Pissing in a River

by Lorrie Sprecher

  Annie was a second-year student and lived in a private flat behind Cornwall House, one of the university’s pubs. It was very convenient. We could walk down when the pub opened and totter back up when it closed. We would sit on the yellow carpet of Cornwall House with pints of bitter and shrimp-flavored crisps. Annie would take out her packet of tobacco and roll her own cigarettes. She had short, brown hair and wore a red leather jacket that zipped up diagonally across her prominent, nicely shaped breasts.

  Echo and the Bunnymen played in the pub one night before they were famous. We got their first tape because I liked the guitar riff on the song “Rescue” and wished that I’d written it. We saw a lot of bands we liked that year.

  I took a bus packed with mods in green parkas and T-shirts with the mod symbol—blue, white and red concentric circles—to see the Jam play in Dorset. We sang the entire This Is the Modern World album on the way there and All Mod Cons on the way back. At the venue, waiting for the Jam to appear, I sang along with the crowd, “We are the mods, we are the mods, we are, we are, we are the mods.”

  And when Ian Dury and the Blockheads came to Exeter, Annie and I even sang back-up vocals to “Fuckin’ Ada.” We were in our hard-won places at the front, clinging to the stage by our fingertips, withstanding the tide of the crowd. Ian Dury’s security posse grabbed us and brought us up on stage. We droned “Fuckin’ Ada, fuckin’ Ada, fuckin’ Ada” to give the audience something to look at until Ian Dury, who was small and fragile, could make it safely offstage. I had purple hair then and a corduroy leopard coat. The crew gave us special Ian Dury and the Blockheads badges. They said “Ian Dury &,” “Sex &,” “Drugs &,” “Rock &,” “Roll &” on five separate multicolored buttons.

  One night when we were hanging about down at Cornwall House, I bet Annie that the university police who patrolled the campus grounds wouldn’t react if I walked out of the pub with one of the chairs balanced on my head. Annie dared me to do it, and soon I was trudging up the hill with a pub chair for a hat. The campus cops outside Cornwall House watched us leave. The cold air slapped me sober, and I realized I’d stolen a chair and didn’t know what to do with it. Annie and I decided we’d take it to Jessie Montgomery House and put it in the common room.

  Suddenly a police car pulled up. Before I knew what I was doing, my legs ran me down the other side of the hill. Annie stayed behind and confronted the two cops so I could get away. There was no chance she’d be deported if she got arrested.

  I threw the chair, which was the bright orange of a traffic cone, behind a tree. Then I slipped on the dewy grass and rolled all the way to the bottom of the hill. I landed on my face in a patch of soaking-wet daffodils behind Reed Hall. I lay motionless until I decided it was safe to move. Then I crawled out of the tall grass toward the beds of vibrant wallflowers and the ornamental chimney.

  I sprinted down terraces of stone steps and through tall trees, saying “sorry, mate” to a statue I mistook for another student in the dark. I paused at the open stretch of road I had to cross before plunging for cover into the blackness of the woods. Everything was quiet, and I took off running. A waiting white patrol car snapped on its headlights and lit me up. I dove into the woods and legged it all the way to Jessie Montgomery House, my heart beating in my throat.

  When I got upstairs, Annie was waiting for me in front of my room. “Where’ve ya been, mate? I was getting frantic, me.”

  “That was close,” I said, breathing hard and unlocking my door. Annie sat on my bed and I tried to warm myself up in front of the orange bars of the electric fire. “What did you say to the cops?” I asked, still panting.

  Annie leaned her head against the wall and rolled herself a ciggy. She wore a dangling silver earring in her right ear—it was right-side-if-you’re-queer then—and a red-and-white-checkered Arab keffiyeh around her neck.

  “Calm down, Amanda,” Annie told me. “They asked me my name and I said, ‘Dick Damage.’ Then they asked me where the woman with the chair on her head had gone, and I said, ‘What woman with a chair on her head?’”

  In the Gayline office, Annie and I slept—or didn’t sleep—in bunk beds, answered the phone, and gave tea and biscuits to anyone who dropped in for a chat. Mark stopped by once a night to check on us. He also ran the “regular” helpline on the other six days of the week. Two students always worked together, and now he didn’t have to do the overnight gay shift with Annie. I had the upper bunk. Sometimes I made Annie pretend our beds were a ship and the floor was the sea. Other nights, I brought my guitar and we sang Clash songs. Annie always said she admired the way I played, and that made me feel proud.

  A sweet guy who lived outside of Exeter in the Devonshire countryside used to call me every Thursday around midnight to say goodnight. He liked to dress in women’s clothing and couldn’t talk to his mates about it. He would tell me what he’d worn that week and how he felt when he could be himself—exhilarated but lonely. He confirmed my belief in people’s desire to express the essence of themselves and the longing for at least one other person to truly know them. I wondered if that was why we yearned for a personal God. I wondered if finding it somehow was God.

  Gayline is how we met Neil. He came round because he was Catholic and guilt ridden about being gay. Annie and I, as we were pleased to discover, were both unrepentant, non-practicing Jews. We made him drink five cups of tea and fed him biscuits as though we’d decided that being Catholic, gay, and guilt ridden translated into being thirsty and hungry. Neil asked us about biblical passages that appeared to condemn homosexuals. Annie and I pointed out that in every case, the offending passage was about homosexuality in the context of sex without love, as in Sodom and Gomorrah.

  “Remember that when David and Jonathan fell in love, God smiled on them,” I said. “Plus, there’s the fact that the Bible was written by men who reflected the culture of their time.”

  Neil stared at me as though the fist of God were going to smash through the ceiling and smite me. “But it’s the word of God,” he insisted.

  “Not really,” I said. “The one time God actually writes down something is when Moses goes up to receive the Ten Commandments. The Torah says that the Ten Commandments were written on stone tablets with the finger of God. But when Moses comes down from Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb and sees that the people are worshipping a golden calf, he breaks them. Then he has to go back up and tell God what he did. Can you imagine that conversation? God says, ‘Make two more tablets and I’ll write it down for you again.’ But this time, God changes his-or-her-genderless-mind and dictates the Ten Commandments while Moses writes them down in his own handwriting. That leaves room for interpretation. Personally, I think God is over the moon about homosexuality.”

  “Hey, that’s really good,” Annie said incredulously. “What are you, some kind of biblical scholar?”

  “Well, I’ve read it,” I said.

  “So have I,” Annie said, “but I never thought of that.”

  “What about the New Testament?” Neil sounded frustrated. “It’s alright for you, but I’m a bloody Christian.”

  “Haven’t read that.” Annie shrugged. “It wasn’t compulsory in Hebrew school.”

  “I have. I’m a literature major,” I explained to Annie, who gaped at me like I was going to betray her by suddenly turning into one of those Jews for Jesus or something. “At lot of stuff refers back to it. It’s kind of an important document in Western culture. There’s that whole thing about the gospel of Mark,” I told Neil. “Mark was written first, and it’s the only gospel that mentions the scantily clad young man who was with Jesus.”

  “What?” Neil laughed incredulously, shaking his head of dark curls, close cropped like a helmet.

  “The man runs away naked when Jesus is taken away. None of the other gospels mentions him.” I raised my eyebrows indicating conspiracy. “Then there’s the part that was left out. A letter was found in a monastery
near Jerusalem that mentions a secret gospel of Mark, an expanded, more spiritual version. In the part of the gospel that was left out, Jesus raises a young man from the dead. The man falls in love with Jesus and beseeches him to let him stay with him. After six days, Jesus tells him to come that evening. The man arrives wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. He spends the night, and Jesus teaches him the mystery of the Kingdom of God.”

  Neil, who had once considered entering the seminary, called the thurible he used to swing that billowed out clouds of incense during Mass, “me burnin’ ‘andbag” and showed us how he’d mince up the cathedral aisle. Then he and Annie performed skits from Monty Python’s Flying Circus for me. Doing this well was a talent I noticed many English people had, like a birthright.

  By morning Neil was gay and proud, and we were all best mates.

  Neil had a car. That put an end to any chance that we might attend morning lectures. We were too tired from roaming around the countryside all night searching out every gay pub from Plymouth to Torquay. I loved Torquay at night with its fairy lights strung like candy necklaces across its main streets. It was peaceful there by the sea with all the boats. Bright shops ringed the harbor reflecting pink, yellow, and blue lights in the water. We sat outside the chip shop surrounded by seagull shit. Green lights illuminated a fancy hotel and fountain.

  There was a secret gay club, mostly frequented by older men, up the hill on a nondescript street away from the lights. Going there was like a journey back in time. Neil rang a bell, and someone peered out of a tiny window in the heavy wooden door. We had to convince him we were gay before he would let us in. “Now really,” Neil said, in his campiest voice, “do I seem straight to you? I’m as bent as a nine-pound note.” Neil was slender, well-dressed, and very beautiful. That and the fact that we didn’t look big enough to be threatening didn’t hurt. When Annie put her arms around me and kissed me on the lips, the door opened, and the three of us minced inside.

  Annie and I ordered a couple of pints, and Neil drank orange squash because he was driving. He was slightly older than we were and quite responsible. Half the girls in my residence hall were in love with his soft, heavily lashed, dark eyes and black, angelic curls.

  Sometimes we stayed in Exeter and sat outside the Ship Inn, the pub in front of Exeter Cathedral. Drinking our pints, we’d look at it across the dark grass. Its huge, illuminated steeples made it look like a giant ghost ship rising against the sky. It was there that we joked about creating the Exeter Gay Women’s Ball. But after closing time, as we lay peacefully on the grass outside the cathedral, the idea solidified.

  Neil, Annie, and I decided to hold the first-ever Annual Gay Women’s Ball in my room. Everyone was invited, but we called it the Annual Gay Women’s Ball to shock people at our conservative red-brick university. Writing it on posters made us hysterical, especially the part about how anyone who attended would be an honorary lesbian for the evening.

  We were certain no one would show up, but the point was to make a statement. The environment in Exeter was still really intense for gay people in 1980. If you wanted to get yourself beat up, all you had to do was hang around outside the Acorn, the local gay pub.

  We were almost delirious at six p.m. when women started arriving from all over Devon. Somehow word had spread about our ball. We gave the women cans of lager, shandy, and Maid Marian cola we had chilling on my window ledge. As the night wore on, the Gay Women’s Ball expanded to include our straight friends and closeted gay-male friends who had originally turned down our invitations. We ran out of beverages in the first ten minutes. As soon as we reached the end time specified on our posters and the ball was officially concluded, we shepherded everyone down to our local, the Red Cow. When the pub closed, we moved on to a one-night-a-week gay disco on the quay.

  At two in the morning, when the club shut down, Annie and I bought soggy chips and warm Coca-Colas from a hamburger van that parked on the quay at closing time. The combination of grease, caffeine, and cold air was great for absorbing alcohol. The bags of chips kept our hands warm. We staggered through the rainy streets away from the river. I zipped my bag of hot chips into my leather jacket to heat my body as the wind picked up. We were halfway up the hill when we collapsed on the curb, too pissed and tired to move.

  I sang a verse from the Clash song “All the Young Punks,” rain falling in my mouth. “‘Hanging about down in Market Street, I spent a lot of time on my feet / when I saw some bums and yobbos, and we did chance to speak. / I knew how to sing, you know, and they knew how to pose. / One of them had a Les Paul, heart-attack machine.’” It reminded me of how Joe Strummer met Mick Jones and being in the Clash together just felt right. That’s how I felt sitting in the rain with Annie. I felt the rightness of everything. I lived for those seconds when the warmth of well-being surged through my stomach. I fell against Annie’s shoulder and kept on singing. “‘Face front, you got the future, shining like a piece of gold. / But I swear as we get closer, it looks more like a leprechaun.’”

  “Lump of coal!” Annie shrieked. “‘It looks more like a lump of coal.’” She brushed my wet hair out of my eyes.

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s like ‘In the Crowd’ by the Jam. I always thought it went, ‘I fall into a trance at the supermarket. / The noise flows me along as I catch falling cans of babies on toast. / Technology is the most.’ Later I discovered it was really ‘baked beans on toast.’” I toppled over laughing, knocking my head against the pavement.

  Annie lay on her back beside me, and we looked up past the tall trees at the stars. She sighed. “You know what? This is the best our lives will ever be. We’re best mates, we’re dead pissed, and I just found a dog-end in me pocket.” She lit the soggy last bit of a hand-rolled cigarette. She took a long drag then passed it to me. “This is dead romantic.”

  I pretended to smoke Annie’s fag. I didn’t inhale. I just blew out smoke into the rain because I wanted to be like her. “Shit.” I put my arm around Annie’s sodden black peacoat. “I feel like I’m living in a Clash song.”

  We started singing “Cheapskates.” “‘I have been a washer-up, an’ he has been a scrubber-up, / an’ I seen him picking up dog-ends in the rain.’”

  “Come on, luv.” Annie grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet. “Stay at mine tonight.”

  “‘An’ he has never read a book, though I told him to take a look. / He lifted his pool hall cue for another game.’”

  In Annie’s flat, we peeled off our wet clothes. Annie chucked me a dry sweatshirt and hung our socks on the radiator. She opened her window and took a bottle of milk off the ledge. We drank large mugs of instant coffee and listened to music. “We have to play only important songs to remember this night,” Annie said. I nodded. It was our sacred obligation.

  We listened to “Dreams of Children,” “Strange Town,” “Eton Rifles,” and “Private Hell” by the Jam; “Stay Free,” “Protex Blue,” “Deny,” “Remote Control,” “The Prisoner,” “City of the Dead,” and “Police & Thieves” by the Clash; “Private Life” by the Pretenders and a Bob Marley cover, “Johnny Was,” by Stiff Little Fingers. Those songs were the way we communicated and understood each other. We lived our lives according to how we felt when we listened to them.

  Annie put on “Stay Free” again, and we sang along. “‘We met when we were at school. / Never took no shit from no one. We weren’t fools. / Teacher says we’re dumb. We’re only having fun. / We piss on everyone in the classroom.’”

  We snuggled under Annie’s soft duvet. We were young. Neither of us wanted anything from the other except closeness and warmth. It gave me a feeling of purity. I felt safe with Annie’s arm flung around me. And whenever I thought about my two best friends, Annie and Neil, my mind kept repeating, “go easy, step lightly, stay free.”

  TRACK 5 Smash It Up

  When Reagan was elected president, Annie and I walked to the university mental health
center so I could ask for political asylum. I heard the women in my head telling me, “Stay in England. Stay in England.” We were informed that Great Britain did not have a policy of extending political asylum to Americans. Of course Maggie Thatcher was just as bad, but I tried to argue that she wasn’t as personally humiliating. Then I asked for citizenship based on being a member of a former colony, but that didn’t work either.

  We went to an “end-of-the-world” party in town given by a friend of a friend of Annie’s. Music blared, and the house was crammed with people dancing. Annie and I fought our way to a bit of space in a corner, trying not to knock into anyone’s cigarette ash or beer. “You wanna drink?” Annie shouted over “Ant Music” by Adam and the Ants. We were smashed up against a keg of Scrumpy. She handed me a plastic cup of the alcoholic cider and said, “Watch that. It goes down easy, but it’s a killer.”

  We couldn’t move, so I kept refilling my cup. The cider was sweet like apple juice. I was sweltering inside my red leather jacket. The first two things I’d bought upon arriving in Exeter were a pair of black Doc Marten boots and a jacket with zippers across the sleeves like the one Chrissie Hynde wears on the cover of the first Pretenders record. Those were my two essentials. Of course I didn’t realize then that hers was probably not actually leather but made out of some cruelty-free substitute. The collar of my Day-Glo pink-and-black striped shirt stuck to my neck.

  “You know, I don’t really like most Yanks.” Annie rolled a cigarette as I filled my cup again. “But you’re not a real one, are ya?” She pulled a stray leaf of tobacco off her tongue. “You’ve got to stop sounding like them. We have to work on your accent and vocabulary. First off, the British ‘R.’ Not arr,” Annie said, exaggerating the contortion of her jaw to sound American. “Say aah. Weekend not weekend. And for fuck’s sake, stop saying garage. It’s gair-edge.” But of course since Annie’s accent was Mancunian, she didn’t pronounce the “A”s the way they did in London and the south. “I want to smoke.” Annie gestured at me to go outside for some fresh air. She threaded through the crowd, but when I tried to follow her, the room pulsated and my legs felt too weary to walk. Annie said later she’d got all the way outside before realizing I wasn’t behind her. She had to fight her way back to the corner where I was still leaning against the wall.