The bus pulled into San Francisco early on a crisp and cloudless Sunday morning. My first port of call was the youth hostel. Now that I know how far it is from the bus station I can’t believe I walked all the way, but walk I did. I tramped off in what I hoped was the right direction. Suddenly, screaming split the air and from around a corner came a truck full of drag queens. I stood and stared as it disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. As I walked on I reflected that everything I had heard about this city must be true.
What I didn’t know until later was that I had stumbled into the rainbow city on the very day of Gay Pride. After I found the youth hostel I went back into the city in time to see some of the parade. Lesbian grandmothers, Native American drag queens, Grace Jones singing on the back of a truck, it all rolled by. People were also handing out leaflets about something called AIDS. Looking back we were like those people in historical dramas who say things about a spot of bother in Germany and how it will all be over by Christmas.
My first priority was to find somewhere more permanent than the youth hostel to stay. I rang the numbers the visiting lecturer had given me. Most of them led to answerphones or people awkwardly stuttering their apologies and silently cursing the stupid bitch who had given me their number. I had one more number to call. What had seemed so simple – ‘Just call any of these people. They’ll be more than happy to help’ – now seemed like a joke. Unless I stepped out of this phone booth dressed as Superman I couldn’t see myself succeeding. Trying not to panic I dialled the last number and waited. A woman called Gail answered the phone. I calmly explained who I was and who had given me her number. She began to tell me why she couldn’t help (yeah, yeah) but – What was that? Did she say ‘But’? – but she did have a number for a place called Stardance. It was a hippy commune near the Haight-Ashbury district of town and they had a hostel room they rented out by the night. This didn’t help me very much, but at least it was cheaper than the youth hostel.
After further phone calls I went to dinner at Stardance so that they could vet me. I felt like such a fraud as I sat cross-legged eating grilled tofu listening to the commune members tell me about their vision of utopian housing. I replied with a harrowing tale of Irish poverty and incredibly evil landlords. They lapped it up. I could have kissed the dead rat on the stairs. The next night I moved in for a week. I left over a year later.
The patriarch of the commune was Geoph. He was in his late thirties, calm and kind of handsome in a boyish way. He had founded the house with Erica. Originally they had been a couple, but now no longer shared a bed. In fact Geoph tended to sleep in an odd loft that he had built in the ceiling of the hallway. This was so he never referred to any room as ‘his’ and also because with his hidden view of the comings and goings at the front door, he was always first with the gossip.
Erica was forty and not to be messed with. She was all for the concept of communal living, she just loathed living with actual people. She was back at college studying nursing and was raising her young daughter Mindy. At nine years old Mindy was oddly subversive. She attended a regular school and spent her time with normal middle-class children. It was Mindy who smuggled the plastic perfection of Barbie into the house, it was she who put Coca-Cola in the fridge. It was a bit like Alien with an enemy egg growing up on the inside of Stardance.
The other permanent residents were Obo and Jem Help and their three-year-old daughter Faith Shines Help. Obo and Jem had been in a group marriage but had eloped when she became pregnant. It was only after Faith was born and turned out to be black that Jem realised she had eloped with the wrong member of the group marriage.
Slowly over the year I became extraordinarily fond of these people. I quite liked the whole communal living thing. There was always someone to talk to, it was cheap and you shared all the dull household chores. Most of these I didn’t mind. The one that I dreaded, though not as much as the rest of the housemates dreaded me doing it, was cooking. I had come from the great student tradition of Pot Noodle, and suddenly I was expected to prepare a vegetarian feast for around eleven people. What do vegetarians eat? Salad. Well, I knew how to make that, I’d seen my mother make it. You take a couple of leaves of lettuce, a quarter of a tomato, two slices of cucumber, egg and beetroot and then you pour salad cream all over it. If I had squatted on the table and carefully coiled my own turd in front of them, I don’t think eleven vegetarians could have looked less impressed.
To make money I returned to the restaurant business. Down in the financial district was Vie de France, a brand new themed bakery/café/restaurant. I got a job working there as a lunchtime waiter. I began living a very schizophrenic existence. At home a vegetarian recycling utopian, and at work a camp, bleach-haired party boy.
This was also the time when I began to drink in earnest. Now, don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into one of those stories of alcohol problems followed by reform. My only problem with drinking at the time was that I didn’t have the stamina and I would end up vomiting quite often. One night I came home and as I lay on the floor of my room (even getting on to the bed seemed life-threatening) I had the wheelies. The room was spinning around and I knew it wouldn’t stop until I satisfied its lust for vomit. I obliged, and then I didn’t move – I just lay there in my own mess. Finally I came to some time during the night, took off my clothes and went to bed. In the morning as I sat eating my Cheerios (God, how the young can bounce back!) everyone who came into the room looked at me in a slightly quizzical way and asked me if I was all right. Weird. I was fine. However, the mystery was solved when I went to brush my teeth and looked in a mirror. I had dried vomit all down one side of my face where I had smeared it taking my jumper off in the middle of the night.
On St Patrick’s Day a film crew was in the bar we were in near Vie de France. The people I was with brought the camera over because I was Irish. They asked me how I was planning to celebrate the saint’s day. Full of lager and confidence I replied, ‘I’m going to drink and drink and then go home and get sick!’ Well, I learnt a valuable lesson about programme making. When it was broadcast on the news it turned out the piece wasn’t about St Patrick’s Day, it was about new tougher drink-driving legislation and by the time they had edited my comments into the piece I looked like some sort of crazed killer. Thankfully, I don’t vomit any more.
The year I spent in San Francisco was by far the most formative in my life. I was already twenty years old, but in rural Irish years that made me a sort of international fourteen. Yes, I had travelled a bit already, but somehow I’d always had an invisible umbilical cord to home. Here on the west coast of America I was unconnected to anyone or anything. I suppose that is why it was quite easy for me to live my strange double life. I wasn’t being untrue to myself, I was simply inventing new versions of ‘me’ and keeping the parts that felt comfortable. To this day I’m a borderline alcoholic that recycles his bottles.
Being somewhere where nobody knows you and there isn’t anyone to judge you means that all normal constraints on your behaviour are removed. I know the following story did happen to me, but I have no idea why.
Given that my only sexual experiences up to this point were a fumble in a French tent and a short-lived affair with a woman nearly twice my age, it seemed a teeny-weeny bit sexually ambitious of me to apply for a job as a rent boy, but that is what I did. I saw the ad in some free newspaper, called the number and was given a rendezvous. I was to go to an apartment for an interview after my lunch shift the next day. Perhaps I thought it would be a sort of Reader’s Digest course in sexuality, so that I could make up for all my lost time growing up in Ireland, perhaps I wanted the money, perhaps I just wanted people to want me and in my clumsy, emotionally stunted way I thought this was how I could make that happen. Perhaps I just wanted to have sex with a man. I didn’t tell a soul what I was planning to do, but if I had and they’d asked me why, I’m pretty sure that even back then I couldn’t have told them.
The next day I left work as normal in my bla
ck trousers and white shirt. However, even I knew that really wasn’t a great look for a hustler, so I went into the toilets of a McDonald’s on Market Street and changed into some ‘casual’ clothes. I can’t imagine what I had in my wardrobe that I thought fitted into hooker wear, but, the makeover complete, I headed to the address I’d been given. It turned out to be an enormous apartment complex, almost like an hotel. Numb with fear I went in, got in the elevator and headed up. When the elevator doors opened I was in a very long, dimly lit corridor with what seemed like dozens of identical dark wooden doors. I was hyperaware of everything: the sound of my shoes on the carpet, the dull reflections of the lights on the fake wood panelling, the drums in my head telling me that this was a big, a really big, mistake. I knew I could stop, turn around and take the elevator back to the bright sunny street – no one would have thought any less of me, no one knew I was here – and yet I kept walking towards the door. I promised myself that I wouldn’t have sex or take off my clothes.
I paused, and then watched my hand knock on the door. Several centuries went by and then I heard a voice. Footsteps and then the door was opened. The man was in his late forties, I would guess, with grey hair. The hair on his body was also grey. I could tell this because he was only wearing a pair of wet shorts. He apologised, he’d been in the pool. Come in, sit down, would you like a drink? No? OK, what’s your name? We chatted. He was English and seemed charming. No mention was made of why I was there. This might have been a job interview for anything, it could have been a tutorial, I could have been in a waiting room.
He stood up. Would I like to come into the other room? I followed. The other room was a large bedroom with a wall of mirrors at the far end. I noticed that both pillows had been slept on. For some reason I found that disgusting. He asked me to take off my clothes and told me he’d be back in a minute. I stood there and like some stooge in a hypnotist’s show slowly unbuttoned my clothes. I left them in a small pile on the floor and stood there naked. The situation was spiralling way out of control. I had promised myself that this wouldn’t happen and yet it had and I was the one making it happen.
The English man came back in. He looked me up and down.
‘Turn around.’
I turned around.
‘Now, treat me like you’d treat one of your clients.’
I walked over to him and put my hands on his hips and kissed him. I pulled down his wet shorts. He had a hard-on. This was as far as I’d ever gotten with a man. I hesitated. In that moment the English man lifted me up and carried me to the bed. The sudden appalling reality of being naked on a bed with some older man who had a raging hard-on finally jolted me back to my senses. Like some convent schoolgirl lying in a field after the village dance, I looked up at him and asked, ‘Are you going to go all the way?’
Without missing a beat he said, ‘Well, if you apply for a job as a secretary, you’re expected to write a letter.’
It was such a slick prepared line that I thought of all the other boys he had said it to, all the other boys he had had sex with.
‘Hey, if you’d like to stop, we can.’
Another line, but this one was the brake I’d been looking for. It was like a verbal version of those little red boxes that say, ‘In case of emergency break glass.’ I broke it.
‘Yes! Yes, I would like to stop!’
As I got dressed I felt fantastic. At the time I thought I felt great because I had said ‘No’ to this man and was somehow empowered. I think the more likely truth is that it was because I had got away with doing such an incredibly stupid, risky thing. I did not deserve to be leaving this apartment not screaming and crying, but that says everything about what is brilliant and terrible about being twenty. As I left, the English man was washing his hands. You could almost hear the cry of ‘Next!’ hanging in the air.
When I got back to Stardance there was a letter waiting from my mother. Seeing the small blue sheets of Basildon Bond paper with the familiar writing was strangely reassuring – I hadn’t abandoned all normality, it was still going on and there if I needed it. My mother was concerned because she had received phone calls from someone called David Villapando who was very worried about me! I had forgotten all about him because I no longer needed him and I suppose I thought he would somehow be feeling the same.
Of course he wasn’t. I phoned his number and waited for him to pick up the phone. It was odd because despite our lengthy correspondence I had never heard his voice.
‘Hi, Graham! I’m so glad you called.’
I nearly blurted out ‘Eugh!’ David Villapando was a queen! His voice was a stereotypical high-pitched whine and suddenly all the letters meant nothing. I recoiled and immediately just wanted to get off the phone. I know this sounds awful, but in my defence it was all to do with how I was feeling about myself at that moment. Of course I’m sure I sounded exactly the same on my end of the phone, but I didn’t know, or want to know, that.
Promising to come and see him, I hung up, determined that I would do no such thing. I felt tainted by just speaking to him. I ignored his future letters and calls and soon they stopped. As I’ve got older and come to terms with being a big sissy queen myself, I have felt very guilty about David and on several occasions have tried to track him down, but Internet searches and phone books have never turned him up. I’d just like to apologise for being such a dick. As this story unfolds I think you’ll find that I have very few regrets in my life, but the way I treated David Villapando is one of them.
Life settled down into a routine of work and communal living. Of all my housemates I was becoming very close to Obo Help. When I was cooking he’d come and chat to me and sometimes play his guitar, singing lilting ballads about the Revolution. One night he asked me if I wanted to go and see a movie. Sure. I remember we went to see Woody Allen’s Zelig. The cinema was packed and we ended up sitting in the front row. I remember it was a warm night and Obo took off his sweater and just sat there in his undershirt. I was sort of proud to have this ‘proper’ man as a friend, just as I had been of Jerry.
Because it was such a beautiful night we decided to walk home after the film. We talked about this and that, about people from the house, people from his past. Then, as we were coming down the hill towards Stardance, he asked me if he could ask me a question. Well, I knew what was coming next. I’d heard that tone of voice before: he was going to ask me if I was gay. I said, ‘Of course you can,’ and geared myself up to give my standard reply about how I wasn’t sure and I thought people fell in love with people not gender and all the other crap that I hear young guys not ready to come to terms with their gayness still spout now. He paused and said, ‘Would you like to spend the night with me?’
If he had literally taken a large wet fish out of his pocket and hit me around the face with it I couldn’t have been more surprised. He had missed out all the conventional stages. This was the first time that someone had not asked any questions but simply presumed I was gay. Just then a car full of lads drove by and out the window one of them shouted ‘Faggot!’ God, the heterosexual bush telegraph was effective. I was only just finding out the news myself, and already they knew. I asked Obo about Jem and how she would feel, but he explained that they had an open relationship and it would be fine. I was unsure. I found Obo sexy but I didn’t want things to be weird in the house, and besides this was a big step. We went inside the front door. I told him I’d think about it and we kissed. Somewhere high above us God and Geoph were watching.
Unlike my brush with prostitution, this was an experience I discussed with everyone and anyone who would listen. At the Vie de France I think there were probably customers I told about my quandary in between listing the soupe du jour and our vegetarian special. Obviously most people didn’t care, but one woman at work I was very close to called Elizabeth took it all very seriously. She thought I would be making a big mistake – she thought Obo was too old, there were all the messy complications of the other relationships in the house, and besides, maybe I s
hould give heterosexual sex another chance, she said. In theory I agreed. I wouldn’t have minded sleeping with more women, but frankly they weren’t asking, and as for me approaching them, the situation could be summed up by one of those novelty badges I’d just bought that said, ‘So many women, so little nerve’.
I argued that Obo was a good choice because I did fancy him but felt fairly confident that I wouldn’t fall in love with him, and on top of that he was older so he’d know what he was doing. I decided that Obo was the one for me. It makes me laugh that I thought I was in control or was listening to anyone else’s advice. Obo had shone his light on me and I was thrilled and blinded by it.
We chose an evening and went out for a date. I climbed into Obo’s VW van, which I worked out was the same age as me. The other slightly worrying bit of maths I did was to work out that the age gap between me and Obo was greater than the age gap between me and his toddler daughter. Oh well! I remember we went to a couple of gay bars. I can’t imagine what the rest of the clientele made of us – some bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kid dancing with a shaggy ageing hippy. Maybe it was San Francisco, maybe it was Obo, maybe it was being with a man, but despite everything I didn’t feel as awkward or embarrassed as I had done with Esther.
That night I slept with Obo. He had tidied up his room specially and lit candles. He was so sweet to me and, of course, breaking the very first promise I had made to myself, I began to fall in love with him. There was one major stumbling block here and that was that, although I didn’t understand it, I was really just a statistic to Obo. Political attitudes being what they were in the house, no one was allowed to object or show they cared, but Obo slept with practically everyone who moved into the house. Shortly after we had slept together a girl called Mary moved in with her son Jasper. One night I walked into the kitchen when Mary was cooking and what do you know? There was Obo and his guitar. Mary was admiring his fingering and I felt like the biggest fool on earth. Due to my lack of a vagina I was slowly moved to the back of the sleeping rota until I finally faced facts and took myself off it.
So Me Page 5
