The Devil Rides Out

by Paul O'Grady

  There was a group of queens from Leeds who lived in a big flat over a shop on the Holloway Road. They were notorious for throwing wild parties that invariably culminated in a mass orgy in the front bedroom and I recall one of them, Regina, drunkenly lurching around the landing, naked apart from a vest, screaming, ‘Have any of you bar-stards seen my jeans and a leather thong?’ I’d become friendly with Paul, known to the residents of the flat as ‘Joyce’, a nurse who worked in the special clinic at my old stomping ground, the Royal Northern Hospital. ‘You wouldn’t believe the amount of male genitalia that slips through my hands on a daily basis, luv,’ he’d say. He was easy-going and a lot of fun and, like the rest of us, no slouch when it came to having a good time.

  He was in the Cap that night and we stood together watching a particularly appalling mime act with a critical eye.

  ‘I could do better than that any day,’ I said for the umpteenth time as one of them launched into the ubiquitous knicker routine. Among other items, the artiste produced a dead plant from inside a pair of voluminous bloomers, to the strains of ‘I Never Promised You A Rose Garden’.

  ‘I know, luv,’ Joyce agreed. ‘A pile of crap and they’re earning good money for that. Do you know, a double act can earn thirty quid – that’s over a hundred quid each a week if you work every night.’

  ‘Really?’ The seed that had been planted long ago began to stir.

  ‘We should get an act together, we’d be brilliant. I love nursing but I fancy a change – and you should see me in drag.’

  I looked at Joyce doubtfully. He was broad-shouldered and what my ma would call big-boned and in no way feminine to look at. I tried to visualize him in drag.

  ‘Here, I’ll have you know that I look fabulous in a frock, luv. Better than half of this lot,’ Joyce boasted, indicating towards the stage. ‘I’ve always wanted to get an act together and go professional. So what d’ya reckon?’

  The seed was germinating at an alarming rate and was about to burst into full bloom.

  ‘Bugger it, why don’t we then,’ I said, suddenly getting very carried away with the idea. ‘What’s stopping us?’

  ‘Well, first we’ll have to find someone to make costumes.’

  ‘And cheaply,’ I butted in.

  ‘Because there’s no way I’m going on stage in public wearing charity-shop tat.’

  ‘I can do that,’ Chrissie piped up casually. ‘I can make costumes.’

  ‘You?’ Joyce and I sang out in unison.

  ‘For your information I served a five-year apprenticeship with a master tailor in Birkenhead,’ he said, adding grandly, ‘I am a couturier. One of the finest.’

  ‘What do you charge?’ I asked, hoping it wasn’t some astronomical figure that we couldn’t afford.

  ‘Well normally I’d be way out of your price range, but seeing as how you’re putting me up, I’ll do it in lieu of rent. Now get us a drink before I change my mind.’

  Chrissie was indeed a genius on a sewing machine. He was totally unique, a jack of all trades. Not only could he design, cut out and sew remarkable costumes, he was also a dab hand at covering a three-piece suite, painting and decorating, and could nick a packet of bacon from under the store detective’s nose in the Co-op before she had time to blink. In addition, as I was to find out over the years ahead, he was a highly complex character, as unpredictable as the weather, with quicksilver mood swings and the possessor of a viperous tongue that could cut you to the quick. Life with Chrissie around was certainly never dull and I knew within the first few days of our meeting that we would end up friends for life. He was funny, daring, loyal and capable of extreme kindness and bore with enormous courage the stinking, rotten illness that eventually carried him off. Remembering him now, vigorously slapping Oil of Ulay on his face in the mirror over the mantelpiece while getting ready to hit the Vauxhall Tavern for the night out, I really wish he was still around.

  ‘What are we going to call ourselves then?’ an excited Joyce asked.

  ‘How about “the Sisters” something?’

  ‘How about the Sisters Shite? Is anyone going to the bar then?’

  ‘How about the Glamazons?’ I suggested, recalling the name of a troupe of extremely tall Ziegfeld Follies showgirls I’d seen in a book.

  ‘The Glamazons?’ I could see Joyce mulling the name over in his mind. ‘The Glamazons? Ooh, I’m not sure, luv.’

  ‘Well we’re both tall, hence the Amazon bit.’

  ‘Aye, but who’s to say we’ll be glamorous?’

  ‘You will be once I’ve finished with you,’ Chrissie said, finishing off what was left of his pint. ‘That’s if one of you tight bitches buys me a bleedin’ drink.’

  ‘All right then, Glamazons it is, luv. Now what we having?’

  The next day was Lesbian and Gay Pride, or just plain Gay Pride as it was known back then, and Vera, Joyce and I were on the float that belonged to Zipper, the gay bookshop that Kate and I had wandered into many moons ago. It had rapidly expanded and metamorphosed into a successful enterprise.

  Also on the Zipper float was Reg, who had broken his leg at the Alexandra Palace Drag Ball. Having had more than a few large brandies, he’d fallen off one of his stilettos as he was leaving and consequently was in a hip-to-ankle plaster cast. It was a bit of a performance getting him on the back of the lorry and even trickier getting him off it at the other end after he’d consumed the best part of a bottle of vodka en route.

  In those days Gay Pride wasn’t the big corporate affair that it is today. Even so, there was still a big turnout for the march through London to the rally in Hyde Park. There was a lot of abuse from Christian groups and gangs of yobs as we passed by. I remember a bus driver, his face contorted with hate-fuelled rage, shouting from his cabin, ‘You all want gassing, you dirty bastards.’

  ‘God bless the queens, darling,’ Reg calmly replied, toasting him with a can of warm Budweiser. ‘And fuck you!’

  None of us was shy in telling our detractors just where to get off and we all gave as good as we got, and for every homophobic heckler it was heartwarming to see that there were just as many sympathetic supporters happy to cheer us on. It was exhilarating hanging on to the back of that lorry. There was a real sense of freedom and, above all, defiance in the air as the various tribes of gay men and women from all over the country gathered together to let the world know that ‘We’re here. We’re queer. And we’re not going shopping!’. The loudspeaker on our float belted out ‘Y.M.C.A.’, a song that I loathed, but in this instance I happily gyrated along to it with the rest, not caring for once what anyone thought.

  A rather worthy journalist ran up to our float with his tape recorder.

  ‘I’m with BBC Radio Four,’ he said, holding his mike up to Joyce. ‘What do you think of Jeremy Thorpe?’

  The former leader of the Liberal Party had recently been on trial at the Old Bailey, charged with the attempted murder of a former male lover. (The jury later acquitted him.) The press had had a field day and it was still a much-discussed topic.

  ‘As a gay man,’ the journalist panted as he ran alongside our float, ‘how do you feel about Mr Thorpe?’

  ‘She’s all right, luv,’ Joyce replied deadpan, ‘but I wouldn’t turn me back on her.’

  That night at the Cap, Joyce, who by now was also working part-time behind the bar, told Babs that we were getting an act together. Her immediate response was to offer us a booking, act unseen, on the forthcoming Bank Holiday Monday afternoon.

  ‘Thirty quid,’ she said. ‘Two twenty-minute spots, that’s if you can get it together in time.’

  ‘Oh don’t worry, we will, Babs, we will,’ I promised, my mind going into overdrive. I was determined that come August the Glamazons would have some form of act, conveniently ignoring the fact that for the next three weeks I’d be out of action as I cared for Maura’s ‘nice owd fellah’. Never mind, I told myself, I’d use any spare time to plan and devise an innovative act, the like of which was going to s
lay the punters of the Black Cap.

  Maura had lied when she described Mr Pantucci as ‘big’. He was a Goliath and, despite a pronounced stoop, he towered over me.

  ‘This is Paul. He’s going to look after you for a little while,’ his wife was telling him, rubbing his arm encouragingly and trying to sound enthusiastic. ‘Say hello to him then, dear.’

  Mr Pantucci, glowering angrily, lunged towards me and grabbed me by the throat, shaking me like a rag doll.

  ‘No, dear.’ His wife gently rebuked him as if talking to a small child, prising his fingers from around my neck. ‘That’s not how we behave towards guests, is it?’

  Three weeks of this. Jesus, I’d be lucky to survive.

  ‘He’s really very gentle once he gets to know you,’ Mrs Pantucci tried unconvincingly to reassure me. ‘He’s a big pussycat, honestly.’

  Yeah, a sabre-toothed tiger.

  ‘The district nurse comes every morning to help wash and dress him and then again in the evening to help you put him to bed. Oh, and speaking of bed, my husband is inclined to get up and wander during the night so I’m afraid you’ll have to sleep in the same room as him. You’ll find a cot bed next to his. You don’t mind, do you?’

  Maura suddenly became very preoccupied with a print of Mozart hanging on the wall. I did mind but given the circumstances I had no choice but to agree.

  The wife’s unwillingness to leave her husband in the hands of a stranger was touching, despite her obvious need for respite from caring for a man with advanced dementia twenty-four hours a day. She was tearful when we finally persuaded her to go, reluctantly getting in the taxi with a worried expression on her face.

  ‘You will take good care of him, won’t you?’ she pleaded anxiously. ‘He really is a dear, we’ve never been apart for this long since the day we got married and I’m loath to leave him. I wouldn’t dream of it ordinarily, it’s just that I’m a bit tired. You do understand, don’t you?’

  A bit tired? That was an understatement. She was exhausted and deserved a medal, let alone a temporary break. Her frail exterior belied the fact that underneath lay a woman of steel, determined to continue to provide the best care she could manage for her husband, despite herself being on the verge of collapse from nervous exhaustion. I tried to put her mind at ease by giving the impression that she was leaving her spouse in the hands of a seasoned professional, and with a sinking heart waved her off for a well-deserved rest at her sister’s in Bournemouth.

  ‘OK then, Mr Pantucci,’ I said, returning to the front room and trying to sound cheery. ‘What would you like for your lunch?’

  ‘GET OUT!’ he shouted, hurling a telephone directly at me but thankfully missing.

  ‘Good luck,’ Maura said, smartly stepping into the hall out of harm’s way and making for the front door. ‘If you need anything, just call the office.’

  I wondered what were the chances of ‘the office’ supplying me with a straitjacket and some horse tranquillizer as I watched her close the door behind her, leaving me alone to face a furious Mr Pantucci.

  ‘Would you like a nice cup of tea?’ I announced in my phoney cheery voice.

  ‘Bugger off!’ he roared, scattering a pile of ancient Radio Times magazines in my direction. ‘And take that bloody dog with you.’ Oh dear, as well as Mr Pantucci to deal with there was an imaginary dog to walk.

  ‘OK,’ I said, beating a hasty retreat to the kitchen. ‘I’ll just put him in the back yard.’

  This was going to be fun.

  The worst aspect of being a carer is the solitude. Apart from visits from the district nurses and the home help, who tidied up and did the shopping, I saw no one. For three weeks I never left the flat and at times the loneliness was crippling, particularly in the early hours of the morning when I sat listening to the shipping forecast on the radio after I’d finally managed to get Mr Pantucci off to sleep. There was a framed photograph on the mantelpiece of a handsome young army officer astride a horse, smiling proudly at the camera, and it was hard to connect this vital young man with the decaying old ruin fighting the demons that had invaded his mind alone in the dark next door. In those gloomy moments I wondered what would become of me, and the unstoppable tide of advancing years and the inevitable afflictions that came with it made me question my own mortality.

  While I bent over to feed Mr Pantucci his dinner one evening he took me unawares, catching me in a powerful headlock, pulling me down and submerging my face in a bowl of tomato soup on the tray on his lap. I really thought my time was up and that I would drown or at the least end up with a broken nose. ‘What an ignominious end to a life not yet fulfilled,’ I could hear Maura telling the police as she identified my body the next day. ‘Drowned in a bowl of soup.’

  Thankfully his grip slackened after a while and I was able to wriggle free but it was a long time before I was able to face tomato soup again.

  The cot bed that I slept on was pushed close to Mr Pantucci’s bed because of the limited space in the cramped little bedroom, and a good night’s sleep became nothing but a distant memory. During the spasmodic moments when he actually slept he snored like a bear, breaking off to have a rant every now and then. Once I was woken by the sensation of warm water running across my face. Happily dreaming that I was having my hair washed, I was content to lie there until it suddenly dawned on me that my dream was in fact reality.

  I opened my eyes and there in the half-light was Mr Pantucci standing over me, his striped pyjama bottoms around his ankles, his ageing testicles swinging like two golf balls in an old sock, peeing all over me.

  Occasionally, as we sat listening to one of his favourite concertos on the coffin-sized radiogram in the living room, there would be moments of lucidity when he would regain control over his mind. ‘Please forgive me,’ he’d beg, appealing to me with sad eyes, ‘I can’t help myself.’ It was heartbreaking.

  Mrs Pantucci rang me nearly every night to see how we were getting on, concerned about the husband she obviously sorely missed. Desperate as I was to get home myself, I’d nevertheless convince her that everything was running smoothly and that she should stop worrying and enjoy her rest, otherwise what was the point of the exercise?

  Glancing through a Sunday tabloid that the home help had left one morning, I was shocked to see a double-page exposé of Rowena Switzer’s escort agency. A journalist, passing herself off as a potential escort, had infiltrated the agency, befriending the girls and even going out on a couple of dates. It was all there, a highly dramatized account of ‘The Sordid Prostitution Racket on Park Lane!’ and because of this woman’s handiwork Rowena and a lot of the girls, Amy included, had been arrested and the agency closed down. Reading the journalist’s story, I came to the conclusion that the girls who worked for Rowena were infinitely more honourable and decent than the woman who worked for this Sunday paper.

  When the three weeks were finally up and Mrs Pantucci came home, I ran down Abbey Road with the sheer exuberance of any creature that has been freed from captivity and released into the wild. But the experience of caring for Mr Pantucci left me with a profound respect for all full-time carers. All too frequently they are conveniently neglected by the system and left to ‘get on with it’, regardless of age or capability. I went straight from this job to a week in a caravan park in Great Yarmouth with a group of Peripatetics and an assortment of underprivileged kids. I had seven little Asian boys in my care and I recall that we all had a whale of a time. However, I was also starting to panic that our act would never be ready for Bank Holiday Monday.

  ‘You can’t beat a good shite first thing of a morning,’ Chrissie declared, waltzing out of the bathroom and into the kitchen. ‘I feel like I’ve shed ten pounds.’

  Vera, who was in the process of taking a bite out of a slice of toast that he’d just dipped into the runny yolk of his fried egg, started to retch violently.

  ‘I’d leave it for half an hour before you go in there,’ Chrissie said wickedly as Vera ran past him and into
the toilet to vomit. ‘That kebab I had last night must’ve been off.’

  Perversely, the sound of Vera vomiting has always made me laugh. Chrissie, knowing this, did his best to set Vera off every morning, even going so far on one occasion as to serve up a cat turd studded with bay leaves on a saucer for breakfast. It wasn’t hard to make Vera sick, the sound of me gagging as I cleaned my teeth was enough to have him projectile vomiting.

  ‘Oh well,’ Chrissie said, helping himself to Vera’s breakfast, ‘I suppose I’d better get on that sewing machine and run up another incredible creation. You better get yourself into town. I need lining material, some more of that white fringing and fabric for those flapper outfits.’

  ‘How many yards shall I get?’ I asked.

  ‘Depending on the width, I’d say you’ll need about three,’ Chrissie said, running an experienced eye over me.

  ‘What about Joyce?’

  ‘Oh, at least ten. She’s bigger than you, particularly around the back.’

  ‘Ten? She’s not that big.’

  ‘She’s getting there though.’ Chrissie loved to tease Joyce about his weight. ‘No, get four yards for Joyce, that should do it. Oh and don’t forget the zips. Metal ones only please, not those useless plastic things. My costumes are couture and when that Regina Fong gets a load of them she’s going to have a thromby. Vera, get out of that lav, your cup of tea’s getting cold.’

  My first port of call was 58 Dean Street, W1, a record shop that specialized in the more obscure soundtracks to films and shows – at a price. It was managed by a wily old queen called Derek, who had the uncanny knack of parting you from substantial amounts of money by screaming, ‘Have I got something for you?’ and disappearing through the beaded curtain into the back of the shop, to emerge with an LP which he’d clutch to his chest as if it were a sacred relic.

  ‘There is the most fabulous track on here that’s very you, darling,’ he’d say tantalizingly. ‘No one will have heard it before, and certainly no other queen will be doing it. Shall I pop it on for you so you can have a listen?’