`can we avoid Intercourse?" Ian looked up from the road map. His sunglasses hid the gleam that lit George's eyes when he laughed, but his jowls began to dimple.
"No more bad puns," Ian pleaded.
"I thought we'd go straight to Bird-in-Hand and try the Family Restaurant. It would save time if we could avoid Intercourse."
"Take the 896 off route 30," Ian said, diligently bringing his attention back to the map.
It was George's idea to visit Lancaster County to see the Amish. The placenames they discovered were an incitement to endless crass jokes. Blue Bail, Bird-inHand, Intercourse and Paradise. Names made all the more incongruous because the Amish were such an upright, puritan and straight living people - the Plain People they called themselves. Though the hokey souvenir shops did a brisk trade in lewd T-shirts. Five million or so tourists arrived each year to gape at the ways and mores of the Amish, the Brethren and the Mennonite population. Nobody came to Lancaster for the scenery. Ian had seen nothing beyond giant fields of corn and potatoes, Dutch barns and silver bullet nosed grain silos. You came to Lancaster County for one reason only, to look at the people who lived there. To spot Amish and Mennonite men in their distinctive black garb and funny beards, working in the fields with horse powered machinery, jiggling the reins of horse drawn buggies, the women in their coloured dresses and black aprons, the pretty blond girls in pinafores and boys in blue shirts, waistcoats and hats.
Shortly before the Bird-in-Hand Family Restaurant they saw their first horsedrawn buggy. A line of cars had slowed to get a better look. You were asked not to photograph the Amish, who felt that having their picture taken was an inducement to the sin of pride. But a host of onlookers were pointing their cameras behind the cover of car glass.
"You turn your back on the world and the whole world comes looking for you to gawk and pry," Ian said. "It's bizarre."
"Do you want to sneak a photograph?" George asked as they passed the horse and buggy.
"No."
"Are you going to be like this for the whole trip?"
Ian folded up the map. In the silence that followed, George fixed his eyes straight ahead while his hand fumbled with the temperature control. The air-conditioned atmosphere within the car was too cold for comfort.
They went directly to the buffet in the family restaurant. The hot food was good, the pork and mashed potatoes, the corn and lima beans and carrots. They'd sweetened the pasta and other vegetable dishes too much for Ian's taste.
"A good smorgasbord sticks to the ribs," George enthused as they carried their heaped plates to an upholstered booth by the window. "And leave some room for the butterscotch."
It was their first trip out of New York together and George was on a spree. George was a native New Yorker in his mid-forties. His head was shaved to stubble to hide his rapid hair loss and he was developing a paunch with an inch of pinch around his hips. He flirted with diets, but he loved food. There was nothing George didn't eat, but he made his money limiting the food intake of others. George had a business called The Calorie Counter. It specialised in low calorie and low cholesterol lunches, gluten free food, yeast free, non-dairy and such. The business was doing well. He had ownership of the Calorie Counter trademark and there was talk of a franchise. He wanted Ian in on it.
Ian hadn't made up his mind. He was ten years younger than George and had always taken pains to keep his figure and his independence. They had been together for six months. But it was often a bad idea for a couple to go into business together.
Back when Ian first arrived in New York he'd walked for days around Greenwich Village. If he was going to stay in this city, he wanted to live in a community where gay men belonged. But what he saw at first hand frightened him. He had the means to get by for a couple of weeks but no definite plan. Accommodation was incredibly expensive, and on his first night walking along Bleecker Street he saw a couple of teenage boys sleeping in a doorway. Darkling waifs holding on to each other in a drink or drug-induced daze on a sheet of cardboard melting in the rain.
He was new to the city but he could spot other men, dressed up for a night out in the Village, looking for action and distraction on Christopher Street or rougher territories nearer to the waterfront. They looked so conspicuous and so naive. Even the beautifully groomed men with toned bodies and expensive clothes that flattered their figures looked vulnerable, and destined for disillusionment and hurt. Worse than that, he saw them as a mockery of his own appearance and intentions. They made him feel like a child again, scrubbed and dressed up by his mother for a party in the home of a wealthy relation, ill-at-ease and feeling out of place.
He went from bar to bar looking for a job. He got used to being sized up like a piece of meat of dubious provenance. Desperation is a cheap perfume, and he bluffed and charmed and kept his cool. But as his feet got sore and his legs got tired, his confidence began to dwindle. Walking along West 4th Street one evening he saw the sidewalk littered with furniture; lamps, easy chairs, a bedside locker, heedlessly loaded cardboard boxes full of personal letters, notebooks, intimate things. The furniture was tatty and mismatched in a way you'd never notice in the excitement of having a place to stay in the Village. But on a city sidewalk with night falling, everything looked shabby and sad. What was it, an eviction, a row between live-in partners, or a death where nobody had returned to collect the personal effects?
He walked into a side-street bar called Slims.
"I'm looking for a job."
"What kinda job?"
"Bartender."
"You got experience?"
"Hey, I'm Irish."
It was a bluff. He was pandering to a misconception, a prejudice. It got him a one-night trial. Tips only. "Pay and train you? Gedoudda here." The owner passed Ian a white apron, nodded to a moonfaced middle-aged man having a drink at the bar and walked out.
Even before the place filled up the cocktail orders went beyond Ian's knowledge of bar work. With the regulars getting impatient, the older man came around to Ian's side of the bar. He didn't say much; he didn't have to. He instructed Ian in the proper measures of vodka and gin, Amaretto, Chartreuse, Kirsch, Angostura bitters, syrups and sugar crystals. They sampled and judged their efforts together and got high. After the bar closed for the night, Ian went back to George's place.
They pigged out with enthusiasm. When they finished they eased back in the booth, stunned by the amount of food they'd eaten.
"Mmmmmm," Ian rubbed his stomach.
"You're not kiddin'." George sighed.
They sipped a final top-up of coffee and watched the bustle of more people arriving, taking seats, hauling food to their tables, feeling almost bereft in the aftermath of hunger so completely satisfied.
"I hope you're having a good time?" George said.
"I am. And I'm sorry about that scene earlier on."
"If you really want out, now is the time to say it."
"Don't start that again."
An Amish girl with a soap and water complexion began to take away their plates.
"I wouldn't blame you if you left," George said the moment she was out of earshot. "I'm a fat slob. A fraud. And one of these days I'm going to be found out."
"You're a good man. A kind man."
GEORGE reached out to give Ian's hand a fond squeeze. Ian was about to respond when he froze and automatically looked around. George withdrew his hand.
They left the Family Restaurant and set out for the Amish Village. The day was advancing and the heavy meal, the evening heat and the long drive produced a mellow lull.
When they reached the place on the map indicated as the Amish Village, they found a car park with a fenced off compound, a dwelling house and outbuildings. The tour would start and finish with the opportunity to buy more souvenirs.
George paid for two adults and they joined a tour group already seated in a sparsely furnished room with bare floorboards. It was explained that you could not barge in on an Amish or Mennonite family or intrude on their private lives. Instead you got a tour of this reproduction household, led by a schoolmarmish lady with a thin mouth. As she brought the tour around the various rooms, painted either blue for the sky, green for nature, or white for purity, Ian was struck by how familiar it all seemed. The castiron cooking stove, the hand-cranked butter churn, and the corrugated scrubbing board were like relics of his upbringing in the West of Ireland. The room where the tour started even smelled like the parlour at home.
He had grown up on a family farm in a locality where mechanisation and modernisation were only beginning to take over from manual labour. Field working tools similar to these traditional Amish implements had raised blisters on his two hands.
Inexplicably, his anger began to return. What did people find good about this lifestyle other than being the object of the world's curiosity? The whole enterprise seemed dim-witted, mule-stubborn and conceited. The noise of the passing traffic outside was unusually loud in the house because the windows were not double-glazed. This torrential road noise was a constant reminder that life in such a household was founded on compromise. Electricity was bad because it hooked the Plain People, to the "English", their catchall term for the outside world. Yet they used battery-operated lights on their horse drawn buggies, telephones, calculators and electric cash registers in their shops, washing machines with gasoline powered motors, propane bottle gas stoves, diesel power units and chainsaws. Laptops were also considered for the purpose of trading. Where did they imagine the oil, the industrial and the electronic components came from? How could they be so wilfully selective or ignore the broader complexities of being fully human?