Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires

by Gilbert Adair

  This blasphemous little tirade of mine caused even the non-English-speaking members of staff who’d been talking among themselves at the far end of the table to interrupt their conversations and turn their attention to me, and I realised at once they’d made up their minds as to what lay behind my outburst. Where there’s no smoke, I could see them all thinking, there’s no fire.

  The first to break the silence was Schuyler.

  ‘I used to know a red-haired guy,’ he said, ‘and, boy, did he go on about the colour of his hair.’

  Then it was Mick’s turn.

  ‘Tsk, tsk,’ he said. ‘Poor little Gideon’s in a state because he ain’t getting any.’

  I wanted to slap his big fat stupid mug.

  ‘Is that all you can come up with? “Poor little Gideon – he’s not getting any!” Just because I don’t come in here every morning and bend everybody’s ear back with how I fucked some beautiful boy the night before till his eyes were popping out of his head!’

  I stuck my face right up to Mick’s and imitated his own tired old impression – one we’d all heard a hundred times – of some oafishly inarticulate gay man. ‘“Bootiful boy! Bootiful boy!” How come they’re always “bootiful boys”?’ I shook my head as though I’d gone speechless with impotent fury, but I was aware of only giving away more than I meant to of my true feelings of jealousy and frustration.

  ‘My dears,’ said Mick, running a hand through his stringy hair, ‘will you listen to her. I do believe I touched a nerve. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’ (Mick also had that odious queeny trait of feminising masculine nouns and pronouns.)

  ‘You methink –’ I started to reply, and already racing through my brain was the recollection of nights spent with Mick in clubs and bars and the possibility that he might have caught sight of me wandering aimlessly about, glass in hand, my wallflower’s solitude spotlighted by some disco floor’s cheesy glitterball, ‘– you may think what you like,’ I corrected myself, ‘but you really know fuck all about me. What is it you’re saying? That I never have sex? That I’m a virgin?’

  He laughed a gravelly laugh. ‘Does the Pope shit in the woods?’

  ‘What?’ I replied indignantly. ‘That is what you think?’

  ‘Listen, darling,’ he said, lighting up one of his poncy Rameses cigarettes and vacuuming the smoke into his throat, only instantly to exhale it, like a conjuror, through his nostrils, ‘why don’t you tell us what you are? We promise not to be shocked.’

  Schuyler imperturbably masticated his invisible gum and Ferey alone seemed sincerely unhappy for me, probably hoping the Berlitz bell would ring, obliging us all to take up our textbooks and make for our classes. The others, English speakers and not alike, made no pretence at hiding their curiosity.

  The bell did ring eight minutes later, but eight minutes were enough for me, more than enough, to insert my foot in the trap.

  It was true that every morning these colleagues of mine, the Scheherazades of a thousand and one night stands, would swagger into the common room, yawning, rubbing bloodshot eyes, boasting of sexual encounters (never not successful) that had kept them up to all hours – and none of them, you can bet your socks on it, ever wearied of making a lip-smacking pun on that preposition ‘up’. It was true that I was being gradually driven crazy by these accounts which left little to the listener’s imagination (to my imagination), accounts of how they stalked their prey, took it home and fucked it silly, accounts punctuated by questions from the others whom the presence of the Berlitz’s few straights seldom encouraged to temper their language – ‘So, tell us, don’t be shy, how big was he?’ somebody would ask, and ‘Was he cut or uncut?’, and ‘Did his balls hang low or did they stay all tight and puckered-up under his prick?’ It was true that, even if I knew better than to believe every one of them, the overall result was like a game of Liar – some of these anglers’ tales were untrue or grossly exaggerated, of that I was sure, but I had no way of knowing which of them were, so that, had I arbitrarily pooh-poohed any single one, I’d most likely have got it wrong. It was true that, even after months had elapsed, I had just sat listening to stories of their exploits without ever having come out with any of my own. And it was true, finally, that only now, only when Mick had started taunting me, did I realise how much I must have seemed the odd man out; or, rather, how it must have struck them that, even if I never for a moment sought to pretend that I wasn’t gay, I clearly either felt sheepishly self-conscious about talking of my adventures or else – and this was far the more obvious inference – I had no adventures worth talking about.

  I had to assume, too, still in the instant before I answered Mick, that they had all been gossiping about me in my absence (just as, when I was present, we gossiped about those who weren’t) and they had probably already come to the conclusion that my main or even only sexual release was masturbation, that closed circuit of mind, hand and cock. Masturbation in itself carried no stigma for them. It was the subject of as much ribald common-room chat as any of the more boastworthy sexual practices. Giving yourself a hand job was a good and necessary thing, ran the argument, because you can’t always be dining out. But if they were to have learned that I masturbated not, say, once or twice a week but every day of my life and that even my few abortive pick-ups would most often end with my returning alone to the Voltaire, at once scrambling out of my clothes and jerking off to the fantasy of what I would have done to the boy whom I had just left – who had just left me – had our evening panned out differently, they would have been disgusted. Yes, disgusted. For there doesn’t exist an active, ‘healthy’ gay man who wouldn’t find disgusting the notion of a boyfriend-less loner whacking his unappetising meat night after night in a spartan hotel room.

  Everybody, I repeat, was looking at me. I had to do something, I had to say something, anything, at once. I looked back at them all in turn. Then, with greater ease than I could have imagined would have been possible for me, slipping into a worldly ‘Well, if you really must know …’ tone of voice, I embarked on a juicy morning-after autopsy of my night of hot physical passion.

  Since all of this happened only days after my misadventure with Yves-Marie, I used that as a template – for my description of the boy I was claiming to have slept with that night I borrowed Yves-Marie’s Cocteauesque profile and coltish physique as well as the exact shape and size of his privates – combining it with circumstantial details from whichever earlier pick-ups of mine I could recall at short notice and co-opting for my climax the most lascivious of my fantasies.

  The very first thing I was asked, as I should have known I’d be asked, was the boy’s name. Forced to improvise, to think on my feet, I was actually about to say ‘Yves-Marie’. Then, realising that it wasn’t impossible, in the cramped topography of Paris’s gay scene, that one of my colleagues might himself eventually pick up Yves-Marie, I managed to come to an abrupt halt at ‘Yves’ with a loud mental screeching of brakes but without crashing through the roadblock of the hyphen. Naturally, the choice of that particular name immediately elicited from my audience calls of ‘Gideon, Gideon, tell us all about Yves!’ And so I did.

  It was a good story, well told, and I seriously doubt that any of my listeners were capable of spotting the joins – which is to say, working out where reality ended and fantasy began. I related how ‘Yves’ and I had gone back to his place; how I’d let him strip me off and how I’d then stripped him off; how we’d showered and soaped together; how he’d taken my erect cock in his hand and, wrapping it round his own, masturbated the two of us at once; and how, so divine was the sensation, I’d had to struggle not to come too soon. (On the occasion of the real-life incident which had inspired this little conceit, I had come, which of course had brought the proceedings to an end just as they were getting going.) Then, I said, we lay down on his bed together and, ‘Yves’ now being rock hard, I let him take me in the ass until I ejaculated over his sheets – not that he minded, I added, since he was ejaculating simult
aneously inside me. And then, like an alarm clock waking me out of a wet dream, the bell rang for our next class.

  After a few seconds when nobody said a word, Mick swung his bag over his shoulder. I saw that, whatever he’d once thought of me, he was impressed now. He grinned.

  ‘Well, well, well, Gideon,’ he said, as we started walking side by side along the corridor. ‘After all the favours I’ve done you, I’ll expect an introduction to this stallion.’

  Since, for an obvious reason, there was no question of my ever agreeing to that, I hurriedly answered, ‘No fear. I know what would happen then’ (meaning, flatteringly to him: what chance would I have if Yves clapped eyes on you?). ‘This one I’m keeping to myself. He’s got what I look for in a boy.’

  ‘I don’t have to look for it, honey,’ I heard Schuyler drawl behind me, before overtaking the two of us on his way to his own class. ‘I know where it is.’

  We all three laughed.

  But how can I communicate what that simple four-word sentence meant for me? We all three laughed, we all three laughed together, we all three laughed as equals. I was, by virtue of a small white (or whitish) lie, one of them at last.

  The incident inaugurated a new era of my life at the Berlitz, of my life altogether. Something had been unblocked. I felt as a motorist does when, just as he’s given up hope of ever seeing space and light again, the monstrous articulated truck in the shadow of whose wall-like rear end he’s had to crawl for miles and miles suddenly turns off the highway. Nor was it only my public image, my self-presentation, that had changed. The sex got better too. Not that it came close to matching my dreams (not a bad thing in a way, with the kinky cast they had acquired of late), but the fact that I’d been accepted into the gay freemasonry of the common room persuaded me that I was giving off less of my habitual air of hopelessness whenever I tried my luck in a club, even on my own.

  Sometimes, of course, a Monday-morning cafard would settle on the company and nobody was up to talking about anything, sex included. Mick, Ferey and I would listlessly prepare for our first classes of the day. Schuyler, who’d been teaching so long he knew the Berlitz Method inside out, would silently train his half-moons on the Herald Tribune crossword. And Ralph Macavoy would sit at a corner of the table picking his teeth with the soggy edge of a metro ticket, then get up and amble out of the room, giving, as he went, a lackadaisical tug at the seat of his trousers, dislodging underpants that had got stuck fast, as I craved to be, in the crack of his backside. (‘Mr Sandman, bring me a dream …’)

  Sometimes, too, most times in fact, it would be somebody else’s turn. I recall Ferey, who at least had the grace to lower his voice when getting down to the nitty-gritty, telling us about a middle-aged stranger whom he’d noticed in a cinema queue on the boulevard Saint-Michel, a man who’d then sat himself beside him in an empty row in what was already a half-empty auditorium – the film was Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies – and who’d kept disconcertingly turning sideways to peer into his, Ferey’s, face in the darkness until, something of a Lord of the Flies himself, he’d unzipped his trousers, taken Ferey’s compliant hand in his own and slipped it into his (as Ferey was startled to discover) underpant-less crotch.

  And then it would be my turn. Then I too would slump on to a chair, my legs spreadeagled beneath the common-room table, as though I’d been undone by an all-night fucking session. And on those days, like a masturbator whose fantasies, untrammelled by the curbs and constraints of the real world, become progressively more extreme, I found myself telling tales bearing less and less relation not just to what I did in life – and, at last, I repeat, I was starting to have the odd fling – but even to what I would have dreamt of doing had I been a totally free agent.

  I wrote earlier of three occasions on which, a gaffe-prone newcomer to ‘abroad’, I made an ass of myself before adjusting to my expatriate self-image. I’d like here to relate a further two: these, by contrast, obliged me to assume, publicly, the identity of a gay man not just glad to be gay but – and this stage of a sentimental education represents the second closet, almost as important as the first, from which every homosexual must freely and voluntarily emerge – glad for the world to know I was gay.

  One night at the Voltaire, well after twelve, an intolerable jungle-rock racket rose up from the room directly under mine and, preferring not to get entangled with the Tunisian porter, I decided to make my complaint in person. A dressing-gown thrown over my pyjamas, I quickly ran downstairs and hammered on the door – hammered on it because nobody inside would otherwise have heard me knocking above the cacophony that had jerked me out of sleep and then, spitting mad, out of bed. After a long moment when the music continued at the same volume as before and I started gearing up to pound the door again, it ceased as abruptly as though a bandleader had just waved an impatient baton over his musicians’ heads. A moment after that, the door opened and standing in front of me was a tall, blonde, hard-faced – what Mick would have called ‘fucky-faced’ – girl in her early twenties, naked.

  Seemingly unfussed by her nudity, that face of hers no more animated than a lava lamp, she began making excuses in an Australian twang and I could see, behind her, another, button-breasted girl, also blonde, also naked, seated cross-legged on one of the room’s twin beds, her head bent so far forward I wondered whether, for a reason related to some internal ‘woman’s trouble’ I didn’t care to know about, she was trying to peer inside her own vagina.

  After her apologies, the girl who had opened the door to me (her room-mate paid no attention whatever to either of us) said, with a prefabricated coyness she must have thought irresistibly coquettish, ‘We’re having a sort of party. Why don’t you join us?’

  ‘Join you?’ I replied with a snarl. ‘Join you? I’d like to tear you apart!’

  Ah! how I chuckled inwardly as I watched her deflate before my very eyes on hearing me turn the invitation down flat. No, my pretty, I thought, there are some of us you’ll never have! There are some of us who have no desire to paw those awful, pushy Toblerone tits or take a bite out of that damp little apple core of a cunt!

  The second incident was a far less trifling affair. Ferey, Ralph Macavoy and I decided to pay a visit to a newly opened gay club located right on the boulevard Saint-Germain and named, in English, The 400 Blow Jobs. It was a gangrenously hot Saturday night; the boulevard, a gaudy neon necklace of boutiques, restaurants and cafés, was jammed with pedestrians; and when we arrived at the club’s front door we found a queue snaking halfway back to the place de l’Odéon. If we hoped to get in, we would not only have to stand in that queue, for who knew how long, in the company of leather boys, clones, queens and transvestites, but also allow ourselves to be ridiculed by a parade of straight male passers-by, who would (we could already see them at it) disengage themselves from their tittering girlfriends and, hands on hips, mince past us with squeals of ‘Ooh la la!’ and ‘Regarde les tantes!’ and even ‘Sales pédés!’

  At first, I confess, I was all for giving up on The 400 Blow Jobs and settling for some less fashionable joint where we’d get in at once without having to submit to any such baptism of fire. When I proposed as much, and Ferey agreed to my proposal, Ralph, my darling Ralphie, stared coldly at me and said, ‘So – you’re ashamed to be what you are, are you? Well, I’m not. See you both Monday.’ And, without another word, he strode away from us to take his place at the end of the queue.

  It was true. I had been ashamed to be what I was; and now I was all the more ashamed of my shame. I turned to Ferey, who didn’t know what he ought to be thinking or doing, I clasped him by the arm and frogmarched us both over to the queue. It took us twenty-five minutes to be admitted, twenty-five long minutes of taunts and jeers and insults – but what unforgettably proud minutes they were for me!

  So my life settled into its routine, its parallel beaten tracks, its twin ruts. There was my private life (more private than I would have wished); and there was my public life, by which I mean the erotic
ised re-creation of that private life thanks to which I had been able to ingratiate myself with my Berlitz colleagues.

  Everything I didn’t do in reality, I did in the so-called retelling of it – fucking, fistfucking, rimming, blow jobs, watersports, even mutual nipple-singeings with Christmas candles (and how did that little frolic pop into my head?). And I did it with every conceivable type of sexual partner, with whites, blacks, browns and Orientals, and from great big burly policemen whom I let tramp over my pasty-pale body in their hobnailed boots to only just ex-schoolboys in Lacoste polo shirts, roll-necked cashmere sweaters and spotless jeans, ‘barely legal’ (more to the point, ‘legally bare’) and about to set off for Bangladesh or Brazil on their ‘gap year’ (another combination of words for which I had a childish fondness).

  That winter, and the following spring, passed eventfully, uneventfully. My life was a rut, if you like, a passionless rut, but for somebody as lonely as I’d always been a rut offered so hospitable a haven of the familiar and the taken-for-granted I was unhappy if my routine was disrupted – Ferey taking a vacation, a twenty-four-hour general strike causing the Berlitz exceptionally to close its doors, a day passing without a glimpse of Ralph Macavoy shimmying along the corridor.

  In the wider scheme of things my personal preoccupations were, I grant, minor, except that everybody surely has the right, the kind of right Americans call ‘inalienable’, to regard his or her own problems as serious without being reminded – as the tedious Peter, a radical but also a bit of a windbag, would never tire of reminding us – of famine in Rwanda or the Chinese oppression of Tibet. Even if my initiation into the common-room set had been founded on a lie, I no longer felt I was a stowaway in the world. I was amazed to discover the effect that the reinvention of my public persona had had on my emotional equilibrium, on the retreats and recesses of my psyche. I was calmer. I faced life’s little snags and discouragements with relative good humour. I had no more thoughts of returning to Oxford or throwing myself into the Seine off the pont Alexandre III, as I’d had after the Yves-Marie fiasco. I was no longer prey to that phobia of phobias: the fear of anybody who isn’t me.