by Paul Mendez
Jesse nodded and smiled as if he’d like nothing better, so Owen ran up, two stairs at a time.
The folding doors behind them were kept closed, and led to the old dining room, which was currently being repurposed and redecorated for use as another bedroom. Prospective tenants were already being shown around, while Jesse overheard from upstairs phrases like high ceilings, period features and original cornicing and rose work. The doors were going to be removed, and the wall filled in with brick and concrete, so there would be much upheaval, noise and dust in the new year.
Owen came back smiling, with a fat wallet stuffed into his back pocket. He fed five albums into the disc changer and pressed play, then sat down, poured them each a glass of champagne and unwrapped a rock of coke onto one of the empty CD cases—Mary J. Blige’s My Life—edging powder off it with a faded old Visa, hurriedly, as if he’d been waiting a long time for the appropriate hour. Jesse knew how that felt, and he also knew the reward. Mary’s was not the album playing. It was bluesy, bassy, dubby.
Getting rid of the albatross. Jesse recalled Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” from GCSE English.
“What does an albatross look like?”
Owen was surprised by the question and gave a little laugh as he chopped the rock finer and finer.
“Well, there are lots of different subspecies of them, but the wandering albatross sort of looks like a bigger, more aristocratic seagull, with webbed feet and giant gliding wings. They partner for life and can live up to fifty years. They fly enormous distances to get the right food for their young. Coleridge made it a cultural icon in ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ ”
Jesse wasn’t expecting this quality of answer, and was slightly resentful of Owen’s encyclopaedic knowledge of things, though felt another wave of infatuation at the mention of partner for life. He hoped one day to be the sort of person who could confidently answer any question thrown at him, but suspected the versatility of Owen’s mind was a result of its Cambridge education. Cambridge. Even the word sounded smug. If it was in the Black Country it would be called Cam-bridge, with a hard a, not Came-bridge.
“What are we listening to?”
“Metal Box by Public Image Limited. Do you have a note?”
“No. What year?”
“It’s okay, you can use this one,” he said, quickly snatching a pair out of his wallet. “You’re the twenty and I’m the ten. We shouldn’t share because of our uncertain statuses.”
“Okay.”
He fondled the note, on one side of which was the Queen, the other, a man with a huge moustache. Uncertain statuses. That made it sound so real. Guilty until proven guilty. He should behave as if he was HIV-positive. He probably was. It cheered him, though, to think that Owen was putting himself in the same boat.
Jesse snorted up the line Owen offered him and sat back, letting the low bassline rumble into him, thinking about his arsehole and the now-dry wound in it, and suddenly, as the coke made him tremble and lick his teeth, feeling it didn’t matter. Maybe he shouldn’t have told him. Maybe the coke would’ve made him tell the truth but add, It’s okay, you can still fuck me with a condom and you won’t catch anything if I suck your dick.
“Memories,” Owen said, after sniffing his line. “Strange things. They come and go. Sometimes it feels like you can remember things from before you were born. I call it borrowed nostalgia. Actually, I won’t lie, someone else has called it that before me. What’s that about? Is extra-sensory perception at play? Could I have anticipated my own birth? Did someone have to die so that I could be born? I was born in January ’71. Jorge Barbosa, the Cape Verdean poet, died on the day I was born. Maybe his poetic soul transferred into mine? I don’t write about island nature, but hey, it’s an interesting theory. We’ll look up who died on your birth date later. This is ‘Death Disco.’ Let’s have a dance.”
The way he went on, Jesse could listen to Owen’s brain shaking out little sweeties forever. He wanted to be spoken to like that while being fucked. He wanted to be hypnotised by someone with a very fine brain and a very large dick, and he could just tell Owen had a very large, jawbreaking dick. He always thought it was those guys who had massive packets, but once he got their pants off it turned out to be almost all fat and swollen balls. Skinny guys with no packet, somehow, seemed to have the biggest dicks. Owen wasn’t skinny, but he carried himself with a certain confidence. Jesse knew he would hurt but he’d commit to it. Owen was thirty-two in a month, Jesse thought. A year younger than Jesus was when he died. Fit and strong, and would only get better as he aged. The thought of Owen forever released a second rush of brightness; nice coke. He ground his teeth to the music. His mouth was nice and wet, but he swigged another glass of champagne anyway, mourning, for just a second, the needlessly shit night his family would be having, spitefully shutting themselves in, locking out the world on its one day of peace and unity while their exiled son was having the time of his life.
“It’s like our own little club,” Jesse said. They danced in their socks, then Jesse folded back the rug so they could slide around. They spun naturally together in the lights, their bodies touching without awkwardness. Owen allowed himself to feel Jesse’s arse, and gave it a squeeze, first with one hand, then two. “Wow,” he said.
“You ever felt an ass like this before?” Their mouths were close.
“I think I would remember if I did.”
“It’s yours,” Jesse told Owen, as other bottoms had said to him.
Owen cleared his throat and released Jesse, then grinned at him. They danced, spun around and held hands. “They released this as a single without the ‘Swan Lake’ refrain and called it ‘Death Disco.’ I prefer this version. You asked the year. Seventy-nine. Same year as Off the Wall and Risqué, and loads of absolutely great post-punk and industrial I know you’ll love. Throbbing Gristle, Wire, The Pop Group, Blondie, Talking Heads. It’s extraordinary, your taste in music. Joy Division are an all-time great band nobody listens to any more.”
“It was wicked with a spliff. But I’m not really a fan of Jacko,” said Jesse, and he was immediately reminded of the blonde woman in the pink dress with the little dog in Gilbert’s who’d said of him, Oh, but doesn’t he look like a young Michael Jackson! when he didn’t yet have much of an Afro.
“What?” Owen asked, either as if to accuse Jesse of stealing the singer’s early look while running him down, or because all black people by definition had to love Michael Jackson, which justified Jesse’s distaste for anything after Off the Wall, when the negro-nose-mutilation and skin-bleaching started.
“Although Off the Wall’s probably his best album. What’s Risqué?”
“Risqué, by Chic? Mate, you’ve got a lot of listening to do. You can hear the influence of black disco music in this, definitely. Everyone was onto it. White people took what they needed then shut disco down, literally. Have you heard of the ‘Disco Sucks’ movement?”
“No.”
“White Americans disaffected by the lack of guitar music in the charts held a massive rally in a football stadium and basically burned disco at the stake.” Owen was the sort of man, like Brother Thomas Woodall, who refused to raise his voice whatever the surroundings were doing, expecting his interlocutor to simply listen harder. Only good-looking, successful white men with big dicks ever did that, and everyone else indulged them. “Not only was it a racially charged movement, it was also homophobic—disco sucks”—he made a blowjob gesture—“as disco was known to be the music of choice among the blacks and gays. Overnight an entire genre, the most popular of the time, disappeared from the charts and legends like Grace Jones and Nile Rodgers had to rewire their sound entirely or face oblivion.”
Jesse’s heart was racing. “I think I know what you mean about borrowed nostalgia. I definitely experienced it really strongly when we were listening to Joy Division earlier. This kind of music just sou
nds like where I grew up, or at least what those places used to sound like just before I was born.”
“This is the sound of Britain in the disenfranchised, racist, impoverished, hungry, angry late seventies, where punk meets disco meets funk meets dub, meets art,” Owen said, passionately. “It brought races together where otherwise there was neo-fascism. You’d see the sort of mix at gigs you’d never see on the street or the football terraces. I was only eight when it was released. There’s no way my parents would have allowed me to play this at home. They hated punk, and especially John Lydon.”
“John Lydon?”
“Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols. After he left that band, he reinvented himself under his own name and created PiL with Keith Levene. I much prefer this iteration.”
Jesse’s shoulders dropped. “I don’t know anything.”
“You’re young,” Owen said, cradling Jesse’s cheek in his warm hand. “You’ve got it all to come.”
Jesse started to feel edgy. He knew that he would need to be topped up with a bump every ten minutes or so to stay in this brave new world, or he would start to retreat back inside himself. His aim, now, whatever the consequences, was to have sex with Owen. He would not reject him. They were men, they could deal with it, and if Jesse wanted him, which he did, they had to face reality and the truth together. But it was still early.
“You were talking about your parents?” Jesse said suddenly.
“My dad died earlier this year.”
“Sorry,” said Jesse.
“You weren’t to know.”
It occurred to Jesse that little more than a year ago, he would’ve launched straight into a spiel about the Great Hope, that people might welcome their loved ones back to life during the resurrection after Armageddon. He was glad he no longer believed that. Had he ever believed it at all? What did he believe in now? He hadn’t stopped to think. Could he be an atheist like Owen? He couldn’t handle the thought.
“What did he die of?”
“Cancer. It started in his chest and then metastasised. And I chose that as the time to come out, which is why I’m here.”
“I don’t understand,” said Jesse. They were standing inches from each other, not really dancing but swishing from hip to hip.
“Have you ever had a close family member die?”
“My dad, but I didn’t know him,” said Jesse. “He died when I was two.”
“So you never knew him. I’m sorry about that,” said Owen. “But when my dad died, because it was really the first bereavement I’d experienced as an adult, I felt, not necessarily that I could take his place, but that the space his power, morals and control had left would remain vacant, and irreplaceable, so that I didn’t have to lie any more. When he was alive I had to do what I could to make him proud of me.”
“You went to Cambridge!” Jesse said. “And he wasn’t proud of you?”
“Of course he was proud of me, but I was supposed to become a teacher, a scientist or a clerk in the company—something professional. My granddad worked on the factory floor, and my dad was a lab technician. He always thought I was a little pansy, with my poetry, my flowers, my Associates records and my little Thom Gunn trace-hoop earring, but he never expected I would stray so far from the family blueprint.”
He no longer wore a trace hoop; Jesse held him by the jaw while he checked both sides, and Owen let him, like a dog; a healed-over piercing dimpled his left earlobe. John Lydon’s wailing voice withdrew behind a cloak as the synths flared up around him and the bass guitar served rapidly escalating notes which, altogether with the insistent drums, got stuck in a frantic, claustrophobic groove.
“This is sick, this scratched record bit at the end,” said Jesse, resting his hands on Owen’s chest.
“It’s great, right? You ever listened to this album before? I thought you’d like this if you liked Unknown Pleasures. Same year.”
“What was the singer’s name?”
“Of Joy Division? Ian Curtis.”
“And he died?”
“Hanged himself in his kitchen in 1980. He was twenty-three.”
“That’s horrible,” Jesse said, thinking of Aaliyah—who died in a plane crash at twenty-two—as the next song, a throbbing, oscillating bassline and wary guitar over cymbals, bass and snare drum, kicked in. “I like the way this cut straight in from the previous song without them trying to mix the two.”
“ ‘Poptones,’ one of the greatest songs ever made. About a girl who got kidnapped and driven to a forest but managed to escape, and all she remembered was that it was a Japanese car and they were playing contemporary pop songs on the cassette player, hence ‘Poptones.’ ”
“It does sound like being lost in the woods.” Jesse was lost in the music, eyes closed, swinging his arms because it wasn’t really danceable. He thought maybe he could interpret-dance to it like Aaliyah did Timbaland’s staccato beats, but refrained. A twenty-three-year-old singer hanged himself in his kitchen in 1980. What a different world it seemed to be, just before Jesse was born. Twenty-two and twenty-three seemed a long way away.
“Shall we have a smoke?” Owen said.
They sat back down and Jesse, already with sweaty, trembling hands, his heart racing, started rolling a spliff.
“So you were talking about your dad.”
“Was I?” Owen said, separating off another couple of lines on Mary J. Blige’s blue face, perfect considering the rumoured drug and alcohol issues that accompanied the making of her masterpiece, her no-doubt-vacant eyes shadowed under a low flat cap. “I don’t want to say anything bad about him. He was a good man. Worked hard all his life. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all dockers, before Granddad joined Lever Brothers. We got on better as adults, especially after I brought Anya home for the first time, but he was always slightly disdainful of the fact that I was a strong reader and loved reading more than anything in the world. I actually think, now, he’d be diagnosed dyslexic.”
All the while, Owen was fingering his £10 note, rolling it, then unrolling it, then rolling it tighter, staring into the middle distance as if there was a television there. There was a television there, high up in the corner above the Christmas tree, though nobody ever watched it as they all had their own TVs in their rooms.
“I think he thought that I thought that I was better than them, but actually, what he didn’t acknowledge was that I was born in the seventies, not the forties, and my choices were a lot different from his. My education was a lot better than his. He left school at sixteen having failed his school certificate but straight away got work for the company. I went to Wirral Grammar School for Boys and excelled. The situation was right, and I got into Cambridge on merit. We hit the sweet spot. He brought me up in this aspirational village but then couldn’t handle the fact that I would be different from him, that I wouldn’t know or expect the same boundaries he’d grown up with. Anyway, like I said, he was a good man. He married my mother, then they moved into the house she still lives in and had my sister, then me. Mum took night classes and qualified to become a schoolteacher. She didn’t get paid that much, neither of them did, but they didn’t really spend any money either. My dad kept an allotment and we grew our own vegetables. I had a good childhood, really. My parents took care of us, and in Port Sunlight, we had everything that would benefit a curious and creative child. I can’t complain. Sorry, you probably don’t wanna hear this happy family shit.”
He finally snorted his line. Jesse felt that Owen probably saw himself as the working-class boy who did well and transcended his birth class and the expectations that were thrust upon him. He thought of Sister Doreen Charles. No education; all conviction. Jesse’s was one of the faces she wanted to see again in the New System, she always said, though at not-yet-seventy she had plenty of living time left. John Lydon sang over an exquisitely smooth and bassy synthpop number. That and
the song before it comprised a fascinating diptych. Careering. There were two ways to interpret that word. Careering, as in dockworking, teaching, prostituting, preaching. But then there was careering, as in running away. Absconding. Perhaps that was what Jesse was doing. When would it stop? When and where would he settle? Was he lost forever? Did he care? He’d suck hard dicks and fuck warm asses until he was dead. With the right weed, he wouldn’t stop to eat or drink.
“You alright?” Owen said.
“Perfect,” Jesse said, assimilating one of Owen’s stock responses.
“This music too intense for you?”
“No, it’s sick.”
“Sick?”
“Fuckin’ grand.”
“How fuckin’ grand?”
“Smoke some draw.”
“What were you thinking about?”
It was so intense, and erotic, the feeling that someone wanted to know exactly what was on his mind, to be so close to him as to tease out his unvoiced thoughts. Jesse felt that if he could speak his mind truly—if he had Owen’s mastery of language, given how he was able to command the attention of an audience at the Kingdom Hall, preaching pure bullshit—he would be able to make Owen fall in love with him immediately. It was Christmas night, and they were sessioning; neither of them was going to go out, or leave. The worst thing would be if one of them yawned off and went to bed. Without the other.
“I’m thinking about death.”
“That’ll be the music.”
“I’m thinking about what I used to believe, that everyone who didn’t dedicate themselves to the vindication of Jehovah’s Will would all die at Armageddon. Like you.” Jesse put a hand on Owen’s shoulder and let it drift across his back. “You’re a really nice person and you’ve been really kind to me. You’ve shown me more love in one day than my parents have in twenty years, but you’re the one who’s supposed to die, like everyone else who just so happens not to be a Jehovah’s Witness. You’re trying to be honest and not to live a lie, and they’re doing the exact opposite, strapping themselves down to a hope in a new and better world because they’re scared to live their own lives on their own terms.”
