A Better Class of Blond

by David Rees

  But one day I shall write a much better book. I have the experience; I have the language. I lack patience, the ability to reject ruthlessly, to rewrite and rewrite. It comes too easily and it’s too enjoyable. I finish a novel in six months that ought to take six years. I don’t let it grow. So what I want to say sticks out too baldly, doesn’t filter up from the depths. There aren’t enough layers.

  I’M NEGLECTING THIS JOURNAL—no time now I’m living at Katya’s, the weekends spent with Phil, reading for the book of essays I’m trying to write. And grading student papers. The boredom of that! Today we have grading of papers. Phil was here last night to dinner, to meet Katya. To prove good meals come from England I cook roast beef, but it isn’t impressive. The Yorkshire pudding stubbornly refuses to rise.

  A tremendous storm in the night. Heavy drenching rain, and a gale so strong the roots of the house move. I’m awake at five, listening. Or was it indigestion that disturbed me? I’m drinking too much white wine these days, and my stomach rebels. Phil sleeps through the storm, but uneasily; he turns, groping for my hand. Am I in his dream? At six Katya gets up, bangs windows shut, and goes to the kitchen to wash, noisily, last night’s plates. She went to bed very early: leaving the lovers alone? It wasn’t necessary. I think she didn’t like Phil. Or … is she, too, sexually attracted? And therefore jealous? Maybe because it’s happened once, I now see it where it is not. But when I told Sarah I was moving in here, she said, with a funny little smirk, “That had better work out!” I didn’t understand, and Katya, when I told her, said “Is that right? Whatever did she mean?” I don’t want, a second time and so soon, to fall victim to another’s jealousy: to take on the role of Joseph Andrews. Where are the uncomplicated friendships gay men have with women? Not to worry: when I’ve gone they’ll settle back once more into the friendships they had with each other, Katya each day from March to November in Harriet’s swimming pool.

  And I will soon be gone. Phil and I have decided to look for an apartment in San Francisco, despite the inconvenience for me of the miles from work. In the big city we’re happy; can be ourselves if we’re not too far from Castro. I could write about the pleasures of last weekend, but I’d only be repeating myself: screwing, meals out, a film. A Britten concert: something very civilised about being in a warm church listening to the delicious clashing sounds of the Missa Brevis and the Lachrymae. Outside the sun shone, as it did all weekend, giving Sin City that appearance of looking, despite the chill winter wind, not far short of paradise.

  The better class of blond, I have to report in the fall of 1982, is Vietnamese: an olive-skinned man with jet black hair who loves being fucked and who has a cock so attractive I can’t keep my hands and mouth off it.

  It is all moving too quickly.

  AIMEZ-VOUS BRAHMS? The chamber music, yes; but not the symphonies. Musical to the finger-tips, structures as solid as buildings,, the ability to pull a tune out of hints and fragments, a tune you didn’t realize, previously, was there. But the sempre dolce cantabile and the thick muddy orchestration pall. He can never write anything fast. I’ve just been listening to the second symphony; the finale sounds like woolly mammoths trying to copulate: their sheer bulk stops them coming.

  PHIL AND I GENTLY DRUNK, on pina colada at Dennis and Paul’s. Brunch at Maggie’s on 24th. Making love. A game of bridge with six other men and Katya.

  “Slow is best; slower is better,” she says of me and Phil. “Festina lente. Is he pompous? Lacking a sense of humour?” No. Definitely not. Castro shops now full of Christmas gaudiness: nude men on wrapping paper; soap stamped GAY BAR or shaped like cocks; mugs, tea-cloths, shirts with slogans, innuendoes, invitations. Lohengrin at San Francisco Opera: production, costumes, orchestral playing, singing excellent. Driving down the Junipero Serra on Monday morning, late for work.

  That was my weekend.

  A CARAFE OF WINE WITH JULIAN. A worrier, and always the fall guy, now fretting himself silly from reading about AIDS. He asks me for every minute detail of my illness; says I should check with the AIDS specialists in San Francisco that my immune system has not been radically altered. He wants to go to the baths, but daren’t. More likely to get the clap, I tell him, but he’s not reassured: gonorrhoea you can deal with; AIDS is another matter entirely. True. We swap details of memorable bath-house sex; both of us, for different reasons, wistful, as if we’ll not do it again.

  We talk about Katya. She’s lonely, he emphasizes; I’ve become a surrogate husband. No surprise she doesn’t like Phil— he means the end of my stay at her house. It’s not sexual her interest in me—the company is what she values. And the help with gadgets—her left hand was permanently damaged in an accident.

  He’s right. Once more.

  NOT A WORD FROM SPEARFISH for nearly a month, and I don’t know the Omaha address. Perhaps he’s found a lover. Is his father dead? On the road back to health? I still want to meet Gary. At least have one night with him.

  THANKSGIVING. At Phil’s, but not spending the day together; we both have prior arrangements that are too complex to change. So, on a morning of heat and sunshine like summer (it’s difficult to imagine this is the last Thurday in November) I’m returning to Los Gatos for dinner with Katya, her seven children and their lovers/husbands/wives. Tonight they will all be in a row of sleeping-bags across the lounge floor. I’m not fond of turkey, but this is one of the best I’ve tasted, and the cranberry sauce—home-made, the fruit fresh-picked—is superb. A battery of vegetables. I try not to eat too much, for I have another Thanksgiving dinner this evening with my students.

  A second turkey! A second battery of vegetables! I look at this meal without enthusiasm—but I manage. I skip the pumpkin pie and toy with a rich chocolate dessert. I’ve been drinking since noon, and now it’s midnight. Beer, wine, vodka. But I seem clear-headed as I drive back to San Francisco; the food must have soaked it all up. My stomach, however, is distended, a football.

  And Phil is not in, though he said he’d be home hours before me. I have no key: Matt is in New Jersey and Robert at his mother’s, so I sit in the car becoming increasingly worried— arrested for drunk driving? Asleep somewhere, incapable because of the booze? Killed in a crash? One a.m.: I drive along Dolores, but I don’t know the number of the house where he’s feasting. I search—without success—for his car. Back to the flat. Two a.m. It looks as if I’ll be out of doors all night. But Robert comes home (with a man) at 2.30: I can now get warm and sleep in a bed. Has he seen or heard anything of Phil? “Oh, he’s OK,” Robert tells me. “Been drinking, of course. He’s taking a breath of fresh air—we were in a bar on Castro. ”

  I feel very angry. How inconsiderate! A few minutes later he arrives, reeking of alcohol and grinning foolishly. Endless I’m sorrys and kisses I can’t respond to. Then “I’ve brought someone back. Is it OK if he comes to bed with us?” We’ve not talked about three-ways, though we’ve said that when we’re apart we have sex with other men. I’m astonished: I wouldn’t have brought a guy home without discussing the matter first.

  An Australian, Bruce—would you believe? I watch him take off his clothes. A well-built hunk, suntanned, with a broad, very hairy chest and a massive cock. Just looking at him I’m upright. Three-way kisses—deliciously erotic. Phil has drunk too much and can’t get it hard; I climb over him to the Australian. “David doesn’t seem to mind at all!” Phil says. Not only surprise in his voice—a certain plaintiveness. The Australian fucks him; I fuck the Australian. Afterwards, stroking each other’s cocks and gently kissing, our skins sticky with sweat, KY, sperm, I think what an international occasion this is— Vietnam, Australia and Britain all in one bed. Drifting towards sleep, it occurs to me that if our presidents and prime ministers allowed themselves to do this there might be no more wars. . ,.Ronald, Leonid, Maggie …

  Often in the past I’ve bottled up annoyance with a lover, sulked for ages, and it ruined our sex life, ruined everything, left me finally furious with myself because it was so difficult to s
nap out of it. But on this occasion … my anger with Phil has completely disappeared.

  SHOPPING DOWNTOWN, tea and cakes in a café on Balboa, in Ghirardelli Square to see Christmas lights switched on, a juggler entertaining a crowd: San Francisco street life, Thanksgiving weekend.

  How beautiful he is.

  WITH MATT AWAY AND ROBERT out most of the time—in South of Market bars or at his mother’s or Candlestick watching the Forty-niners ball-game—we have the apartment to ourselves. Which is very nice; there’s an extra warmth and intimacy between us as we cook dinner or lie on the sofa watching TV, a suggestion of what’s to come when we have our own place in January. Yet I find I’ve missed Matt this long weekend; I enjoy coffee with him in the early morning, Saturdays and Sundays while Phil sleeps in late, swopping details of what we’ve each been doing the past few days. It’s interesting to observe him and Robert in their home: I like to watch gay couples in the same space peaceably moving round one another, to speculate on why this picture was bought, which episode of their lives does that souvenir represent, and note who does what, enjoying the many significant differences between their life-styles and those of straight lovers, taking part in the easy conversations straights could never have. I want the same thing for myself; it’s been a two-year absence.

  Last November in Frankfurt I spent a few hours in the tiny flat Dieter and Fritz have shared for more than a decade. It was cluttered almost beyond belief with records and books and so many plants I thought I was inside a conservatory. Serious, gentle, kindly men. (With quite the largest feet I have ever seen.) Just watching them hurt. I wanted them to take me to bed: it didn’t happen. I’ve no idea if they indulged in three-ways, or, if they did, whether they would have wanted to with me. But unfulfilled sexual desire was not the cause of the hurt: I had a lover at the time, but we never lived together.

  A COLOSSAL STORM. Trees down everywhere: power-lines, telephone cables broken. Five cars at the university crushed by a eucalyptus. A DC7 on a runway at San Francisco airport is blown into the Bay; it sinks in mud. Snow on the roads through the sierras cuts us off from the world again. This winter is a freak, everyone says; rainfall, snowfall are four hundred per cent higher than average.

  VIII

  AN INTERVIEW in the San Francisco Chronicle with Edmund White, whose prose I much admire. One of the best of modern gay writers. He says he had sex with five hundred different men before he was sixteen, and some of it would be regarded as violent sex. I had it once before I was sixteen—in the lavatory at school, with a boy whose cock was so vast I could scarcely get my two little hands round it. And there was no violence: just a very satisfying mutual wank. I often wonder what happened to Richard Lee—I’d like to play with that phenomenon again, to make sure time and imagination haven’t played me false. It was a prodigy!

  I don’t envy Edmund White the fact that he had four hundred and ninety-nine more men than I did. How did he manage, in his schedule, to eat, sleep, go out with friends, finish his homework, talk to his family, and do the ordinary things that occupy the days of everyone, adolescent or otherwise? He must have been a specialist in only one area of life, and therefore tedious—as Tesman in Hedda Gabler, whose only interest was the industries of medieval Brabant, is tedious.

  I don’t think I’ve had five hundred men in all the years since sixteen, though it’s probably not far off that number. Some of that heaving and groaning bored me stiff—I mean unstiff. But there were times I’ve loved the marathon of ten hours or more in a bath-house.

  Five hundred men before the age of sixteen! But those publishers of young adult fiction, who blench at a manuscript in which a sixteen-year-old has a few naughty thoughts—let alone does it—should take note: teenagers do fuck, some of them repeatedly, and sometimes with their own sex. I’m no longer interested in writing young adult fiction—it’s the middle-class hypocrisy over matters sexual I can’t stand.

  MY MOTHER OCCASIONALLY writes to me. She will be eighty next week, and though she is very doddery now all her mental faculties are intact. I wish I could be close to her, share parts of my life as a straight son might with his mother. But my homosexuality is something she has never come to terms with—has never rejoiced at the pleasures and achievements of my gay existence, nor comforted me in its periods of trauma and misery. She’s missed out on so much—the enjoyment she could have got from knowing my lovers, for example. Every night she prays I’ll be cured. If she has to pray, why not ask that I’ll have a rewarding, contented life?

  I once asked if she would leave me in her will the portrait of my grandmother that hangs in her sitting-room. “I don’t know that Momma would want to see what goes on in your house,” she said. And “fight it, fight it,” she told me. “It’s evil. It only brings unhappiness.” To her, in effect.

  But her most recent letter is startling: she’d like to come out here for a holiday. I don’t think she has changed her attitudes at all; it’s because she’s extremely impressed with a few pages I wrote to her last month, trying to offer her some kind of comfort for the grief she still feels about my father’s death two years ago. She’d be very welcome. I could put away some of the visible evidence of gayness, I suppose; the porn calendar and the KY tube, the mug in the kitchen that has the words KISS ME, I’M GAY on its side. I wouldn’t want to. And I’ll be living with Phil and sharing a bed with him; and I won’t refuse to entertain our friends—she would have to accept all that. Probably see me touch him or kiss him.

  I will not pretend to be other than what I am for anybody. So I suppose she won’t come.

  THE SAN FRANCISCO BOARD OF SUPERVISORS (the city and county council) has given Scott Smith five thousand dollars because he was Harvey Milk’s “dependant”. (Harvey Milk was shot dead in his City Hall office in November 1978 by Dan White who, moments before, had killed the mayor, George Moscone.) This is the first time any city in the world has decided that the gay partner of one of its employees who has died should be treated in the same way as a bereaved husband or wife. Applause, applause. Muted applause—there are some odd features to this case. Only one supervisor voted against when the board made its decision; he said that it had not been proved that Smith was really a dependant, and that if he was he should have been awarded the full-amount of money usually given to such people—fifty thousand dollars; Milk and Smith ran a photographic shop on Castro; they were business partners—and ex-lovers. “Dependant”, therefore, is possibly not a strictly accurate definition of Smith’s status. But if the authorities choose to think it is, what right have they to conclude that a gay is worth ten times less, financially, than a straight?

  Milk’s lover, in fact, was a young man who committed suicide a short while before the killings: if he were alive, would the Board of Supervisors have given the money to him instead of Scott Smith?

  The annual ceremony to commemorate the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone was held last Saturday. We intended to go, but forgot. Quite inexcusable. Several thousand gay men and women, in sombre mood, marched from Castro to City Hall, each one holding a lighted candle. There is still a great deal of anger about the assassinations and the preposterous trial of Dan White, who will be out of jail early in 1984. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes: there is almost nowhere in the world he can hide.

  Castro’s public events aren’t all costume parades and celebrations, and it would be wrong if they were. Gay history is not exactly an uninterrupted chronicle of triumphs.

  I’M WRITING A PIECE on Virginia Hamilton for my book of essays on children’s authors: it’s evening; Katya is on the other side of the fire, sipping vodka and gazing absently into the flames. Sarah appears, not drunk, but she’s certainly been drinking. (Since lunch-time, she tells us. Brandy.) The reasons I had to leave—the sole reason, she repeats—is because I wouldn’t go to bed with Harriet. So Harriet turned nasty.

  I was right, then.

  She has made a decision. Or at least a decision to make a decision. To leave Harriet. Katya looks a
t me, eyes like saucers.

  The evening’s programme is abandoned (Katya and I were going out to a restaurant) and I cook steak, broccoli, tomatoes and mushrooms for the three of us. We drink till gone midnight. Does she want to talk to Katya in private? “No! If I’m going to talk to anyone, it will be to you.”

  Me? Why?

  She sobers up gradually, and we talk of other things—the university, books, politics. But keep returning to the one subject of interest—the breakdown of her relationship with Harriet. What do I do, she asks. Where do I begin? Resign from the university? Go back east? I was a social being once, she says. Now I’m not. And what chance is there of any relationship enduring? Name one you know of that really works. We do, but she dismisses them all. There’s a mild sort of violence in her tonight, turned in on herself because, I imagine, Harriet knows how to deflect her aggression. “How was Thanksgiving?” I ask. She ate two hot dogs and spent all day in her room.

  Eventually she disappears into the night.

  “Well …” Katya and I say to each other.

  IN CONTRAST: PHIL IN LOS GATOS. Walking in the mountains, dancing at Los Desperados, dinner at Cats, which, we learn, was a brothel in the nineteenth century and outside its doors are two huge stone cats. So both theories concerning the origin of the name “Los Gatos” are correct. It’s now a pleasant enough steak-house with country and western music. Saturday we drive over the mountains to San Gregorio: a day of bright sunshine and vivid fall leaves. A rushing ocean sweeping across smooth sand. No one else here. Back to Katya’s for a dinner party: a log fire, and her children have come to decorate the house for Christmas. A tree that touches the ceiling: coloured lights, tinsel.