by David Rees
Sex leaves me still on a high: to be fucked by a man as beautiful and as good at it as this one is just leaves me feeling … privileged. Next week he’ll have gone south; and I don’t suppose I shall ever see him again. But that doesn’t destroy my mood.
Harriet brings me down to earth. What’s the point of it all, she asks. Gay Games, what do you hope to achieve? Aren’t there I any gay people in the real Olympics? I try to tell her, but it’s useless. And she spends nearly every night in bed with someone of her own sex!
LOS GATOS IS SPANISH for the cats. Why, I ask, give a place such a strange name? Because, Harriet says, to service the prospectors in the Gold Rush days, the biggest cat-house in the West was built here. It’s as likely a story as her drunk monks. The oldest house in town, Sarah tells me, has two big stone cats at its gates—hence Los Gatos.
The heat disturbs my nights. A hundred degrees at noon yesterday—OK. But bad dreams wake me in the small hours. Or is it mosquitoes, or because the other half of the bed is empty? I listen to the far-off barking of dogs, and return to sleep only by wrapping my arms and legs round pillows, thinking blond.
Gary calls and invites me to Spearfish for Thanksgiving. Ten weeks away. I am definitely one of his long-term options, he says. The others aren’t men—they’re places and jobs. I could be someone by a road-sign at which he pauses, he tells me, but perhaps we’ll travel together. Women in the last century answered advertisements for marriage in Australia, sailed out there and lived happily ever after.
Three in the morning. Crickets. There’s a strong wind tonight, but it brings no lessening of the heat. The wood of the house groans, snaps like gunshots. An earth tremor?
THE BATHS. The Watergarden, San José, to be precise, dearer than most similar establishments, but very de luxe. Some very de luxe men, too. I’ve been often recently because there are always attractive bodies who want to be screwed rigid—into the floor, as they say. Some quite splendidly expert Vietnamese kids. We have more choice than straights when it comes to what we do in bed—one of the bonuses of being gay is the variety of roles we can assume. It’s possible, of course, for a woman to make love with a man aggressively, for the man to be led the whole time, but we can move further, from the most macho games to complete passivity—and all the different fulfilments in between. The straight guy knows none of the delights of being penetrated. Manhandled. I’ve enjoyed being screwed quite savagely at times, and the bigger the cock the bigger the challenge, the excitement—though gargantua does not necessarily provide the ultimate in bliss. I had a relationship that lasted seven years, and in bed he wanted to do little else than fuck. Whatever satisfaction—emotional and physical—it gave me, I was not doing what I wanted most of all, which is to screw. That imbalance contributed to the downfall of things. For me, the most pleasure and what leaves me feeling a hundred per cent sane, whole, and good to be alive, is when he is on his back and my cock is inside him, particularly if he is slim, bond, youthful and masculine, lets me be quite rough with my teeth on his neck, wants my hand to twist his nipples till they hurt, while my other hand, KY slippery, manipulates his cock. And if the cock isn’t too small. And orgasm is more or less simultaneous … a lot of ifs!
He has to be male male: an effeminate man gives me instant limpness. It’s not the buns that turn me on, though that’s where my cock wants to go, and they can be aesthetically beautiful. It’s the maleness of shoulder-blades, biceps that curve impressively, chest and thigh muscles that are the result of strenuous physical exercise: that’s when I start getting hard. I can’t imagine, now, the pleasure of penetrating a woman. All that softness. And no cock. It would be a totally alien landscape.
TO LOS DESPERADOS, the local gay disco. I sense at once that this isn’t cruising ground, let alone where I’ll find undying love; the problem is everybody knows everybody else. Your friendly neighbourhood gay bar … the one that has no time for strangers. They’re all with their own crowd. If this was Salt Lake City, I’d be in the middle of three conversations at once; the bars there don’t see a tourist in a hundred years. Well, that has been my experience. But Los Gatos is not in Utah, not quite so remote and certainly not Mormonized; it’s on the edge of a conurbation of nearly a million people, and San Francisco is an easy drive up the Peninsula. Los Desperados (far from desperate) is much like some of the clubs and discos in English provincial towns—good music, nice kids, pleasant decor—and cliquey. I leave after an hour or so, not having spoken to a soul.
COMMOTION AT 4 a.m.—we’re torn from sleep by the sounds of bodies plunging into the swimming pool. The dog is barking her head off. It may not mean that violent urban America has at last come to destroy Los Gatos, but it’s undoubtedly an intruder. A very dark night; none of us feels we want to rush outside and make a citizen’s arrest.
“Goddam teenage kids,” Harriet says, and phones the police. Who arrive with incredible speed—in about three minutes. A car must have been patrolling down a road nearby. The two cops advance stealthily on the pool, waving guns and flashlights and shouting “Come on out of there at once!”
Our felons are a family of racoons.
Laughter, apologies, coffee all round, and back to bed.
NOT BECAUSE I SUSPECT I’ve caught something, but after all my recent escapades I think a check-up is a good idea. The only venereal disease I’ve ever had is NSU-—I’ve been lucky. Notoriously difficult to diagnose and cure, NSU: the symptoms are so mild. Is this slight burning another attack—or my imagination? Is that a discharge—or sperm from last night’s sex?
I go to the Santa Clara Health Clinic, where I pay the required six dollars and fill up a long form that wants information about symptoms, what kind of sex I’ve had recently—gay or straight, oral or rectal, and so on—and partners (not much I can disclose: at the baths one rarely exchanges addresses and phone numbers, and I wouldn’t know how to spell those Vietnamese names). Unlike England, it’s mixed: there are no separate times for men and for women. But the crowd looks much like the crowd you’d find in any VD queue back home—that sounds ridiculous, but I’m sure there are various types of people you don’t see in a special clinic; therefore some types you do: in my experience, amazingly dishy young men.
I’m interviewed at great length by a nice elderly woman clerk, who takes a blood sample and informs me that the clinic only treats, in its six-dollar fee, cases of gonorrhoea and syphilis: other venereal conditions are casualties of Reaganomics. I feel outraged. It’s as if the government has said to the germs “Go forth and multiply.” They presumably do.
I get passed on to the doctor, and perform the customary rituals—peeing in bottles, etcetera. There is no instant treatment here: the lab takes two days to analyse the specimens. They’ll phone me on Wednesday if there’s anything wrong. If I have NSU they’ll tell me, but I’ll have to pay extra for the antibiotics.
I have nothing.
JULIAN IS CHARGED with drunk driving. No bag of crystals in America: it’s a blood test and he’s sure he’s not guilty—just two glasses of beer a couple of hours before the incident. The police saw him drive away without lights from a restaurant; he’d gone only one block when he remembered to switch them on, but it was already too late.
Why record this? I don’t like the police anywhere. If they suspect you of an offence of any sort, they are extremely unpleasant, the British as much as all the others. But—in the Land of the Free—was it necessary to point guns at this mild, middle-aged university professor, handcuff him, verbally abuse him, hold him in jail overnight, take away his medicines (he’s had a heart attack), and not let him know the result of the blood test so he can’t tell how he should plead when the case comes up?
V
MONDAY MORNING, at work feeling as if I’m suffering from a bad hangover. Which is odd as I haven’t been drinking. Tuesday afternoon, and my temperature is a hundred and two. Thursday evening I’m in hospital, having a lumbar puncture for suspected meningitis.
It isn’t bacterial me
ningitis, but there’s more than twice as much protein in my body as there should be. Jesus, am I ill! Unless I lie absolutely prone, I have a crippling headache. I vomit all over the neurologist’s office. Then I’m sent to an isolation ward, where I’m drip-fed intravenously, a process that almost drives me to tears of frustration and anger—I cannot go to the loo without lugging this cumbersome machine with me, and it wakes me frequently at night, urging me to pee. I feel I’m a lavatory, being constantly flushed.
Light hurts. My temperature is a hundred and two for a whole week. Food is disgusting. Being pushed in a wheelchair makes me dizzy and sick, as if I’m in an aeroplane, spinning out of control. I’m not allowed to have any visitors. I’m given a brain scan, a chest X-ray, an EEG; innumerable blood samples are taken and analysed. The white corpuscle count is extremely low, and I’ve virtually stopped manufacturing platelets. A haematologist is called in. He diagnoses leukopenia (destruction of the leukocytes) and thrombocytopenia (inability of the blood to clot properly). There is also an excessive production of lymphocytes, some of them “bizarre”, and a poor sedimentation rate. I don’t know what all this means—except that my immune system is taking a battering from something very nasty.
The neurologist rules out brain tumours, lung cancer, diabetes and half a dozen other horrors, but he isn’t really sure what is wrong with me. He thinks it is a flu virus that is, he says, “behaving unusually.” He prescribes no medicines, not even to get the temperature down. But it does drop at last; I gradually recover and I’m sent home. I don’t remember much of the ordeal, in particular how time has passed while I have been lying there. They’ve given me tylenol as a leaving present, for the headaches, which persist for several days. The newspapers are full of the tylenol-cyanide murders. (Someone, last month, put a number of tylenol—codeine—tablets, laced with cyanide, in Johnson and Johnson bottles and left them on the shelves of drug stores in Chicago. Seven people have died.)
The fever has gone, but I’m far from well. It’s a weird condition, difficult to describe; the haematologist calls it fugue, but the neurologist says it can’t be, as fugue means a severe memory loss. My senses seem to be dislocated. Taste and smell have returned to normal; I can bear kitchen and bathroom odours; and I have a positively gluttonous desire for bacon and eggs. How delicious my breakfasts have become! I don’t usually enjoy a morning fry-up, though Ulrich and I sometimes had one at weekends; now, every day, bacon and eggs—and my pleasure in this is almost orgasmic. Harriet and Sarah invite me one evening to eat roast lamb with them, and I have four, five, greedy helpings; I could go on stuffing myself with it all night.
Balance, hearing, touch, eyesight are wrong. Everything I know to be flat slopes. Hearing—not so bad, but a symphony orchestra on the radio is a harsh, confused jangling. Touch—I have no urge whatsoever for sex. I masturbate once, just to make sure I still can, but there’s no pleasure in it. Worst affected are the eyes. It’s as if there is a veil or some kind of ectoplasm between me and everything, or Sylvia Plath’s invisible bell-jar were incarcerating me. Some times are really bad—the landscape can dissolve in yellow dots, as it does when one faints. But I know I’m not going to faint.
Obviously I can’t drive the car. I’m off work, more or less indefinitely: “Have another two weeks’ rest,” says the neurologist. “Do what you feel you can do.” Days pass. Weeks. Moments of panic—I’ll never be well again. I read, and write, for my book on children’s authors, though I seem to have lost a sense of judgement, too. What are these essays on Jane Langton and Katherine Paterson worth? I don’t know.
Ulrich sends flowers, “Get better soon. Missing you very much.”
The weather saves me from almost crushing depression. Seventy, seventy-five degrees, cloudless, golden fall light; it’s October, but feels as if we were living in perpetual September. I walk each morning and afternoon in the mountains and find, as with the bacon and eggs, that I need this weather, this landscape, almost sensually—the light, the leaves, the parched grasses, the skies, the huge vistas down to the Bay.
It’s a month since I came out of hospital, and I’m still unfit. Bills from the doctors arrive with every post—thank God I’m insured; the brain scan alone cost four hundred and fifty dollars. I don’t detect a great many differences between our socialist and their capitalist medicine, except cost. The treatment, the care and attention, the food, are about the same. Maybe, initially, you’ll get seen more quickly here; I don’t know, as I’ve never been an emergency case in England. I’m not sure how necessary all those tests were. In England, I imagine, the minimum would be done; here, as the patient pays rather than the state, the doctors perhaps do things our doctors would not. There’s a lot of snobbery attached to American medicine— a great deal of money goes on plush offices (“suites” they’re called) with sofas and potted plants all over the place, on immaculate headed writing paper, on clerical staff sending out bills.
I’ve got used to not working. To solitude. Bacon and eggs, this weather, are enough. As for that better class of blond: Gary writes and phones. So do Ulrich and Andy, but separation from them doesn’t bother me. I’m more concerned with getting myself well—being unfugued. I’m zonked, exhausted, drained.
A MEETING OF GAY STUDENTS at the university. I feel distinctly uncomfortable because I’m not sure, being faculty, if I ought to be here, and nobody has said “Hi!” or “Who are you?” or “Come on in.” In fact I’m ignored totally: very un-American—Americans are usually much more welcoming and friendly than we are. I course could talk to them—but I’m so shaky I’m incapable of getting up from the cushions on which I’ve seated myself. Just driving the car ten miles has, for the moment, sapped all my energy.
But I must be improving. On the way home I want sex and spend some time at the Watergarden with a very satisfactory young body, firm and fit. One more slim Vietnamese boy.
So two gay events within a few hours of each other, and at neither have I spoken a word. I am not just an ageing face; I am not just a certain size of cock that likes to fuck rather roughly. I am these things, but more than these things. Gays can be guilty of synecdoche—or is it metonymy? I’m never sure of the difference. I’m referring to those figures of speech in which the part stands for the whole; “Give us this day our daily bread”: bread means all our food, not just bread. If our search for the part— the big cock, the unlined face—becomes paramount, we can end up using only bits of ourselves, never being able to relate to the complexities of real people. And we then ossify. Become a living fragment of bone.
That “very satisfactory young body, firm and fit” and the “ageing face” also needed to talk, to go out to dinner, listen to a symphony concert… whatever. Anything rather than silence. I’m lonely tonight, and wish I were back in England, among friends.
A YOUNG MAN, A CAR MECHANIC, is stopped by the police because his tail-light is not working.
“Shit! And I’ve only just mended it,” he says.
The cop obligingly holds a torch while the guy fiddles with the wires, then suddenly the cop starts viciously beating him over the head with the torch, yelling “Where’s the gun? Come on, where’s the gun?”
The car mechanic, head streaming with blood, says “There is no gun!”
And indeed there is not. The policeman apologises and drives off.
TROUBLE BETWEEN HARRIET AND SARAH, stemming, as I think it usually does, from Harriet’s bisexuality. In Greece this summer she met a man, Konstantin, who is now staying at the house—Sarah is not thrilled. “There are ways of coping with jealousy,” she says. “You don’t own someone else’s body.” But when she and Harriet think they’re alone, you can hear them from the street, screaming and bawling at each other.
I don’t blame Sarah one bit. Katya, who lives just round the corner and is a friend of both women, asks me what’s going on. My opinion is the same as hers—open relationships are fine if the people concerned want that; but if one does and the other does not, then the person who s
crews around ought to be rather more discreet than Harriet is being. Katya and I admit, laughing—because it isn’t totally logical—that we’re envious of Harriet. Why should she have two lovers when we have none? We know, of course, only too well the longueurs of steady affairs; how much in Harriet’s situation we might want excitement on the side, and—in contrast—how awful it can be if one’s partner is doing it.
Katya, after two marriages and seven children, has been alone for eighteen months. She’s forty-nine, Russian, very sympathetic. “If he presented himself at my door with all the right credentials,” she, says, “I’d let him in. But I can’t be bothered to go out and look. Not now. ” She sips her vodka, and gazes at the distant mountains. “Actually I don’t think I want another man,” she continues. “I’d prefer a woman.” More gentleness possibly; more stability. Is that why? She’s never had a lesbian relationship. “I miss sex,” she says. “But not so much as curling up with someone in bed.”
Eventually Konstantin departs. Maybe things will settle down, but Sarah and Harriet are not speaking to each other.
TWO LONG ARTICLES in the San Francisco Chronicle on AIDS, and a poll on whether the current scares about sexually transmitted diseases are causing gay men to change their life-styles. The fact that a hitherto unknown virus may be causing the collapse of the body’s ability to deal with certain rare secondary infections—chiefly fungal conditions, Kaposi’s sarcoma, pneumocystis carinii, and toxoplasmosis—which almost inevitably lead to death, is only now beginning to worry people. But what makes the immune system lose its ability to fight? Prime suspects are the herpes viruses. Hepatitis B is another possibility. Also the life-styles of the victims—men who frequently take poppers, cocaine and amphetamines, and who are sexually very promiscuous. The articles do not mention, however, that all known deaths from AIDS-related diseases, with three exceptions, have occurred in the United States. Some gay men in other countries also sniff poppers, Sleep around, and are hepatitis sufferers. So far they have mysteriously escaped.
