Sometimes Syd and I travelled on the same night bus home. He lived in Peckham a couple of stops beyond where I got off in Camberwell. We would sit upstairs to get away from the people who were so drunk they couldn’t manage to climb steps. The charming Adonis in his perfect uniform of baggy Levis and white T-shirt sitting next to me, the small grey potato with sprouting hair on my head and espadrilles on my feet. My mind was racing. I had to say something. This was it. Of course I knew the answer, of course I didn’t really need to ask, but in some weird twist of logic it is always the hopeless that dare to hope.
My initial pick-up line isn’t quite as bad as it sounds.
‘Would you like to be my cousin?’
A couple of nights earlier Syd had picked up a man who had been eating in the restaurant, and when Helen had asked him why they were leaving together, Syd had told her that his companion was his cousin from Canada. She had believed him, and to be someone’s cousin had become our new favourite expression. However, Syd, presumably desperate for me not to have meant what he thought I meant, looked at me and just said, ‘What?’
The agony continued. I braced myself and went for the direct unprotected approach, devoid of cutesy armour.
‘Would you like to spend the night with me?’
As embarrassed as I was at the time, I can only begin to imagine how mortified Syd must have felt. He looked at me. Judging from the expression in his beautiful eyes, I might as well have asked him to hold my vomit for a moment while I nipped to the loo.
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’
A pause to assess just how humiliated I felt. ‘Right.’
For a couple of stops I attempted to recreate an attitude I’d heard of called ‘nonchalant’. Finally it was my turn to get off. I turned to Syd, dear, kind, sweet, beautiful Syd who had not done one thing to encourage me or bring about this festival of shame, and said, ‘Goodnight, sleep well,’ and then clattered down the stairs past a thicket of drunken limbs and out into the wasteland of minicabs and kebab shops. By now I was crying again, and I think you can guess what the weather was doing.
Now that I am forty-one, I like to think that one of the few perks of being older is that I have learnt how to deal with the demands of my heart and cock a little better, but the sad, laughable fact is I haven’t. I don’t believe anybody does. We learn to be frightened of love and the terrible havoc it can inflict on our lives, while our hearts take such pleasure in mocking our brains. ‘Yes, that’s right, that is the way you should behave, that would be the sensible course of action, but watch now as I make you do something so reckless and self-destructive, it will take you several years to re-establish even a basic form of self-esteem.’
Weirdly, however, the tarot reader had been right, because although the bus journey to hell via Camberwell had been awful beyond belief, it did jolt me back to reality. The air was cleared. I could get on with my life, and Syd and I could get on and become the friends we were meant to be.
I was beginning to come to terms with London and myself. Life seemed good. I was making friends and money, and I had the time to focus on the reason I had come to the city in the first place: drama school.
I applied to East 15, LAMDA, RADA and Central. I prepared my Shakespeare pieces and my modern, reciting as I polished cutlery in Smiths or waited for the bus. Hamlet was a particular favourite, ‘How all occasions do inform against me . . .’
I can’t have been completely useless because I got recalls wherever I went, which are a big deal when you are on the drama school audition circuit. East 15 were the first to reject me, which did set my confidence back a little since they were the least prestigious of the schools I had applied to. In a way, though, I was rather relieved because they had a very serious, worthy reputation. If you were playing the role of an Eskimo, you’d have to go and spend the afternoon squashed between the cheddar slices and the fruits of the forest yoghurts in your fridge – that sort of thing.
LAMDA felt very grand when I went to the recall. A long panel of God knows who sat behind a trestle table. I did my monologues, and when I finished there was a long silence. Sometimes after a dramatic piece that can be a good sign, the air emotionally charged, the panel welling up with tears. Or it can be, as it was in this case, the panel thinking, ‘Sweet Jesus in heaven, what are we going to say to this poor fuck?’ A lady at the end broke the silence. ‘Do you think your Shakespeare went better at the first audition?’ I had no idea, but I thought I’d better err on the side of caution. ‘Yes, yes, I think it probably did.’ The thin lady removed her glasses and studied me for a moment. ‘Pity.’ I didn’t get accepted to LAMDA.
RADA was the big one, the one everyone wanted to go to. My first audition was fantastic. The second audition was brilliant. Now I only had the one-day workshop to get through. RADA was mine. This was where I was meant to go.
The night before the workshop I went out for one drink with Syd. The next day would be the beginning of the rest of my life, so surely I deserved a quick glass of wine. We perched ourselves at the bar in the front of another restaurant in Covent Garden and began ordering cocktails. I don’t want to bog you down with all the details, not least because I can’t remember any of them, but I’m fairly certain we ended up being asked to leave and never return. The next thing I can remember is waking up on the floor of a friend’s flat in West London. I felt like something that would normally be found under a pile of piss-soaked newspapers in a documentary about animal cruelty. I peered at my watch and very slowly worked out that I was late for the rest of my life.
Now, I still maintain that they should have accepted me at RADA. OK, so on the day it may not have seemed obvious why they would have wanted a sweaty, greenish-grey lump in trousers that smelled of smoke and a few late-night chips to join their elite troupe but on the other hand they never knew just how awful I really felt all day, and believe me, not letting on required a great deal of acting on my part.
RADA rejected me, and I knew it was my own fault.
The Central School of Speech and Drama was my last hope. I stopped drinking for a month and polished up my audition pieces. Now, what they do rather cleverly at Central is that they give people so many recalls that even if you never wanted to attend the school, by the end of the process you would feed your Granny into a wood-chipper in order to get a place. Rumours abound about the audition process. There is one story about a poor woman who was doing a speech by Glenda the Good Witch for her modern piece, who was so bad that they kept giving her recalls so that other members of staff could get a chance to see her. As you read this she is probably icing a cake, telling her children about how close she got to attending a top drama school. Some jokes are too cruel.
My own auditions at Central were fairly uneventful – it was just that there were so many of them. In the end I was recalled to be on a waiting list. I could almost feel the leg warmers, I was so close. At the end of the day I was called into a room, and George Hall, the principal of the school, broke the news: I wouldn’t be going to Central. Did he say ‘would not’? I couldn’t believe it. This was not my wonderful life. It was the set speech from Measure for Measure made real: ‘To whom should I complain?’
I had told myself when I got back from America that I would only follow my dream to be an actor until I hit a full stop. Of course life is never that straightforward. There is always doubt, there are always choices. Being turned down by every major drama school should have given me a clear sign to give up, but stupidly the people auditioning me had encouraged me enough to make me want to try again. I retied the strings on my waiter’s apron and resolved to give it another go, ignoring my mother’s adage, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, you mustn’t be very good.’
Since coming to London I had been more or less celibate. Elizabeth had made a brief visit early on, but by now she was dating a Persian prince back in California. I don’t think I was all that devastated by the news because when she broke it to me all I can remember saying is ‘I think y
ou mean Iranian’.
I had never really discussed my sexuality at the restaurant, but one by one all the people who worked there just assumed I was gay. By the end of a year, although I hadn’t slept with anyone, I was de facto a homosexual. My first brief affair was with a friend of Syd’s from Vancouver. His name was Philip, and to save on lengthy physical description, let’s just say he was a tall queen. I think what seduced me was how flattering and attentive he was to me. He took me out to dinner, to the movies; he treated me like a boyfriend. Amongst the Canadians he was a figure of fun, and I think Syd setting me up with him was really his revenge for the night bus of shame, but I remember Philip as being sweet – a big, queeny fool, but a sweet one.
One night we went for dinner in the sort of restaurant I wasn’t used to somewhere in Fulham. We drank wine and I ordered a goat’s cheese salad. They apologised, there was no goat’s cheese but they could do it with Brie. ‘That’ll be fine’. What arrived was an entire Brie – I don’t even remember it being sliced – sitting on top of a large leaf of lettuce. I ate it.
More wine, liqueur coffees and I was very drunk and a bit queasy. We walked back to Philip’s expensive bedsit at the World’s End bit of the King’s Road. Along the way I managed to lose his favourite cashmere scarf that he had lent me, and then, just to make the evening complete, when we were just starting to have sex I vomited all over him and his tiny apartment. I lay there groaning while Philip washed down the walls and took care of me.
The next weekend, leaving some party north of Baker Street, the situation was reversed. Philip was legless and falling over in the snow. Did I return the sweet care and affection that I had received? No way! I tramped through the snow towards the main road, listening to my designer scarecrow crashing around behind me. I was simply furious with him. I resolved to get in the first cab that came along Baker Street, and if Philip hadn’t caught up with me, tough luck. It began to dawn on me that this wasn’t love.
Back at Smiths a new Australian waiter had started work. Blond and handsome in a sort of forties movie-star kind of way, Ashley immediately caused speculation amongst the rest of us. Helen was very impressed. ‘Look at the way he pours champagne.’ I didn’t really know what that meant, but at the time I knew it was a good thing.
Falling in love with Ashley was the easiest thing in the world. We just clicked. Laughing, flirting, it felt like this could be the big one. Syd was a mad crush, Philip was a fling, Ashley was going to be the love of my life! The only obstacle in my way was that I had no idea how to make a move. The direct bus route was not an option, so all I could do was make myself available. Like some slutty gazelle hanging around the water hole faking a limp and hoping that a lion would eat him, I put myself in Ashley’s way as much as possible. Now I have a television show to lure prospective suitors with, but then I had nothing. My one claim to coolness was that I had moved in to a houseboat – a small, freezing, floating hut – but it provided me with a plausible invitation. ‘Would you like to see the houseboat?’ He said he would. The gazelle was smothering ketchup all over himself.
The tension was palpable – the accidental brushing of hands against legs, the laughing at every little joke, the no mention of leaving. It was exciting, but it was going on for ever. Any sort of gay God would have just screamed through the clouds, ‘Get on with it,’ but it seemed we were as bad as each other, both terrified of rejection, refusing to read the ‘sure thing’ signs stuck on our foreheads. What a long, seemingly pointless evening – chatting on the deck, drinking wine in the kitchen, wandering out on the deck again because it was warmer outside than in, and finally venturing into the bedroom ‘to look at some photos’.
We talked some more. It is odd, but even after all these years, first date conversations between gay men, a bit like Nana Mouskouri’s taste in eyewear, are always the same. There is always a first sexual experience story, then an optional ‘Have you ever had sex with a woman’ segment, followed by the mandatory ‘Do your parents know?’ section. We had covered all of these when finally Ashley could bear it no more.
‘What would happen if I kissed you?’
A brave start, but a rather awkward question. Was I actually supposed to tell him? He might as well have asked me ‘What are you into?’ or ‘What’s your favourite drug?’ The lion was about to strike. I didn’t want to be covered in cling film and popped back in the fridge for later, and yet all I could think of saying was, ‘I don’t know’.
Would the lion phone a taxi? No – he was hungrier than that.
‘Well then, is it a good idea?’
This was more like it. This was a question I could answer.
‘Yes,’ I said as clearly as I could with a mouth full of another boy’s tongue.
The next morning we walked up to the King’s Road from the river to get some breakfast. I was so full of the love drug that I didn’t notice where we were walking. Just too late I realised where we were – opposite Philip’s apartment. I looked up and in an awful, impossible coincidence my eyes met Philip’s looking from behind his curtains. Silly, camp Philip looked like a puppy that had been kicked by its owner. The message was cruel but clear. I was no longer going out with him and all he was left with was a faint smell of sick and a space on his shelf where his favourite scarf had been.
I was in love for the first time in my life. Romance had blossomed and taken over the entire garden. I hope not everyone falls in love the way I do, because for me it is close to a state of madness. Like some sort of chemical imbalance, the smallest thing can set it off: a smile, a haircut, the way he orders a drink – that’s what I fall in love with, and then, like an emotional tarpaulin, I’ll stretch that one thing I love to cover over all the things that I don’t like or that don’t fit. Finally, after a while, that tarpaulin of love starts to rip and all the things that were there all along are revealed and I realise that I’m going out with an arsehole who has nice hair. In Ashley’s case, however, the tarpaulin never got a chance to wear out, he pulled it off himself.
Initially we couldn’t have been happier. We worked together and pretty soon we lived together. The flat was in a great neighbourhood and nicely decorated, and there were always loads of people around. Australians come from a country with unlimited space, but for some reason when they travel abroad they are happy to live like cotton-wool balls packed into a plastic bag. The flat Ashley and I shared had one bedroom, but in the year and a half we lived in it there were never fewer than five people calling it home. What this cost us in terms of privacy was more than made up for in the spice it added to our sex life, and the fact that there was always something in the fridge to eat. By and large our other flatmates tended to be wine-guzzling Australian women who worked in offices and were in love with Ashley. He ruled the roost and declared the living room as our domain. Like plebeian royalty we sat up in our battered sofabed eating party-size packs of mini sausage rolls and watching daytime telly before dashing off to work.
I totally embraced the idea of being in a couple, and friends were put on a back burner while I got busy spending lots of ‘we’ time. I would have been quite happy for us just to sit around playing with each other’s hair, but Ashley was determined to see a bit of Europe, so a holiday plan was hatched. We would go to Turkey.
We flew into Turkey’s third largest city, Izmir, thus carefully avoiding Istanbul, the only place I had ever heard of or had any desire to see. Never mind. The first night we headed out for a meal and then back to the hotel where after sex we fell into separate single beds and I slept right through the night. In the morning Ashley didn’t look great. It turned out he had spent most of the night on the toilet with an upset stomach. We wondered what might have caused it because we had eaten exactly the same thing. I tried to make the right cooing noises, but really I just felt very smug.
Ashley got us into some sort of shared taxi thing and we headed off to the bus station to catch a ride to Effes to see its famous Roman ruins. Whatever. As the taxi rolled and shuddered around
dusty corners I became aware of a slight rumble in my stomach. Oh-oh. By the time we got to the bus station, the Vesuvius of my ass was in danger of turning the inside of the taxi into a poo Pompeii. I ran from the car and found the public toilet. Although I couldn’t read the Turkish signs it wasn’t that hard to find, since my nose knew what it was looking for and a helpful swarm of flies were flapping their shit-covered wings and buzzing encouragement about the place. I didn’t care. I squatted over the hole in the ground and my insides promptly fell out.
I stumbled from the scene of the grime and found Ashley. By this time he was fully recovered and hurrying me to get on the bus for Effes. We were the only tourists on it, and since we were the only English speakers I’m not sure how we knew this, but the route was non-stop and took about three hours. I put on my Walkman and Ashley got out a book. The engine started and the doors closed with a hissing noise. Literally the moment the bus started to move and there was no escape my ass went into spasms. It seemed my insides had not all been left behind – there was lots still in there and it wanted out. I clutched the seat in front and broke into a cold sweat. I battled each new wave of spasms like some woman not wanting to give birth to her sticky brown baby. I kept saying to Ashley, ‘I’m in bits, I’m in bits.’
So Me Page 7
