Still Standing: The Savage Years (25 page)

Tony, the Liverpudlian behind Tilly, was blessed with that dry wit peculiar to Scousers and he could cut an upstart down to size with a withering look and a line sharper than a bee’s arse. Self-deprecating and very funny, he frequently gave me and Vera a lift up the South Lambeth Road in his specially adapted car when we’d had one too many and Vera had temporarily lost the use of his legs.

First time visitors to the Thursday nights could never quite believe their eyes when they saw the talent that trod the Vauxhall’s ‘illuminated runway of joy’. There was the Princess Melina, a tall gangly queen who mimed in Greek, and Judy Luft, a young man who was rumoured to be the son of a famous film director and whose speciality was his unique interpretation of Judy Garland singing one of her most famous hits.

The recording he used of Judy was not one of the lady at her best, as when she wasn’t slurring her words she was forgetting them, and to add insult to injury he included some of Judy’s incomprehensible rambles in the cacophony. This was no tribute to the star once the idol of a generation of gay men and object of much reverential impersonation by the drag queens. Judy Luft’s version was something entirely different. ‘Avant-garde’ I called it at the time, for want of a better explanation, as I attempted to pacify an angry audience following Judy’s show-stopping performance.

Judy Luft was a big lad, well over six foot tall. He would paint his face clown white and stick on a little black dress that
didn’t fit and a black wig that could pass for roadkill. Finally, he would dunk his entire head in a sinkful of water to represent heavy perspiration just before he went on. I’d watch with a mixture of fascination and apprehension as he lurched into the spotlight, shaking his head as violently as a wet dog and soaking everyone who had the misfortune to be standing near the front as he careered up and down in an impossibly high pair of patent leather shoes that had a sense of direction all their own. Judy could hardly stand up in these death-trap shoes, let alone move, and he frequently lost all control, involuntary launching himself upon the crowd who in turn would beat him off and throw him back up on to the stage, hurling pints of beer at him, furious that he’d soaked their neatly pressed jeans and shirts and smeared them in clown-white make-up. After a while Judy vanished as quickly as he’d appeared, never to be seen again, and even though I’d miss his insane contribution to the evening it was nice to be able to walk across the stage without needing waders.

On the whole the crowd, despite being extremely rowdy, were a good-natured lot, tolerant of even the most abysmal of acts and rarely hurling anything worse than friendly abuse and catcalls – until, that is, the night a post-op transsexual got up and proceeded to strip.

This person was highly unpopular, a pushy exhibitionist with an unpredictable temper who despite female hormones and extensive cosmetic surgery still looked about as feminine as Desperate Dan. She’d been missing for a while, reappearing to brag that her absence was due to a spell in Charing Cross Hospital undergoing gender reassignment surgery (although that’s not quite how she put it) to become a fully fledged woman, the primary reason for this transition being so she could go on the game.

‘I’ve got a licence to print money between my legs,’ she announced proudly within earshot of anyone who might be interested, which apparently they weren’t as everyone turned their backs on her and suddenly became engrossed in conversation.

Even though I was wary of her I was civil towards her, believing it easier to be pleasant than confrontational especially when dealing with a person who wouldn’t hesitate to shove a glass in your face. She looked down on the others in the dressing room, boasting about how she was ‘a real woman’ whom men couldn’t resist. She was that most dishonourable of prostitutes, a ‘clipper’, luring unsuspecting customers with the promise of a good time by giving them the the key to a non-existent flat nearby in exchange for cash upfront. She told these suckers that she’d be along in a minute, which of course she never was, vanishing instead into the streets of Soho to reel in another fish. Any mug gullible enough to fall for this flimsy ruse deserved to be ripped off, but even so I disliked her for it.

From the moment she minced out on to the stage she managed to antagonize the audience. The chants for her to get off became deafening yet she completely ignored them, instead setting about writhing suggestively on a stool. In my experience, the audiences in the gay bars loved drag performers and female singers and comics but were intolerant of women pretending to be drag queens, and in particular post-op transsexuals still posing as drag queens. The attitude was: why? Why go through all that time, effort and pain to become female and then still hang around the gay bars acting like a screaming – and extremely annoying – tranny?

Letting her halter neck top drop she revealed a pair of breasts so tight and firm that it looked as if the surgeon had
stitched a couple of bowling balls under her flesh. The groan from the crowd rivalled the one that went up when England lost to Portugal in the World Cup, and encouraged by this she proceeded to fondle these unnatural mammaries, flicking her tongue in and out obscenely as she pulled on her extraordinarily long nipples.

‘You can milk them all night, love, but I doubt if you’ll get anything out of them,’ a wag in the crowd shouted to much merriment from the rest. The smiles were soon wiped from their faces, though, when she pulled the poppers on the denim miniskirt she was wearing and let it drop to the floor, revealing an absence of underwear and a lot more besides. The spectators gasped as one as she sat on the stool and slowly spread her legs, exposing the recent handiwork of the surgeon. Every chin in the pub, including mine, hit the deck with a thud as she stuck her fingers in and opened it up, leering at the crowd and shouting ‘God bless the National Health Service’.

The reaction from the audience was terrifying. They stormed the stage, hurling bottles, glasses, ashtrays, stools and even a table. Someone threw me a golfing umbrella which I opened and hid behind, trying to quell the riot by screaming down the mike for them to pack it in, but to no avail. Eventually I gave up and crawled off the side of the stage and down to comparative safety behind the bar.

It was on the front page of
Capital Gay
the following week with me quoted as saying that I’d ‘never seen anything like it – and I’ve been in the Toxteth riots’. I took a few weeks off from ‘Stars of the Future’ after that, giving the crowd down the Vauxhall some time to cool off and remember that it was a pub and not a war zone.

Most weekends there was a party to be had somewhere in the area. One house in particular, a squat in Vauxhall Grove, seemed to have a party going on seven days a week, and Judy London – one of the Stars of the Future who sang ‘Secret Love’ in such a way that had Doris Day been passing and just popped in for half a lager she would have failed to recognize one of her signature hits – who lived in a nice little house round the corner with his partner Reg, was frequently throwing his doors open for a ‘do’.

Chrissie had been invited to a party in a high-rise. ‘It’s a fancy dress party. Come down to the shop and find a costume,’ he said. Normally a good root around among the thousands of costumes on offer in the cellars of C. & W. May was like a holiday but I was working day and night that week and didn’t have the time.

Chrissie, who despite loathing the clergy and anything to do with organized religion had a penchant for ecclesiastical garments, was standing in the tiny kitchen when I got home from work dressed as the Pope complete with mitre and sceptre, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken out of the box.

‘What d’ya think, then?’ he asked, licking his fingers. ‘It’s not too much, is it? Give us a ciggy, will you? I’m gaspin’.’

By the time the rest of our band of revellers had turned up at the flat to get ready for the party I was sulking because I didn’t have anything to wear, telling anyone who would listen that I wasn’t going. Robbie, who worked behind the bar and had been christened ‘Maggie Muggins’ by me, was going as Tarzan in a costume that consisted of nothing more than a couple of chamois leathers and a few leather shoelaces tied around his wrists which, considering that he could hardly be described as the Johnny Weissmuller type, I thought took a lot of bottle. George, one of our drinking
cronies from the pub, was in the bathroom wearing a tie-dyed body stocking trimmed with a dubious-looking fur doing something elaborate to his face with a box of paints.

‘I’m Grizabella the glamour cat,’ he said proudly, painting whiskers on with a shaky hand. ‘Y’know, from
Cats
… “Memory” …’ Someone else was in the front room dressed in bad drag asking Chrissie if he had a spare pair of tights handy as there was a ladder creeping up the leg of his (Chrissie didn’t), and on the sofa casually skinning up on the back of an LP was Noddy.

Looking at this lot preening and posing and having a good time made me all the more desperate to go to the party, but even though I didn’t want to go without a costume I was adamant that I was not going to dig Lily out and go in drag.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Chrissie said, picking up a pair of dungarees off the bedroom floor, ‘put these on and go as Huckleberry Finn. I’ll lend you me straw hat as well if you’ll shut up giving out.’

I quite fancied myself as Huckleberry Finn, in a gingham shirt under the dungarees that I’d rolled up at the hem, the rim of the straw hat frayed with a pair of nail scissors to give it that authentic whiff of hillbilly chic and, as the finishing touch, a red hanky hanging out of my back pocket.

‘It’s not bad, considering it’s been flung together,’ I said, pushing the hat further back on my head to create what I thought was a halo effect. ‘I quite suit a hat, don’t I?’ I added, admiring myself in the mirror. ‘What d’ya think, Chrissie?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he said, taking a pull on a joint before handing it to me. ‘You should wear a hat more often – preferably one with a fuckin’ big heavy veil.’

Nobody gave us a second glance as we made our way down the South Lambeth Road, stopping to buy cheap booze in the
newsagent’s on the way. Dope always used to make me laugh uncontrollably and by the time we were going up in the lift of the high-rise I was in hysterics, setting off Maggie Muggins and Noddy, like a pair of sniggering kids.

‘Behave yourselves,’ Chrissie tut-tutted. ‘These are very respectable people and I don’t want to be shown up. Now pull yourselves together.’

‘Nobody respectable lives in this block,’ Grizabella muttered as we made our way down the landing, struggling to pull his body stocking up where the crutch had sagged almost down to his knees.

‘Shurrup, George,’ Chrissie said, ringing the bell. ‘One of them’s a teacher.’

The gentleman who answered the door to us was wearing a pair of leather chaps with nothing but a heavily studded leather jockstrap underneath, and apart from a coarse carpet of black hair that covered the best part of his Herculean body very little else.

‘You sure you’ve got the right party?’ he asked, his eyebrows vanishing into his hairline.

‘This is Tommy’s place, isn’t it?’ Chrissie enquired.

‘Yes.’

‘Then we’re at the right party,’ Chrissie announced, marching past King Kong and into the hall, the rest of us following suit. ‘We’re expected.’

‘What made you think it was fancy dress?’ Tommy, the host, asked when he caught up with us in the kitchen, hemmed in the corner by a gang of leather queens.

‘Isn’t it?’ Chrissie asked.

‘No,’ Tommy replied, laughing. ‘It’s a heavy S and M party.’

I’d thought as much when I’d nearly tripped over a naked man crawling along the floor on all fours wearing a dog collar
and muzzle, being pulled along on the end of a lead by an obese giant dressed from head to toe in leather.

‘Come and see the show,’ Tommy said, leading us out of the kitchen past disapproving Masters and Slaves who I assumed objected to the presence of the Pope, Huckleberry Finn, Noddy, Tarzan, Grizabella and a tranny as it probably broke the severity of the mood required for such a party. In the dimly lit bedroom, where the air was thick with the smell of sweat and stale amyl nitrate, and bin-liners adorned the window to prevent any light from creeping in, a naked man in a harness lay suspended from the ceiling.

‘That’s the teacher,’ Chrissie hissed under his breath.

‘What’s he teach, gymnastics?’ I asked, watching fascinated as he splayed his legs, wrapping them effortlessly around the chains that attached the harness to the ceiling, making himself comfortable for the big beefy chap who was advancing upon him with one of his hands covered in what looked like Trex.

‘I hope they’ve screwed that into a reinforced beam,’ Chrissie said, ignoring what was getting screwed in the harness below, ‘otherwise they’ll have that ceiling down on top of them.’

‘Chrissie,’ I gasped, grabbing his arm and making him jump. ‘He’s got his hand up his bum.’

‘What did you expect? What type of show did you think they were putting on?
Sooty
?’ Chrissie snapped, annoyed at my naivety and still preoccupied with the complexities of how you went about attaching a harness to the ceiling of a council flat.

The human puppet show that I was watching was not that dissimilar to Sooty’s act, although I didn’t think for one minute that it was in any way suitable entertainment for a children’s party.

‘Chrissie!’ I squealed like a schoolgirl, breaking the heavy silence, unable to believe that the human body could actually tolerate what I was watching without incurring permanent damage. ‘He’s got his arm in now, right up to the elbow.’

‘Dirty bastard,’ Chrissie sniffed, wrinkling his nose up in disgust. ‘Come on, let’s go and see if there’s any food knocking about. I could just fancy a pork pie.’

I couldn’t, not after what I’d just witnessed, but I followed Chrissie out anyway, having seen enough.

‘I can’t believe that, Chrissie, I really can’t,’ I said, sounding like my mother. ‘I honestly didn’t think it was humanly possible.’

‘Disgustin’,’ Chrissie said, heading for the kitchen. ‘Like watching an episode of
All Creatures Great and Small
.’