The Butterscotch Prince

THE

BUTTERSCOTCH

PRINCE

by Richard Hall

Foreword by Jeffrey Round

ReQueered Tales

Los Angeles  •  Toronto

2023

The Butterscotch Prince

by Richard Hall

Copyright © 1975/1983 by Richard Hall.

Foreword: copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Round.

Cover design: Ron Perry Graphic Design.

First American edition: 1975

This release based on Alyson Publications 2nd edition: 1983

This edition: ReQueered Tales, October 2023

ReQueered Tales version 1.20

Kindle edition ASIN: B0CKKSG33J

Epub edition ISBN-13: 978-1-959902-13-3

Paperback edition ISBN-13: 978-1-99902-14-0

Hardcover edition ISBN-13: 978-1-99902-15-7

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By RICHARD W. HALL

The Butterscotch Prince (1975)

Couplings (1981)

Three Plays for Gay Theater (1983)

Letter from a Great Uncle (1985)

Family Fictions: A Novel (1991)

Fidelities: A Book of Stories (1992)

The Spinner of Tales (2023)

Praise for Richard Hall and

THE BUTTERSCOTCH PRINCE

A deliciously written, softly witty and intricately plotted gay murder mystery … A delight!

— In Touch

Hall’s canvas is thickly populated with interesting figures and he has a nice touch for the potential of the lurid and banal alike. This is a neat, tidy thriller of the Agatha Christie variety, with an amateur sleuth and a convoluted plot, lots of local color and the pleasant addition of good sex scenes. Richard Hall uses the whodunit to advantage … humanized it in a way few have before.

— George Whitmore, The Advocate

"The Butterscotch Prince has my admiration … a good read in one sitting."

— Michael Lynch, The Body Politic

Hall writes … in a measured, often moving voice that explores the difficulties of grief and commitment.

— Kirkus Reviews

The elegance and refinement of Hall’s prose have once again marked him as one of our most distinguished writers.

— Gay Pride

Hall’s stories evoke comparison with Henry James or Maupassant, Hemingway and Fitzgerald … A luminous collection … Hall has found in gay life stories to amuse, entertain, and move.

— Lambda Book Report

Hall shows again and again his fidelity to the gay male community at large. These stories are the work of an acknowledged master at the top of his form.

— Bay Area Reporter

Richard Hall

Richard Hall was a novelist, an acclaimed short-story writer, and a widely produced playwright. He was book editor of The Advocate from 1976 to 1982 and the first openly gay critic to be elected to the National Book Critics Circle. His landmark essay, Gay Fiction Comes Home, was the front-page article in The New York Times Book Review in June 1988, and his reviews have also appeared in The New Republic, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Village Voice. His Family Fictions: A Novel is also published by Penguin. The Spinner of Tales was published posthumously by ReQueered Tales in 2023. Richard Hall died of AIDS-related complications in October 1992.

THE

BUTTERSCOTCH

PRINCE

by Richard Hall

Foreword

It’s amusing to look back at this book now, nearly a half century after it was conceived, knowing that its author intended it to be read as pornography. That it was turned down for publication by a caucus of literary lesbians for failing to meet the requirements of such a work is also amusing, though no doubt it was a blow to its author’s ego, as his initial impetus for writing it had self-admittedly been pecuniary.

What difference would it have made to Richard Hall’s trajectory as a writer had The Butterscotch Prince been accepted as pornography? We will never know, but the fact is that it was eventually accepted by a mainstream publisher and sent into the world as a work of literary fiction in 1975, selling a respectable twenty-five thousand copies before the remainder were pulped, only to be given a second life with the then-fledgling Alyson Publications in the 1980s. And, for that, we now have this belated third edition of Hall’s gay mystery, and premiere novel, from ReQueered Tales some forty years later.

Of what do the book’s literary qualities consist? Of Hall’s later books, like Fidelities and Family Fictions, they lie in his mastery of the craft carefully honed over the years. But in this first work, in what was then already a well-mined genre, the answer is simpler: Hall makes us care about his characters and allows us to feel that we are there in his scenes, listening, absorbing and laughing along with them, while sharing their triumphs, disappointments and discoveries as he takes us on his protagonist’s journey to solve the mysterious death of a beloved friend. It is this simple yet telling gift that colours the writing.

The story in these pages is set in a transitional time, as far as gay literature goes, bridging the gap between the hedonistic freedoms of the mid-70s, when it was first published, and the decade that followed, after AIDS had already reared its ugly head, when Hall revised the book. In so doing, he acknowledges an attempt to make the story more current, referring to a fear of death among the gay crowd in New York City without naming it, but at a time when the concept of safer sex had not yet taken hold. Ergo the uninhibitedly promiscuous romps experienced by the protagonist, Cordell, in his quest to solve the murder of his best friend and twin soul, Ellison, the book’s eponymous Butterscotch Prince.

As we learn, Cordell does this with the aid of a single clue overlooked by the police, who are clearly not interested in a queer murder, tracking down the murderer with what would now be seen as a quaint sexual device: a double-sized masturbatory condom sleeve. We laughingly imagine prudes of the time looking askance at such an object, as puritanical Victorians might once have looked on peep shows, though clearly it was viewed as risqué if not downright shocking by the book’s characters.

This book then is a romp, a fun backwards glance at an era as viewed through the eyes of a nascent writing talent eagerly exercising his literary skills while exploring the newly opened vistas of life for those who dared explore them in a starry-eyed, post-Stonewall America in all its innocence. Tellingly, Cordell’s search culminates in an all-night sextravaganza at a club called, appropriately enough, the Hellhole. Yet Hall appends a final chapter, bringing his story to a full close with a Pride march, a soul-liberating trail blazing through history. Whether you are encountering this book for the first time or coming back to it after many years, you may find some long-buried part of yourself in these pages.

Jeffrey Round

Toronto,

December, 2022

Jeffrey Round is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and songwriter. His breakout novel, A Cage of Bones, was listed on AfterElton’s 50 Best Gay Books. Lake on the Mountain, first of the seven Dan Sharp mysteries, won a Lambda Award in 2013. His latest book is the poetry collection Threads (2022) from Beautiful Dreamer Press.

For Dan

who taught me how to tell the truth

I. CORD

NOW, SOMETIMES, WHEN I HEAR the new math teacher’s voice floating down the hall from her classroom to mine, furious because her kids aren’t paying attention, I can’t believe she’s right next door, separated by the same twenty yards of dirty linoleum that once separated me from Ellison. I never heard Ellison screaming at his ninth-graders, not till near the very end. He had that special quality that can turn thirty squirmers into a single learning machine.

When Ellison taught down the hall I never had to tap the door-stopper with my foot and swing it shut. Because his kids were pitched forward on their rubbery behinds, pencils gripped firmly, hot in pursuit of x the unknown. And loving it. You’d think x was the winning number in the state lottery or a prize thoroughbred at Aqueduct, the way they breathed. Ever hear thirty kids breathe while they use their heads eagerly, joyfully? They sound like the woodwind section playing the Forest Murmurs from Siegfried. Adenoidal ecstasy.

When you’re a teacher you wait and hope for that. Forest Murmur time today – beautiful. That’s your reward. The magic. The rest is only a job in a zoo. Sometimes, when a week or two go by and no Forest Murmurs, you start to wonder what drove you into exile among the Little People. What wrong turning? Are you atoning for wrong-doing in a previous life? Suffering from clogged veins or riboflavin deficiency? But don’t get me wrong. I can’t imagine doing any other kind of work. Most of the time.

But now, sometimes, when I hear the roars of Ginger Lucas down the hall and know she’s standing in front of thirty flat blank faces, it seems only a bad dream. I even switch channels and pretend she isn’t there. I view the bent heads in my own class as we read about Tom Sawyer and Holden Caulfield and tell myself I’ll meet Ellison in the faculty room for a smoke in a few minutes. And he’ll punch me in the upper arm in that hostile-friendly way of his and his eyes will be soft with wariness and humor, two wet sherry-eyes at the bottom of the glass, and we’ll trade a look that says everything.

Says, Dig, Mr. Rivkin the principal missed his prostate massage this morning because Luella, the school nurse, found the forefinger in her rubber glove all worn away. Dig, we’re gonna buy old Horatio Hess, the French teacher, a Petite Larousse so he’ll get his vocabulary over two thousand words. Dig, there’s a new secretary named Awilda in the front office and we’re gonna turn up wearing T-shirts that say Puerto Rico Me Encanta. Dig, buncha kids want to build a kite at lunchtime, a super-kite, let’s give them a hand.

But none of that is going to happen now. When we drop Tom Sawyer and the kids look up and the Forest Murmurs fade (if they ever started) and Jesus Gongora jumps up with his right hand nailed to his crotch, I’m going to stay in my seat. I won’t trundle downstairs to the faculty room. I’ll lock my door for five minutes and sneak a smoke here. I can’t take the vacancy there. The air is bent to his shape still, but where he should be, one eye squinty in an aureole of smoke, is emptiness. Ellison Greer, who used to complain about the view from his apartment on 22nd Street, now has the finest view in three states, a thousand-dollar-a-month condominium-type view from New Jersey, where the morning sun hits the glittering peaks of Manhattan and turns them into illustrations for the heavenly city. He’s in the Elysian Fields Cemetery, Section 35, Plot B. The all-black section. With a puncture wound through his grieving heart.

Maybe I should introduce myself. Cordell McGreevy. That’s one of the advantages of parenthood – one of the few, I guess. You get to name your creation. I was born 31 years ago, named for Cordell Hull, who was racing around signing peace treaties when my father was young. He was very impressed. Frankly, I’ve always felt kind of dated, like bread that says Good Until September 25th. Nobody knows Cordell Hull any more.

I grew up in Troy, New York, which is a nice place to be from. The best thing I can say about it is that if they chopped it off and moved it to a warmer clime I might like to go back. But since my father died and my mother moved to California, I can find no reason to return. I only had one friend there, the quietest boy in my class, who raised praying mantises professionally starting at the age of ten. He put curtain rings around their middles and tied them to the back fence with sewing thread, but I have a sneaky feeling he’s tied up somewhere now with a curtain ring around his own middle.

I guess I had a standard American upbringing – everything rosy on the outside but inside a real House of Atreus, everybody full of pent-up wrath and plans for revenge. My sister and I have barely spoken to each other for ten years. Our last quarrel was over the division of spoils when my father died and my mother broke up housekeeping. Geri and I had a vicious fight over a book – an Oz book which we both loved – but it was one of those quarrels which is not really about the matter at hand. It was an ancient wrong with underground runners that went back and back, down and down, like oak roots under the front porch. Back to who got to sleep in Mom’s bed. Who got to kiss Daddy first. Who got to ride in the front seat. God knows.

But as we stood in the upstairs hallway, snatching the Oz book from each other’s hands, there was one moment when our eyes met and we both knew, deeply and truly, that we would never forgive or forget. That at the age of sixty, seventy, on our deathbeds, we would still be competing, still trying to push the other aside (Me first, me first!), still taking out old injustices and polishing them to a fine black glow (The Annual Awards Dinner for Grievances – this year’s prize goes to Cord for his standout performance in I Remember Mama). And something in me went cold – a flame perishing – and I let her have the book. We have been cool ever since.

That story reflects no credit on me. I won’t waste pages trying to justify myself, tracing our sibling rivalry to the same pounding hungers that exist in every family. It doesn’t really matter, does it? I mean, all we’ve got is now.

One other story from the past – the last one, I promise – and one I like better. Not that it’s any more flattering.

I studied piano as a kid, mostly under my mother’s prodding. The worst part was the annual recital given by the students of my teacher, Miss diFlorenzo. This recital was a very classy affair at the Trojan Acres Club with the girl students (and the students were mostly girls, believe me) in evening dresses and the boy students (all three of us) in pre-tied bow ties. The recital was organized so that the most advanced students played last and one year – believe it or not – I was the most advanced. The last of the last.

Picture it. A six-foot grand on a dais (I used an upright at home). Acres of relatives out front, beaming with pleasure that their ordeal was almost over and the bar within easy reach. Miss diFlorenzo almost buried in a gardenia corsage she had sent herself. And yours truly, approaching the keyboard with the terrifying conviction that he couldn’t play unless he went to the bathroom first and dropped a load.

The Chopin Funeral March, my scheduled offering, had gone clean out of my mind. Luckily, my fingers still remembered and I sat in remote bemusement watching them scuttle over the keys like mottled crabs, picking out sounds that seemed vaguely familiar. But all good things have to end and when the da capo came around, my fingers ran out of gas. So, after rippling off a handsome broken chord in the diminished, I spun around to the audience and said, That is where Chopin died, ladies and gentlemen. The piece was finished by his star pupil, Ludwig van Beethoven, as you all know. But I’m sure you want me to end the piece here, where Chopin did, out of respect. Cool as ice, not a quaver in my voice. Naturally there was great applause – mostly because now they could hug their kids and head for the bar. But the pay-off came when Miss diFlorenzo rushed up and kissed me, her corsage going like sixty, and said in her birdy voice, He did what Paderewski used to do. He always stopped there too. And he was a personal friend of the composer.

I tell this story not to show how weak is the hold of the average citizen on nineteenth century chronology, but to make another, sadder point – how easy it has always been for me to lie. Sometimes I think I was born with a tape running in my head, the Lie for Today. When faced with any difficulty, the tape starts and I get this homing feeling, the relief of knowing I’m back in the land of lies, all snuggled in and comfy, where no one can reach or harm me.

Even now, when my life is so different, I sometimes get the old urge and it takes a firm hold on the tape to keep it from rewinding and starting over. In my heyday I lied for no reason at all, just to keep in practice, or to tell my hearer something that could be believed more easily, without an explanation. And that’s why I’ve always made my friends people of integrity, those who make the rare stubborn stands of this world. No one else interests me. That was true even when I was a kid, which explains why Miss diFlorenzo found herself minus a star pupil after the recital.

How I got from Troy to teaching in P.S. 9 in Manhattan is a long boring story, mostly about sitting in classrooms and taking notes and regurgitating the notes on exam forms, plus a few years of therapy to help me bridge the gap between the glorious bullshit of college and the brutality of the West Side. That’s one way of putting it. Actually, two years with Dr. Ash were spent learning how to be a fag.

I put it that way because things are better now and I can joke about it. That is, I can be self-deprecating in a mildly humorous way, which Dr. Ash always said is a sign of maturity – a word, I’ve always believed, that should be applied to bonds and not people. But learning How T.B.A.F. was not as easy as it sounds.

I know, these days, it’s supposed to be a smooth transition from a world that hates you to a world that loves you, a smooth boogie from an old life to a new. Read the pride manuals, go to a few rap sessions, turn out for some zaps, march in the June parade, and whammo! – there’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re automatically rid of the scorn (Hey, man, you throw that ball like a girl!’’) and the fear (You didn’t get a hard-on when you danced with Cindy, whazza matter with ya?"). Well, it didn’t work out that way for me.

In fact, there were some very heavy times, when I figured I wasn’t going to make it. I had to develop a whole new cell structure that could handle it – a Cordell McGreevy clone that could cope with cocksucking, as it were. It wasn’t easy. In fact, I suspect that even Dr. Ash, a balding model of subdued optimism nailed to a black Barcalounger, occasionally had his doubts.

Like the week I couldn’t stop talking, after overhearing two men my own age, in the ad agency where I worked as a copywriter, discuss the fact that I was queer. I was visiting a colleague in his topless cubicle when my name sounded over the glass bricks – my name followed by a few estimates of my sex habits. I stumbled out, ears roaring, back to my own cubicle. That afternoon a silver thread of sound started pouring from my mouth. It didn’t stop for fourteen hours a day for seven days. I talked to every human being who crossed my path. When you figure I was riding the buses and roaming the streets, that adds up to a lot of people. Most of them, and it’s a credit to New York, were courteous, perhaps realizing I was in extremis but harmless. I talked about everything and nothing – a blind rush of chatter that kept the lid on the hysteria. I don’t want to get clinical, because this story is about Ellison Greer and others, but as I analyzed it later, with Dr. Ash’s help, my talking enabled me to hold on. It was the glue that held the shreds and tatters of my ego together. The wind in the sails of my self. I talk therefore I am. As simple as that.

* * *

I met Ellison Greer not long after the talkathon. I was still shaky but at least I’d hung up my harp. I’ll never forget the shock of seeing him. Not because he was handsome, although he was. No. Because Ellison Greer, except for his smaller size and the amount of melanin in his skin, could have been my twin. If I describe him you can see us both. Just reduce his dimensions by ten percent.

Broad forehead, a blade nose, a chin that won the west. Brown eyes, shading up to amber in a certain light. His best feature is hard to describe and I spotted it instantly. I’d call it natural grace, the unbought kind. He hung well, light and bouncy, ballbearings under his feet. Coat-hanger shoulders, snake hips and an ass that bobbed up like two apples in a basin. An aristocrat in a shadowed skin. A butterscotch prince.

I met Ellison in the lobby of the Lyric Theater, and I don’t mean an opera house. It was on East 14th Street, in the heart of mango land, San Juan North. The Lyric, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, is a browsing pasture for dedicated trophy hunters, sword swallowers. On screen was hard-core pornography, dicks like barbers’ poles, vaginas deep as the San Andreas Fault. You wouldn’t believe how dull fucking can be until you sit through two hours of it. After a while you think you’re in an auto body shop.

Why did I go? A good question. I can give you the usual reasons – loneliness, boredom, sexual dementia, etc. But none of them is exactly right. What drove me to the Lyric was – to quote one of Dr. Ash’s more sententious remarks – my identity crisis. It was a place in which to find the mantle of a self and wrap it around me. Those hungry Hildas roving the aisles, those human suction machines, gave me a sense of myself. Cord McGreevy as a member of a group. Some group. A far-fetched psychiatric theory, obviously, but you’d be surprised how well it tested out. Because when I was dissatisfied or annoyed, when I’d told one lie too many and lost what little sense of myself I had, the need to hit the Lyric would come down on me like the vengeance of the Lord and I would find myself transported to the goblin palace with the white marquee that said Adult Films Only.

Cleopatra didn’t ride her barge with greater glee than I did the crosstown bus. Just buying the ticket from the lady with polyester hair was a high. Handing it to the ticket man, who was once a star in the Yiddish theater around the corner, buoyed me up even more. And when I hit the interior, fruity with the groinsmell of a hundred desperate men, I could feel every muscle go loose with excitement. Gliding around that black cavern was as soothing as a lobotomy. Up and down I went, noiseless, my steps cushioned by the carpet, down to the can, out to the alleys on either side, past rows of men, eyes to the screen, caught up in those vast meaningless couplings. As I moved around I could feel my edges soften, the boundary that separated me