to have second thoughts.

  “You want one of these, or do you want a real drink?” he asked me.

  “What do you mean by a real drink?”

  “You’re not some kind of a choirboy, are you? You know—a pussy?”

  “I hope not.”

  He grinned. “Good. Come on.” He led me to where there was a small refrigerator, against one wall. I’d never paid much attention to it, because its door was secured by a padlock, and I didn’t have access to the key.

  Renzo unlocked the padlock and opened the door. I now saw that the refrigerator was well stocked with beer, both bottles and cans. In fact, there was nothing in it but beer. Renzo grabbed two cans and tossed me one.

  “I ‘borrowed’ my Dad’s key and had a duplicate made,” he said. “But what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. Unless you tell him, that is.”

  I sensed this was a challenge. “I’m no squealer.”

  “No? Good for you.”

  I felt a need to assert myself, though, to some degree. “It might be different if you start taking cash out of the till,” I warned him. “I can’t
be expected to turn a blind eye to something like that. Because with my luck, I’d be the one who got blamed for it.”

  We’d popped the tops of our cans. He nodded, and then he took a sip of his beer before answering. “That’s not going to be a problem. I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid.”

  “What if your old man notices the beer’s missing?”

  “He won’t. I’ll replace what we drink—eventually. And in the meantime, believe me, he can’t count that high, especially after he’s had a few of these himself. Unless he’s going over the books, or, like you said, counting the cash in the register. That sort of thing he keeps track of, down to last nickel.”

  “He’s tough, but he’s fair.”

  “Fair?” Renzo looked and sounded dubious. “Maybe he’s fair to you.”

  “He has been, so far. He’s all right to work for.”

  “But not so hot to live with, take my word for it. Shit,” Renzo said. “If my old man knew I got into his private stock of booze, he’d take that fan belt over there to my backside. You ever gotten your ass beat with one of those?”

  I shook my head. “No. Have you?”

  “Hell, yes. Plenty! Once he used one of them on me so hard he took a layer of skin off my ass. I ended up in the emergency room, and they called fucking Child Protection.”

  I was shocked. My father never hesitated to bawl me out, verbally, but I couldn’t remember him ever having inflicted any kind of corporal punishment on me, or on any of my siblings.

  “What’d you do to deserve that?” I asked, feeling my throat constrict in empathy.

  “Deserve it? Hell! I never had to do much of anything to get a whipping, but that time I guess I did ask for it,” was the nonchalant reply. “I stole a car out of the garage here. I didn’t have my license yet, but I wanted to drive so bad I couldn’t wait. I wanted to go somewhere, you know, meet up with my buddies, so I just ‘borrowed’ the keys and took the car. My Dad showed up here before he was supposed to, and he found the car missing. Somehow he just knew I’d done it—sometimes I can swear the son of a bitch has eyes in the back of his head, or he can read my mind—so he didn’t call the cops to report the car missing. He just waited for me to bring it back, and when I did, of course I was screwed. He shut the garage doors and hauled my ass right over there, into that corner, and he told me to take my pants and my shorts down. And then, as big as I was, he bent me over his knee and he grabbed one of those fucking fan belts, and he let me have it, right on my bare butt. I screamed my fucking head off and I begged him to stop, but of course I didn’t have the guts to even think about trying to fight my way free of him. It might be a different story, today. Now, I’d beat the shit out of him if he tried to lay a hand on me. Anyway, I was bawling like a baby by the time he was through. He told me I was disgusting and he was ashamed of me, that I made him sick and he wished I’d never been born. I could’ve lived with that. But then, to top it off, he made me wait an extra month after my birthday until I could get my license. I was more pissed off by that than I was by the beating.”