A Better Class of Blond

by David Rees

  But the Townes Pass through the Panamints is gentle and, if there were no road, if one were on foot, it would be easy enough to traverse. I say that because in 1849 a party of gold-seekers, coming from Utah and looking for a short cut, entered Death Valley and could not find a way out through the Panamints. Their story is haunting and tragic. For a month they lived on the floor of the valley, which is consistently the hottest place on earth, and has the dubious honour of having the highest temperature ever recorded—one hundred and thirty-four degrees in the shade—and it is virtually without water. There are no living things here, or so the forty-niners said, no birds, animals, fish. It’s not quite true; they meant no edible things. They killed their oxen for food, burned their wagons, and made their way out of the valley on foot, not west through the Panamints, but south. Only one of them died in Death Valley, but many perished afterwards as they walked on. Why didn’t they turn back? The desire to get to the gold before anyone else?

  The descent from the Townes Pass is not troublesome, and the views are spectacular. Death Valley, one can see, is many kinds of desert—walls of rock on either side, but the bottom is sand-dune, scrub, salt, stone, and it changes quickly from one to another, minute by minute as I drive. Stovepipe Wells, five feet above sea level, is a store, a gas station, and a motel. The temperature here is one hundred and nineteen degrees, and it’s not yet mid-day. I buy some beer and drink it in the sun, enjoying the heat on my skin. Then go on, into the sand-dunes; stop the car and walk for a while. There is life here. In the sand are the curious S-shapes left by sidewinder snakes, like hieroglyphics or masons’ marks that, one thinks, would mean something urgent if only one could decode them.

  At Furnace Creek there is a museum: a building that resembles a modern high school, surrounded by very green grass. It seems quite absurd that it exists, with its irrigation, air conditioning and drinking-fountains, and I wish it didn’t, for it somehow suggests that humans could, if they wanted to, make Death Valley look like anywhere else. Not far away are the ruins of the Harmony Borax Mine. That anyone should have found it profitable to mine anything in Death Valley is incomprehensible, considering the climate and the need to use twenty-mule teams to transport the stuff one hundred and fifty miles to Mojave, the nearest rail-head, across some of the most formidable terrain in the world. The miners were mainly Chinese. Perhaps they were thought to be more dispensable than whites.

  Zabriskie Point, where Antonioni filmed all those naked young couples making love in the sand, is a different landscape again—dried yellow mud, a model of an uninhabitable planet’s surface, folds and canyons and waterless streams wriggling downwards into the valley. I take off all my clothes and sunbathe for an hour. The heat is kiln-like and the silence absolute.

  At Dante’s View I’m five thousand feet up, and the drop is almost perpendicular. It’s cool and refreshing here—a mere ninety degrees. There are all the Panamints, from below sea level to the towering summit of Telescope Peak. Beyond, the snow of the sierras. On the bottom is a lake, Bad Water, undrinkable and white in colour; the dried-up bed of the Armagosa River; sand; petrified salt deposits and the crunchy salt crystals of the Devil’s Golf Course; other dust I can’t put a name to, a kind of hidebus bright green. Yes, Dante’s vision of hell. If landscape has meaning, symbol, significance, rather than just simply is, it has it in this desert. This is the country of our nightmares. Our mistiest and most irrational fears have shape in Death Valley: a putrid smell, for example, or a sick taste of metal, neither of which I can explain, is expressed in that hideous bright green. There are no clouds, no birds drifting on wind currents, no sign of any creature, alive or dead. The silence is thick and it reverberates as in an empty cathedral at nightfall: it engulfs me against my will, deprives me of my knowledge of myself as a warm, living human animal. It is my own mortality I’m experiencing—this is despair, negation, the inevitable not-me to come.

  THE NAMES OF DEATH VALLEY PLACES record the mortality other men have felt here: Furnace Wash, Dry Mountain, Funeral Peak, the Devil’s Cornfield, Starvation Canyon.

  Death Valley Junction is a ghost town. In the doorway of a derelict house an old woman sits on a rocking-chair, a rifle on her lap. Behind her, two Dobermann Pinschers are barking malevolently. She doesn’t answer my request for water, just raises the rifle slightly; I feel it’s prudent to leave. Death Valley Junction is modern, unlike most California ghost towns; there is even a ruined gas station. And an opera house! Here, in the middle of the desert, is the Armagosa Opera House. Its walls inside are covered in murals, obviously painted in recent years. What mad folly led to the building of this place? What is its story? The only person who could tell me is the old woman with the rifle, but I’m not happy about the gun or the dogs. I drive away without solving the mystery.

  At the Nevada state-line is the usual casino, though I’m still in the desert and there isn’t another house in sight. I drink vast quantities of water, orange juice and beer.

  THOUGH PEOPLE COME TO BOTH PLACES, Las Vegas is, like Death Valley, antagonistic to most forms of human life. It’s an excrescence on the middle of an extremely uninteresting desert: its buildings are ugly, and it lacks Reno’s trees, and grass. Its daytime temperatures in summer are consistently over one hundred and they rarely fall below eighty at night. The air is humid and smog-polluted. To observe Las Vegas at a distance is to see a cloud of a peculiarly unpleasant mauve colour.

  It exists for only one reason—to prey on human greed. Downtown Las Vegas, like Reno, is not shops, offices and public monuments, but hotels, motels, and casinos. My first reaction to the famous strip where most of the big casinos are to be found is sheer disbelief. I have never seen such glittering light. After a few minutes I walk away, then return, thinking my eyes must have made some curious mistake. They haven’t; the second viewing produces the same sensation of protest at one’s senses. The strip is all the world’s fairgrounds put together and seen at once. Piccadilly Circus is a pygmy in comparison. I am bombarded with flashing colours and dazzling brilliance as every casino tries to out-scream its neighbour in advertising its existence. It is all undoubtedly rather beautiful.

  There is nothing else that is beautiful in Las Vegas. The interiors of the casinos are a barrage of electricity and sound; the bulbs glare, the bells jangle, and the slot machines shriek raucously as they chew up quarters and dimes. There are crowds of people everywhere, gambling, gambling, gambling. The employees for the most part seem so pale and tired they look like grubs asleep. There is something bad about this city.

  To lure you inside, each casino offers an extra attraction that will devalue those announced by its rivals. You can make a free phone call to anywhere in the United States; or drink as many free strawberry daquiris as you like; have a free photograph of yourself, a key-ring embossed with your initials, or your name in a newspaper headline—“David Rees Queen of Red Lights”, for example. All of them serve food and alcohol very inexpensively. Las Vegas must be one of the world’s bargains for eating and drinking—vodka and orange for half a dollar, breakfast for seventy-five cents, New York steak for a couple of bucks.

  In which casino is Gary waiting on tables?

  I eat an excellent dinner that costs a mere four dollars, and I have not one but two waiters dancing attendance. A listless, dispirited girl, and a very beautiful young man. He has pale straw-blond hair, splendid white teeth, and eyes of the deepest blue. Almost Oriental cheek-bones. His body, in tight-fitting clothes, looks lean and energetic. About six feet tall. Is it him?

  There’s something familiar, yes, but this boy is much better looking, sexier, more … more sure of himself than Gary’s photos—or his correspondence and phone calls—implied. We talk; he graduated this May and he’s working here through the summer. Tonight is his last night, thank God, and he can leave this hell-hole.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “Dallas.”

  “Gary?”

  He looks puzzled. “Yes? Do I know you?�
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  “David.”

  The girl brings my bill. On the back she has written “Meet me at 2 a.m. when I’ve finished work—Joyce.” I look at her, astonished, as she scurries away to the kitchen. Then I laugh-out of embarrassment, I suppose.

  “I told her she’d have no luck,” Gary says. “And that was before I knew who you were.”

  In my king-size motel bed. His body is without blemish; it is perfection. Unlike the other casino employees, he’s suntanned, all over, not a white patch anywhere. The hair on his legs and the pubic hair are golden; the pecs are superbly developed, the curve of the biceps firm, the thighs equally firm and muscular. His cock is a good hard eight inches or more. He lies on his back, one leg bent, one arm under his head. And smiles.

  XX

  ALL CREATIVE WRITING IS SELECTIVE, even a diary. There is another diary I could have written, its theme my year as visiting professor at a California university. To compare the teaching methods, administration, expectations, successes and failures of English departments in academic institutions in the New World and the Old is, I guess, a worthwhile concern; David Lodge in Changing Places wrote a highly readable comic novel about it. I’ve said almost nothing of my colleagues or my students, and other areas of my life have not found much space in this attempt to turn a year into words—my reading (I read about a hundred and twenty books all told), my daily routine at the gym in Campbell and the people I met there, the characters of my friends and my relationships with them, and Katya’s children with whom I spent much more time than I’ve suggested. I can’t imagine why a sophisticated, gregarious Russian émigré, perfectly attuned to the American West, should want to spend a whole year in a remote part of Ireland, but in February Katya will be coming to live in Galway. So I shall see her. And Phil; I’ve recorded more of my feelings of detachment from him than my feelings of attachment to him, but they, the latter, are probably too private even for a diary. Or maybe I can’t, or don’t want to, imprison those feelings in words. He arrives in Exeter on Christmas Eve and will be with me for a month. I am not yet certain, but I may break several laws to bring him here for good.

  Words written in consecutive phrases and sentences have their own structures and logical associations, illogical undertones and meanings, different from the structures of the thoughts that beget them, and are outside the control the writer would like to exercise over them. They are particularly poor pieces of equipment for dealing with our profoundest convictions and emotional experiences. So, love becomes the most difficult word in the English language to define. (The second most difficult, I often think, is pornography.) It is easier for me to put into words the appearance of a mountain or a lake and how it affects me, though it isn’t because it’s a soft option that this diary concentrates on scenery, a sense of place—and music, the male body, sex. The sifting process has not been all that conscious, even if I, as a gay man in San Francisco in the 1980s, think it important to discuss what I see of gay life in that city, and, equally, feel it of dubious value to preserve my conversations in bed with a waif from the Vietnamese boats, the thoughts and emotions, the history and geography, that his words and his body convey to me.

  He and I had this in common for a year: we were jetsam in a society that perhaps more than any other consists of jetsam; he, tossed east across the Pacific by the horrors and consequences of war, I, just simply attracted to Gay Mecca. Neither of us totally lost a sense of transience or detachment from the land in which we’d arrived, though he, perhaps more than I, wanted to. However, that uneasy awareness of impermanence is also the heady sniff of freedom, and never before have I experienced that so strongly as in California. Free from the restraints of my usual responsibilities, I did, except for my twelve hours a week at the university, exactly what I chose to do. I enjoyed sex with men of all races and colours of skin to a degree that is, I guess, impossible in Britain; I experienced landscape of a vastness and grandeur unknown in Europe; and explored cities as ugly or as beautiful as, but quite different from, those in our cluttered countries.

  What, after all, is California; how do I sum it up? I can’t begin to put it in words with any kind of adequacy. Mentally, my California doesn’t even follow the real borders of the Golden State: I know almost nothing of the north with its giant redwood forests, or the southern deserts where it touches Mexico. My California seems to embrace most of Nevada and Utah, and something of Arizona. Its frontier begins just north of San Francisco and travels east to include Reno and Salt Lake City, then turns south, dips round the Grand Canyon, and ends on the Pacific somewhere between Los Angeles and San Diego. Beyond that frontier is the wrinkled surface of a continent I know little about—‘it’s merely land I have crossed. My California doesn’t contain the peculiar religions and weird cults that have sprouted in recent decades, mind-expanding drugs, flower power, student revolution, freaks and fads and fetishes; its artists, writers and musicians; the movies, silicon chips and soft fruit by which it earns its income; the ordinary, nine-to-five routine existence that over twenty-two million of its twenty-three million inhabitants are said to live. My California is certain cities, deserts, mountains, music, people, solitude.

  What are David’s books about, somebody once asked a friend of mine, who replied: “Sex, scenery, and Sibelius.” Perhaps, then, I’ve not learned so much, or been changed less by California than I’d thought; perhaps this diary is the mixture as before, the result of doing what I said Chuck was wrong to attempt: imposing my own vision on the things I’ve seen and experienced.

  Why the sex? some readers will say. Why record all those orgasms and big cocks? Where does the heaving, thrusting, licking, sucking get us? There is a strictly limited number of copulatory positions and surely we all know them and frequently use them? Isn’t the whole bath-house syndrome a frantic and futile search for romance with the perfect stranger that results in ignoring the potential of the relationships I already have? No. Nor is it to titillate, or work out hang-ups, or wank while I type. Some may react with jealousy, or even puritanical shock; and there will be those who feel, perhaps because they are defensive about their bodies or those of their lovers, that gay writing should not be concerned with beautiful flesh. There is also the danger of boring the reader. I found much of John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw tedious; the first time the narrator said “He put his cock in my mouth” I was certainly interested to know what happened next, but, by the thirty-ninth occasion, I wished he was describing some other object he’d put in his mouth, such as the egg he’d eaten at breakfast. But John Rechy’s book deals with two very important facts we should remember. For centuries we have not been permitted to write about gay sex; now we can—and therefore we should try. Also Rechy tells us that being gay isn’t primarily about relationships, politics, adopting certain life-styles or codes of ethics: being gay is essentially making love with people of one’s own sex. And he’s right.

  No other subject interests us so much; we think about it, talk about it, and do it as often as we can. In our fantasies we rehearse perfect men to fuck with, and picture them in the pages of the books we read. And for me there was something else of just as much consequence. As a bit of jetsam in that jetsam society I was, in some ways, very fragile. In California I was much more aware than at any time, before or since, of my own impermanence, of that one fact of which I can be sure—my death. It was not just a feeling produced by a serious illness, earthquakes, the momento mori of Death Valley, fear of AIDS, the seeming insubstantiality of cities built on fault-lines, the possibility of being shot dead on the streets. Nor was it simply the absence of my own four walls in Exeter with their windows on to the hills and the cathedral towers, my attic workroom to which I retreat as into a dark warm cave that is wholly mine and of my own creation—solid, reassuring, with its copies of my published books, that couple of feet of print (that nobody, afterwards, may read them doesn’t bother me) which is my two fingers to the inevitable not-me to come. It was all of this, but more. To be in California is to be c
onscious of past and present in a wholly different way from in Europe, to know one’s utter insignificance in the great time-continuum. Our visible European past is mostly man-made things that comfort and console us—churches, works of art, old houses; it is not at all the same sensation to Walk in a desert unchanged since before man was, or to stand against the trunk of a tree two thousand seven hundred years old. The desert, the sequoia, may be beautiful— but they certainly remind one of one’s slenderness in a way the Mona Lisa or the Choral Symphony do not. Set against the uncaring permanence of landscapes are freeways and cities and people often so instant, so new, so much illustrations of the dictum that the hazards California faces today America—and the rest of the world—must meet tomorrow that it is no surprise one sees oneself and those who live here as awash between then, now, and finally. Sex, therefore, takes on a new importance—it becomes a recoil from fragility. Warm, living, human animals, indulging in the experience that brings more pleasure and satisfaction than any other, are agreeing—if only for a few minutes—that skin, muscle and cock are not mortal, not nearer to death … but alive, alive. And the Vietnamese, the black, the Filipino, the Yugoslav, the Australian, the Latino, the Canadian in my bed are telling me I am of all mankind, that every man’s life enhances me, not that every man’s death diminishes me.

  I CONCLUDE THIS DIARY AS I BEGAN IT, preoccupied with a better class of blond. A friend of mine said, a few years ago when I was depressed about something—or someone—“Think blond.” He wasn’t just talking of fair hair. Jean Genet once said he had been asked to write a play about blacks, but it was difficult: first of all you had to decide what colour they were. Again, I know what is meant—these words that signify colour of skin or hair may suggest other physical attributes, mental attitudes, emotions, history, place. So, though Gary in the literal sense is blond, Phil, dark-haired and olive-skinned, is metaphorically, and therefore really, blond: lover. So words slip, slide, perish under the strain we put on them—or become pregnant with meaning. “California” is another example.