Man Hating Psycho

by Iphgenia Baal

  The book was part of a series, which included five or six other titles and when I went into the publishers’ office to sign the contract they gave me copies of some of the others. That night, in my Old Street pod, I read the first book and liked it so much that I looked up the author’s name on the Internet. Rudimentary research revealed he had another book that had just come out in the US, so I bought it. It arrived in the post a couple of weeks later and I started reading it as soon as I opened the envelope, intending to skim the first few paragraphs then put it aside for later. Instead, I read the first third in one sitting, cackling and vehemently nodding in agreement at the things the book was saying and the way it was saying them. The author, whoever he was, was clearly an ally.

  I was so impressed by the contrast between the book’s snotty, know-it-all tone and the genuine altruism and desire to share information at play in the text that when I finished reading, I did something I never do. I went on Twitter and I posted a link to where the book could be bought directly from the publisher’s website accompanied with a single word, ‘Recommend’. Everyone that followed me ignored it, but the next afternoon, to my untold surprise, an email arrived in my inbox from the author.

  He wrote that although he didn’t want to come across like a stalker, he’d seen my post and it appeared so fortuitous that he couldn’t not get in touch as he was at that moment reading a book I had written. Strange indeed. Also, he was due to arrive in London in a matter of weeks for the UK launch of his new book (the one I was reading) and although he’d been hassling his publishers to organise an event for the launch they’d failed to do so, so he had organised one himself. He was worried no one would come because no one in the UK knew who he was. He asked if I’d be up for reading at the event with him, thinking that my being there might make a few more people turn up.

  I replied saying the events he described were fortuitous indeed, that I’d be happy to read, but I wasn’t sure that my doing so would bring a crowd of any description. In fact, people would be more likely to avoid this. He found this funny and the deal was sealed. An event was scheduled for November 24th.

  A week or so later he arrived in town. We met at Marble Arch. I was late. Very late. Sprinted up Park Lane and arrived, panting and sweating, to find him standing, hands in pockets, by the ping-pong table covered in pigeon shit. I didn’t know what he looked like but recognised him immediately anyway, more from the way he was standing (looking like he was waiting for someone) than anything else.

  We walked up Oxford Street, me babbling about the latest run in I’d had with the police (I’d posted a dick pic to Facebook as a joke but the guy’d taken it seriously resulting in me getting a caution for ʻthe distribution of material of a sexual nature with intent to cause distressʼ). My new friend wasn’t fazed, in fact he found it to be hilarious and made encouraging noises about my nutter activities in a laconic pan-American accent.

  — Where, I asked him, unable to place his accent, — do you live again?

  — LA, he said.

  Without pausing for breath I launched into an account about a trip I’d taken to LA some years before, which had entailed a trip to Britney Spears’ house (sadly she wasn’t there) and a brawl at Coachella before getting the fuck out of Dodge. He said that sounded about right.

  I took him to Trisha’s on Greek Street, where we sat in a dark corner, me drinking Camparis, him drinking vodka tonics. I can’t remember what we talked about but I do know that by the time it came to leave I felt the need to apologise.

  — Sorry, I said, — For being so forward. It’s just that I feel like I’ve known you for time. I think it’s cos I’ve read your books.

  He told me I didn’t have anything to be sorry about. I didn’t attempt to correct him.

  We met again the next afternoon. It was raining. Miserable. Even so, we walked along the Regent’s Canal. Chat, chat, chat, until we got to east London and Burley Fisher, where the event was to take place. When we arrived, he ditched me to go and have a cup of tea with Iain Sinclair. I was miffed to not be invited but there was nothing I could do about it, so I popped into the bookshop to introduce myself. The men working there said hello but then went back to selling books and didn’t seem to want to talk to me. I gave the bookshelves a once over then left and, The Railway Tavern being no more, took myself for a lonely pint at The Kingsland… Which turned out to be not so lonely after all because an elderly Jamaican man called Sammy bought me half a Guinness, while an equally ancient Irish man, also called Sammy, paid for a double of Jamesons. The two geriatrics sat with me, one on either side, paying me compliments and telling me how beautiful I was until my drinks were drunk, when they both disappeared into the furniture.

  I returned to Burley Fisher. Audience people had arrived. The event started. I read a long, as-yet unpublished tract about my dead ex-boyfriend then my new friend got up and demolished the business model of Facebook to chuckles and guffaws from the audience. Afterwards two old women came up to me and told me I was ʻbraveʼ for ʻsharingʼ. I needed a drink.

  It was decided we (the authors, the bookshop people and the publishing people) would go for pizza. Some of the audience also tagged along. I got as many free drinks as I could and behaved in my usual, awful, drunken manner, berating the bookshop staff for the window display, criticising the publishers’ business model and telling them how they should be publishing new British authors rather than buying in already-published content from America. When I paused in my monologue the publishing people’s face were filled with disdain, the bookshop people’s faces blanched with pity, but my new friend was grinning…

  Around midnight my new friend said he had to leave. He asked whether I would walk him to the station. I agreed, hid my drink in an alcove in the window with a beer mat on top so it wouldn’t be cleared away and stepped out with him, linking my arm through his thoughtlessly. The camaraderie between us so undeniable that it didn’t feel weird.

  I walked him to Dalston Kingsland. We stood outside the station making eyes at each other.

  — Oh, I feel like I love you already, I said with what I hoped was a girlish coyness but, knowing myself better now than I did then, more likely sounded like a threat.

  I kissed him on the cheek and he was gone. I went back to the bar and carried on getting wasted.

  We met again the next day on the steps of the British Museum, where he wanted to see John Dee’s magic tablet. I arrived before him and stood, insulated from the hordes of tourists by my hangover. I spotted him as soon as he came in through the gates. Hands in pockets again. We went inside, located the correct cabinet in the correct room and peered in at the black, reflective disc filled with a dark reflection of our faces.

  — I wish I could touch it, I said.

  — It’s pretty amazing, my new friend said.

  — Maybe we should go look at the mummies, I said.

  We turned our steps towards the lift but upon reaching the Ancient Egypt section were met with a wall of shrieking, farting children. It smelt like death so we aborted the mummy mission and left.

  We spent the rest of day in each other’s company, with me pointing out London’s charms and wonders, spilling its secrets, dispelling its myths. Then, as we were drinking our millionth cup of green tea and I was slagging off the publishers who were about to publish my book, he interrupted my art cunt rant to ask the time. When I told him it was five to eight, he jumped to his feet, saying he was supposed to be at the Leicester Square Theatre to see Stewart Lee do stand up and was late. We paid up and went outside. I took his hand and marched as fast as I could through Soho, dragging him behind me. We arrived at the theatre to find everyone had gone in but the show hadn’t started and happily there was one return on the door, so I was able to join him.

  We watched Stewart Lee shout about Brexit and consumerism. We didn’t sit down as our seats were not together and the theatre was sold out, so we stood leaning against a pillar, shoulders touching every now and then.

  In the int
erval we went outside.

  — God, my new friend said, — He’s so good.

  — He’s the greatest, I said.

  We lapsed into silence, looking at each other.

  — What do you think is happening here? I said.

  — What do you mean? my new friend said.

  — Well, do you think that maybe we’re in love? I said.

  — Ya think? he said.

  After the show we walked through China Town and up Charing Cross Road, until we got to Tottenham Court Road station. The station was a building site. We stepped into the temporary doorway to the site to say goodbye to each other.

  — Goodbye, I said.

  — Goodbye, he said.

  Nobody moved.

  — Goodbye then, he said.

  — Goodbye then, I said.

  Stayed standing where we were.

  — Put your hand in my jumper, I said.

  — What? he said.

  — Just do it, I said, lifting the hem.

  He laid his cold hand on my stomach. I flinched.

  — You should come back to mine, he said.

  — Okay, I said.

  — But I’m not having sex with you, he said.

  — Okay, I said.

  We caught the 98 back to Maida Vale, where he was staying in the spare room of a house belonging to a friend’s dad’s ex-wife. We crept upstairs in dark, sniggering like children. We got into bed and had a cuddle then suddenly his phone started going insane. More messages than I’d ever heard a phone get at one time. He got out of bed to see what was going on: Trump had just been voted in as President of the USA. Of course, both being of cynical persuasion, we’d each expected this to happen but wrapped up in one another as we had been, we’d forgotten about what the rest of the world was obsessing over, and so the election result came as a surprise.

  We talked through the night discussing the potential NWO, kissing a bit, sleeping a bit, no sex and then, the next morning, when it was time for him to leave, had this amazingly frank discussion. We were in love, that much was obvious, and so arrangements would need to be made that would allow us to be together. What those arrangements would be were as yet unclear and would take some time to figure out.

  I accompanied him to Paddington where we parted, having arrived at the incredibly adult decision not to communicate with each other by phone until we knew what we were going to do about our situation. Speaking on the phone would only be frustrating and stressful. What we would do instead was wait. Wait until we could figure out what to do.

  The decision not to communicate evaporated immediately. He called two days later suggesting I join him in Amsterdam and the next morning, I was on an Easyjet flight from Stansted, excited and nervous.

  Amsterdam was everything you’d expect it to be. Long walks along the canals, churning misery on behalf of the Eastern European whores writhing in Red Light District windows, weird food and filthy sex followed by a bout of boo-hooing (on my part, obvs). Then, two days later he flew back to LA and I returned to London.

  Although I was glad to have gone to Amsterdam and glad to have been able to spend time with my love, the fact that we’d fucked definitely made things more difficult. When he’d left London I felt centered in my (hopefully becoming less) marginal existence, but now half of me was in a city I barely knew and didn’t like on the other side of the world, and the other half of me, the physical half, was in London. Stupid, petty, horrible London with its ugly dickheads and mannerless misogynists and racist cab drivers and middle-class narcissists and depressing fake-organic shops and spineless hipsters and armchair anarchists and rapey left wingers. Could it be that I’d finally had enough?

  I’d lost the penthouse by this point but managed to organise a semi-permanent, semi-affordable room in Bethnal Green. The ivy that grew in through the windows seemed to be the only thing holding the brickwork in place. Coming in and going out you’d get weird looks as if you were going into a bando or something. No front door just a metal shutter, which made a deafening clanging noise when it was pulled up and down.

  The building was part of a complex that included a coach yard, another residential building and a warehouse once owned by Empress Coaches. They’d sold the complex to a developer years earlier but the developer was waiting for the nearby gasworks to be decommissioned before they started demolition and so Empress continued to operate out of the yard and rent out the residential section (officially listed as abandoned) on the cheap. Cheap enough not to complain about the mice in the kitchen, rats in the attic, hole in the roof covered with a sheet of blue tarpaulin weighed down with rocks, water that streamed down the walls when it rained, constant waft of diesel fumes from the yard or filthy conversations of the coach drivers that boomed through the floorboards.

  — Ere, cunt. Watch your fucking cunting mouf.

  My kind of people.

  I was able to escape temporarily back into the city I knew and loved but I could tell its days were numbered. Not just because of the artisan coffee shops and supper clubs and Containerville studio complexes springing up but also (the main drawback of living in the bando), the film crews. The complex was a favourite spot with location scouts and multiple BBC dramas were shot there. They filmed a lot of Luther and a Joe Strummer biopic and a dramatisation of the British Black Panther movement. The film crews were made up of the kind of entitled arseholes, who would think nothing of wandering uninvited into the private bit of the house without knocking.

  Having broken our promise not to communicate once, the floodgates were now open. I spoke to my love on the phone constantly (exactly what we’d been trying to avoid) batting sweet nothings, stupid jokes, and anecdotes across time zones at all hours of the day and night. The conversations were mostly pointless, covering what each of us had or hadn't done that day, people who'd annoyed us, but would always include some planning about when, where and how we'd see each other again.

  The date to get thrown out of Bethnal Green was approaching and I will forgive a cynical reader for thinking that a man with a flat who loved me was the answer to all my problems. In spite of homelessness looming and in spite of my starting to resent London I still, maybe out of habit, put in a case for my love to move here. And to his credit he was up for it, but with a flat (sorry, an apartment), a cat that was obsessed with him and a successful writing career, a move for him wasn’t going to be anytime soon. He needed time to pack down his life while I on the other hand (with no dependents and being largely shunned, ridiculed, and patronised (not in the good, old-fashioned way) by the ‘industry’ I was part of) had nothing to tie me in London beyond a book launch that was six months away. And so it was decided that I would come visit him in LA for a bit, to see how it went.

  I flew to LA on Boxing Day, staying awake for the entire eleven-hour flight and peering out the window at the earth. I watched England disappear into clouds, the sea smash again Ireland’s west coast, the pack ice start, the pack ice thicken, the pack ice break up again and outline what I thought might be the southern coast of Greenland, then the criss-crossed nowhere landscape of Canada, the Great Lakes, the Midwest, Nevada desert, the Rocky Mountains and into California’s hazy sunshine before descending into the vomit of Los Angeles.

  My love picked me up from the airport in a Zipcar and although we were both pleased to see each other we were also kinda shy. The trip felt loaded from the offset, both of us harbouring high expectations but not knowing exactly how it was gonna go.

  We drove through Culver City’s oil refineries, which I thought was a fucking cool thing to have in a city, then went east on the 5 before taking Sunset and then going up to Hollywood where we stopped at a red light. I looked out the window thinking how beautifully blank Los Angeles was. No history here, unless you count the hundreds of thousands of dead Native Americans.

  The red light was next to a Wendyʼs, its neon sign glowing in the twilight. The bushes beside it were rustling. Looking closer, I saw a group of homeless people sitting in them, li
ving in them by the looks of things. Broken plastic chairs, tarpaulins, piles of weird stuff. Then, as the lights changed, a ball shot out into the road, a dirty child minus shoes rushed out after it. The Mustangs and Hummers paid no heed to the child and revved away from their starting points. I’m glad to say my love kept his foot off the pedal and waited for the kid to grab its ball and return to the safety of the pavement. Sorry, sidewalk. The kid didn’t seem the least bit affected by its brush with death and neither, I noticed, did the adults. Not one of the people in the homeless encampment so much as blinked.

  — What the fuck? I said, as the car started moving. — I can’t believe people live like that.

  — Welcome to California, my love said.

  The first week passed in a blur of jet lag but once I escaped GMT and shifted to PST we fell into a routine that was workable. It was a provincial existence compared to the one promised by LAʼs reputation. I’d wake early and sit out on the balcony and write. My love would wake around midday. We’d drink coffee. We’d cook. We’d shower. We’d fuck. We’d shower again then, because he didn’t have a car, would walk or Uber somewhere. He showed me round the city, taking me to Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the hills and pointing out the scenes of mass murders and Elvis Presley’s favourite spots. We walked Downtown, along the Atwood River. We caught the L to Venice. We drank cocktails at Musso & Frank’s. We ate out at Clifton’s. We went to dive bars and old movie theatres and then, two days before I was due to leave, we went to Beverley Hills County Court and got married.

  I returned to London with, for the first time ever, absolutely no desire to do so. I flew into Gatwick, my most hated of airports, and caught the Thameslink into town. Lost in my LA dream, I hadn’t bothered to sort anywhere to stay and so I was heading towards my parents’ house. I can’t say I was happy about it and I can’t say they were either. My only reassurance was that the situation was temporary since now the plan was to move to LA.