London Triptych (8 page)

1954

I’ve been following in
the newspaper with great interest the case of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. He and his cousin, Michael Pitt-Rivers, and some journalist called Wildeblood, are being charged for conspiring to incite or commit acts of gross indecency. As I ate my toast this morning, I read with utter fascination about their dalliances with RAF men. It seems England is scandalized by men of different classes having any sort of contact whatsoever. Just as in Oscar Wilde’s time. I remember this Montagu fellow being arrested last October and being tried for indecency with Boy Scouts, but he managed to escape conviction then. Now they’ve got him in connection with two RAF chaps, who are giving Queen’s evidence. Poor sod doesn’t stand a chance. The papers, of course, are having a field day, calling the men involved “Corrupters of Youth.” I wonder what they would make of my relationship with Gore. Would they call me a corrupter of youth? Gore is far more corrupt than I. If anything, he is more likely to corrupt me. Dear God, I wish he would. I want desperately to ask him what it’s like, being beautiful. How does it feel to look in the mirror and like what you see, not hone in on the flaws and the imperfections that can burden a face, nor turn away in shame or, worse, recoil in horror? What emotion is provoked by the desire you must encounter in every pair of eyes into which you gaze? What must it be like to possess that power, that gift? Even when I was young I was ugly or, if not ugly, plain; I knew early on that I was fated to be looked over and promptly overlooked, with my narrow, rounded shoulders and my shortness and my frizzy hair. Even at boarding school I was invisible. I wanted desperately to be initiated into those things about which there were rumours, notes exchanged, suspensions, expulsions, suicides, scandal.

Could I ever tell him? I wonder. Tell him how much I look forward to our Wednesday afternoons? I’m sure to him it’s just the day he has to trek over to Barnes. Or if he does look forward to it, it’s because he’ll be financially better off at the end of it. I can’t imagine he feels toward it the way I do. I find myself waking up earlier than usual, with a feeling of great expectation. Christ, I even whistle as I shave. My heart is buoyant, my energy high, and as the hour of his arrival approaches I suck on my own anticipation, my hands twitching, unable to lie still. To my shame, I act just like an expectant lover.

And it’s not just the prospect of seeing that body again, though I still find myself staring at it each time as if it were the first time. And it’s not simply the company, though I find myself getting lonely out here these days, in a way I never used to when I worked. It’s as if he supplies a different air, richer in oxygen, and I feel myself getting high in his presence, and I become more animated as I talk, and I find myself thinking all morning of things we could talk about, and I suppose it’s like a youth drug or something. It’s as if I’m a young man again. As if I’m in love. Christ, my hand won’t stop shaking.

I’ve decided to stop going to the drawing group. It seems I have become the object of malicious gossip. Peter, in whom I had stupidly confided about Gore’s visits when we were chatting last week, has gone and told the rest of the fishwives. It isn’t that I deliberately kept it from them, it’s just that I am by nature a very taciturn and private man. It’s none of their business, I told myself. I don’t really know why I told Peter. I regretted it immediately. On the way home, after I’d let it slip, I berated myself for my stupidity, for my ridiculous vanity, showing off what? My wealth? My devotion to art? Or was I showing off Gore, my trophy? Bragging about the fact that he visits me regularly, in private? The trouble is, I find it so damned hard thinking of things to say to Peter, and I mentioned, without thinking, during one of those awful lulls in our conversation, that I was thinking of painting in oils again after years, doing sketches in preparation. He asked who was modelling for me, and before I could think to say I was working from the sketches made at the group, I blurted out Gore’s name.

“Gore?” he said. “Who’s Gore?”

And before I could think to say vaguely, “Just someone I know,” I said. “You know, Gregory—he’s modelled for the group a few times.”

“And you call him Gore?” He moved in closer, his eyes betraying his fascination. I regretted ever opening my mouth. But I stumbled on, getting deeper in the mire.

“Well, he said that’s what his friends call him.”

“So you and he have become quite pally, then, have you?” God, it was excruciating. Luckily Miss Wilkes clapped her hands loudly, announcing the end of the break in her usual manner.

“Chop, chop. Next pose.”

I was released.

After a couple of days, I had reassured myself that Peter could be trusted—that he was so shy he was unlikely to divulge the information to the others. Then, this week, the chatter in the room fell silent the moment I entered. They all looked up and smiled a greeting, which made me instantly suspicious, as they don’t usually do that. I looked at Peter and he looked away, and I knew. A sense of panic gripped me. I don’t know why, it’s not as if I’m doing anything criminal, but I felt such a sense of shame, I’m sure I blushed like a guilty schoolboy. Ridiculous, really. Let them talk.

At one point, while we were all sketching away in silence, Miss Wilkes said to no one in particular, “I really must see about getting Gregory back to model for us. He’s such a wonderful model, and it’s been such a long time since he sat for us.”

“Oh, yes, do,” said Maurice, “he’s my favourite.”

There was an interminable silence during which I could virtually feel the physical weight of their anticipation, but I said nothing and the intensity waned. The conversation moved elsewhere. It always strikes me as odd the way they all chatter quite openly in front of the model, as if he or she were not really there. It must be the way the aristocracy behave in front of servants, acting as if they are deaf or aren’t really human. I barely say a word when I’m drawing there—the complete opposite of when I am drawing Gore alone, when I can’t keep quiet.

So I decided on the way home never to go there again. It will be awkward; my absence will undoubtedly be commented upon, and I shall no doubt bump into one or more of them in the street on occasion. Barnes is like a medieval village sometimes. But I don’t need them. Shan’t miss them. It’ll give me more time to work on my paintings at home. I never produce anything very interesting at the group; it was always more of a social thing, strangely enough. Now the social element has gone to the dogs, there hardly seems any point in pursuing it.

I always reassured myself that at least I acquired wisdom as my youthful ignorance was replaced by knowledge and experience. Now, however, having met a man half my age who has truly lived life to the full, I feel like a child again.

His appearance belies his knowledge—for there is a knowledge there, after all, which I have come to discover.

Much more there than meets the eye. He isn’t as dim as he first appeared, just inarticulate, incapable of expressing the complexity of what he feels. How do I know? The rapidity with which his moods change, and the colour of his eyes with them; the world-weariness worn like a garment that ill fits the statuesque demeanour. His intelligence is of a different order—an intelligence of the body, if you will. An intelligence that shines unselfconsciously, wordlessly, and which would evaporate should he ever try to articulate it with anything
other
than his body. It is a logic of the blood-beat, a meaning held within the contours of his skin, coded within its tones and lines.

His face expresses such a joyful innocence when it breaks into a smile. His eyes sparkle with mischief, though not of a specifically sexual nature. His face and neck always discolour to a light shade of red when he is naked, making him look slightly embarrassed, even though his body language suggests the opposite. When he gets excited—which he does often when he talks—his hands move with wild abandon and his voice oscillates madly as he stumbles to find the right word. There is something extremely innocent about him that I wouldn’t immediately associate with a whore, though what that says about my prejudices I daren’t begin to imagine. He is like a beautiful child, and he makes me feel so jaded by comparison, so cynical and tired. His joy serves to remind me of my solitude, my self-enforced speechlessness—my monastic vow of silence that I took in my sleep one night, unaware of how much I’d miss engaging with the world. Until Gore’s arrival into my narrow world, I had grown accustomed to expressing no further sounds than “good morning” or “good afternoon” to neighbours and shopkeepers, and the weekly banal small-talk of the drawing circle. And now this man has come into my life who seems to question all my beliefs, casting on them the light from his skin and bringing them under scrutiny—without even knowing he’s doing it. I feel like a pupil with everything still to learn. Oh, I can hold my own, I’m well-read if not well-travelled, but everything I know seems anodyne in comparison to the side of life to which Gore has been exposed. His experiences are the stuff you never read about. He has a scar on his back, just underneath the right shoulder blade, from where he was stabbed in Johannesburg. He lost a toe from gangrene in a prison in Turkey after he was caught drug-smuggling. His body tells the story of his life. He seems to me the freest person I have ever met. How like a prison my little house seems once he has gone and I am left to rattle in it alone. How dull the light seems in his absence, how dim the rooms.

1998

I moved out of
Edward’s place after a few weeks and into a squat near King’s Cross. Edward and I crowbarred our way into it one night and I found myself a home. It wasn’t bad: it was adequately decorated and had running water and electricity. Once we were in, Edward nipped out to a friend of his who lived in the same block, to invite him back for a smoke. This man, emaciated and intense, was a poet named Dominic who dressed like a tramp and told us stories about the history of the area. Queen Boadicea was said to have fallen there, in the Battlebridge Basin, and the area, he told us, was bisected by ley lines. The huge skeletal cylinders of the black metal gasworks nearby, whose monolithic outlines filled the sky, were listed buildings. Vast iron lungs, imperceptibly moving up and down, up and down. The place was an ancient site of spiritual energy, he told us, a historic gateway to the past, a vital source of regeneration for the entire city. Periodically, Edward would croon the word “fabulous” as he passed Dominic the joint. In his soft, serious voice Dominic told us he was working on a long poem about the place and its history, and asked if we would like to hear some of it. Edward nodded enthusiastically, and Dominic began reciting, his eyes fixed straight ahead as if he were reading from idiot boards. The only line I recall is, “He was mad by every measure of a standard man.” Dominic told us that the earth, being older than us, holds us. He said that, however much we may feel that we have banished nature to the outskirts of the city, it inhabits the very buildings we construct to protect ourselves from it. There is nothing but nature. Culture is nature, he said. We are a recent natural phenomenon, and we may well prove to be transient. He said the next natural phenomenon will be the post-human, whatever form that takes. But the land, he said, is eternal. It moulds us in ways we couldn’t begin to imagine. It makes maps of us, not the other way around. It traces patterns on our skin and takes its co-ordinates from our desires. We think, he said, that we locate the land, but the land, in truth, locates us.

Dominic worked for the housing co-operative that rented out the flats where I lived, and he managed to wangle it so that I could pay rent on my place and stay there indefinitely, which was perfect. Now that I had my own place, the career that had begun on that golf course with the Count could resume. I placed an ad in the free gay press, and pretty soon my phone was ringing. The first client was a rather timid old man, who spoke very softly and was rigid with nerves. I ushered him into my bedroom, which was at the front of the flat. Outside there was a narrow balcony upon which pigeons nested, and which I shared with the neighbouring flat. I’d yet to meet the neighbours. Before I’d had time to ask the man whether he wanted a drink first, the doorbell rang. He looked at me, terrified. I ignored it, but it rang again and again, persistently, until I had no choice but to answer the front door. Outside in the hallway stood two firemen and a young man who introduced himself as my neighbour. He explained that he’d locked himself out of his flat and needed access to the balcony in order to break into his flat. The three of them marched through the door and into my bedroom, where the old man was by now virtually palpitating with fright. They opened the sash window, clambered through and disappeared, the young man going last and thanking me for my help, casting a puzzled glance at the old man sitting fidgeting on my bed before disappearing through the window. I stood there flooded with relief at the timing. Ten minutes later and it would have been a different story. The man asked, “Does that happen often?” and I said, “No, it’s the first time.” Then he said, “Get it out, then, so I can suck on it.”

Before long I was also posing naked for photographs and performing in pornographic films. These were the tools with which I slaughtered everything I had been. I removed myself—am still removing myself, even now. I became a whore in order, not to find myself, but to lose myself in the dense forest of that name. Words, by naming, claim a sovereignty not rightly theirs. In doing so, they mask a geography of possibilities. My first solo video was for a middle-aged man in Cambridge who worked as a tennis correspondent for one of the broadsheets. He picked me up at the train station and drove me back to his house. Over a cup of coffee, he began showing me photographs of other models, clothed and unclothed, solo and in pairs or groups, and giving me their names, asking me which ones I fancied doing a film with. Suddenly there was the sound of people coming in the front door, and the guy quickly scooped up the fan of photographs he had been showing me and hissed, “
My parents!
” He pushed the photos underneath the sofa before doing the same with the thick wad of photo wallets that lay beside me, telling me in quick whispers that I would have to pretend I’d come to discuss tennis, a subject about which I know absolutely nothing. His aged parents and an equally elderly aunt then shuffled their way into the room and he introduced me. The three of them settled down into the floral three-piece suite and the man offered tea, and then disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me alone with them.

“Which court do you use?” asked his mother, making small talk.

“Do you know Willesden Green?” I replied, to which she shook her head. “I use a court in Willesden Green.”

They came around another time when I was just starting a duo, and at the sound of the key in the door, to which the middle-aged man had made himself particularly attuned, the boy and I were hurried into an office at the back of the house while he went off to entertain the parents. By the time he returned we had already fucked twice.

It was for him also that I had done my very first duo, and when he’d introduced me to my co-star, a six-foot-four, dark-haired, hairy-chested, chisel-jawed man, I was straining at the leash. The video guy, John, left us alone while he went off to fetch his camera, and this beautiful, sexy man leant across and whispered in my ear, “You can do anything you like but don’t touch my hair.” I found out later that he had had a hair transplant and was some kind of walking advert for the procedure.

After every shoot I did for him, John would cook us lunch and he, my co-star, and I would watch his recording of our performance as we ate from trays on our laps.

I did several films for a man in Hove, whose bed was encased in black leather sheets, and who always wore the tightest stone-washed jeans imaginable, and liked to go through a ritual of washing our genitals after we had cum for his camera. He would disappear to the bathroom to fetch a warm wet flannel with which to wipe us down.

Having sex in front of a camera was a curious process of self-objectification, whereby I would distance myself completely while remaining utterly within the present tense of what I was doing, within the moment of pleasure. I was in that state of being where only sex matters. I never doubted that I was in complete control, that I was doing what I wanted to be doing. It was falling in love with you that made me start questioning my life, made me stop wanting that way of life. Maybe love is always an aberration from what we take to be our normality. I can imagine you saying something like that.

In those days, all that mattered was fun. I didn’t want to feel anything but constant stimulation, extreme pleasure. Dancing and fucking, that was all I lived for. The next drink, the next fuck, the next drug, the next client, the next party. London meant having everything. I wanted sex all the time, and found that it was possible to live this way. An entire network of men appeared, only too willing to thrust money into my hands for the pleasure of seeing or touching or tasting my flesh. To say that my vanity responded does not do justice to the vigour with which I pursued this line of work. I was doing two or three videos a week as well as servicing my clients, and because the life modelling didn’t pay as well I eventually did less of that, preferring the more lucrative porn work. Slick with baby oil, I would slide from one encounter to another. I hid myself beneath that glistening skin, beneath that hunger for pleasure. Unknown desires were unearthed within me. I explored them and explained myself to myself through the coded messages that came from touching other men’s bodies. Nothing about my life seemed real to me, and that was just how I liked it, just how I wanted it. On top of that, I was going out every night and having recreational sex once or twice a day, often with more than one person at a time. It never occurred to me that I might live life any other way. My body moved to an insistent blood-beat that never seemed to rest except perhaps for those brief catches at pleasure when I realized that nothing was easier than to live like this. My pleasure lay in getting what I wanted even though I wasn’t sure why I wanted it. Sex became so habitual that I ceased getting much pleasure out of it, though I continued to act as if I did, and continued to pursue it constantly. Everywhere—parks, toilets, even the tube or the street—men are picking each other up, following each other home, undressing each other, and wordlessly exchanging pleasure. It thrilled me to be part of that unspoken, unseen network of activity.

There is something about that life that sours so easily after a while, and yet it remained impossible to leave. One party blurs into another, one encounter morphs into the next; you wonder what you are doing, but never enough to wonder why you aren’t doing something else. When do you officially become a whore: when you first take money for sex, or when you first realize you’ve lost count of the men you’ve had sex with?

Something disconnects.

I’m not saying it wasn’t a good life; I’m not saying I didn’t have fun. What I’m saying is that I was in for a shock. I thought that pleasure would always manage to steer me clear of pain, not knowing then that the two walk together like mute Siamese twins, never talking to one another, though never able to separate, often thinking the same things, and always, always, inhabiting the same space. I tried to make sure pleasure was always one step ahead of pain. For a while at least, I suppose I succeeded.

One night, in a club in Leicester Square, I was approached by a paunchy middle-aged American sporting a moustache, Hawaiian shirt, baggy Bermuda shorts, and a baseball cap. It was toward the end of the night and somehow I had lost the people I’d arrived with, and he began chatting to me. I was speeding off my dial. He invited me to a party being held by a well-known male strip troupe that was appearing in town at the time. He mentioned a few celebrities who would also be there. He explained that he had been sent to find some boys, that it was only five minutes away. I’d already had sex in the toilets with a Brazilian, but I was still horny and it sounded like fun so we left the club and walked around to his car. I stopped, suddenly sober.

“I thought you said it was only five minutes away.”

“In the car. Five minutes in the car.”

I got in the passenger seat and we drove off. He asked what music I wanted on, and I said that if it was only a five-minute drive I didn’t care. I began to feel uncertain. Some instinct was telling me to be wary. He put the radio on. Then he began telling me stories about the strippers, how they started by doing circle jerks at college. At one point he touched the top of my leg, to indicate how high-cut the strippers’ shorts were. Eventually he pulled into a large block of flats on Kensington Gore and drove into an underground car park through a remote-controlled door that slid shut behind us. Inside the car park, he stopped the car and asked me to get out and open the gate that closed off his individual parking space. I did so. My unease had increased, and I found myself imagining what gruesome fate might await me in that flat. Scenarios of slaughter filled my thoughts, with parts of me ending up in skips, in the river, scattered across the city. Once he had driven into his parking space I pushed the gate closed and ran to the door. Instinct made me run. Set into the larger garage door through which we had just driven was a smaller door. As I approached it, I wondered what I would do if it was locked, but it opened and I ran out into the night.

Anxious that he might come after me, I ducked into Hyde Park. Within ten minutes I was picked up by a biker in full leathers, and we rode back to his place in Wimbledon on the back of his Yamaha, me breathing in the smell of leather inside the helmet, holding onto him. Back at his, he hooded me in a studded leather mask and handcuffed me to the bed while he fucked me, spitting at me all the time, trying to aim it at the eyeholes and unzipped mouth. You find danger if you need it. After I had cum, he uncuffed me and asked me to choke him as tightly as I could. “
Tighter
,” he hissed as I increased the pressure, his fist pumping furiously at his cock, his face getting redder and redder. I watched him lying there panting afterward, my white handprints vivid against his crimson neck, a huge smile on his face, and thought about the fragility of this life.

I have no idea what time it is now. The whole prison is shrouded in silence, apart from the occasional scream or eruption of rage, and the steady snorts from Tony below me. How I envy him his lack of consciousness right now. Sleep is a country that has just cancelled my visa. All I have to my name are these useless memories. Because of them I am here now. They form a path that leads both backward and forward. That’s the strange thing about prison: there doesn’t ever seem much point in looking forward, not even to the day you get out. It seems like a liberation to which you can no longer lay any claim. And the present is so unbearable that the only safe place to look is behind you, both literally and metaphorically. But my memories give me nothing resembling safety. I feel a rush of vertigo every time I think of you.