Maxine’s intake of breath was audible.
“You’re right, and you need cheering up in a safe environment to take your mind off things. I’ll make sure you’re home by half eleven—sober. Lovely. I can’t wait to haul you two out of the 1950s and into the twenty-first century.”
As Mr. William Butler Yeats wrote all of those years ago, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, and seeing as mere anarchy is loosed upon my world (and a domestic revolution is imminent), I might as well explore this gay life that’s on offer.
Maxine also said she’d spoken to Carmel on the phone, which came as a shock, because I really didn’t think those two was close enough to be chatting to each other long distance. Turned out Carmel had bumped into Odette in St. John’s, whom she’d not seen since Odette left London in 1989. Apparently Carmel’s staying at Odette’s spa hotel for a while and has postponed her return.
More bad news.
It goin’ be revelation with breakfast, defamation with lunch, revenge with dinner.
“When she coming back?” I asked Maxine.
“She won’t say, Dad. I get the feeling she doesn’t want to come back.”
I might not even have anything to tell Carmel when she gets back, because when her and Odette start catching up, it will all come-a tumbling out. But when will she reappear? This has gone on too long a-ready.
Morris’s voice cackles down the intercom: “A-who dah?”
“You know full well a-who dah.”
Him and his blasted foolishness.
“Is that you, Mr. Walker? Is that really you? Come to apologize? Come to kiss my arse?”
“I’ll do more than kiss your fine little arse, you ole fool. Now beam me up. You know you want to.”
By the time I reach the door to his flat, it is open and he is moving back down the hallway, the red dragon kimono I bought him from Selfridges billowing behind.
At the square junction of kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom, he turns to face me, his kimono hanging open—saluting me with his fifth limb.
“Yes, Private de la Roux. Is just this kind of respect I deserve. I is de general, de potentate of our microuniverse, and you will do my bidding or your punishment will be severe, yuh hear?”
I run him up and down with my eyes, so that he is in no doubt I goin’ devour him alive. I can’t believe he can still charge up my electrodes so bad. Who’d-a thought it? How can one person get you goin’ from childhood right through to (youthful) ole age?
I shed mi jacket, mi shirt, mi braces, mi string vest, mi trousers, mi boxers, and mi hat. I kick off mi shoes and pull off mi garters and socks.
Now there’s nothing standing between him and mi Conquering Lion of Hackney.
I roll forward, making sure I hold in my stomach, and when I reach my destination my heat-seeking tongue makes contact with his and engages in some muscular, energetic gymnastics. This is always the best way for us to clear the air, avoiding a round of incriminations and recriminations.
I feel him up and slip his silky robe off of his shoulders and slide my hands over the supple contours of his moisturized epidermis.
I bite into his neck and suck out the marrow of his goodness.
He smells shower-fresh, minty-toothpaste clean, smoothly shaved and cologned. Smashing.
I drop to my knees (well, more like lower myself carefully, in stages), while he cradles my head, closes his eyes, and purrs.
He lucky. How many fogies get such indescribable pleasure from such a willing and proficient lover?
Is my way of telling him I sorry for being such an arse. Don’t need to spell it out.
I lead him toward our Chamber of Love and the black satin sheets with red stitching I bought for him in multiples when he moved in.
Come hither, sirrah. Come here, my spar. Come hay, nuh, man. Abee a guh cook.
I push him lightly onto the bed, so that he flops facedown on the pillow without damaging any joints.
I go do you the way I always done you, the way you always like me doing you, and when I finished doing you, you go be spinning toward the stars, my friend.
While he lies in a state of deliciously explicit and excited expectation of the delights I got in store, I close the curtains and put Shabba Ranks’s “Mr. Loverman” into the tape player on the bedside cabinet. Oh yes, Ranks might spout homophobic doggerel along with that batty-baiter Banton, but this one song is our perfect wine an grine theme tune.
I climb (also in gentle stages) onto his back and start rubbing his shoulders. Morris a-love that.
We can take our time, because we got all the time in the world; and after we taken all the time in the world, with Shabba growling in the background, we stare up at his magnolia ceiling, catching our breaths.
Little shivers of pleasure shoot up and down my legs.
“Morris, you can pass for one of those buff middle-aged fellas who still pump iron in the gym, easy. Why don’t you put an ad in one of those periodicals I keep in the garage: Mature gent: eight inches, uncut, muscular, horny, ass-play, versatile.”
(He’s not versatile, but I like to humor him. Not eight inches neither.)
“Very funny, Barry, but I’d have to pay them. And I’m sure there isn’t a single twenty-year-old in the world who would think I look buff. More like, Extramature gent: wrinkly, dinkly, and shrinkly.”
“Morris, you must be suffering from that body dysmorphia condition people in rich countries have just invented because they got time to waste creating psycho-illogical problems for themselves. It’s all about perspective, and from mine you are buff.”
“Maybe I’ve got a bit more buffed since I last saw you, then, seeing as I already been to four Pilates for Pensioners classes. Yuh think a six-pack is showing already?”
“Sure thang. You getting results a-ready.” I turn toward him and drape him with myself. “Don’t care how buff you is, I still want you. Love still goin’ strong, Morris. Love still goin’ strong.”
Did I just say that? What is the matter with me? I feeling so happy just being with him.
“I grateful to you, Morris. Yes, I grateful. In this my hour of need you taking my mind off my troubles and woes.”
“Yuh goin’ all soft on me, Barry? Yuh getting in touch with your feminine self, ehn? Tell me, what-a go-wan? Something’s gone down this past fortnight, because you different.”
And I do tell him, breaking it down into chronological scenes: Daniel, Meltdown, Maxine, Donna, and finally, the possibility, or rather the inevitability, of his ex-wife and my soon-to-be ex-wife plotting to destroy our reputations while having their feet massaged by Antiguan gigolos looking for sugar mammies.
By the time I’ve recounted the whole kit and caboodle, omitting Donna’s “graveyard snooping,” Morris is looking at me like he can’t decide whether I’m mad or he should be proud for me being so offended by the posh thug.
“Barry,” he says, calling my name unnecessarily, the way we both do, like it’s not just the two of us so close our breaths are vaporizing into each other’s mouths, “take my advice: next time you feel like losing it, ask yourself what the Dalai Lama would do and follow suit, all right, boss?”
“All right, boss.”
“Because coming out to Daniel and his friends in the dead of night was scaling the heights of stupidity, even for you. At least you had seventeen years of knowing him. You think I ever goin’ be babysitting my latest grandson Jordan again if Clarence finds out what I am? My boys are always complaining about racial discrimination, but they so full of discrimination themselves. You know what? As a father, I fucked up in that respect.”
“Don’t talk to me about fucking up fatherhood, Morris.”
I might as well join Morris in his glass-half-emptiness worldview, because I ain’t feeling so Pollyanna right now.
“Barry, you are still leaving Carmel?” he says, sounding a little worried.
“Yep.” If only Morris really knew the internal trials I been enduring to get to this stage.
“Good—so you must tell her as soon as she walks back in through the front door and then we take it from there. Okay? Whatever happens, we go deal with it together. All righty?”
“All righty.”
“So . . . just to be clear, you goin’ leave Carmel and move in with me, right?”
“Yes,” I say, emphatically this time. It feels good to say it—real, purposeful, a decision wrought by recent dramatic events, doubts, and extreme personal anguish.
I feel say I could flex myself again. I could—with the assistance of my kindly, reliable, but rather expensive friend, Dr. Viagra.
* * *
Ten hours later we are in Madame Maxine’s Gay-ho, the narrow thoroughfares around Old Compton Street riddled with motor vehicles trying to run you down, bar crowds overspilling onto the pavement like they own it, and those irritating rickshaws that appeared in the West End about ten years ago. I ask you: Is this Shanghai? Is this Bombay? Is this Ho Chi Minh City?
Hordes of fellas on the cruise too, not in parks or cemeteries at night, where location alone is proof of intention, but out here in blatant, flirtational, public view.
It’s not as Village People as I expected. Fellas are dressed quite normal and not all Gay-Pride-Parade-Wearing-Only-a-Sequinned-Thong-and-Peacock-Feather-Headdress. Actually, me and Morris is the ones getting anthropological looks, with our smart ’50s suits, spats, fedoras, and, in my case, a chunky gold chain around my neck. I give them anthropological looks right back. Don’t they understand that we the visitors here, not the natives?
Halfway down Old Compton Street we walk past the Admiral Duncan pub that got nail-bombed by that Nazi nutter in ’99—the quarter-brain who couldn’t get a woman, blamed gays, blacks, and Bengalis, and decided to blow us all up as revenge. The pub’s got flamboyant pink lettering and purple walls, with that Freedom Flag flying at full mast. When I heard the news of the bombing back then, it became one more reason why I shouldn’t go anywhere near these bars. Stick to the parks, Barry. They might beat you up, but at least you won’t end up with your legs down one end of the street and your head down the other.
This is when it hits me. For the first time in my life I got no doubt that everybody in the vicinity knows that me and Morris are “gentlemen of doubtful virtue.” Ain’t no fakery here. Lord, they know us. Oh my, I don’t even know where to put myself because some of these fellas make such prolonged eye contact with me they should apply for a resident’s parking permit. Not for a minute are they thinking we are two spruced-up husbands, fathers, grandfathers, cutting through the West End on the way home from a wedding reception, funeral, or Pentecostal church service. No sah, dis-a not Hackney, dis-a not Brixton, dis-a not Leyton. This go be Gay-ho, and they thinking, Look at those two ole Caribbean queens.
If I had more courage, I would hold Morris’s hand for, say, one second. All-a my life I’ve watched couples holding hands, kissing in the street, on the bus, in pubs. I’ve watched couples walking arm in arm, ruffling each other’s hair, sitting on each other’s laps, dancing closely, romantically, jazzily, funkily, badly, bawdily.
And never, not once, have I felt able even to link arms with the man I love.
Me and Morris exchange sidelong glances, and flicker.
He grabs my hand and squeezes it for a few seconds.
It is our first public display of physical affection in sixty years.
* * *
The first bar Maxine lures us into is called the Yard. She’s dressed relatively sensibly today in not-so-sprayed-on jeans and so-called ballet pumps, having “totally wrecked” her feet in the clodhoppers from a few days ago. I say relatively normal, because she’s wrapped her head up again to resemble one of those bulldozing Nigerian matriarchs who roll down Ridley Market three abreast and will mow down anyone who don’t step aside.
The bar is so densely packed with young beefsteak, fag hags, and, as Maxine prewarned us, “voyeuristic hen parties,” and thumping with such ear-splitting so-called music, that Maxine has to screech operatically, hitting a high C, just to ask us what we want to drink. I screech operatically back that me and Morris need to sit down to avoid having heart attacks, but there are no empty seats. We hightail it out-a there, try a couple of other bars similarly afflicted, before Maxine suggests we “jump into a taxi,” as she knows “just the place.” On the way she phones her bezzies to tell them we relocating to the Quebec, just around the corner from Marble Arch. I tell her I ready to call it quits, because I ain’t bar-hopping like a student. She reassures me it’s aimed at the older gay clientele and also known as the Elephants’ Graveyard.
“Charming. Why don’t you just take us to the undertaker’s and be done with it?”
“Daddy,” she retorts, “you’re not planning on being a grumpy old man all night, are you?”
I didn’t expect to be and I don’t want to be, but I can’t shake off the fact that the wife is at this minute sticking pins in a voodoo doll of me; that my elder daughter been carrying around a lifetime’s resentment; and that my only grandson has been shamed by me and will never talk to me again.
The doorman asks us if we know what kind of bar it is inside, and Maxine responds that we are regulars, brushing haughtily past him. Soon as we enter, fellas take a sneaky butchers at the newcomers. Most of them look like retired bank managers and schoolteachers, your run-of-the-mill demographic of middle-class gents from the suburbs.
I realize that as a newcomer to these gay habitats I really did expect to find habitués who are attention-seekers, but not a bit of it. They’re just regular guys, older versions of the ones I used to al fresco with back in the day. Just goes to show how even my assumptions might, upon occasion, be misconceptions.
The narrow pub’s got a wooden bar the length of a medium-sized yacht, faux-Victorian carpet, wallpaper, chandeliers, and, ruining any nostalgic inclinations, ugly air-conditioning pipes hanging from the ceiling that are more suited to a dank hospital basement than a pub. A flat-screen TV suspended on the wall also pursues a theme of the contemporary commingled with the antique, along with a pinball machine that’s being worked furiously by some sweaty Asian fella with mah-jongg in his veins.
“It’s the oldest gay pub in London, darlings,” Maxine announces as she beelines over to an empty table.
Since when does my daughter get to call us darlings?
“It opened in 1936, although I don’t think gay pubs existed then.”
She settles us down in our seats like a fusspot (whispering in my ear to check that I’m okay), all but pulling the chairs out for us and helping us take off our jackets. Why doesn’t she just measure us up for our coffins at the same time?
“Oh, I don’t know,” Morris says, his eyes roaming the room like it’s the Sistine Chapel. “I wonder if Quentin Crisp used to come here? Gay fellas had their meeting places too back then.”
“And what an adorable little muppet he was.” Maxine rubs her hands together. “A lovely bundle of pink bouffant. If at first you don’t succeed, then failure may be your style.” She laughs. “Tell me about it.”
“Indeed, Maxie,” Morris co-enthuses. “What about this one: Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave. Now tell me about that.”
“Daddy, if you and Uncle Morris had come out in the ’60s, you might have known him.”
“If we’d so-called come out then,” I tell her, smiling indulgently, “you wouldn’t-a been born. Besides, neither of us has actually so-called come out, not properly.”
“No, not yet,” Morris agrees, resting his hand briefly on mine on the table, so that his lighter fingers fall into the cracks between my longer ones.
My instinct is to dash my hand away, but it really is okay for him to do that here.
Nonetheless, I should have withdrawn my hand, because he suddenly goes and plants a kiss on my cheek. Maxine’s eyes nearly pop out of her head in be-thrillment.
Step by step, Morris. Don’t expect me to be another Quentin Crisp in five
minutes.
Her mobile rings. “They’re here!” Maxine jumps up as her three bezzies pile in through the double wooden doors with a blast of youthful exuberance.
Why did they call her when they was right outside the door?
“Look!” Maxine squeals as they approach, making a show of herself and pointing at us like we’re a pair of monkeys tap dancing on the table. “Aren’t they wonderful, ladies?”
The bezzies gather round, while Maxine coos and quivers. They shake our hands and slap our backs, stopping just short of pinching and prodding us.
“I discovered them,” she declares, hugging both of us in turn, cheek to cheek, like a proud parent. “So hands off and be-have, especially you.” She wags her finger at the blond one. “This is Dad, Uncle Barry to you, and this is Uncle Morris.”
You wouldn’t think none of them was gay fellas, except maybe Blondie. They just look like arty types. To be honest, Maxine is clearly the campest person in the room.
She takes the order for drinks, which rather surprises me, seeing as I ain’t never seen her actually offer to pay for anything in the history of our relationship. True to form, she not goin’ let me down now. “I’ll start a tab,” she says pointedly. “Dad, it’ll be a Coke for you.”
Will it?
“I’ll have a Coke too,” Morris chips in. “But put a double shot of rum in it.”
The others place their orders, Maxine goes off to the bar, and me and Morris are left with three pairs of expectant eyes waiting for us to whistle through our backsides.
“Chaps,” I say, clearing my throat, “you seem to know who we are. What about you?”
The first one to introduce himself is Blondie, who can’t keep his eyes off Morris.
“Pierre Duchamp, cosmetics entrepreneur,” he says, holding on to Morris’s hand way too malingeringly. Indeed, such is the current of desire flowing toward my man I could go skinny-dipping in it.
What is he, a gerontophile?
I sneak a glimpse at Morris, who looks flattered. Getting big-headed a-ready.
Blondie has green eyes that almost glow in the dark. Around his neck is a thin black collar with silver studs, a theme that extends all the way up his earlobes and all the way down the sides of his black leather trousers.
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