Rock’n’Roll Kisses

Hutch leans against Starsky on the park bench as they watch Joey walk off with her football captain, and sends kudos silently after her.

For one thing she raised the alert that saved Hutch from a sticky end, even if she did blow their cover in the first place, and for another she’s kept him and the rest of the squad entertained for weeks with her dogged pursuit of a bemused Starsky — apparently nothing can stand in the way of an infatuated teenager with a new driver’s license — followed by her total loss of interest once she captured his attention. Now Starsky’s left with two Springsteen tickets in his hand and a dazed expression on his face.

“Dumped for a jock, Starsk.”

“Hey! Not your everyday jock, captain of the football team. And like you said, he’s nice-looking.”

“Yeah. Sweet of him to invite Joey’s ‘uncles’ to the football practice. How’s your ego holding up there, sport?”

“My ego — which I’ll have you know is Teflon-coated, pal — is congratulating me on being off the hook without breaking a promise to the girl who saved your skin.”

“Yep, Nancy Drew’s got nothing on Joey.”

“Better I should lose a date than a partner.” Starsky looks down at the tickets in his hand. “So, what are you doing Friday?”

“Depends who’s asking.”

“Me, dummy. Joey gets the cute jock, guess I’ll make do with the broken down old man in the letterman jacket.”

“Oh, that’s real nice.”

“Don’t worry, Blondie. I wouldn’t swap you for the whole football team.”

***

On Friday night as they arrive for the concert and run the gauntlet of hawkers on the sidewalk outside the theater, Hutch thinks maybe he’s the one who’s ended up on a date with a high schooler.

“Hey, I could get a T-shirt! You want a poster?”

“Starsky, it’s gonna fall apart as soon as you get it home. Unlicensed merchandise is just an excuse to rip off kids’ pocket money…”

Starsky ignores him and points past the signs proclaiming ‘Tonight – Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’ to the long queue of hopefuls undaunted by the SOLD OUT notices. “These tickets are like gold dust! Joey has no idea what she’s turning down.”

Hutch smirks. “Oh, I think she does. How’d you get the tickets, anyway?”

“I have learned never to look a gift bear in the mouth.”

“Starsk, that’s not what that means, the horse is… ahh, forget it. Must have been some favor Huggy owed you.”

“Nah, I think Joey charmed him. He says she’s got chutzpah, even if she has terrible taste in men.”

“No arguments from me.”

“Don’t forget who’s holding the tickets, chump.”

***

The opening act has finished by the time they’ve scored beers from the bar and squeezed in to stand at the back of the crowd.

“At least you’re tall enough to see the band without sitting on my shoulders, Blintz.”

“You too, buddy. My back is very grateful for that fact.”

“And you’re old enough to buy me beer.”

As the E Street Band are announced to thunderous applause from the packed auditorium, for a split second Hutch thinks Starsky is on the stage. It’s unnerving how like him Springsteen is with the hair, the jeans, the constant motion. He looks beautiful up there, vibrant, like Starsky on the street when the sun is low in the sky and he seems to glow. Watching Springsteen move on stage feels like a guilty pleasure.

It’s a long time since Hutch has been to a gig like this. He’d forgotten the sheer physical sensation of amplified music — sound waves vibrating through his body, bass line like a second heartbeat, making him bulletproof, impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Starsky is bouncing beside him, singing along, eyes flashing sparks of reflected color from the stage lights.

Over an insistent beat of drums and guitars, plangent keyboard chords hit Hutch right in the solar plexus. Springsteen’s lyrics might paint a picture that’s closer to Starsky’s life experience — Hutch has never worked ‘neath the wheels in the badlands — but there’s a fierce longing and a desperation that speaks directly to Hutch, fills him with a bittersweet sense of something vital that’s just out of reach, makes him yearn for an escape that if he could only touch it would change everything.

There’s a bleak kind of comfort, too, in hearing the songs lay bare all the ways the world is set up wrong, standing here in this crowd and bearing witness… If Starsky weren’t so distracted right now by having a good time he’d tell Hutch to stop thinking so hard and just enjoy the rock’n’roll, but Hutch likes letting his mind wander where the music takes him. It feels like he’s being tuned up, recalibrated.

Springsteen has undeniable charisma but he’s not slick. At one point he struggles for a full minute to tune his guitar and Hutch is paralyzed by second-hand stage fright, his anxious guitar-player’s heart beating double time as he feels sure that in his place he would freeze right up — but the songs keep coming. Now Hutch too is singing along to lines he knows from countless hours spent next to Starsky on the bench seat of the Torino, radio on and looking out as the mean streets of Bay City go by, speculating on the lives of people they pass and occasionally ending up sprawled in Starsky’s lap after sudden sharp turns. Maybe the new bucket seats aren’t so special, even if they are gentler on his back.

Up on stage, Bruce is telling the crowd that his girlfriends rag him for writing all these songs about cars without knowing the first thing about how to fix a motor — “when I go under the hood, it’s like Alice lost in Wonderland.” Score one to Starsky, thinks Hutch, who at least talks a good game when it comes to maintaining the Coke can on wheels he loves so much and with so little reason. He puts a hand on Starsky’s shoulder, leans close to ask him whether all Springsteen’s love songs are about cars. Starsky winks, yells back, “Well, girls and cars. Why d’you think I like ‘em?” and sure enough, two songs later with the elegiac harmonica line of ‘Thunder Road’ twisting his guts into knots and Starsky beside him yelling about two lanes that will take them anywhere, Hutch thinks maybe now he understands a sliver of Starsky’s inexplicable passion for motor vehicles, what Springsteen calls the spiritual and religious significance of a three-ninety-six. Not that he’ll ever admit it. Got to keep the world spinning right on its axis, play his part in their vaudeville routine. It takes two to tango, as Ginger would say.

Now Bruce is singing about the darkness on the edge of town, how everybody’s got a secret, son as a xylophone adds a bittersweet edge to the menace of the minor chords. The crush of bodies in the crowded theater on this hot summer night takes Hutch back to another heatwave, standing in John Blaine’s office doorway with Starsky, joking and planning a Saturday night meal that never happened. Hutch feels an echo of Blaine’s roughhousing jab to his belly as he walked past them that last time; feels the warmth of Starsky by his side both then and now, a sensation he’s learned not to take for granted in the long months since Blaine’s death when their relationship has been more strained than ever before, the ground beneath their feet uncertain.

He gets a frightening urge sometimes to push Starsky’s tolerance as far as he can and find out what it will take to make it shatter. But in moments of reprieve like this with Starsky beside him, he still feels he’s found his place in the universe.

Springsteen yells, “Rosie, come out tonight!” and the crowd goes wild.

Starsky gives a wry shrug at the name, but even if the lyrics cut a little close to home after a few beers it doesn’t stop him singing along to entice Señorita Rosalita to sit by his fire. Never mind that Starsky’s own Rosey chose to leave Starsky far behind, and Hutch to pick up the pieces. Listening to Starsky screaming out with the rest of the crowd that Rosie is his one desire, Hutch is filled with a wave of fierce, protective appreciation for Starsky’s brave heart, for the way he goes through the pain of his losses and mostly out the other side, without putting up walls and pushing the world away.

Hutch glances across at his partner to stoke the feeling a little higher and sees Starsky’s face light up as the crowd roars. Springsteen has slid across the stage on his knees towards his saxophone player, and when Hutch pulls his gaze from Starsky he sees that they, Bruce and Clarence, are kissing. He’s seized by a sudden irrational panic that his surge of affection for the man beside him has somehow caused this to happen, veered off like a demented firework and ignited spontaneous kisses between these two men on the stage. The shock must show in his expression because Starsky is laughing at him, pulling him close.

“Hutch, your face! They always kiss, didn’t you know? Come on, it’s no big thing.”

Hutch swallows. “Sure Starsk, no big thing.”

“Ha! I knew it. You can take the boy out of Duluth, but you can’t take Duluth out of the boy.”

“Fuck you, Starsky, Bob Dylan is from Duluth.”

“And he kisses guys?”

“Well he sings about it. Verlaine and Rimbeau and all that.”

“Hutch, I don’t think Rambo does that kind of thing. Though maybe he’s a Muscle Mary, who knows?”

Hutch cuffs Starsky’s chin, steals his beer and takes a gulp, but he’s genuinely thrown by their reactions to the kiss that’s still burned into his mind’s eye like the afterimage of a flashbulb while the concert rolls on. Starsky’s easy acceptance is just not what Hutch thought would be on the cards after their charged conversations last summer in his battered Ford LTD confessional-on-wheels, with Starsky reeling from the twin blows of grief for John Blaine’s death and shock at their discovery of Blaine’s closeted gay life. ‘It is something to contend with. It’s not your usual everyday thing.’ Now Hutch is the one on the back foot, compelled to justify his response, shouting into Starsky’s ear over the music,

“It’s not the kiss, Starsk, it’s the circumstances. I just really wasn’t expecting that to happen.”

“Yeah, yeah. I knew you weren’t that sophisticated. You talk the talk but can you walk the walk, is the question. Not very far, it turns out.”

Hutch is flustered to be sure, wrong-footed, but he feels lighter somehow, dizzy with it. The world has rearranged itself a little, got sharper, brighter.

***

Well past midnight and three encores later, they’re weaving their way through the crowd of people spilling out of the foyer into the street, bumping shoulders, aching and hoarse and buoyed up by the atmosphere around them. Hutch glances across to find Starsky watching him.

“You’re still getting over that kiss, ain’t ‘cha? ‘Labels don’t mean a thing’ my ass.”

Hutch is out on his feet, feels like he’s gone ten rounds with the department shrink over things he would never discuss with the department shrink — love and sex, yearning and friendship and the impossibility of trying to be a hero on the backstreets or a saint in the city, not to mention the can of worms that is fathers and sons. He’s been taken apart and put back together, slapped on the ass and sent back out into the world after an encore that has coached him, call and response in words of one syllable, to raise his hand and ask for what he needs. Easier said than done. But yeah, the kiss is part of it.

“I told you, I just wasn’t expecting it. I was taken aback.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“It made me question my assumptions is all. Hey Starsk, you think Hall and Oates kiss?”

“If they don’t it’s the slow burn of the century. You’ve seen that photo on the lyric sheet in their silver LP? If they ain’t kissing then they wanna.”

“Maybe it’s all image.”

“Maybe. You’re no judge of kissing anyway, Mister You’re-Not-Even-A-Good-Kisser. What do you know?”

“What are you… C’mon, you know I was winding you up that day. How would I know if you’re a good kisser?”

“But that’s the point, Hutch. Don’t you think it’s kinda sad that you don’t know that? I mean, Bruce and Clarence know.”

“They do, huh?”

“About each other, dummy! I think it’s nice that they know that. You know, that they do that. That they have that kind of friendship.”

This is so surreal that Hutch giggles.

“Starsky, do you want me to kiss you?”

Starsky shoves him.

“Oh, shaddup. It’s not a laughing matter.”

“Then why are you laughing, mushbrain?”

“I’m talking about the sacred bond of friendship here, dumbass. Some best friend I got landed with.”

“C’mon, stop, stop. You know I love you, Starsk. Here, I’ll buy you a taco. My treat.”

“Don’t think you can distract me with food, Blintz. But yeah, I’ll take a taco, I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry.”

“What can I say? Gotta fuel my youthful zest for life.”

They stop in the shadows by the side of the taco stand. The concert crowds keep streaming past while Hutch digs in his pocket for cash.

“There now, who says I don’t treat you nice. You want hot sauce?”

“Depends if you’re gonna kiss me later.”

Starsky grins, leaning up against the palm tree that’s growing out of the sidewalk behind the taco stand and settling in to wait for his edible peace-offering.

“I mean, I want hot sauce, but I don’t want you to spontaneously combust, you know?”

He tilts his head to look up at the silhouette of tattered palm leaves against the sodium glow of the street-lit sky, leaving the usual space for a comeback quip from his partner.

Hutch just watches him for a moment. “OK, hot stuff, I got a solution.”

“Yeah?”

Hutch leans in and catches Starsky’s jaw, looks him in the eye for a half second, and kisses him. It’s a good kiss, not deep, but deliberate and well, kind of electric. Starsky’s eyes briefly close as they drift in the moment, then he blinks dopily as Hutch pulls back.

“What was that?”

“That, my friend, was a comradely kiss of brotherhood.”

“Um, you sure about that? ‘Cause I’m not sure that’s how it goes, Hutch.”

“Well, give me another chance, I’m a beginner here.”

Hutch hooks his index fingers through Starsky’s belt loops. Starsky looks up to meet his eyes, fighting not to giggle.

“Huuutch…”

Hutch nips Starsky’s bottom lip, runs his tongue along it.

“Is that better?”

Starsky shivers.

“I really don’t think you’re doing it right.”

Hutch kisses him again, the kind of kiss he remembers Starsky exchanging with Vicky in Las Vegas, slow and easy and relaxed, sucking slightly on his bottom lip. He feels Starsky rise up on his toes a bit to get the angle just so. Or maybe, between the champagne bubbles in his blood and the butterflies in his stomach, Hutch is starting to float away. He tightens his grip on Starsky’s belt loops, anchoring himself, and his wrists bump against the soft hairs on Starsky’s belly where his t-shirt has ridden up. Starsky squirms at the contact and breaks the kiss. Hutch leans forward and licks his neck.

“Hutch, you don’t have a brother, do you?”

They’re both laughing now, ducking their heads. They lean back against the rough bark of the tree, shoulder to shoulder and panting slightly, facing the corrugated metal panel of the taco stand.

Hutch’s sense of self-preservation kicks in just long enough to give thanks that the concert venue is a) located on a strip with a thriving gay quarter and correspondingly relaxed policing policy and b) out of their jurisdiction. Then the intensity of Starsky’s gaze pulls him right back into the moment.

Hutch waggles his eyebrows and asks,

“So, did you like my solution?”

“Solution to what?”

“The taco problem, dummy. First we kiss, then you get all the hot sauce you want.”

“Hmmm. I got another solution.”

“Yeah?”

“First, we kiss…”

Starsky demonstrates. Hutch co-operates. They take a moment to regroup.

“I see. And then?”

“Um, we kiss…”

Hutch takes his cue, closing his eyes and leaning in. He’s been running on empty for what seems like years, but with each kiss he can feel himself recharging, energy coursing through every cell of his body. They lean their foreheads together and just breathe for a moment, ‘til Hutch prompts,

“…and then?”

“Huh?”

“Starsk, you going somewhere with this?”

“Yeah.” Starsky’s voice is rough. He scrubs a hand over his face. “C’mon babe, the Torino’s getting lonely.”

“What, no taco?”

“Shuddup and walk, Blondie.”

Starsky pulls him along as they set off down the street again. The concert crowds have thinned out by now and he puts his arm around Hutch’s waist, tucking his left hand into the left back pocket of Hutch’s jeans — his going-out jeans, his date night jeans. In the interests of comradeship and brotherhood Hutch mirrors the gesture, though given the tightness of Starsky’s jeans, getting Hutch’s right hand into Starsky’s right pocket is quite a challenge. Come to think of it, Hutch’s jeans also seem tighter than when he put them on earlier this evening. He wonders how quickly he can get them off. Should he need to.

“You know Starsk, I must be your brother, if we’re Joey’s uncles.”

“Oh yeah? It’s not the only explanation for the situation, if you use some imagination.”

“You sound like Huggy.”

“Go on, give your brain a workout, college boy.”

“Well… I guess I could have married your sister…”

“I don’t have a sister.”

“…or we could have married a pair of sisters… or…”

Starsky quirks his eyebrow, meaningfully.

“Or…?”

Hutch can’t keep the grin off his face. He feels a squeeze in his back pocket, steals a quick squeeze back, because his hand is right there on Starsky’s ass, because he can.

He hopes that Joey had a wonderful evening.

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