A Young Man's Passage (18 page)

Grimly pointing out yesterday’s weather,

I am old news
.

A motherless goose
,

Hatched and blinking by chance at you

Yet having no instinct to beg
,

I falter, fret but cannot follow
.

Mark chivvied me out of my wistful state by taking me out again. ‘Let’s go and look for Henry!’ he’d say. We never found him, but I was pleasantly distracted by fresh faces along the way. ‘Looking for Henry’ became our coded phrase for going out on the tiles.

In those pre-AIDS days using a condom was regarded as a kind of weird hygiene-related fetish. The lottery had started but we didn’t know. Rumours circulated about a deadly virus you might get if you slept with an American. Bars would fall silent if a Yankee accent was heard. Eyes would roll, backs would turn.

I specialised in Spanish, Italian, Greek and French gentlemen callers. They seemed exotic and lusty, and if there wasn’t much joy to be had from conversation, so much the better. Sometimes I’d get exasperated, though, if I said something funny and wasn’t rewarded with a laugh. My particular brand of spontaneous comic quip has never stood up well to any form of deconstruction. Any requests to explain my remarks or translate into a beginner’s vocabulary got very short shrift.

‘You’ve simply no idea how witty I’ve just been!’ I’d snap.

‘Que?’

It was a bit like doing a gig in Chatham.

On Monday nights I usually went to Bangs on the Tottenham Court Road. It was there I met Siro, an Italian passing through London on his round-the-world adventure. His English wasn’t great but he could make himself understood. He wanted sex every 15 minutes, and by Wednesday I could take no more and made my excuses. Before I fell into an exhausted sleep, I wrote down one of his many monologues:

‘Portugal, America, Paris, London – I search for love, for happiness, I don’t know what. I like to make people happy. In the gay sauna in Boston I let 30 men fuck me. The 31st he call me a slut. I am not a slut. I like to fuck, so I do. I think I give a lot of pleasure. I am very sexual person. You just touch my arm and my prick is jumping bigger. Always it is this. Sometimes I just touch my arm with myself and it is doing it. So. It is the way I am. It is not wrong. Sex is like water. I am thirsty, I drink. Some people drink three or four drinks, some seven or eight. It doesn’t matter. I want sex, I have sex. Always I am ready. It is not love, I know this. Sex without love is just water. Sometimes you have water with the gas. This is sex with love. So.’

That’s as may be, I thought as I drifted off. But – moral judgements aside – didn’t the marathon in the Boston sauna make it difficult to walk the next day and therefore hinder rather than help the ‘search’ for love?

Another cruising sister was Stephen. Linda and I met him when we took to frequenting the Dover Castle. Gone now, but then a drag pub on Deptford Broadway. Stephen was from Belfast. Twenty-one, black hair and startling blue eyes, full, wanton lips and an arrogant jaw. If you’re thinking I put it about a bit, then Stephen made me look like Mother Teresa. Always ready with an anecdote about that day’s conquests. ‘He was covered in tattoos, so he was, and he came all over the window.’ He enjoyed making several dates for the same evening at various bars in Soho so he could decide later which one to grace with his company. He was on the lookout for sex day and night. In the days when train carriages were divided into small eight-person compartments, the journey from New Cross to London Bridge, a good seven minutes, was particularly fruitful. But so were public lavatories, parks or almost anywhere. Stephen radiated charm and sex appeal, and the look was spruced-up barrow boy with a few too many buttons carelessly left undone. ‘After dark London belongs to the homos,’ he would say.

He always referred to his sex life in terms of ‘portions’. ‘I’ve had three portions today already so I won’t be picking anyone up tonight,’ he’d tell me when we were going out. I had only to say ‘Three?’ enquiringly if I felt like hearing more. ‘I had a portion with John this morning before he went to work, I had my seconds in Charing Cross public conveniences and then I met a man from Glasgow in the Brief Encounter and we went to a derelict building site for sex. That’s three portions I’ve had.’

Stephen divided all of his life up in that way, as if it were so much quiche. There is nothing wrong with this method – you can apply it to anything. At the end of an evening out, Stephen could give you a résumé of what he’d eaten, how many drinks he’d bought, how many were bought for him, how many men talked to him, looked at him, asked him home, gave him their phone numbers. ‘I could have gone home with six or seven,’ he’d say in a triumphant Belfast twang.

He had a live-in boyfriend called John for a while, but didn’t let that stop him. He’d crush up sleeping pills and dissolve them in John’s tea, then wait 20 minutes until he’d nodded off before going out. He was suspicious of John, too, and with good reason. He told me he followed him one afternoon. John had gone to a public loo that was a notorious cottage. Stephen waited five minutes then went in. He stood on the toilet seat and peered over the wall into the adjoining cubicle and caught John having an intimate moment, not to say mouthful, with a stranger. ‘Coo-ee!’ said Stephen.

The Dover Castle featured acts such as the Trolettes, High Society, the Playgirls and a trio called LSD, who were Lily Savage, Sandra, and Doris aka David Dale. Their finale was an appearance as Andy Pandy, Teddy and Looby Lou. Our favourite was Phil Star, a polished and wonderfully vulgar performer, expert at bitching other acts. ‘Lily Savage was waiting at a bus stop the other day. She got raped three times and still she never lost her place in the queue.’

When it closed there we could, if we wished, move on to the Ship and Whale in Rotherhithe. Open till 1.30 a.m. and a disco thrown in. Much the same crowd as the Dover Castle, but drunker.

It was here I met Andrew, a car mechanic from Upminster. He had thinning hair and a rather flat face and was a victim of some unfortunate condition that caused his teeth to be black for a good quarter of an inch round the gum region. He wore a very Essex big knitted jacket with frightful leather panels, and cheap underwear from a supermarket. He was very rough and told lies all the time. You always knew when he was lying because his eyelids went into a kind of involuntary flutter and his irises disappeared upwards. An inconvenient physical tick, one might think, and enough to render lying pointless. Seemingly not, in Andrew’s case. I enjoyed inducing the lies. I’d corner him about some contradictory information, some fading love-bite not fully concealed beneath the collar of a garish shirt from Upminster market, say, and stand back. He’d sometimes get through a sentence before the fluttering began, sometimes not. When the whopper had been unconvincingly told, he’d fix me with an insolent stare. If I could be bothered, I’d ask a supplementary question and the whole process would begin again.

But I liked him. There was a common gangsterish charm to him. His brother was in prison for GBH, which rather added to it. He would turn up unannounced late at night, park some dodgy motor outside my flat and stagger in drunk, wanting sex and a can of lager. He’d say ‘screw’ rather than ‘fuck’ too, which endeared him to me. We ‘saw’ each other for a while, as they say. We didn’t exactly ‘go out’. I’m sure you know the difference.

It all ended in tears, I recall, one Sunday night at Benjy’s nightclub on the Mile End Road. There was a ‘scene’. A few weeks before Andrew had asked for a photograph of me and I’d given him one of my new modelling shots. Anyway, that evening he had a friend with him. I was introduced to the chubby smiling dark man, who nodded a lot in a significant way and looked meaningfully at Andrew. I didn’t know what was going on. Later, just before the club closed, Andrew ushered me over to one of the intimate curved couches. A fresh pint of lager for us both.

‘What do you think of Sasha?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He wants to sleep with you. Will you do it for me? You know I love you. Go home with him and I’ll come round later. Or if you’d rather I’ll come with you and wait. Do it. I really love you . . .’

What upset me was the casual nature of the request. So I picked up my pint and poured it over Andrew’s head. He didn’t dodge out of the way, and the lager, poured with enthusiasm, fanned outwards at 90 degrees, drenching innocent homosexuals, who arched their backs and squealed with indignation. He looked as if he might kill me. I was asked to leave.

THE FACT THAT
I did not contract the HIV virus during these years is entirely down to luck. I was young and gay and having sex with lots of different men, but I stopped having anal sex. This wasn’t a preventative measure on my part, but because I had an embarrassing problem that wouldn’t go away. A nasty business: anal warts. It’s pointless speculating as to who gave them to me (this is a memoir, not a phone book), but one penis I remember in particular may be the culprit. I met a skinhead type at Heaven who took me back to his south London council flat. He gave me a tab of acid and loosened his braces. We had sex for hours on his bed beneath an open window. I remember watching the night sky lighten, the clouds drift past, dusk and then night again. I thought the trip would never end but I seemed unable to move from the bed. At one point I became enthralled with his penis and examined it closely. Tucked away under the folds of his foreskin were several small, white, bogey-sized lumps. The clouds that floated by the window were now in the room with us, attached.

A month or so later a personal itching problem forced me to get a mirror, spread my bum cheeks and see what on earth the problem was. There were the small fleshy lumps again.

A trip to the STD clinic named and shamed me as the carrier of anal warts. I was mortified, and wrote a poem.

This gay life that I lead is now due for inspection
,

I haven’t gained a lot except venereal infection
.

If I have lots of one-night stands and take them lying down
,

I must expect a little keepsake, there’s so much of it around
.

A weekly treatment of ‘freezing’ the little bastards ensued, but they seemed to flourish – fertilised, if anything, by their ordeal, and ever increasing. After a while I learned to live with my dark discomfort and re-entered the sexual arena, sternly brushing away any gentleman caller’s hand or other body part that sought to investigate my nether regions.

Thus during those dangerous years my sexual activities did not, at least, put me into the high-risk category. That’s the only reason I’m still here, I suspect. Anal warts. God bless ’em. They are easy enough to hide, and no one knew. By 1985, however, they had got out of hand, described by one doctor as ‘like a bunch of grapes’. I felt like a hybrid baboon. He even took a photograph of them as such ‘beauties’ were rarely seen these days. I’m probably due considerable backdated royalties by now from some illustrated medical journal or other. He referred me to a specialist and a few weeks later I went secretly to hospital for a few days. The troublesome blighters were surgically removed, never to return.

I’D BEEN ON
the waiting list for a council flat since I arrived at Goldsmiths, and in 1983 I was offered a ‘hard to let’ flat on the Brook Estate in Kidbrooke. Lynda the landlady had returned to Hardy Road, pregnant if you please, so it seemed a good idea to move on. Twenty-seven Ridgebrook Road was my first home of my own. It was a one-room flat with a kitchen and separate toilet. There was no bathroom, but if you lifted up the kitchen counter there was a cunningly concealed bath. I could soak in the bath and keep an eye on my boiled egg at the same time. The only real problem was that there was nowhere to keep your towel. Bottles of shampoo and hair conditioner stood side by side on the windowsill with washing-up liquid and cooking oil. I sanded the floor and my mother bought me a sofa bed. It was rather cosy. I was on the first floor and I trained Fanny to take herself down to the grass verge when she needed a wee.

Being ‘hard to let’, the flats housed an odd assortment of people who clearly suffered from a number of social problems. The sad old boy next door invited me in one day to admire his new wastepaper bin. ‘It’s for me little bits of refuge,’ he explained. Next door to him was a dirty girl with a cleft palate. One weekend she asked me to feed her cat for her and left me the key. It was unspeakably filthy and smelly inside, and I picked up the cat’s bowl to reveal a veritable mound of maggots wriggling on the floor.

Directly below me was a big-boned girl called ‘Lesley’ who had just come out of prison for stabbing her father. She told me she slept with a knife under her pillow. She knocked on my door one day and asked me to turn my radio down: ‘It’s getting on my nerves,’ she said menacingly, her tone suggesting that perhaps her father had bothered her in a similar fashion. Of course, I never turned it on again. She was quite mad. I heard her shouting one evening, having a furious row. Then her front door opened and slammed shut again. I looked nervously down the stairs and there was a battered yucca plant outside her door, covered in cigarette burns. She didn’t even get on with plants.

It was 1983. I never budgeted my unemployment benefit very wisely. When it arrived I went to the supermarket and bought whatever I fancied. When money was running out I ate a lot of baked potatoes. I signed on every other Wednesday at Greenwich unemployment office. My life was full of expectation. My nightly outings to Soho’s pubs and clubs were all-important. Surviving on limited resources was a triumph of ingenuity which carried its own sense of satisfaction. Stephen and I managed somehow to save and borrow enough money to go on a week’s holiday to Sitges, a gay seaside resort in Spain. We miscounted our pesetas when we arrived, imagining for three days that we were rich. We ate in the most expensive restaurants, guzzled champagne and purchased other stimulants as the fancy took us. On the fourth day, in a rare sober moment, we re-counted our funds and realised our error. There were so many noughts in the Spanish currency that we had mistaken our modest few thousand pesetas for millions. We were left with about £2 each for the remaining four days.