Still Standing: The Savage Years (28 page)

Chrissie: ‘How are you hooked up with him?’

Me: ‘I could never figure it out.’

Chrissie: ‘What was his business?’

Me: ‘He used to be a big shot.’

Chorus of the last few bars of ‘My Melancholy Baby’ and off to find a café for a bit of breakfast.

I think that it was the first time that Murphy had ever seen a musical as he was a man who preferred football and snooker to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Kevin, now more perplexed than ever, could not believe that his tearaway twin was constantly declining every offer to roam the West End in
favour of a night in front of the telly watching
South Pacific
. Without admitting it, Murphy and I were now officially courting and I found I had a genuine bona fide boyfriend, one that I’d never be able to rein in and tame even had I wanted to, although I’d certainly have an interesting time trying.

Bluebirds should’ve twittered around the window box, which sadly was full of dead herbs and not daisies, as I leaned over it and hung out the window to take a gulp of the early morning carbon monoxide emissions from the busy flow of traffic on the South Lambeth Road. Love, an overrated emotion as far as I’d been concerned, or at least as I’d always professed until now, was most definitely in the air in Victoria Mansions.

Today was my thirtieth birthday and I had a flat, a fellah and a following, and I couldn’t believe my luck. I turned from the window to look at Murphy, lying on his back in bed, half covered by the duvet.

Murphy was one of these annoying people who not only always looked wonderful in repose but was positively stunning first thing in the morning, the swine, and lying in my bed asleep he resembled a fanciful artist’s depiction of a romantic gypsy for the cover of a Barbara Cartland novel.

Murphy had been in a long-term relationship with a woman called Celia for years. He loved and adored her, but confused and at odds with his sexuality he took a job in Spain teaching English to give them both some breathing space while he tried to make sense of a painfully difficult situation, and hopefully arrive at a solution.

Celia, who by all accounts was a remarkable woman, had taught at Murphy’s school. Their relationship, as you can imagine, caused a bit of a stink at the time with Celia being
not only his teacher but an older woman having a fling with a teenager to boot.

Murphy was unfazed by the gossip, as even as a lad he was his own man with a will of iron and a resolve impossible to break, a kindly euphemism for one stubborn bastard. And as far as he was concerned Celia was the only woman for him and that was that. Case closed. His only concern was for Celia and the harm that the gossip might do to her, although she was more than capable of dealing with any detractors herself.

One ordinary morning, as Celia was cycling to school in Gosport, she fell under the wheels of a bus and was killed instantly.

On receiving this shattering news over the phone Murphy flew home from Spain immediately. At the funeral he refused to go in the church, as at the time he held strong opinions about the hypocrisy of organized religion. He considered the funeral service unsuitable and not what Celia would have approved of so he stayed outside, lurking in the doorway and smoking angrily, his heart broken. He moved back into the family home for a while, paying frequent visits to London to stay with his twin Kevin who conveniently also happened to be gay, and together they’d terrorize Soho, their favourite hang-outs being the Pink Panther club, a dive somewhere up one of Soho’s seedier streets, and a pub called the Golden Lion in Dean Street, a popular hang-out for rent boys and their clients.

The rent boys loved Murphy, and although he wasn’t interested in them sexually I believe he was offered loads of freebies, proposals he assured me that he always turned down, preferring to play a more avuncular role, offering advice and patiently listening to their pitiful stories of how
they ended up working the streets. I once stood at the door of this pub shouting up the stairs to Murphy that ‘if he didn’t stop whoring with those filthy trollops and get himself down here I was going to punch his headlights in’, a rant that didn’t go down very well with Jack and his partner Ian who ran the Lion and were great friends of Murphy’s. I have a feeling they barred me after that.

Kevin could be big trouble when the mood took him and was not one to sit on the fence when voicing his opinions, frequently getting himself into arguments that Murphy would inevitably end up having to sort out. These barroom squabbles would usually end in a fight, and Murphy, no slouch when it came to fisticuffs, would wade in regardless of whether he was outnumbered or not, a quality that I greatly admired.

Over the years the Murphy twins were chased by police, hotel managers, jealous boyfriends and, on one occasion, an angry mob through the streets of Barcelona, and if I was ‘born to trouble as the sparks fly upward’ as that Christian Brother at my old school had once declared to my mother then I’d met my match in Murphy.

He was now unemployed following a blazing row with the management of the gay sauna, and the evening before my birthday he’d blown the best part of his giro on a meal at Rebato’s Wine and Tapas Bar on South Lambeth Road, a romantic gesture that I wouldn’t have believed he was capable of. Loving him all the more for this surprising turn-up for the books I chose to ignore the fact, as I mopped up the juice from my garlic prawns, that as he’d blown his giro on the meal I’d probably have to support him for the rest of the week.

But that was last night, when I was still in my twenties. I
was thirty now, which in gay years is Neolithic. Still, at least, in the words of the song, I still had my health, which is a damn sight more than a lot of my friends had.

I tiptoed quietly into the kitchen as I didn’t want to wake him just yet. He’d had another restless night, his sleep disturbed by another bout of the horrors as he cried out in the dark for Celia. His entire body would shake as he sobbed, calling out her name and frantically twisting the Claddagh ring that had once been hers round and round on his finger until finally, his grief subsiding, he’d lie still. He lost that bloody Claddagh ring one night when, unusually for him, he was blind drunk. He was inconsolable when he found it was missing, as it was irreplaceable, and the next morning in desperation I rang Breda at the Vauxhall to see if she knew where I could buy one. The shop that she suggested in Lambeth Walk had long closed down when I got there, and after searching around the jewellers of the Walworth Road with no luck I eventually went home.

My mother always said that if you’d lost something precious you could petition your guardian angel to find it for you. Putting on the kettle I made a silent plea to mine, not expecting a positive response but employing the usual bargaining process of promising to go to church and so on. And then, as I sat on the sofa sipping my tea, something under the coffee table caught my eye. It was the Claddagh ring. We’d searched every inch of the carpet with a fine-tooth comb over and over again and it would’ve been impossible to miss, yet now here it was winking at me from under the coffee table.

I was so shocked and relieved to find it that I put my coat straight back on and caught the 88 bus to Victoria and the Cathedral to light the promised candle of thanks. I slipped a
tenner in the box as I left only to realize that it was all I had on me, which meant a walk home in the rain.

A guardian angel with a warped sense of humour smirking down on me. Just what I needed.

I was working the evening of my birthday at the Goldsmiths Tavern, a pub where Vic Reeves was a regular with his Big Night Out. Murphy couldn’t come for some reason so Vera accompanied me. It was nice to have someone to help with the baggage; when Murphy came with me on a booking he refused to carry anything as he didn’t want to be seen as a drag queen’s hanger-on and so I’d struggle through the pub while Murphy strolled twenty paces behind me pretending he didn’t know me. I was slightly annoyed that he’d refused to come with me to the Goldsmiths but all was forgiven when on my return I found him bashfully standing next to a spray of thirty red roses.

‘What grave did you nick those from?’ was all I could say, shocked and suddenly shy at the sight of the beautiful floral display tastefully arranged in a plastic bucket on the front room table. To break the sudden tension of the lovey-dovey atmosphere I did what I normally did and leapt on him, dragging him on to the floor in an armlock only to be skilfully thwarted by a cunning move that resulted in me being flung under the table and sat on. As I said, love was in the air.

The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, James Anderton, had described Aids as a ‘self-inflicted scourge’ and said that gay people were ‘swirling around in a cesspit of their own making’. Mr Anderton claimed to have received these messages as a result of regular and direct communication with God himself. Inspired by Mr Anderton, the south
London police raided the Vauxhall Tavern one evening just as I was about to go on. Over twenty police officers descended on the pub wearing rubber gloves as a ‘preventative measure against catching Aids’ to deal with alleged overcrowding. As a result eleven people were arrested, including Pat’s wife Breda who was upstairs watching television with her children at the time. The charge of overcrowding was a poor excuse for a spot of police harassment and such was the outcry among reasonable civilized people following this phoney raid that the BBC’s
Heart of the Matter
made a programme about it. The headline on
Capital Gay
’s front page that week quoted me as announcing ‘We should riot’ from the stage of the Vauxhall, which I did, as I believed that attitudes towards gay men and women were taking a nasty turn that was demonstrated by the frequent witch-hunts orchestrated by our police force.

The tabloids were quick to jump on the bandwagon of paranoia surrounding Aids, persecuting gay celebrities in an attempt to destroy careers and reputations. Kelvin MacKenzie, a fat ignorant oaf who was then editor of the
Sun
, knowingly printed a totally fabricated exposé of Elton John that cited him as paying for rent boys for the many drug-fuelled orgies that he held, even going as far as to state that Elton cut the vocal cords of his dogs as their barking annoyed them. All vicious lies of course, spun to sell a tabloid rag, and Elton, most upset by the claims that he’d silenced his beloved dogs in such a barbaric manner, quite rightly sued, winning a million pounds in damages with the
Sun
having to print a full page apology. The rent boy who had originally sold his sordid tale to the
Sun
later came clean to the
Daily Mirror
, admitting that he’d ‘made it all up and only did it for the money and the
Sun
was easy to con’.

The
Daily Star
’s editor Ray Mills was expelled from the National Union of Journalists for his persistent racist and homophobic abuse, not that the expulsion bothered him as he still carried on referring to the gay employees of Camden Council as ‘bent’ and talking about the poofter persuasion, while up in south Staffordshire Bill Brownhill, the leader of the Tory council, announced that his cure for Aids would be to ‘put ninety per cent of queers in the ruddy gas chambers’. A lesbian protester spat at a police officer during a small demonstration against ‘the gas man’s’ comments, the police officer later demanding a blood test in case he’d contracted the Aids virus from her. To explain this hysterical behaviour away a spokesperson for the Police Association blamed the media, claiming that police officers picked up their information about Aids from the press and that it wasn’t surprising that they were getting the wrong idea. Indeed.

The government finally stirred itself out of its lethargy and launched a massive ad campaign on television that was meant to be informative as to HIV/Aids and its transmission and prevention but only succeeded in confusing the public further with its histrionic images of icebergs and exploding volcanoes. Queer-bashings were on the increase and the general mood was anti-gay, the police frequently raiding house parties, clubs and pubs for no other reason than harassment.

At each and every venue I worked in up and down the country I named and shamed each and every one of these evil cretins via the medium of Lily Savage.

It was my way of fighting back.

Vera had come to stay for the weekend from Bradford and on the Sunday night the usual suspects gathered for a lock-in at the Elly as we’d been doing for the past few weeks. Gladys,
one of the acts from the talent night, was a professional Irish dancing teacher who offered to give us lessons, resulting in a rousing shebeen where we charged around the floor to Irish music with Gladys standing in the middle of us in full drag shouting out instructions.

At around 4 a.m. the police raided. Scottish Andy was unfortunate enough to be holding a drink just as the law swanned in, and this was enough for the south London police, hell-bent at the time on harassing gays, to arrest him.

Vera, slightly the worse for drink, went to Andy’s aid, challenging the police in a voice that was incomprehensible even to me. They nicked Vera as well, throwing him into the back of the van with Andy and holding them both in the cells of Horseferry Road police station. Vera was summonsed to appear in court the following week charged with being ‘drunk and disorderly on the premises known as the Elephant and Castle Public House’, but when he got back to the flat he had a quick cup of tea and a bacon butty, packed his bag and cleared off up to Yorkshire to vanish in the depths of Bradford, leaving me to deal with the coppers when they came looking for him. I was becoming adept at lying to policemen on the doorstep as only the week before they’d turned up looking for Murphy, whom they’d traced to the flat from the car hire company we’d recently hired a car from. A Mercedes had cut him up badly and while the offending vehicle sat at the traffic lights on Portman Street Murphy had taken the opportunity to get out and tell them what he thought of them, kicking the door of the car and denting it to show he meant business.