A Better Class of Blond
Page 16
I only said what he looked like naked; I could have said what we talked about, what I thought of him, how he was coping with his father’s death. He was nice enough, not so very different from the impression his letters and phone calls had given me. Yes, he has a lover in Dallas, but he didn’t mention it before because, he told me, he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. We had some very good fucking on that motel bed. In the morning we drove to Boulder Beach, then looked at the Hoover Dam. We stared, sticky and sleepy, at the ugly catfish in Lake Mead, and stood on the state-line, one foot in Nevada and one in Arizona. Then took our separate ways, he to Needles to call on a friend before continuing his journey to Texas, I to the Grand Canyon. I was, as he had once forecast, a road-sign at which he paused, not the man with whom he was going to travel.
The rest of the trip: the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, Bryce’s Canyon, the long green valley that runs up the middle of Utah and is its only fertile feature, a tribute to the dedication and hard work of Mormons—then to San Francisco via Reno and the Donner Summit. Last days in Los Gatos, the farewell parties, the goodbyes, the train journey from Oakland across America—through the Rockies to Denver, over the great plains to Chicago, northern New York, and the magnificent forests of New England; then a few days with friends on Cape Cod, and the flight home from Boston. Phil, in floods of tears on Oakland Station. I watched him, aghast.
I don’t want to write about this. Anyway, I couldn’t describe the Grand Canyon; it’s impossible, and there has been enough, or too much, scenery in this book already. But the Great Salt Lake reminded me of something I had written long ago, a poem that mourned the end of a difficult, disordered seven-year relationship, far from the pretty Temple and the gay Latter-Day Saints I had met:
It was an extraordinary phenomenon,
Bizarre as comets with twelve tails
Or small green men climbing from saucers—
An obvious omen, but I
Ignored the oracle, the thunder.
Rain in the Salt Desert, on salt so hard and stacked
And packed it could not drain away
But lay, a new Arctic Sea, polar
With icebergs and hot frost. Lightning
Cracked; thunder thumped from clouds like bruises.
Stetson, denim shorts, skin brown as mahogany,
Money, a car and freedom, I,
Outside and inside my eye, only
Saw canyons, deserts, dead lake beds,
Mist off the Sierra Nevada
Lift at sunrise, raking summits and centuries
Of snow. I wept, the Panamints,
As hot and dry as Venus, were so
Barren and beautiful. The salt
Flats storm warned of an era ending:
Five thousand miles away in a Torquay hotel,
At the same moment, you were in bed with
Another man. Well. . . nothing much of
Importance in that fact. Except
You fell in love with him; I lost you.
Sufficient to report that the Grand Canyon produced a sense of disbelief similar to the Las Vegas strip at night, curious though that may seem. I thought, once again, that my eyes had made a mistake. I walked away, then returned to look into that stupendous drop, and found, in an absence of only a few minutes, that my mind had already adjusted it, shrunk it into some measure of things to which I’m used. My mind was wrong. It was much vaster than my brain, retrospectively, said it was. Nor could I begin to put into words its extraordinary beauty, and the same is true of the colours of the Painted Desert, though perhaps if I lived near either for as long as I did in San Francisco, I would make the attempt. I gave a ride through the Painted Desert to a young Navajo Indian who was hitch-hiking some immense distance to see a girl. I still wear the necklace of beads he gave me. Dusk found us miles from anywhere, so I curled up with him in his sleeping-bag under the stars. I retain as one of my most vivid and meaningful pictures of America this man in the desert night, more at one with his surroundings than I could ever be, stroking my skin and talking about Navajo customs; while I, to satisfy his curiosity as we drank Olympia beer, smoked marijuana and made love, tried to explain Castro life and teaching at San José. All the paradoxes of California seemed to draw together in those moments. Meaningful, I said. It wasn’t meaningful. It just…was.
It had no more meaning than the crunchy crystals and hideous dust of Death Valley, or any fragments I’ve noticed that appear to have urgency, that demand to be recorded—a woman in Glendale watering her garden with a hosepipe, a black preacher I met on a train who told me of her fears of flying, Avril as she walked down, a corridor reminding me of Christmas trees. The stalagmites of Mono may suggest the salt pillar at Sodom, or Angelino smog warn of doom, the steel threads of the Golden Gate seem to stitch the two halves of California together; but they do none of these things: these are metaphors from my mind. The tufa, the petrol fumes, the bridge just simply are. So it is with the notes scraped on catgut that move me in a piece of music, the gesture of dancers at a disco, sex, the finite nature of all relationships. California has no meaning, however hard I try to find one, bring its extremes into some scale I can understand. It just is. It says, not try and understand me, but experience me, enjoy me.
I guess I did that.
Out of the Winter Gardens
David Rees
David Rees’s latest novel describes the excitements and problems confronting a teenager as he moves from childhood to adolescence. As a 16-year-old, his first experiences with girls, his first trip abroad, and especially his discovery that his father is gay, force him to shake up his ideas about sexuality and the whole “grown-up” world. This book is a tender exploration of the father-son relationship.
David Rees’s writing has been variously described as “crisp, economical … carries the narrative along” (Times Literary Supplement) and “once begun, difficult to put down” (Time Out).
The author is a much-published writer of stories for and about young people, The Milkman’s Oh His Way being the best-known. In 1978 he was awarded the Carnegie Medal (UK) for his novel The Exeter Blitz, and in 1980 he won the Other Award (UK) for his historical novel The Green Bough of Liberty.
Paperback, 128 pages, ISBN 0 946889 03 1, £3.50/$6.50.
Alphabet City
David Price
As his marriage disintegrates in a welter of suspicion and accusation, Peter begins to discover a homosexual identity of which he was previously unaware. He tries to escape his past and recreate his identity by fleeing to America. There he is drawn into the bleak sub-culture of Lower Manhattan and at the same time into a devouring relationship with Joe, a black actor. The two of them undertake a dangerous journey through the South-Western States, a journey of pursuit, self-discovery, and self-destruction … But Peter finds that his past is not so easily left behind .
“David Price has extracted the heart of New York and delivered it alive and throbbing on the page. This is the underworld that few tourists ever see… David Price has seen it with great clarity” (Edmund White).
“The novel’s core, of a man launching out in search of transcendent passion, is winningly and sharply presented” (Time Out).
Paperback, 128 pages, ISBN 0 946889 00 7, £3.50/$6.50
The Scent of India
Pier Paolo Pasolini
“Moment by moment, there is a smell, a colour, a sense which is India”. So wrote Pasolini in this collection of essays describing his visit to India with fellow authors Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. This book captures the shimmering, magical quality of India, while at the same time Pasolini’s critical eye records the terrible poverty that accompanies it.
Though widely admired as a film director, Pasolini’s talents as a poet, essayist and social critic are not generally known outside Italy. His ability to portray the dreamlike yet earthy quality of a country, which showed so clearly in his films, comes through in this book.
Paperback, 96 pages, ISBN 0 946889 02 3, £4.95/$7
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The Other Italy
David Price/Gotthard Schuh
Here is the Italy which many travellers seek but few ever find, a series of portraits of traditional Italian rural life, drawn by someone with an intimate knowledge of it. David Price shows us an Italy which is steadily disappearing but which has, nevertheless, proved to have an extraordinary tenacity in the face of modern social and economic developments.
The book ends with a look at the Ruins Management of Pompeii, which is seen as a symbol of this other Italy, challenged by natural and man-made disasters, and yet somehow still surviving.
The essays are complemented by Gotthard Schuh’s photographs taken in the 1940s and 1950s. Text and photographs combine to express nostalgia for an Italy which has almost passed away.
“Lovely book … a strong undying charm like a scent from the past” (Literary Review).
Paperback, 80 pages ISBN 0 946889 01 5, £3.50/$6.50