Punctured [picture ladybird]
I was wheeling my bike back from the library. It was a windy night but I was tucked up with the barbour/barber jacket I had decided I would buy, and hang the signification. In fact the thing amused me, and the more so given the mish mash style I had arrived at over the years, something like when kids play that game of drawing an unlikely individual by iterations of sketching a head, torso and legs, passing folded paper. I found the thing comfortable, and that went a long way with me after my various gauche attempts to get in with various trends. It had been warm, but cold in the evenings, and the thunderstorms had been whipping up on occasions.
I was listening to the cricket on my pocket radio. The wind was up and it whistled uncomfortably in my ears when I rode at the best of times, forcing me to turn up the volume uncomfortably high. I was one of these who visits clubs and always feels that my generation is due an epidemic of tinnitus, liver failure and yet-to-be-invented mental ailments resultant from dropping pills like tik-taks – Special K and the like, it was now, and I was on familiar terms with people who took the lot. Nasser Hussain had been struck by a nasty bouncer and would be out but it had otherwise been a good day, and I found it infinitely cathartic just to listen to those voices: articulate, even erudite, and with the kind of diction I might in other circumstances find aggravating, dependent upon my mood, but which I could find calming when they spoke not with ignorance and neither with that erudition to which I was by now too familiar, that is, the clinical blue-flamed oxy-acetalyne[] erudition of narrowly focused discussions that could last hours, but with this more living partial inefficiency, like a log fire or a coal fire throwing out smoke and flitting shadows: [synesthaesia: I have two people’s voices in mind]. It was a lifesaver that little radio.
The clouds had closed in an hour or so beforehand, smoothly, seemingly from every direction, and without fuss, almost like the twist of an aperture on a camera lens. I had been out then for a smoke – Dmitri would on occasion offer me a menthol, and I would accept for the break of routine – we had both stooped into the alcove shaking her lighter and on our tour of the building, around the sort of balcony, it got grim. Still, there was nothing I would do now back home but listen to the radio, and the pleasantries might even keep me from that, and keep the others from their tonic, the television, I had my jacket and I enjoyed an evening stroll the more for these turns and caprices of the British weather; enjoyed pushing on the bicycle by the saddle, tilting it to steer as the old dynamo which functioned as much, or so I often explained in one of the lazy riffs of conversation I kept to hand to stave off interactions, as an anti-theft device as anything else, so old-fashioned was it, it whining against the buckled wheel as it powered the LED I’d contentedly soldered into the contacts of the screw of an old bulb which glowed in spurts like the cherry of a cigarette in the wind.
The road from campus meandered gently, as a river might, between overly manicured but nonetheless attractive lawns and a variety of trees I had not thought to wonder at only months before. A pleasant ten, twenty minutes, before the complex of traffic lights and islands and the kind of tinny taste in the air on that ever busy thoroughfair and the main bus route into town that reminds me on days the pollution sits low, of the times I would touch my tongue across the contacts of square “PP3” batteries when I was a kid: one of the few pleasant and abiding almost Proustian memories I have, what with the smell of phosphorous from matches reminding me of the times I begged for the privilege of lighting matches as a boy. This the way I embroidered that walk from the Library.
It was the time I used to practically live at that place, just like barmen in small towns and villages practically live at their pubs. I used to work near the journals where nobody from the department tended to find me and often I would take a periodical or two – the kind of thing unrelated to my work and targeted at the layman, the kind of thing that could serve as a break that didn’t involve that fateful trip to the so-comfortable but noisy coffee shop downstairs which could only lead to the kind of comfortable yet plodding progress that would mean more evenings stuck in the place, and would strive as part of those rich routines of work that build up as part of any successful post-grad stint to have interesting yet tolerably short articles so they didn’t serve too much as procastination from the job at hand. One time it had been The Ecologist; as one of the few people in the country who can afford barely to set foot in a car it’s somewhat comfortable to read how, if I’m not doing anything of any real practicable use, I’m yet not as iniquitous as the majority: but, no, that dismisssive tone is habitual, as little as I am used to saying it, there are some things I believe in.
The article on this occasion, avoiding[] criticism of a psychological study of errors of visual processing, asked the question ‘how connected are you?’ And it gripped me. Basically it was a questionaire, and looked like those magazines routinely resort to in a slow month, but as I glanced at it while flicking from the back to the front – it looked, I thought, unpromising for an article to kill a little time, to procrastinate, as low on content as such things tend to be – it caught my eye. It was a series of questions relating to the reader’s relationship with the environment around them. What species is the nearest tree to your front door? Is it native to your area? How many vegetables could have been grown within 30 miles at this time of year? Name five resident birds in your area. Name five migratory birds in your area. Where does your household waste end up?
That day, struggling with motivation and with flagging concentration, having been kept up by inconsiderate stoners at a party the night before, I took out [trees of the British Isles]. As I picked it out and flicked through it to see if the information I would glean from the number of times I would pick it up once this procrastinatory mania had died down would be worth the burning sensation of my thighs and calves from making my way back up from the lights on the Derby road (it was a heavy book) I was struck by a thought – and struck really was the word here, as all too often it is not, and as I never tire of being struck by thoughts – a premonition, perhaps, or mere wish, of relating this knowledge laid out in front of me to a son; and though I had never had such a thought before, for all my agonising, it came unforced and unforceful, unselfconscious, matter-of-fact, like a cueball gently kissing a red into the pocket and traversing unhurried, past the cluster, past the blue, to the D, as if it were a given.
Real bedside reading for many a week, more so even than Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy had become before it, and then renewed month after month after month – unwanted, this beautiful book - so that it acquired a place of its own on my floor and so that I gained more of a feeling that this knowledge was for me alone than the most arcane of tomes, either the subterranean antiques you have to as good as scrub up to handle or these Oxford University Press books with a print run of eight to twelve and glue that cracks between milk-white pages when you open them.
I passed the hawthorne which hung over the wall which from that point crept up away from the pavement. There was then a willow down at the corner I looked forward to seeing in the wind. These the kind of regular contentedly [] thoughts that had formed just a small part of my daily routine for those months.
It was late and the weather was bad. The Library had closed and the Union had not yet rang last orders. The was nobody about. And that suited me fine. There would be plenty once I got off campus, and even before then, from the fork in the road that went off to that more industrious bunker around engineering and the sciences, and besides, it would soon be high exam season once again.
The squeel of her brakes was the first thing I heard, and then she swerved around my bike, which I was pushing in the road since the pavement narrowed out. Obviously one of these who feels the need to dodge around the high speed bumps. I do it myself, and even enjoy it, another of these almost zen [] in the day, leaning and putting my weight to one side. My LED in any case took little power to light up and she couldn’t have missed it. It was at the next one she almost came a cropper, breaking again, her elbows seemed to , her shoulder bag went to one side and she overbalanced, just as the bike came to a halt. ‘Shit’, she said, audible over [commentator]’s voice, perhaps just before she realised she wouldn’t fall.
I walked no quicker, and soon reached her. She had dismounted and checked the tyre. A puncture, and from her body language it looked like the last thing she needed. Mid-May already, and panic had long been in the air – that panic I had long forgotten: mine was more the marathon than the sprint.
I could describe her fully, of course, but since I’m trying to do justice to that first impression, I shall restrain myself from that image in my mind which has been played again and again and which is at once as distorted as is a rental copy of Sharon Stone uncrossing and crossing her legs in Basic Instinct and yet also [embroidered]. She was between streetlights bending down to the bike, and wholly absorbed in trying to seem in control of the situation. I tugged the cord of my headphones and popped them out of my ears. Her hair was long, half way down her back, but it had been freshly cut. A clip pulled the hair off her face, though it then and for a long time thickly covered her ears. She wore brown flared chords. Her favorites for a long while. I forget what else though I think it was her slim leather jacket and an odd two-tone ‘Sixties top with horizontal stripes she used to wear.
As I approached, walking along the narrow pavement, I told her how the thorns from the hawthorn tree probably tend to gather in the dip beside the speed bump. I offered to help. I had a puncture repair kit and an old pump attached to my bike.
- I wouldn’t want to put you out, she said. But she had already by this time tried to walk a little way with the bike, and had, as she would later comically relate, banged her leg painfully against the pedals in the attempt.
- Oh, I don’t mind, I said, I’m just listening to the cricket, that’s why I’m wheeling my bike. I can’t listen to it comfortably while I’m riding, but I’m just killing the time. Anyway, I’m not in any rush.
- The cricket. That’s all the more reason. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not into it myself, it’s just my dad is, and once the cricket’s on there’s no stopping him.
She looked embarrassed then. I had half a mind to make a comment about Norman Tebutt and his cricket test to allay any worries she might have since it was fairly clear – at least I thought so – that her Dad would be supporting Pakistan; of course, I couldn’t say anything when she hadn’t volunteered the information.
- No, that’s all the more reason for me to occupy myself with something else. I go on about it enough myself. People ask conversationally how it’s going and I can run statistics and factoids off for hours. It’s not like football when you’ve got a score of two numbers. No, besides, it’ll only take a minute.
- You work at the library don’t you?
- Yeah, and you study English. I remember faces. It makes the day go by at least to try and follow your customers.
- Yeah, that’s it. You’ve got a good memory. Mind you, she said, playfully, there’s not many of us.
- What, pretty girls? I don’t know. But, yeah, it helps.
She smiled. You know what I mean.
- And you? Do you study?
- Philosophy, I said, PHd.
- Tell you what, do you want to move down into the streetlight.
- I trust you. She said it and was instantly embarrassed. I had a way of phrasing suggestions that way, but I was just having trouble looking for a thorn. I’m having a blonde day, she said. Again, she seemed to feel a little embarrassed by that. I guessed it was some kind of a catchphrase from halls or something – she was clearly a first year – but it gave me that impression again that she was a little more self-conscious with her language with me.
- You shouldn’t, I joked, to make her feel better. D’you have any idea how many blokes hover around with puncture repair kits on the off chance? It’s like non-smokers in clubs with lighters. But, no, I added, just in case she took me seriously – though by that time she was free to – really, I don’t mind.
She laughed. – Ok, still, I trust you.
Besides, I hardly think I’m likely to be murdered by a man in a barber jacket who listens to the cricket… Or who knows the names of trees, she added, mischievously.
I laughed. It struck me then, too, that she was mature for her age. Not just mature in the sense that she was a little more developed than white girls her age. Most asian girls were that. But I mean in a fuller sense. The asian girls I had met up to then who, like her, weren’t evidently westernised to the nth degree weren’t callow, but often were circumspect, and chary of giving their opinions too directly. It came naturally to them to hold back. They were mature, intelligent, friendly, and I often had observed that they were not remotely shy – it came from life in big families; but not so much always in the Irish sense of many children, but in terms of the extended family – but they were reserved and kept their keenest judgements to themselves. She seemed already by then more open. Already, from her mouth, her voice and her manner, she seemed sexy. Her voice was soft but not equivocal, and soft in terms of timbre rather than volume: I could certainly hear her clearly with the wind. She was articulate in a way that was now uncommon. I remember fondly a story told by a couple of friends of mine. One was visiting the other who was having a year in California. They were chatting on a bus when another guy interrupted them: “I haven’t heard the word acquiesce on a bus in twenty five years.” That was something I had noticed before, how asians can take on patrician English etiquette and make of it what we’ve long ago lost, if we ever had it at all, the ability to put others at ease. It calls to mind the gentle scene in Dickens’ Great Expectations, in which [] corrects Pip’s table manners. Though I can reconstruct most of our first conversation verbatim so firmly did it stick in the mind as an exceptional instance of conversation before ever it came to assume those other meanings much later, I cannot reconstruct those sturdy, elaborate almost over-engineered constructions of social convention which once had been so common in speech and yet which are too foreign to me which, I am almost sure, she used without effort. But whether it was this or something else, maybe simply a lack of the more grating and insipid turns of phrase of ordinary conversation (and I often feel like I can’t get excited by conversation as tends to be played out any more than I can get excited by guitar music which for years, as I feel I know from the education of Jase, who loves it, has been a corruption of the idiom more or less laid down by Hendrix and a handful of other blacks, corrupted first by ego and technique for technique’s sake and then also by the outright and ostentatious rejection of musicality by industrial performance artists and punks. I find the same in conversation today. Walking one time in one of the once-great cities of the EU-it hardly matters any more which one-past one of a row of bland welded sculptures I had to cringe to listen to a similarly bland blonde, An English girl, going on to her friends: “well, I wouldn’t exactly have it in my room, but out on the street it’s, like, really…vibrant.” There was no enthusiasm in her voice . Crunching power chords. Jazz chords with maximum distortion. Two hand tapping. Eigth and sixteenth notes picked, hammer-ons and pull-offs, slid into, bent and trilled in the high register with little musical relation to one another. Screaching bends held with vibrato sustain like the brakes of the ancient Midlands railway rolling stock. It affected me just the same: an [] to wince, hold my ears and get away. A few simple chords strummed in unsophisticated musical progressions. Now I can listen to that endlessly. Spanish guitar. [] I see a headline Time waiting in New Street to get a magazine, having travelled with the normal range of ersatz dialects and accents: English being corrupted by foreign speakers. How it is suffering for being a world language. Bullshit. It’s suffering for a thousand reasons, each of the native speaker’s own making. For white music industry bosses picking up on the downtrodden Black America’s understandable drive to differentiate their language from the mainstream, and corrupting this drive to paradoxically make mainstream music from the bastard child of avant guard street poetry, forming neologisms with a schizoid compulsion. From downtrodden white England’s understandable desire to distance themselves from the mundanity and drab meaninglessness of their poverty by adopting styles and codes from the poverty defiantly and voyeuristically [] by music videos and films. From privileged white England’s preposterous desire to distance themselves from their own privilege. From British manhood’s craven and idiotic desire to conform more to the narrow stereotype and be more earthy. From the educated’s apparent embarrassment at being educated. At reading books. Lazy irony and that intellectual pose of being forever sarchastic, disdainful, unimpressed. In all of this, broken in England in two shades the same as electric guitar tones may be clean or distorted I find the same inauthenticity.) Whatever it was in her the politeness was there, and it was warm, human, as it was not in others’ hands. A guy told me which way to tilt my soup bowl at formal dinner and I wanted to throw the fucker in his face and never turned up to one again. She had it as it should be. Christ, you hold a fucking door for someone now and they can’t thank you enough. Africans often seem to us whites the same, though I know they often come over to blacks of carribean descent as condescending.
A gentle voice and that restrained confidence.
I mean, she said, warming to her theme, perhaps its just me, because, I mean to say, I still remember the day I was drawing pictures at school, and so I draw this damn thing, red with black spots and a smiley face, six legs. And so, the teacher comes over – she drew herself up into a teacherly posture, so, [name], she says, that’s nice what is it? And I say, it’s a beetle. Because, you know, that’s what my Dad had told me. I laughed.
- No, I said, it’s not just you. I felt by then she had opened up to me. She had given me her name unsolicited, and surely, I thought to myself, it would have been unusual for an asian girl to give details of her father’s mistakes in the language to an unfamiliar white man without first feeling a little sure of him, even if she were making a playful little []. I explained about the book.
- It’s like that bloody advert for Boddingtons, I said, having touched on people being out of touch with nature, with that cartoon cow wandering about acting like a right lad. And he’s got a sodding udder! I mean, I’ve heard beer’s full of oestrogeons or something – I’m a whisky man myself – but that’s rediculous. Sodding hermaphrodite cattle.
Perhaps it was her turn to be amused by my self-conscious use of language, all this bloody and sodding. She seemed in any case then to relax.
It was at times like that that I found myself amusing. I had fallen into the role of this borderline eccentric. It was at times like that that the fact that almost everybody fell into such dull, lifeless types no longer mattered, that the simple fact of beingout side of them was not enough, and that it really did signify little more than the unbelonging everyone of these clones took it to mean.
I had a mother at home and no father to whip me into shape. A mother, a cleaner, with a welder for a son and this burgeoning academic, and who knew more how to deal with one than the other. That creature of the campus as out of place on the mean streets of Harbourne as a monk in midnight manhatten.
Three years earnestly negotiating philosophical problems surrounded by pseuds and dudes who never grew out of that pubescent rebellious kick of rolling up in the back row of school and who deal, sealing eigths of weed into the celephane wraps of packs of B&H with a clipper lighter, who grow ponderous or geometrical beards, dread their hair and dread the future of work as soon as they see it’s coming on, and that their years of dossing has set them up for a harder kick than most. Three years negotiating my sexuality, and forever holding my personality in my hands like one of these kids with a Rubik’s Cube who had once, twice or more succumbed to temptation and inexpertly peeled and swapped some of the coloured stickers but only succeeded in confusing themselves, probably making it insolvable and besides, making that distant goal all the less satisfying (well, the way I see it, if you can unselfconsciously compare the trauma of dealing with your atypical sexuality to the trauma of struggling with a faddy ‘80s toy cum puzzle your neurosis has not yet got a firm grip). Wearing the right clothes, at times. Going to the right bars and clubs. But the right bars and clubs with two or three or four divergent social groups.
I called it mission creep. What soldiers call their briefs, which seem so often now from the time of Bush senior’s new world order to shift insidiously to new and more dangerous terrain. We had come for a degree and stayed. Me, because at that time I was caught up. I had got into asking questions and for three years, and with all the distractions of those years, had got no answers. That much was by then familiar.
I had got into a whole confusion over ends and means. That’s a philosopher’s way of looking at it, I admit, but what I mean is… I’ll go walking. To the hills. With one walking group or another, more or less “hardcore”, and if you don’t watch it, and if you don’t go often enough and get to know people and be known by people you’ll end up with somebody who’ll ask you, as you’re walking along a ridge or along a valley or cirque[], looking down on a lake, miles away from any cars that don’t just look quaint miles away buzzing along on their own, “Where are we going?” I exaggerate, of course, it’s happened to me once, perhaps twice, and with pleasant enough kind of people you can quickly forgive for missing the point, but that’s nonetheless what I’m talking about. I go walking precisely in order not to go anywhere. You end up in the pub, it’s true, but it’s not the pub as a destination that makes it so great. It’s the fact of being in the pub exhausted but energised from a day’s walking. And walking itself is about the fact of being out in nature – among the trees you know to have such variety even if you don’t know how to put a name to it – and walking in air which may or may not be fresh but from which you can taste something different from that metallic tang, and walking with the kind of rhythm you can chat to, and having the time to do so, unrushed, unhurried, unhassled, and free of the endless inanity of television, and with people you know want the same, just to chat and then sit someplace and eat and drink, perhaps to smoke and chat some more, and with the blood flowing just right to think, but not think too much, to listen and talk and just chat with no bullshit that is not literal, physical, on the floor and swarming with flies.
I felt, you see, like I had got a grip on things. Mercifully free of any neurosis that I could detect in myself with that kind of intellectualised neurotic introspection some of us can at least, mercifully, turn on and off like a switch, I had got myself into and out of a number of undemanding, unfulfilling, untraumatic sexual relationships with men and women both, and, underwhelmed, found myself nonetheless ruled by this small part of me, my life dedicated to being accepted as this or that, accepted by these or those cliques, attractive as this or that, to this or that, forever going over what is or isn’t real, and what do I find in myself as genuine, uncorrupted by this intellectualising, rationalising I can’t subdue, and what can I do about it. All friendships provisional, false, until such a time as they prove themselves worthy to me of some kind of hint too subtle, too contrived, for them to catch on to, leading me to another round of agonised [] I still could not transfer to the superego without getting a round of guilt; questions all the while of what if I did this, what if I did that? Take a girlfriend and it’s fine, but in the back of your mind it’s cowardice too, because you haven’t faced up to the other side of you, and though yes, you’ve been out with the LGB[], still, plenty of people thought you were windsurfing or at the cinema with that one of your friends they happen never to met. Tell her and you’re sabotaging the relationship, not giving it a chance, but hold back and you’re being secretive again, and it’s not a relationship at all. Forever going through the meanings of everything you do. And I contradict myself, do I not, because I’m essentially free of neurosis and yet here I am listing it? Aren’t I? Well, no, I’m not. What it is is you are forever damned if you do damned if you don’t. These confusions and pitfalls are all there for you in the outside world. You don’t have to add to them. You see everything as an individual problem, but they all have group solutions, with all the muck and bile and bullshit of group dynamics, and I was allergic to that.
Because people are not bad. Not most of them. Homophobia as I’ve experienced it is not hatred so much as stupidity, ignorance; little more culpable than an old man’s hob left burning over night to cause a fire in a block of flats. People are not bad. Just clumsy. Stupid. Life so often is like playing snooker with a kid who’s only ever played pool down the local while out of his tree on a Saturday night and who’s picked up the first bent cue with an old chafed tip he’s come across without a second thought. Tell me what’s the point in that? Chess with a guy who played draughts as a boy. That’s how I find it with my Dad dead when I was a lad, bisexual and among people who, he would have said, don’t even know they were born – rich kids from good schools. And that, believe me, is just fine, and I could go back to the days when they mixed among themselves and so did we – that one is an argument I would not shy from and would not tire of as I do most that I now hear – but it’s like these fucking idiots who say, every year you’ll hear it and you’ll read it, if you pay attention as I cannot help but do (would that I could) that relative poverty doesn’t mean a thing, but only absolute poverty. God damn it, you compare yourself against others, and you measure yourself, and your worth against others, and it matters a great deal. I just need to be with people on my level. I don’t give a damn who they are.
What did I find?
Another metaphor. And this one is clumsy, I know. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I fire a gun, I get the recoil. In the same way you learn as a kid growing up among normal people, how it hurts when you hurt someone close to you. Or if you make yourself immune to that, you get hurt. You hit a man you’ll be holding an ice pack to your hand for a while. But I find I’ll chuck someone on the chin and feel like I’ve broken my wrist. People’s reactions and sensitivities are just set up all wrong for me.
You’ll be in a club, and they’ll take you to be shy, and urge you on … you’ll tell them and then they’ll [] you.
Knowledge isn’t power. Stupidity is power. Brazen idiocy. Lies, however transparent.
I don’t reject hatred. I’m not one of these that talks of everyone loving one another. That it would be a beautiful world goes without saying
Christians I can forgive their hatred. So long as I can keep away from them and they me. Oh [that Scottish bigot, and some others, yes, but for the most part they’re the kind of people easy to ignore or dismiss]. The fact they conveniently forget that the bible [] shellfish and the like is just amusing.
I’m not entirely consistent myself, since I see religions unequally in this regard. This is perhaps only because Christian countries have to a greater extent allied themselvesd with more or less secular constitutions
I’m not particularly partisan in this aesthetic [] of mine. I feel exactly the same reaction from the other ‘side.’ The idiotic arguments people deploy in our defense, as if I need to be stood up for. “If being gay isn’t natural, then why do men have g-spots in their arse?” Can any more misunderstanding of fundamental facts of anatomy and evolution get squeezed into one sentence of such brevity, and yet I’ve heard this over and over, and every time I reflect, I don’t know why, but I reflect on how, yes, homosexuality can and perhaps does serve a valid evolutionary function with the least aggressive males effectively dropping out of the cut and thrust of heterosexual pairings, for example, and though this may not be a particularly reassuring thing for some who need a meaning to every part of their identity and who need too for some inexplicable reason to prove themselves anything other than nudging towards the female side of the gender spectrum, still it makes a great deal more sense than that a multi-purpose organ such as the prostate could, by an iterative generational drift towards a place in one’s anatomy that might conceivably give pleasure during homosexual anal intercourse (and let us not forget that for myself and many others homosexual sex is like Christmas in that it’s better to give than receive) there would be a knock-on advantage in terms of heterosexual reproduction.
Where this intellectual pugilism came from I don’t know.
And with all of this mess
I escape from the world and from my head with music, when I can – good live music of the kind that is so rare that you can afford to stand around with a beer or a whisky, and even a book before it all kicks off if you can’t find someone to go with you – with comedy, which I generally find to be safer outside of the clubs since comedy clubs can be the most depressing places when a guy or a girl steps up to the mike with no talent, puts on a voice or , or worse, starts slagging gays in a more or less direct fashion, which happens often enough and is guaranteed a laugh. There are a few films I can watch over and over and which are guaranteed to settle my mood when I’m alone, or with a friend who shares it, though it’s guaranteed that when I try and share my tastes with others who always inflict on me their latest mainstream recomendations, a comedy say, they stare blankly, asking idiotic questions. Monty Python is one I’ll turn on, especially Life of Brian – Chapman, one of the first celebrities to come out, on George Melly’s show in the seventies, features heavily, for a start. In the DVD I’ve got there is a bonus documentary, The Pythons, which was recorded on the set of the film and in which Chapman talks about his parents wish for him to become a doctor, and about how John Cleese is too uptight about sex, thinks it through too much. The others talked about how he was difficult to know. Among his best friends were Keith Moon, the drummer from The Who who was said to be such a misogynist bastard he would shit in women’s shoes.
I’m a complicated man, [] carefree, it’s there, waiting for any chance to express itself. What’s that expression, take care of the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. Well, me, and a million others in this country are a living [rejection] of that. Most of us in a financial sense – people who [] and even avoiding the thousand temptations that face them down every day and get them instantly [] as being undeserving of help – and me, perhaps, in terms of happiness, forever up for a laugh, and getting a kick out of whatever I can, but living from one kick to the next. You could say that for plenty of men, and certainly men like my Dad. The philosophy, if you could call it that, of Dennis Leary’s No Cure for Cancer. That was one I watched with a friend of mine. He loved it and would sit and say that’s true that is time and again as Leary went on about how you can only live from one kick to the next, an orgasm, a cigarette. But for me and a thousand others too, in different ways, since there can be few differences between myself and my father, and my friend who would sit beer in hand still wearing the black top and jeans covered in aluminium filings he had worn to work, it’s how we like it, it’s comfort, and taking the smooth without the rough is like playing golf ; I come out in a rash in the sun, and forever squint and miss the scenary.
My world had closed in. Few friends, and those I had I had lost my taste for. They were all fine in their way, but I had tired of them. I had known them too long, so that they were like old favorites, old tunes and old films that lose their charm the more you watch them, until you have to find something new, depend upon them less and less until one day you go back and find you love it once again, that it has its old power.
waiting for the encounter that will make that pain worthwhile. At uni in the first three years it had been a group rather than an individual in the walking and climbing clubs. An environment. But also a guy I could never, thank God, have found attractive, though many did – no he was too damn handsome for me, all sculptured and svelte and incapale either of growing stubble or of neglecting to shave for a day - it wouldn’t surprise me now if he had been in the closet, nor indeed that he always will be, so far did I fail to find the motivation for that cutting humour. But with him I could forget everything.
In those years since graduation I had found so little time. I was surrounded by people I saw little of. But many of them. I so long had to focus on my studies, and did so contendedly for so long, un[bothered] by the social demands of undergrad life. I scarcely recognised how my close friends were dwindling.
Even when I became aware of this I experienced it as much as a liberation as a []. For years I had been friends with men who were so different from myself, and it was nothing whatever to do with being bi, even – I am convinced of this – in the sense of reaching out for new things[]. I was into rock when friends were into dance. My films were different. I would listen to their music, watch their films, listen to them talk about football and cars – truly stereotypical conversations. We had good times I would hold back on ties until I really settled, discovered what drove me, find new friends who would share interests. After all it was easy to lazily pick up friends – I read an article one time from a woman who’s made a name writing the kind of lifestyle journalism I usually hate (which, I realise now I often now read on a Sunday precisely in order to hate, and especially since reading Sygmunt Beauman[]’s Liquid Love in which he takes the hated things apart), talking about how she realised late in life that she had never had a partner who she chose, and how, so, she had always been chosen, and therefore, was always with the kind of man who chose women like her, rather than the kind of man she would choose. I chose to think of this instead in terms of friends; for so long I had been so unsure of myself I would be flattered by any good impression people had of me, and though I realised people were often attracted to the same misapprehensions I was comforted by the fact they couldn’t see through me: I don’t doubt it sounds rediculous, misanthropic, utilitarian or what not but just sometimes I felt trapped inside of these bonds, these relationships with these good people, restricted by them in the same way people feel restricted by their parents even when they know their good intentions. A little space, a little time to myself wasn’t such a bad thing. And really, I feel that is true. A saw a documentary on Gazza one time. I remember my dad talking about him, and indeed, him giving me my first beer with some ceremony and a word in the wife’s ear in that match in 1990 memorable for millions of others for Gascoine walking off the pitch in tears, but really I only managed to stand sitting and watching the thing because I was depressed, and wanted to indulge those feelings, yes, but also couldn’t motivate myself away from the damn tube. It was surprising, though, fascinating and moving, and what I thought, if I thought at all, would be a timely opportunity for mawkish indulgence and to comtemplate for the millionth time the [] paradox of a man who made me, and who is so different from me, and the fateful [] [] I cannot ever escape from became an opportunity instead to really think about what it means to be a man, why it was so important to men in this country when he walked from the pitch in tears just two years after having effectively been left out of the world cup team, the tensions and emotional bottlenecks that lead to all the aggression and idiocy and often from men you couldn’t say weren’t basically good; but most of all, thinking of what holds back so many men I know, and men I’ll always be intrinsically tied up with, how he spoke of not being able to be alone, because the thoughts come rushing to him, bad thoughts, and talking about that so inarticulately, rushing to the booze, to company. It was like the times I have come to understand a celebrity I’ve never had time for through In the Psychiatrist’s chair. In him I saw so many of my friends. They can’t avoid that, can’t be alone, don’t know themselves and won’t ever grow up. I needed to know myself; even more than most.
Not thinking. Jase, never alone, living hand to mouth, from work to the pub or the football pitch, or the practise room, paying debts for amps and guitars, and paying business tax in arrears on the warehouse they had picked up cheap together as a band – Uber Insect – and signed over []. Paying it though he played no part in that idiot decision. Paying it because they are mates. Just one thing he’s got himself into, and I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years it’ll be the CSA.
There were years of being heterosexual. In retrospect I was a genius at denial and any buzz I got from looking at men as I naturally did was put down to a kind of envy at their fitness – this was years before I heard the word in a sexualised context, and I initially considered it befowled not because of any repression, because in my heterosexual life I was anything but, but because I had until then always viewed fitness, as in cadiovascular fitness, as a higher goal – I would see a pair of shapely male legs and think to myself that I was avaricious of their shape in myself and got a kick only from thinking how I would achieve it, as they invariably got lazier and lost that natural fitness, I would overtake them with my running, my swimming, my martial arts, the lot. My first sexual experience? At karate, where I went with my brother, and one of the tutors, a stunning young brown belt, wearing a bikini on a summer’s day. We were drilling one of those choreographed attacks we would do in pairs – forward a step, back a step, move, counter-move, and I was to demonstrate with her, fatefully, a thrust to the crotch, a move like bowling, I still recall, in a low stance thrusting the forearm between her legs. Naturally, I held off. Once, twice, and then she told me, irritatedly, to do it again with my partner. He, she said, is a boy. That was the form feminism took in those days, and it seems quaint enough what with all the bitterness and diatribes targetted at me from the more intelligent privileged women who might otherwise be using the empathy I had once suspected women of being more capable of than men for conversation. And in that time heroes stacked up to be measured against.
Snooker. Jazz.
I pumped up the tube and told her to be quiet for a minute while I located the puncture. A moment before I had briefly interrupted her to have her turn on her flashing friend LED onto constant as I walked the spokes round to look for a thorn, but I had found nothing. I turned the tube round beside my ear. I worried I might look a fool with the wind still up unable to find it, but soon enough I had the thing blowing pleasantly and steadily into my ear.
So what halls are you in?
- I’m not. A shrug.
- I take it, I said, judging from that gesture, your parents weren’t too happy about the idea?
- Exactly. She seemed glad I understood. Plenty of people don’t – it’s a very white uni.
- How about, what’sit called? Nightingales?
She shrugged in a let it be kind of way, making it instantly clear there was no point pursuing
Wanting to change the subject she told me she shuld be following what I was doing, in case it happens again, but I could see she wasn’t interested and s I made no effort to describe why I was using the sandpaper.
What area of philosophy do you study?
But it is interesting. To want to know about things. Plenty of people aren’t interested. They just accept whatever comes their way. Convenience food. And what are they making time for with this convenience food, but convenience culture.
Yeah, well maybe it just takes longer to . Why do you have to understand something to have a relationship to it. It’s like the trees. Now, that’s something I didn’t know. I know it, and now when I go walking or out into nature… I gesticulated minutely with the solvent.
All right my Dad goes on, but it’s different. Curiosity is a good thing.
Trust me, I said, curiosity is overrated. Paranoia. I told him to see the counsellers. I told him I couldn’t care less what he was and wasn’t. I told him not to flatter himself that I could give a damn. I would have waved to him on campus, said hello when he got out a book. Further, I couldn’t care less, and if he didn’t want pleasantries, well, pleasantries he can keep. I’ve enough people to wave at, nod at, say hello to and . The kind of aquaintances that in this busy world, in urban environments when you see so many familiar faces you don’t know, add up to minuses. You for me were due to be one of them. Nondescript, but a minus. Bigger than many throughout the years who come and go, but not as big as you’re determined to be now. You need plenty of pluses in your life. It can be family, friends. It doesn’t matter. Lots of little pluses, mates; my Dad got by like that, and that’s not my way, not now, but I can see that, yeah, great, fantastic. A handful of big pluses. That’s it for me, the times I can find them. You can do what you like. But what is it that you can’t deal with this. It was your decision and you weren’t mature enough for it. What, do you have lots of minuses hanging around. I’m making this simple for you. It is simple. Don’t get me wrong, but I’m stripping it bare. People you don’t feel comfortable around as yourself? I was bored by it. Not intimidated. I don’t even believe in all these hang-ups people tell me about. People who conform to stereotypes anger me, because it makes it too easy. The fucking gays with a chip on their shoulders about being men. Anger arousal theory. Starting fights. I was bored with him for that. And told him so, which made me more of a threat. I told him to go write on a toilet wall. Showed him a photo which had always amused me. On my phone – I let a straight bloke piss on my hand and it was the best thing I ever did. He made the mistake others did. I was easy to intimidate. I wasn’t telling anybody, he thought, because I was scared. I wasn’t telling anybody because I didn’t care. I told him so. My sex life wouldn’t interest anybody if it didn’t interest me. Told him to fuck off and get a bulldog tattooed on his chest. I’m over that now, he writes, will you come to mine?
I don’t believe you really believe that. Too many people aren’t curious. Aren’t interested in anything.
[]
Don’t take this the wrong way but there’s something of the Morrissey about you.
I attempted to shrug it off with high sarchasm. I suppose everyone has his weak points. I once, stoned in a campsite in Newquay told a girl she looked like Darleen off Roseanne – a girl whose friend had been crawling at length out of her tent on her hands and knees with her tits hanging out and who came over later for a mallet – I had been in a sardonic mood, she was sent into a terrible mood for the remainder of the holiday which sent her friend into my grateful brother’s arms, and her to set off drinking day after day with some geordies in a caravan: not so much the love interest, it seemed, as an honourary bloke. A friend of mine, meanwhile, who could have been easily identified throughout his uni days for wearing one of a restricted number of tops and hoodies, tried on leaving to affect something of a personal style revolution, except that mid-metamorphosis he tended to get labelled with either Jack Osbourne or Mike Moore, both of which got him understandably riled. Or it can take is the vaguest of resemblances, in the girl it was the voice, and the curly black hair and if not a grungy style of dress then certainly not on the glamorous sideand in him, for Moore, a tendency to wear caps on occasion and, when unshaved, which was not in him uncommon, a sparse beard and a slothenly look, and for Osbourne, the suit jacket and hair. Now I knew in anyone who said it of him there was no malice intended but something of a joke, and it wouldn’t have been mentioned at all if anyone had really seen so clearly such an unfortunate resemblance. Still, even knowing how these things are so you can’t take it that way, not when it’s just the wrong person; it’s like those idiot tables on slow news days or whatever it is that [] that a new haircut is only moderately less traumatic than a bereavement, even the pure aesthetic affront may last a mere few seconds, knocking out your system like a quaff of a very stiff drink but you land a celeb whose very person is if not repulsive then itself gruesomely disproportioned and its quite a job to maintain relatively handsome, more so than myself in my most confident days, and in a different way, and since I was not remotely coiffed it could only be the personality that had led to this. And she had known me a few minutes. It could have been no longer than that. I hope it could have been no longer than that, not to change a tyre. I may be bi, but I have a male ego to maintain. The trouble was also that I had, since Andy had left – the guy with whom I had had an on and off three year dalliance as straight man of a double act – I had attempted to take on his sarchasm. Take it the wrong way, take it the wrong way, I said, and by then I already realised I had got the tone wrong and wuld soon descend into the territory of gauche if into anything at all. In comparing me to the high priest of misery . Chapman’s comment again.
By this time I had finished. She both apologised and thanked me profusely.
There is nothing worse than being judged to be insufficiently grateful. Like these men and women so devoid of social skills that they take to dishing out favours unsolicited for a whiff of good will and who then raise the bar so high to gratitude and in the process of carrying out this unwanted favour, something which soon becomes more of an imposition, rile you to such an extent you can’t meet their standards. Perhaps that’s just me, gong off again, but in any case I didn’t want to be one of those people, whether I had invented them or not – and I can’t now think of a single case – and so I tightened the quick release bolt, clipped in the brake cable and told her it was nice talking to her, and good luck in her exams.
I’ve got plenty of people to wave at on campus, she said. I don’t really need another. If you want to listen to your cricket, that’s great and thanks for your help, but otherwise we could walk back together.
I agreed.
So you were working tonight?
Yeah, and you, essay crisis down the computer rooms?
Nooo, well, yes, essay crisis, and I should be working on an essay or two, and probably should have in retrospect, but no, I was down at a meeting of the New Theatre.
What, it was a typical, boring..?
Well, no, I mean the meetings are never the most enthralling things. I mean, you are surrounded by these creative types, and, well, they try and turn it all into a social event and so they are always chatting and they never get to the point, but the thing is that if you don’t spend all your time there, and if you’re not so completely obsessed with theatre and sure you’ll get a job there, or so set up for life that you’ll never need to, and, basically – I found later that this was a quirk of hers, this drawled out emphasis on the first syllable, something I would never tire of hearing – if you’re not happy about failing your degree to do something with this theatre and with people to whom time management is an absolutely foreign concept, then you won’t understand the bloody jokes anyway, and this waiting for them to get to the point, as desperate as they are to be entertertaining is infuriating if you have anything else in your life that you might want to achieve.
I laughed.
And basically, it’s just one joke. I might be exaggerating now in this quirk, but it was true that she would lose a little of her articulacy when she was [] excited about something. The whole thing, for however many hours, and considering they start late and don’t do anything to make you feel welcome as they fail to gather and get to the point and get started. The whole thing is showing how carefree they are, and the whole joke is to dawdle and every time they clamour to be the next to sustain some idiotic chatter rather than getting to the point of the meeting, I mean it galls them, the central clique, to have these interlopers who think that because they help out and want to get involved that they can pitch in, but then, too, they’ve got an audience, all these people who don’t know one another and are too afraid to speak up, and so they have to [] and exclude them as far as possible, put them in their place.
Disarmingly punctilious, I thought. One of these who is unable to understand anyone who isn’t organised. I smiled in a way that seemed to make her feel defensive.
But really, it’s a pose, and I have all the time in the world for non-conformism, but just none for ostentatious non-conformism. I agreed with her, that was my thing the whole three years with philosophy. I just have never understood why being involved in the arts should mean . If it means you don’t have to make the effort to be different, that’s just great, but this sham ego trip just seems to distract from the bloody theatre itself.
Well, they’re playing a role…
Yeah…, she said, like she hadn’t really took this in.
…the whole time.
I was smiling again.
No, it’s just you remind me of someone. The way they’ve got you riled. Elecution lessons. I was in Lon-don. She took great pride in teaching me to bitch about the performing arts types. They would come into the library and read through these texts with four-letter words used like commas, and she would bridle.
They start talking about Othello so they have to talk about Thundercats. Iago is apparenty like Munawar or something…
Mumra…
…Which starts a whole conversation about whether Skeletor could have Mumra… It’s so juvenile…
I remembered a lot of people like her at school. They always had a point, but it was always to easy to wind them up.
Have they found their Othello yet? I had seen the advertisements around the library, looking for a black actor. They had attracted my attention, as the walls often tend to do when I’ve drank too much coffee and end up staring around, because they seemed a little desperate, and in many ways, not too tactful. Acting experience desirable but not essential, said one.
Nooo, she said, and that’s the thing. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to go to the meeting. I didn’t think they were going about it the right way, and I thought some of their attitudes were off-putting. You know I heard one time one of them saying “these ethnics”, used like a standalone adjective, you know, “they are always whingeing about not being involved in stuff and then when you go out of your way, they don’t show any interest.” I mean, it was one of the techies, you know, which maybe shouldn’t make a difference but, frankly… Still…
Yeah, I thought I got an indication of that from the poster.
Exactly. As Moreish as [turkish food]? If that’s you come and join New Theatre. I just wanted to let them know why it might not be working. Because they are complaining, and though they’re holding back – and I’m not being funny but I can see in part it’s because I’m there – and they’re consciously trying not to speak like that techie I overheard, still they’re saying much the same thing, and I just wanted to point out, well, look, how many white people do you get turning up, as a proportion of the whites at the uni, and if you take that same ratio of people interested in theatre and keen on devoting so much time to the theatre as such a lead role would demand, and then think of the number of blacks at the university, well, then you have nobody, and they’ve already turned a couple of people away early on for looking wrong or sounding wrong. Now they had to. I don’t argue with that, but my point was that they can’t complain. They don’t have reason because of the numbers involved.
No, I told them, but they rounded on me like I had a chip on my shoulder and was accusing them of racism. They all started talking at once, and then with this exaggerated patience you get. I mean, I thought it was a simple enough argument to grasp.
I have very little faith in people grasping any argument. You can’t reason with people.
I tried to explain. And then when I saw they weren’t getting it, and when they all just kept on repeating, in this patient voice like I was failing to understand, well than I took another tack. Which was a mistake. Another argument they weren’t going to grasp. I should have given up. I should have been bloody writing about romanticism. I was saying, well, perhaps Shakespeare is all very well, but it’s not the most exciting thing for a black man. Not a challenging part, and it doesn’t feel relevent. Feel a part of their life.
You don’t have to be black for that, I said. I’ve got a lot of time for Dickens, but Shakespeare I can take it or leave it. It just reminds me of teachers laughing out loud at centuries old jokes about VD that differ from those that would be banned in the classroom only in the sense that they require paragraphs of notes to make sense of. And this thing of reading him, studying him. That would have been so foreign to the man himself. I mean he hardly made it easy for all these compositors or whatever you call them.
Well yeah, I mean, people are force fed it it’s true. I like it. But that’s me, you know. I like it, and I said that, but there I was attacking English culture or something like that. And that got their backs up again. You know I was just telling them other things black men might be getting involved in: club nights, music, sport. There’s a lot of things competing for their attention, and Shakespeare might not be top of the list.
[]
I was just talking about their reportoire, because what have you got. What is there to attract a black guy who sees a poster that’s clearly been designed by a bunch of white men and women, white public school types. What’s going to draw them in? It is a very white reportoire, and you can’t get around that. It happens to be inconvenient to them inasmuch as they want to show a play with a black character, but otherwise they hadn’t given it a second’s thought.
[]
Again it’s like I’ve accused them of racism. They’ve got a very conservative audience. But, I tell them, it’s not a conservative reportoire, it’s a white reportoire. I mean they’ve got these Northern plays in which everyone gets beaten up and stabbed and are selling drugs, and in one sense, yes, it’s the new cannon and such things have ceased to be sensational and have become mainstream, but essentially, they’re not conservative, just white. And I was just pointing that out.
And unfortunately, yes, most of the potential audience is white, and they have to listen to that audience whether they want to or not. And I was saying, fine, well, in that case, just don’t get angry. I told them to black up for the role as they did until Paul Robeson took it on, and stop complaining. I told them Sir Laurence Olivier blacked up for it in 1964.
How did they take that?
Well, then they acted like I’d really hurt their feelings now. I wasn’t being provocative, just matter-of-fact.
[]
[] Well, some say that it should not be played by a black man. There was a production in ’97 where it was played in what they called photo negative. I mean, for God’s sake these things like the racial [] of Othello are elementary things they should at least be aware of.
[] Hey, go slow on me.
[] The black man as some kind of impulsive, That’s an image that persists in people’s minds.
Not least in some black men’s minds. I thought that was pushing it, that she might take offence.
Well, exactly, it’s still relevant. It’s like this Yardie thing now. And in a way having the black actor confuses the audience’s reaction. I mean, I would like a more representative mix, of course I would, but I don’t really see how Othello can be a part of that. Not in terms of Britain today, and hot-headed maurauding Blacks. Yardies on the streets of Nottingham, you know the deal. I think if they were brave enough to do it, blacking up a white actor who could act and do something with the role might actually be a lot better than finding a black actor with no experience.
[]Yeah, I mean, I slag it, but I can see how it can still be relevant, I suppose, if you do it right. I mean in that way, in showing how values have changed, in that juxtaposition.
I mean it was just a simple point, and they took it like I had set out to wound. I knew the feeling but I didn’t say anything to that. I mean, talking about this reportoire they had. I just see it as a really inoffensive cannon. To the degree that it’s effectively pointless. I mean you get ‘edgy’ drama on TV and it’s no different. They were talking about a conservative audience, but I was just saying, well, it’s not just asians who would turn up to a plays about Islam today, because it affects us all, surely, after 9/11.
Well, they say, we don’t want to get into politics. Well then why show all these political plays. Political plays written under Thatcher which might have been a [] period, I admit that, but things have changed. Blair is her inheritor, yes, but… Sorry, I bet you’re wishing you stuck to your cricket. You’re right is all, they got to me.
No, not at all, I’m something the wiser. I mean, the whole Shakespeare aversion is little more than a kneejerk thing for me. It just seems too much like base nationalism. The greatest playwrite of all time. I hear it all the time. Well, who’s the second? No one comes close. And all this about is he gay? is he homosexual? is he bi? So many trees cut down for these stale debates, and I just don’t care. I was testing the water. Something I always did sooner or later to avoid disappointment.
Well, yeah, I mean, I’m interested in anything it throws up about his life, but otherwise just sticking a label on him is a little childish.
Anyway it sounds like you’ve got your work cut out. A mate of mine found the same. He turned up to interview for something and he wasn’t quite lovie enough.
Yeah, I’ve been trying until now to kind of pick them off one by one. They’re not so bad on they’re own. What’s that phrase, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, and then stop.
Yeah, sometimes it’s really not worth it.
Don’t get me wrong, I keep on at things. On my own, I take Samuel Becket’s line: fail again, fail better.
You’re absolutely right. [I had first seen it on an episode of Faking it. One of the only things I had seen on TV and liked, aside from a late night meals programme where one guy proposed to his girlfriend and she started crying – and the others on that programme turned up to start talking about the look of their vaginas and the like. It wasn’t a resolution. It was like a race to the other extreme.]
That’s the kind of thing I would watch. And actually, I disagree with you. Shakespeare’s are plays I would almost rather read. And Becket, for example, I would always rather watch.
Yeah, I don’t know so much about it I suppose. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love the theatre, but no one to go with I suppose. I did take my brother down one time to London to see Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. He insisted on me goiing to see a WhiteSnake tribute band and I told him I would do an exchange. He’s not so big on his culture, you see. Motocross, speedway, football, rock. That’s it.
She laughed. It sounds interesting. How did it go?
Well, not bad. The guy kept on turning his mike stand upside down and flipping up his mike from the crotch of his leather trousers to immitate an erection, but… I laughed before she had to say anything. Yeah, I loved it, of course. It was fantastic. Peter O’Toole. I couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe it. Before hand I was trying to think of a film he was in Jase would know. He recognised the name, and I was surprised he even knew that. I mean, he is a real case for Van Dam, you know. But anyway, he comes on and the first thing he says, and loud, is Shit, that’s the guy what gets throttled in that Caligula. I was like, half cringeing, and half, like, what?! I didn’t know anything about it.
My knowledge of the classics, the Romans, Greeks, all of that is, shwt, she gestured and made a dismissive sound.
No, me too, but this is like some huge, crazy art porn film. More porn that art in the event, but screenplay was by what’sisname, Gore Vidal. Porn supplied and edited in by the owner of Penthouse. But that’s just him. He couldn’t believe it afterwards, it had been some great secret between him and Dad ‘cos they’d watched it together with some of Dad’s mates round. But I was surprised, yeah, he liked it. Though we went to Soho later, and walked round like tourists in all the places Bernard hated. Anyway, sorry, what happened, do you still want to be involved or what?
Well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m reluctant to be pushed into behind the scenes.
You’re starting to sound like a bit of a control freak. You don’t have the same seat in there do you?
Pub. You look like you could do with a drink. You sound like you could do with a drink. Besides, I think I need a drink, and I rarely drink. I had a tipple at the meeting. They’re like that of course. Well, it was vodka jelly, but I love jelly, you know. It’s like it was a delicacy when I first saw it – this mad wobbling rabbit at a friend’s house, you know, and she became my best friend. Had you really not noticed? How had you not noticed?
It’s bigger than it looks. She laughed, but held off from making any comment.
How big?
- You see. It’s not the size, it’s the fact that you know the size. How out of control can you be when you know it’s 70cl. I mean, what’s that? Three whiskies? And anyway, you look like you need a drink with a living person.
By way of response I gave her a kind of mock offended look, the kind of thing I thought we could share by then, and swung my bike around to the sign to lock it up.
I mentioned earlier trying to paint her not just as she was then, but as I saw her then. First impression. Because they can count, I admit that, but for jesus Christ’s sake should they? I sometimes suspect – and don’t think for a minute that pins me down, because I suspect lots of things – I sometimes suspect that I wear the get-up I do just so as to get the worst bastards and bores and bints who judge all the time on looks and first impressions, the hell away from me. I remember back to reading Isherwood’s diaries – me listening to Thelonious Monk on huge headphones running along the floor on a curly extension chord, and Jase sat on his bed stooped around his guitar and over a huge wah wah pedal with his Docs on, his own pair holding back his long hair. Both of us then in our own worlds. Mum had insisted on the headphones. She didn’t insist on many things and we never really pushed her too far when her nerves seemed to be on edge – they showed in her voice and in a twitch of her eye. We would sit like that for hours. Him with his forearm muscles twitching like the hammers inside a piano. But there I am looking back, no, I remember the pleasure of reading his harsh character judgements on a first meeting, and then going on to find them become friends – that was not merely a pleasure then, not only a rare form of catharsis, but at that time when friendships had already lost their simplicity for me, their ability to be themselves and nothing else, it was a lifesaver. That first impression is lost to me. I’ve got the basics of it, but can’t look back, through everything.
But what of those who can’t and don’t see beyond it. Sometimes I have thought this is key. Men go out to get into women’s pants. That much is obvious. Tediously so. They no longer have to make any pretenses. Fine. Relationships start and end in the same night, and women have to make quick decisions. Men come up to them all the time and they have to decide if they are a weirdo or not. A snap decision. The result? Men have to hyperconform.
It’s probably nonsense, but then
But so often on meeting a girl for the first time I felt there was this tiresome game. And with her there wasn’t. With her sanity. A conversation. She didn’t know those games. Didn’t have to fend off man after man. She doesn’t meet many. There I was with my Barber and my cricket and the puncture repair kit in my bag like a good little scout, that put her at ease and we got to talking. And so, a simple, unforced spontaneous exclamation that seemed as much observation as suggestion; nothing I had to interpret.
Except, there was, too, that “you look like you need a drink. You sound like you need a drink,” and there is nothing that gives away a man’s take on the glass half full, glass half empty conundrum than the spirit in which he takes a comment said half in jest: it dawned on me that I was numb, that I had been suspended in this rich routine of mine for some time, forever making adjustments to my own environment, and this crutch, routine, as far as I could – a portable radio here, a menthol cigarette there, snooker, films downloaded in my room, whisky in a hip flask poured into automat coffee in liu of real milk, even going to the horse racing once a month, on my own, travelling there on busses accompanied by Philip Marlowe, and spending there money – this a real [] of anal retention – a fraction of the money I calculated I had saved from not spending on, say, coffee I might have previously bought, or beer or books. I thought we [keep on] and we are too good at it for our own good, so that we don’t even know we’re doing it until one day for no particular reason you reach your point and it’s too much, or, you get through it, whatever predicament had to be put up with, withstood. Comfortably numb, in the words of the song I once or twice convinced Jase to play in his band as a cover. I had had no indications, but we don’t, and here was someone, I thought, telling me, gently, what I would not have seen myself, and what I might have denied all the stronger from someone else less sympathique. I thought that, a prime example of the kind of thinking she came to recognise in my eyes, and never failed to be amused by, or to keep the tone of . “I’d like that,” I managed to say, and she smiled. She locked up her bike to the pub sign, and I locked mine around hers, securing her front wheel. She remarked on it in some way. “A captive audience,” I said, as if to myself, “how little she suspects.” She turned, laughed, and told me to stop.
It was a huge place set off the road, and one of the few that had for the most part remained relatively untouched by the whole process of studentification hat had taken over the area with landlords with their cartels (the asians doing well in that regard), and decent families fleeing the place. I’d go there from time to time with my parents when they would visit for the weekend. All the students would. They had decent carveries with veg that weren’t boiled into mush, decent Yorkshires and stuffing. It wasn’t such a production line affair as at some places. You had to wait a little while but it was worth it. Otherwise, a selection of real ales, neatly partitioned corners and cubby holes to have a conversation and discrete music. And evenings you’d see more soiled high-visibility vests, packs of Sovereigns and L&Bs than you would . It was exactly the kind of place I felt immediately settled in, and which for three years I had had to go back home to Brum to find, before or after a match with Jase or out with a few old workmates who would invariably spend the evening making jokes about my career path. Not the kind of place you wuld see many asians, though, male or female.
I was perhaps a little surprised when she asked for a vodka, and that she looked so at home in the place. I got the impression, and though she toughened up in the years following the time we met and I thought it necessary to try and make sure I was not backdating everything in my mind, I got this clearly from a look as we were standing at the bar – unlike plenty of people I know her smile always affected her eyes, but there was something else, and I got the I distinct impression that very little could phaze her: she was incredibly mature, with the kind of intelligence I had not come across at university at all, broad and deep and yet witheld and restrained, understated and concise, unlike the opinionated types I met every day; had I been speaking to her on the internet or even the telephone I would have taken her to be an energetic woman of thirty or more.
We sat and just freely chatted. It was a week day and we found a corner – in fact she led us there – and from the time the glasses touched the table we didn’t stop; nothing seemed to be [], and I was as surprised with myself in this as with her.
I knew a little abut Bollywood. There was a video shop down my way. I had always loved films, but cultish stuff, and the chains of Blockbuster and the like were always disappointing and limited, and those local places stuffed with derivative action films and staffed by no-hopers who would loudly and intrusively recommend you a film as soon as you’d pick it up and determine it to be [] trash from two lines of the blurb were too drab to be enticingly sleazy in the way I found the cheap strip clubs Jase frequented around the time I found I might have something to hide. We got onto it from music, which we had got to talking about, perhaps as one of the stock questions you have to ask and which rarely flowers into anything more. I told her, as everyone invariably does, that I listen to all kinds of stuff, but in my case I could back it up. One time he was practising, learning from one of his guitar magazines he was so obsessive about. He had learnt his scales with the kind of dedication he had never displayed at school to anything but sport, and had now discovered modes, the mixolydian in particular, as I recall, being as [] and as devastating to his underdeveloped melodic instincts as myxomatosis in rabbits. In that way he would get enthused, and endearingly so as only (and he would forgive me even if I didn’t consider it as anything other than a slight) those of underdeveloped intellects can, he began to play a riff – I remember it, from Offspring, before, as he would say of any band after a while, they sold out – and to talk about how they had formed it of an exotic scale. modus lascivus I remembered one of the funniest encounters I had ever had, with a friend from school, Sukhpal, who took me home one day. He was a bright kid, and one of the few I knew who were witty, and mildly hyperactive with it. I came in to the sound of music and he excitedly showed me round. It was coming from the cupboard under the stairs. He gestured me to be quiet and opened the door. His older brother was sat cross legged on the floor playing a violin held between his chin and the point his ankles crossed. He was surrounded by winter coats evidently bought from market stalls. That and clutter. And there was the smell of something like dope. Weed it was, explained Sukh with a gesture, placing a coffee down at his brother’s feet and closing the door on him, and mothballs, which his brother had recommended his parents after consenting to practice in the place after his father, a bus driver with a neatly twisted greying moustache over his beard, who was ever on his guard to be seen as a man keen to establish himself as part of the community, had took to be something like a complaint from the neighbours, and thought of a use for the most noise-insulated room in the house. “He don’t know what it smells like anyway,” explained Sukhy, “But I told you, man, he’s mad my old man.” I told him no, he was a Brummie, something I was persuaded of with a mere glance at the house; here was a different breed of tat, but tat it was, the homely clutter I was accustomed to. It led me though, this brush with a music that threw me and confounded my expectations, through that boredom with music after years of depending on it as only male adolescents can, to a period trying to seek out world music through anything from Andy Kershaw to the impulse to check out local asian stations to listen to while doing homework, avoiding the chance of being distracted by English lyrics and chatter after being almost knocked down by motors driven with the usual bravado but better than average distorted beats by asian kids: thus, Bhangra.
Naturally, she didn’t stumble upon Bollywood in the same way I did and enlightened me a little, talking with humour of how muslim actors changed their names and got on in the Hindu-dominated world in Bombay, with one of them changing his name to Johnny Walker as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the brand of whisky, on the censorship of kissing and how as an intellectually curious teenager she had burned up when her Dad once found her watching the end scene of Cinema Paradiso – the famous scene in which a boy brought up on films watches the censored outcuts of hundreds of famous screen kisses that [] spliced together and presented him with years before: she felt as if the world would end, not knowing then that he applied his strict morality only to those he suspected of having the strength of will and the judgement to follow it. We got to talking of Iranian cinema, but also French, European, and of the kind of films I had always struggled to find friends for: somewhat gingerly she broached going to the cinema alone and we both smiled as she said she had never quite been able to take anyone seriously who had not done so.
You sound like you need a woman.
I’m bisexual.
Then you need a woman or a man. The world is your oyster. But I still think you need a woman. Don’t ask me why.
I tried the gay scene. Small talk. Small willies I don’t mind. In fact big’uns are a pain in the arse. And it’s like these snakes that dislocate their jaw to swallow their prey whole. Sorry, being graphic.
I don’t mind. In fact it’s funny.
No but I hate people being graphic. It’s a kind of exhibitionism…
…Have you ever read the Idler?
No.
No, well, it’s just that I was reading it one time. It was an interview with Jeffrey Bernard, and he was saying how real pubs don’t exist anymore, and the thing is he’s got a point. I mean, part of it is his mysogyny, I don’t doubt. The old places were unfriendly for women and what you’d get is these rough Graham Greene types, but he’s got a point. And he was saying to the kid who was interviewing him I wouldn’t want to be your age. I don’t know. He was just talking about meeting these interesting people, and you know he did. I’m just looking for authenticity.
People think I’m a puritan. You see that offends me. More than racism or islamophobia. It doesn’t scare me more, of course, but it offends me more. Because it’s personal. But it seems, and I’ve got to say it, you’re almost scared to enjoy yourself.
My first resort was a kind of joke. I had been procrastinating from reading journals on the internet when I stumbled upon an internet site. What kind of Humanist are you? Well, I would have to admit I’ve never really learned or indeed been interested in what exactly differentiates humanists from other mortals, atheists, liberals or whatever, but, perhaps out of mere curiosity, filled in the survey, just clicking radio buttons, on my response to churches – am I filled with wonder despite myself, am I overcome by indifference, and what will I do with my body when I’m dead and gone – well, apparently, I’m a hairshirt, which means I’ll never cheat on my wife or partner, take illegal drugs and bla bla bla. Well, I don’t cheat on my wife or partner and don’t take illegal drugs, and yes, perhaps I do consider it the height of raciness to have a hip flask in the library… She cut me off.
Hairshirt. Fiddling with the answers afterwards.
But, no, really, I’m no puritan. Once I set up an e-mail address just to send mail to one of my tutors, anonymously, of course. I sent some filthy mails her way. I mean, really filthy. I told her how I was exploring my sexuality and how I sat in the back of her classes, and how I listened, and took notes but that all the while I was picturing her naked, in lingerie, in my bed. Whatever. I think I wanted to get into trouble. To force some kind of confrontation. I mean you read all the while of women getting offended by such things. She didn’t reply, and so I kept on sending them, thinking sooner or later she would be unable to ignore it.” I was telling her this thinking she had in mind some kind of too nice guy. And nothing gets me more wound up, like she hated being taken to be sexless. “And these weren’t big classes, and I was giving more away. Perhaps I was getting turned on by the difference between my public face and this, depravity.
Anyway, after a while she replied and the first thing she did. I couldn’t believe it. Was apologise because she used a different e-mail address to the one listed on the web.
And then.
And then she said it was normal in lectures of any difficulty, and that it was normal too, to want relationships with lecturers who turns up week after week or day after day and who you have to look upon. That it’s normal to . And normal too for a man unsure about his sexuality to perhaps try to find a woman sexy, whoever she is. She was being very kind, seeing it for what it was. Refusing too to get angry, since perhaps she suspected that was what I wanted. Said she was nothing to look at and that I would be disappointed. Said she was curious. Said I could send her a photo of myself, naked, and that if I did so we could maybe get together.
And did you? She asked, shaking a smile onto her face.
Well, I wasn’t sure if it was a joke. And there was this great tension, was she joking, not taking me seriously, or was it indeed a trap to have me disciplined, and there was this feeling of anti-climax, that I had worked up to it, and she had written back in this condescension of sympathy I was so sensitive to at that time in my life. I took a series of photographs of myself, naked, with an erection, and some with my cock in my hands.
Her eyebrows raised. You’re shocked.
I’m not shocked.
It’s ok to be shocked. Or if not that then disappointed. I think I would be in your position. I was disappointed in myself.
I know it’s ok. Emotions can’t be controlled, it’s ok to feel almost anything, and I would say so, but I’m not shocked. Amused, perhaps surprised. It’s like that Labour MP in Wales who posed on the net in his pants.
Poor bastard.
I’m not sure I’m not impressed.
I’m not sure I believe you.
But really. I see free love in the sixties as different from sex in the toilets today. There was something to it. And if you’re writing to get everything off your chest, then you’re giving something of yourself, like you are with me today, it’s not just…
[]
Exactly. It’s a relationship. Something is exchanged. Emotion. Need. I hate to get back to literature . You can’t be a good reader and a prude.
Anyway, go on.
Well, I met her. She wrote back saying she would be glad to try and help me come to any conclusions. That she couldn’t offer any commitment, but that she figured I wasn’t looking for that. She came to my halls almost every evening, we put on some music, fucked, chatted. Sometimes she brought a little dope. I don’t know, I look at it and I see it like I was completely straight, a player. We would talk about everything, philosophy, films, music, life.
Who broke it off.
She had a boyfriend. A serious boyfriend. You see I didn’t know then how I felt, and she didn’t know how she felt about getting engaged and settling down which her boyfriend, though he was younger, was keen to do because she’s living this life of the constant student. I mean she was like me. You spend yourself reading so much material, deep thoughts that challenge everyday lived reality and are radically different from everything normal people hold dear, and yet you find yourself because of this way you dedicate yourself to these radical thoughts, falling into a very conservative life. It petered out over months and at the end, as a gift, she let me take some dirty photos.
That was trusting.
That’s what I told her at the time. I could post it to her boyfriend. Anything.
But she still let you?
I laughed a little, ironically. She told me I wouldn’t do that, that I’m so in control.
Were you upset.
Yeah. Like I say, it petered out. The visits just became further and further apart. But she would it became more of a relationship. It took me a couple of months before I realised why she wasn’t coming over. I’d wait in for her for a while after dinner and nothing. I was surprised, I felt a little rejected, and a little used, that she wasn’t coming over when she was on, just to chat. I wrote and told her to feel free to just pop by, and I was so happy when she did, and we just chatted. It was some kind of wish fulfillment for both of us. She would bring her boyfriend’s porn and tell me to put it on my computer, and then lean over the desk, me behind her. I know, it sounds sleazy.
I am impressed.
So was I. I was worried she wuld take it the wrong way. Think less of me, but at the time I was glad. It was some time after the Graham Chapman thing had hit me, and I realised I was enjoying myself. It came at just the right time, but it also paradoxically set up a high bar. I had talked about everything with her, and every subsequent relationship quickly pailed in comparison. The sex, the conversation – first women and then men just failed to get me aroused in one way or another. I could see she wasn’t shocked, and her talk about literature convinced me, indeed, I wondered if it was in fact the other way around, and that she was eager for me not to think she was free of fantasies, of sexuality herself, the same kind of mistake I’d made with my lecturer, thinking she would be shocked and offended.
No, I wasn’t strong. I’m bi, and so anything goes and it’s a shock for people but they can go into denial and tell themselves it’s a phase, or that fifty fifty I’ll end up with a woman, and if it’s a relationship they don’t approve of, well, most don’t last, and especially, they’ll tell themselves men together, because, well, why would it last? Where will it go? I wasn’t in a relationship at any time I was working this thing out. It came on and I was in a state of shock, yes. Sitting around waiting for a table and looking out and staring at this guy. And it wasn’t the kind of place you want to be doing that. I was lucky at the time. I could take my time. My brother thought I was staring at the guy because he looked like a prick, and he was the kind of guy my brother hated; the kind of fashion victim who started turning the tide long before every straight man had a copy of GQ every month and started apeing the fashion trends. Nothing happened but that we intimidated the guy. He left soon after and we got us a table. And brave doesn’t come into it. Most gays get bullied throughout school. Like some guys tell me on the scene, there’s no such thing as a gaydar. Not really. Not like it’s made out to be. Not when you get beyond those who selfconsciously use clothes and mannerisms to tacitly come out, to set the scene to keep it more gentle: you see a lad wearing velcro accupuncture shoes and a skinny T, well no shit Sherlock, give yourself a medal, of course he’s fucking queer. When you come down to that dilemma over falling in love with boys who are firmly in the closet – and you might say well, why do it, you could psychoanalyse that, and sorry, I don’t mean you, but plenty of people do this, even to themselves, you could take it all apart and say, why do that to yourself, why not keep to the boys in the out and out gay uniform, well the reason is for some of us its not sexy, some of us who watch James Dean films, and besides, it takes plenty of people a long time to come out. Anyway, life isn’t perfect and it doesn’t even matter that gaydar is a great big fucking dream. I mean, sometimes, after the first, second, third time when it really rips you apart, it’s almost nice to have that torment, like a permanent adolescence, but that part of adolescence you can almost miss, with strong emotions running wild, and incontrollable. Does he, could he love me, does he not? You’ll come home with it every day like you did at school, running over the most innocent glance, a handful of the most ordinary comments. But the real fucking tragedy is that this gaydar doesn’t simply not exist, it’s on the other fucking side. Again, you’ve done nothing wrong but you feel like with my broken wrist, like you’re a nazi during the battle of Britain[]: the bullies have it. They know who you are even sooner than you do. Oh they get it wrong sometimes, but it’s not like for you. For them it’s the same. They rip somebody’s life apart and only gain from it, just that it’ll be some poor straight sod. They’ll even forget it years later. A bully comes up to his victim years later in a pub and hi how you doing, looking back rosy on school like nothing ever happened. They get it wrong and it’s fine. You get it wrong just make one silly move – I mean, Christ, how many times do men and even women put their hand inappropriately on someone’s arse, tits, thigh, reach out for a kiss and get a slap or whatever, before they get remotely socialised with the opposite sex? You get it wrong and again, it feels like it’s over.
It must be terrible. [he’s drunk now, and he’s just wittering on, and he doesn’t know if she is interested or not, but he’s finding it useful.]
It is, but that’s what I’m saying. My brother, the welder. And back then he had this dream to be in the marines, and almost every day after school when he wasn’t running back home with his bag stuffed full he was in the weights room with a mate, and everyone saw them while they were stood round waiting for busses and the like, doing sit-ups on an incline and hitting each other’s stomachs – from some Marines manual or the like, and he reckoned for a while it freed up the muscles. The alpha male. The guy who first dissed me came to remember it, and I knew it, and so I walked proud – a tota
