Maybe the Calvinists are right: the decision is made at conception — except that no one can be lost. Every sperm joins every ovum in a graceful linking of arms; the kick of every foetus in every womb is a dance of joy.
26 Nijinsky
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I rarely meet someone for sex without money changing hands. I prefer it because it means I have control over when it happens (and finishes), and it means that I don’t have to please the boys. I can come and go as I wish without their approval. Any healthy relationship is based on a certain sort of equality (ergo the Greeks’ man-boy love never impressed me as a model for today), but I don’t want a relationship. It would be too fixed. It would mean ‘living in sin’. My preferred method is to sin and then to begin again after a good Confession — a house in the country to be opened up then locked up at will, not a permanent home. A boyfriend would make this equivocation impossible. Now I can leave the Confessional and return home to my microwaved supper with an easy conscience. Not so if I were to arrive at my front door to the smell of supper already cooking on the stove and the sight of my slippers warming by the fire. Moreover, my sexual energy is scatter-gunned. I’m excited by a man’s hands exploring my naked body, but I’m more excited by a constant variety of hands. ‘Oh, for a thousand tongues!’ I want to taste a thousand kisses on my lips, to feel ten thousand teeth biting into my neck.
But more than all of that, when I’m paying I can create the perfect make-believe world. I know my escort will want to try to please me, often saying flattering things and pretending to be aroused (the best ones are so good at it) because then he’ll get a bigger tip. And surrounded by his honeyed words and fake groans of ecstasy I can happily live out my sexual fantasies. And then I can switch them off. My finger always on the button. I’m wearing the trousers, even when (temporarily) I’m not. I can fool myself that it is a service like visiting the barber’s shop: short back and sides, touch me there, stop doing that, do that some more. I have the menu in front of me and I can order exactly what I want, pay for it, then leave.
I did try a couple of the new smartphone apps which miraculously display gay men on the screen arranged by distance: Jerry is 200 metres away, and there is a photo of (one has to trust) Jerry, flexing his biceps in a gym somewhere. ‘Ready for action’ his profile states. Man after man, endlessly pouting chests, puckered lips, sly, seductive eyes, peacock feathers splayed, mating calls a silent cacophony from listing to listing — bottom, top, versatile, vanilla, no strings, no attachments, straight-acting, stay cool, walk away, discreet, blocked. I was curious at first but reached a dead end when filling out my profile. I reduced my age by ten years and my weight by twenty kilos (I could always go on a diet), but I couldn’t say anything about myself or what I was looking for which sounded plausible. And then to upload a photo. Not only was I scared to have pictures of my face or other body parts flashing into public view on people’s phones but I have enough self-knowledge to know that money is my greatest asset with handsome young men. I have a paunch, ugly legs and a small penis — not the words to use as meat magnets on Craigslist or Grindr. I tried taking a few shots of my naked chest one reckless afternoon. God, was my flesh really that colour, and so pasty and puffed? I didn’t need to cover up my groin, my stomach does that for me.
On one of the apps I ended up posting a photo of Nijinsky reclining as the Faun for my profile, thinking the reference would pique the curiosity of the sort of men I might want to meet. The interesting ones wanted a date which I then realized I couldn’t pursue after all, and the stupid ones thought it was really me:
‘Hey, do you have another pic, without the loincloth?’ ‘Great legs, dude.’ Then I realized, because the Cruisadaddy app is for young men who like older men (and the, oh so common, reverse), that I was getting all the oldies. Beautiful young guys in this community were turned on by white chest hair and dried-up nipples. I should have uploaded a picture of Diaghilev. ‘Daddies’ — the irony of the paternal nomenclature was not wasted on this ageing priest.
Public toilets? Well, a couple of times I looked over at a handsome face and then looked down to the stream of steaming urine and its source, but the smell, and the damp, dank floors, and the buzz of the flies, and the possibility of arrest, and the sheer visibility of it all makes me uneasy. Once I was sitting in a cubicle at a men’s department store and a note appeared under the divider: ‘wanna suck me off?’ I ignored it and left hurriedly, but outside I decided to wait to see from whom the offer had come. I stood there amidst the rows of suits and trousers and ties for a good ten minutes and then shuffling out slowly in an old tweed coat too big for him came a scrawny man with a few wisps of white hair and badly-fitting false teeth. His gait had something of infinite sadness about it, as if each step was a pulling down as well as a pulling forward, a slouching towards the grave. He carried an old plastic carrier bag with a free local newspaper sticking out of it and there was a plastic triangle of sandwiches bulging along one side. I followed him out into the street and was on the point of inviting him, out of pity, to join me for a cup of coffee — but then I walked away.
27 Kindness
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Some people seem to have a physical aptitude for kindness, a certain look in the eye or turn of the mouth, not so much a smile as a softening of features, a giving way without giving in. They invite you into their space without insisting you give up your space. They simply create a neutral area of acceptance. It’s a gift. Bishop Bernard has it. It’s not a question of an excessive friendliness — he is not a pal to his priests; no, his distance from them enables them to trust him more, beyond feelings or favourites. He knows that sometimes to say nothing, with a kind countenance and an open heart, can be to express everything.
I actually don’t know how Bernard was promoted to the episcopacy in the first place. He has no regal bearing, no smooth public face, no dazzling double degrees, and he has never worked in Rome, which is a frequent fast-track to mitre and ring. Everything about him is normal, modest, hidden. Yes, he ran his previous parishes effectively and energetically but nothing exceptional appeared to be happening as far as an outsider could see. Nevertheless there was a significant increase of communicants wherever he went, and charitable works seemed to sprout up spontaneously.
Cheerfulness can be the opposite of kindness when it exists in a form which suggests superiority. Father Neville’s relentless bright eye staring at me every morning above his cold-water smile is a perfect example of this. His bright optimism is a shiny platinum membership card to an exclusive club from which I’m excluded. And once I’d shared with him something of my sexual addiction, even without details, there was no going back. I’d lost the virginity of my propriety, that badge of Catholic honour for the celibates who hold the reins of power in the Church. Only eunuchs may wear the crowns. A body sticky with the sap of life is disqualified. Blackballed.
But my faith, tattered as it is, still has threads strong enough to withstand Father Neville’s smugness. He lacks authenticity. I can laugh at him. And in a way his priggishness is easier to side-step than my bishop’s kindness. I am safer in my unrepentance with Neville. I can remain sitting in my pool of sin, mud lapping against my leg, brown-splashed past knees to loins. Its stench keeps others at bay. I don’t want to change. But Bishop Bernard’s compassion reminds me that I’ve become hardened, that my ground is so dry and barren that water just rolls away, that the effort involved in turning my life around would be more than I could bear.
28 Bedsits
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A rent boy’s bedsit — a rabbit hutch in which to sleep and study and eat and defecate and fuck, paying off student loans one dirty old man at a time.
Poverty need not be squalor but with these flats it usually was. Victorian villas divided up with indecent, post-war haste, old curtains sagging behind filthy windows. One step on to the drafty porch where a dozen doorbells spew tangled wires out of a rough board of buttons.
Faded, transient names on mailboxes containing only bills and junk, creased envelopes sullenly wedged inside the rusting apertures.
Inside the flats there are leaks which seep with acrid water, every crack forming yet more cracks. Condensation dribbling down into mould, then mushrooming into more mould — bunions of mildew at the base of the rotting sills. Cardboard walls and inherited carpets which push up to cobwebbed skirting boards with a rind of detritus.
The cooking arrangements were always nauseating. A sauce-scarred pan resting on a cold hot-plate. Dishes jumbled in the sink. Moral disarray mirrored in domestic neglect. Filthy kitchen, filthy bedroom; food and sex. The nauseous symmetry of these two natural appetites of human survival melted down to lard: a candy bar for a diabetic.
Without the intoxication of lust I might well have retched at some of the beds I sank into. The odorous cocktail on a prostitute’s sheets — oil, sweat, sperm, cheap aftershave. Under the blankets the faded but still-clear stains from last week’s weak wash. There too the stray pubic hair’s squiggle and the metallic wrapping hastily ripped then discarded from an earlier condom. The scrunched-up sheets, the flabby mattress — no monk’s pallet or yogi’s futon here. But don’t get too comfortable in your horizontal recline on the coiled divan because once you’ve ejaculated, wiped off and paid the piper you’re outta there. Past the encrusted pan through the cardboard door in the cardboard wall down the narrow staircase past the tangle of wires hanging from the doorbells into the cold, unforgiving night. The contemptuous night. No, don’t dramatize... rather the oblivious night. Catch the night’s eye if you can. But you can’t. It looks past you. The best it can do is to hide you between the yellow lampposts as you limp along in your damp underpants — crotch sticky, testicles milked dry — along your path of unrepose.
29 Callow
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When you speak to no one all day long (except Father Neville) and have no distractions, meal times become like sugar-water to a laboratory rat. Around four o’clock I start looking forward to dinner. I watch the clock, willing it forward.
It was the old monastic tradition for one of the community to read aloud during mealtimes but this practice has been replaced at Craigbourne by audio books — extracts from spiritual writers read by actors. This week we have sermons of St Augustine, whose relentless energy serves to make me more listless than ever. Simon Callow’s magnificent voice relishes the melodious, archaic contours of the language whilst, I imagine, keeping the actual message of the ‘theologian of the West’ at arm’s length. He (Simon) has become my friend this week, a strange comfort in the midst of my desolation. I listen to the music of the words without caring about their meaning. They are a vocalise resonating through the prison bars, stealing me away from Craigbourne and carrying me off to some garden of delights.
I see Father Neville praying into his food, head down, back straight, starving himself of pleasure despite the necessity of nutrition. What if he were to relish the flavours? Wouldn’t that be more holy? To eat a tomato with mindfulness requires detachment, allowing time for it to reveal its delights, waiting, contemplating, with patience, with reverence, with gratefulness. Without gratefulness life is pale and tuneless, a piano without hammers, a Stradivarius without strings. ‘Now what do you say?’ my mother used to say to me, the little boy in the short trousers. ‘Thank you, Mrs Armitage,’ I would lisp. My mother knew that such gratitude would eventually mean more to me than to the one who had given me the lemon drizzle cake that Saturday afternoon.
30 Ronnie
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Ronald Knox spoke about insomnia’s dark hour. It’s four o’clock in the morning and you’re lying in bed, wide awake, wider awake than during daytime. Awake to the emptiness of it all, the failure of it all, the futility of it all. No one wants a friend who phones at four o’clock in the morning. Kettles don’t whistle so early, toast is not buttered or burned at that ungodly hour. It is dark outside the curtains, cold inside the curtains — the sheets shroud a restless cadaver.
Well, he didn’t quite put it like that, but we can read between the lines. This eccentric priest, shining like a jewel then chiselled out of the ring, replaced by glass. Given a life’s task then, at the point of handing it over, every facet perfectly, brilliantly shaped... all thrown away. He slaved on a translation of the Bible, from the Latin. Only the Latin is authentic. Finish it, Ronnie, and we’ll use it in the Mass. Your luminous words will inspire souls from Timbuktu to Toledo. He poured his heart into it, wishing he could use the Greek which he knew as well as St Jerome’s Vulgate. He allowed himself a few footnotes, a few caveats. No Ronnie, the Latin. Don’t be obstinate. Don’t be disobedient. Don’t be like your heretic father, the Anglican Archbishop. Language of the Church, if you don’t mind. Language of the Liturgy, if you please. Sacred language. You know we’re going to have the readings in the vernacular soon. So people can understand. We want a fresh, accurate translation. Every word. We trust you, Ronnie. We’re relying on you, Ronnie. Things are changing. Just think, Ronnie. From Toledo to Timbuktu.
But then, ink still wet on the page, things moved in a different direction and they decided to use a translation from the Greek after all. Ronnie’s four o’clock in the morning sweats, his headache-inducing days squinting over texts, his typewriter’s pitter-patter... all thrown away. A dead letter as he handed over his life’s work. Ah well, all for the glory of God. Offer it up, Ronnie. Offer it up, for the good of souls. For the Holy Souls. A day of Purgatory erased for every word typed. One of the Church’s most brilliant intellects forced to take refuge in eccentricity and pipe tobacco. There’s a lot you can hide under a baggy tweed jacket behind a cloud of St Bruno. His subtle mind, a scalpel, was forced to hack like a lumberjack. Blunt blade, badly cut wood. Offer it up, Ronnie.
31 Ten o’clock in the morning
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Unlike Ronald Knox I usually sleep well. It’s my sanity. It’s ten o’clock in the morning when I face my darkest hours on this retreat. Father Neville breezes in at 9:30 and talks at me, asks what I’ve been praying about, then breezes out. Another soul brought closer to our Blessed Lady. Finger the beads. Touch the scapular. Ouch, that cilice is sharp. Stone in the shoe. Every step a step closer to sanctity. Deo gratias!
Then it’s ten o’clock. About ten minutes after he leaves. It’s silent in my room. It’s raining outside. I feel like shit. The day opens like an empty coffin, nothing inside, not even a velvet lining. I can’t pray I can’t read I can’t think. Ah, but I can masturbate. And I do, lying on the bed, imagining the most terrible things being done to me. I masturbate. And writing this down now, later the same day, makes me want to write the M word a thousand times. I want to say to Father Neville tomorrow when he asks about the progress of my prayer: ‘Father, I lay down on that bed over there, see it? Look!’ I want to point and force him to turn his stiff, starched neck in his high, white collar. I want to watch his face crumple with blanched horror: ‘There!’ I’m shouting now and others outside can hear me. ‘There!’ I’m pointing at the bed. ‘There! I masturbated yesterday, pulling up and down, up and down, up and down.’ My hand curls in the air, faking the act in his face. He is looking at me in speechless disgust. ‘And it felt good. It felt very good.’
32 Buggered
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A fifteen year old comes to me: ‘Father, can I talk to you? The thing is, I’m gay.’ What can I say? I have two options within the teaching of the Church: ‘It’s an intrinsic disorder and you must be celibate for the rest of your life’; or: ‘There are treatments for this. Let me find a summer camp where they can cure you of your unnatural desires? Actually what I end up saying is something along the lines of being gay being a gift from God. A different path. An example of the fascinating, complex variety of human life. One of Hopkins’s ‘dappled things’. I believe this, even if I’ve not lived it. I see it as my weakness rather than my hypocrisy. And my time slot in hi
story. When I was born it was still ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, but the world has changed. And today’s teenager dares to speak its name.
In some ways it was easier to be a pastor in Bosie’s day. The young person in question would not have had the courage to come to me openly in the first place, nor would he have had the word to describe what he knew himself to be. So he would have remained in the closet, made it cosy, closed its door to affection, companionship and intimacy. The lucky ones became eccentric bachelors, academics, hardworking oddballs, favourite uncles. Then there were those whose eccentricity blurred into madness, whose hard work became obsession and insomnia, whose solitude became searing loneliness, whose sadness sliced sharply to suicide. Others became priests, in some ways the best option. Being ‘Father’ instantly silences any probing questions about a future family: ‘Have you got a girlfriend? When are you getting married? You’re not... one of those are you?’ The priesthood supplies the most elegant evasion, a place in a community of like-minded brethren, the promise of a front seat in Heaven, and, in case that’s not enough, all topped off with the cherry of a free car and a housekeeper. What’s not to like?
What’s not to like is the cauldron of deception, the pink lips puckering easy blessings, the fire of lust subsumed into custard tarts. If only one bishop would come out with it: ‘I’m gay and celibate.’ Is there not one role model out there? These leaders demand continence for life from the fifteen year old, but cannot offer a finger of support, of empathy, of humility, of taking the risk that they might appear a little less than perfect. ‘But you, my son, embarking on life’s journey, just abstain. With the help of grace and our Blessed Mother all will be well. It will be hard at times, but trust in God. I know you wake up at night in a sweat of desire, your heart pumping, your cock about to explode. Reach for the rosary! Offer it up!’ I’m afraid that’s not enough, you gay, celibate, pink-faced, tart-devouring bishops. The choice you give us is either to behave like good sons of the Church and feather the nest of our closet or to leave the closet and the Church. You’re buggered if you do and buggered if you don’t.
The Final Retreat Page 7
