“He might be Pierre Duchamp to you,” another one jumps in with a rather highbrow voice. This one’s a tall fella with a long face and dreadlocks piled high into a spaghetti twist on his head. “But he’s Benjamin Brigstock to his parents. I’ve seen his passport.”
They all fall apart at that.
“For Crissakes,” Blondie retaliates, “Benny Brigstock is never going to sell the metrosexual makeup range I’m developing.”
“I can’t see there’s much potential in makeup, myself. Not for real men anyway,” I say while putting my arm, yes, my arm, around Morris, who stiffens.
Blondie looks offended. The others chuckle, unsure.
He skulks off, muttering something about helping Maxine with the drinks.
“What about you? What is your name, young man?” Morris asks, doing what he does best, alleviating tense situations with friendly social discourse.
This is one helluva handsome fella, a latter-day Eros with curly Italianate hair, dramatic features, seductive sloe-eyes, and juicy blowjob lips. I bet he’s a dutty bastard. I can always tell.
“I’m Marcus,” he says, blatantly aware of his beauty.
I can’t take my eyes off his mouth. Lord, it’s so big the Titanic could have sailed in it . . . and me, back in the day.
“And what do you do, Marcus?” I ask his mouth.
“I’m head of visual-merchandise design at Miss Selfridge,” his mouth replies. “I was at Saint Martins with Max.”
“What is this visual-merchandise business when it’s at home?”
“Pretty much anything to do with the display of merchandise in stores,” he says, like his job is as vital to human survival as agriculture or medicine. “Anything from window displays, creating props and accents, organizing clothing placements, marketing campaigns. I’m the in-store aesthete, if you like. Their greatest asset, or so my manager keeps telling me.” He snorts.
“Don’t be deceived,” Spaghetti Head butts in. “What he means is that he puts wigs on mannequins during the day, and in the evenings he puts condoms on anyone who’ll take him, like his manager.”
“You weren’t complaining when you were the one rolling my condoms up your dick,” he snaps back.
“Now, now, chaps.” Morris intervenes a little too prematurely for my liking. “Let’s keep this occasion nice and convivial.”
Why?
I examine Blowjob Lips. Apart from his mouth, his nostrils are a bit too wide and his skin a bit too tawny for him to be entirely of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion.
“Where yuh people from?” I demand. He looks taken aback but answers his elder obediently.
“Jamaica.”
“They black?” I ask.
“Um, yes, no, red-skinned, as they say over there.” He’s flushing.
“Thought so,” I reply. “Just like people back home who wanted to pass.”
I see Morris squinting at me through my excellent peripheral, as if to say, Don’t start on this one too. Chill out, nah, man.
“I’m not passing, because I’m hardly properly black, am I?”
“Not if you can pass.”
Whoah! Barry, yuh starting to sound like one of those radicals. What’s got into you? You not a race man. What do you care? Leave the boy alone.
I just killed the conversation stone dead. In which case, I’d better give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation before Maxine gets back. I turn to Spaghetti Head. “What about you?”
He throws up his hands and blurts out, “Guilty! Guilty! Arrest me, lock me up, behead me, put me before the firing squad.”
That relaxes the atmosphere just in time for Maxine’s return with the drinks, Blondie in tow, clearly reassured that Maxine will protect him from the Evil Ogre.
“Good to see you’re all enjoying yourselves at last,” she says, handing out drinks. “And no one’s being a troublemaker, as usual.” She slams down my glass of Coke in front of me with such force a chunk of ice leapfrogs out of it.
Except my princess can’t stay angry with me for long because who am I but her privy purse?
“Dad,” she says in my ear, “they don’t keep tabs at the bar. Er . . . can you help out at all, pretty please?”
I slip her a fifty-pound note. “Get a double shot of rum for me too or I want the change.”
She frowns. But she’s been bought. I watch her all but skip off, happy as when I used to give her twenty pence for a lolly from the ice-cream van.
Me and Morris are seated side by side. Blondie has parked his arse on the other side of Morris, strategically just out of my immediate eyeline. Maxine is at the end of the table, Blowjob Lips is next to her and opposite Morris, and Spaghetti Head is facing me.
Maxine proposes a toast. “Here’s to Daddy and Uncle Morris. The elders who blazed a trail. Respect!”
Blazed a trail. How, exactly? In the wardrobe?
“Respect!” they toast, and we all down our alcohol-infused drinks that will charge us up nicely for an evening’s carousing.
“Young man,” I say to Spaghetti Head, while the others start fawning over Morris. “Tell me about yourself. You a Rasta?”
“Christ, no, never in a million years. It’s just a style thing.”
Is that what he calls it?
He flashes me a crisp white smile that goes with his crisp white shirt, open at the neck to reveal a dark, chocolatesque chest. He sits back and spreads his crisply clean, be-jeaned legs wide, showing off long, lean thighs and a decent enough package.
This one’s not a young Adonis like Blowjob, too intelligent-looking, although his body makes up for it. His face is too long to be handsome, and his nose too short relative to it; he’s got a chunk missing from his forehead, and he talks lopsided.
He catches me observing him and gives a sly smile. Nonetheless, I do believe I could take a trip to the toilets with this one.
Lord, an ole man can have his harmless fantasies.
“Before you ask, my name is Lola,” he says.
“Lola?” I splutter, nearly choking on my drink.
“Short for Damilola,” he says, grinning, unfazed by my reaction. “Which I only use in the Big Bad Homophobic World Outside. To my friends, I’m Lola.”
Right . . .
“Nigerian,” he further explains, picking up a stray strand of spaghetti that’s fallen over his face and tucking it back into the meal on his head. “Born there, raised here. I’m twenty-nine, so a lot younger than this bunch, but, I’m afraid to say, so much the wiser.” He nods over at his cohorts before backtracking. “Not Maxine, of course. I worship her. She’s not immature at all.”
Oh yes she is.
“As for Marcus and Pierre, they’re only good for a night out on the tiles, which is great when I need to blow off steam.” He leans forward in a posture of confidential disclosure. “I call them my Friday Night Hedonistic Friends, as distinct, you understand, from my Saturday Evening Dinner Party Friends, my Art House Movie Pals, African Academics Debating Society, and Gay Support Group (London Chapter for the Under-Thirties).”
I try to suppress the ripples of laughter bubbling up deep within my wicked soul.
“Those two usually end up completely trashed and giving complete strangers lap dances. Don’t expect them to have heard of James Baldwin or Bayard Rustin. RuPaul and Danny La Rue? Yes. Langston Hughes? No.”
I wonder if Blowjob will include me in the “complete stranger” category? And, if so, would Morris mind?
Spaghetti Head ploughs on: “It’s impossible to engage them in a weighty conversation, as I think you’ve just discovered. I know from Maxine that you’re a bit of a thinker. A kind of autodidact, in fact?”
Alarum! Alarum! Is this rass snob suggesting I’m some kind of sad sack who wasn’t clever enough to go to university? Oh, shut up, Barry.
Breathe deeply and repeat ten times: I am the Dalai Lama, I am the Dalai Lama.
I assume a friendly, nonconfrontational countenance. “So you and Marcus was lovers, then?”
&n
bsp; “For seven months,” he replies, looking a bit miffed that I’ve detoured the conversation. “Until I discovered I was just one of many fuck-buddies—nocturnal visits on my moped, et cet-er-a . . .”
He takes a sip of his white wine, a drink I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. It’s a woman’s drink, and Lola or no Lola, he’s a man.
“I take it you’re not one of the so-called fashionista crowd, then, Lola?” I inquire, sounding all upbeat, because one of my better interpersonal skills is to stop folk sinking into the sludge of self-pity.
“Christ, no! Love art, hate fashion is my mantra.” Suddenly revitalized, he rolls up his shirtsleeves to reveal sculpted, gleaming forearms. Our people usually moisturize good. Englishmen don’t, which is why they end up crusty.
“You know how people in fashion are always proclaiming passionately, I love fashion! like they’re saying something meaningful instead of spouting the most annoying platitude ever?”
I nod my head. Yes, dearie, I notice it all the time.
“You see, uncle, what I myself personally find great is how artists like Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien, and Yinka Shonibare subvert the kinds of hackneyed cultural and historical iconographies that usually go unchallenged.”
This one’s a speechifyer for sure. Only problem is that he takes the motorway to go to the shop round the corner. He’s still not told me what he does.
“What is your profession? You an artist?”
That would excuse the hairstyle, at least.
“Unfortunately not. No talent in that department, sadly. I’ve two degrees under my belt, and I’m in my third year of a PhD at Brunel University, where I’m president of the LBGT Society. I’m interrogating the history of homosexuality in Africa, focusing on the privileging of heteronormativity in Nigeria and the constitutionally enshrined persecution of homosexuals there as elsewhere on the continent, except South Africa, where it’s at least legally legal, so to speak. I could talk about it all night. In fact . . . I often do.”
No wonder Blowjob Lips dumped him.
Just then the lower end of the table erupts with mirth. This might be the highbrow end of the table, but some lowbrow nonsense is preferable on my historic first night out of the wardrobe.
“Lola,” I say at last, “to be quite frank with you, I am not fully cognizant of Africa’s pancontinental yet heterogeneous homosexual history, nor do I know anything about institutional and attitudinal prejudices thereof. It is not an issue that ever enters my sphere of interrogative probity, in truth.”
Oh yes, I can speaky-spokey too.
“Let me tell you, then,” Lola replies. “These myth-makers are actually arguing that, unlike the rest of the human race, Africans were quite incapable of having same-sex relations without being shown how to do it by the Europeans. What’s more insulting: To say that Africans were sexually infantilized until the Europeans arrived? Or to admit that they were evolved enough to get their groove on through same-sex attraction?”
Of course men have been at it with each other since time began. Sticking it in any ole bodily orifice they can.
“Let us not forget,” he continues, “that prior to Christianity sub-Saharan Africa had indigenous religions with their own moral beliefs. The Zande warriors of Zaire, the Berbers of Siwa in Egypt, transvestism in Madagascar, a boy’s rite of passage in Benin. This is what’s so twisted about it all. It’s homophobia, not homosexuality, that was imported to Africa, because European missionaries regarded it as a sin. Take Angola, prior to colonial intervention, homosexuals were accepted, not persecuted. It was the Portuguese who criminalized it.”
He leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and seems to be recovering from his verbalization, extemporization, and philosophization.
Maxine right. I really do feel like a grumpy ole man today. This is too much for me. Maxine’s bezzies are too self-confident, too in-yer-face. It makes me want to puncture their egos.
I like the pub, though. The regulars are quiet, discreet, none of the braying braggadocio of your usual male bar crowd. Our table is actually the rowdiest. I might even come back here with Morris and meet some fellow elders, although if any one of them shows any signs of dementia I’ll be out the door in a flash.
By the time I finish drifting, Spaghetti Lolanaise is taking a rather graceful sip of wine. Oh yes, radical today, banker tomorrow. A real radical would be drinking cheap beer or cider.
He drains the last of his wine and waves it in Maxine’s direction like a hypnotist. She rises to the bait. “Same again, everyone?” And she’s off to the bar. Silly girl should know better than to be played. Let him get his own bloody drink.
“Uncle Barry, I want to know all about you,” he says, finally noticing my mood shift. I’m never sure whether I’m immune to what I observe in others—the attempt to camouflage negative thoughts and emotions.
“Sod African history for the moment, you’re living history.”
Thanks . . .
“Max tells me you—”
“I’d rather talk about you. When did you first realize you was a pooftah?”
He deflates into his seat. “Poof . . . tah?”
Morris turns around sharply. “Barry, you behaving yourself?”
“Yes, cherub, I only joking.”
“Good.”
“Lola,” I say, all nicety-nicety with Morris listening in at my side, “I take it you’ve come out to your family?”
“And how. My dad’s response was to declare that adodi, which in Yoruba means ‘one who fucks in the arse,’ should be necklaced. My Nation of Islam brother Bolade said I was mentally ill. I told him that his hero, Malcom X, was adodi too, and that his childhood friends had testified to his homosexual activities from a young age. Bad move. He attacked me with a solid glass ashtray and I ended up in A&E. You see this?” He points to the crater in his forehead. “Christmas 2004—present from my brother.”
I think I might almost start liking this lad. I pat him on his hand, and he sinks into his seat.
“You braver than me, Lola,” I say. (See, I got a heart.) “I did something even crazier the other night, this so-called coming out thing to a group of drunken teenage boys including my grandson. I didn’t mean to do it, I just vomited the words up.” I can’t believe I’m discussing this openly, being so influenced by these gay fellas so quickly. “Whereas you did it knowing what you was up against. Me, I was drunk and out of control. I ain’t no hero.”
“Me neither,” says Morris, listening in and shaking his head somewhat tipsily. “And Barry, did I tell you that was an idiotic thing to do?”
“Oh, but you are heroes. Both of you. I certainly don’t see any other black men your age here, do you?”
He right, but it don’t bother me, not no more. So long as folk treat me decently, equally, I fine with them. I never came to this country expecting to be in the majority. Look at Peaceman. I’d rather sit down and chinwag with him more than anyone else other than Morris. Don’t matter what color a person is; some folk just get a connection. Next time I see him I go tell him about me and Morris. Yes, I go do it.
Peaceman will probably say, Barry, I have been waiting for you to take me into your confidence on this matter since we first met in 1965.
“You be a hero for all-a-we,” I tell Spaggy.
“Yesh, you be a hero for boshofus,” Morris concurs.
Spaggy smiles appreciatively. “I’ll try. I’ve been interviewing gay men at private parties in Nigeria. ‘Kings and queens’ is their equivalent of ‘butch and femme.’ You’ll never believe this . . .” His eyes glitter. “But I’m actually seeing a brigadier in the Nigerian Armed Forces. Mean, keen, and utterly devastating in his army uniform. Also Muslim, married with two wives, and the father of seven kids. Hello? Welcome to the Nigerian down-low.”
He waves his glass at my daughter again. I quickly thrust a fifty-pound note at him so I don’t have to see her act like a puppet.
“Are you sure?” he asks while grabbing it.
The rest of the table suddenly look up, all attentive. Funny how the mention of free drinks can do that.
“Dad,” Maxine says across the table, “it’ll be a Coke for you, with no pollutants.”
“Yes, Barry,” Morris butts in. “Go easy now.”
“Since when has four shots of rum been anything other than an aperitif?”
The bezzies laugh, but Maxine and Morris stare me down. They goin’ whup my ass if I step out of line. They right, though: I shan’t let my alky-holiday turn into another alky-hell.
I goin’ stay sober until my showdown with Carmel—and this waiting is increasingly killing me—and then I goin’ stay sober until the divorce done.
I look around at Maxine’s bezzies, all lively and, if I’m honest, they are being nice to me, even though I was a bit harsh on them earlier. Morris right: I shouldn’t be so judgemental, so down on people, especially my own.
Suddenly it’s like divorcing Carmel is not enough, I feel the need to so-called come out to her too. What is the matter with you, Barry? That is the barmiest thing you can do.
“Lola, get me a pure, healthy, sugar-free, chemical-free Coca-Cola and . . . before I forget, what is this LBGT thing?”
“It’s an abbreviation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender, standing for a diversity of sexuality and gender-identity-based cultures.”
“Whava very good idea.” Morris nods his head vigorously. “We gender-benders have got to shtick up for sholidarity.”
The way he’s carrying on, I wouldn’t put it past him to get his nipples pierced tomorrow.
“Are you saying that I am now lumped together with those born-a-boy-die-a-girl sex-changers? I’ll have you know I am quite happy with my fully functioning cock.”
“Hear-hear,” says Blowjob, joining my fray. “Me too. Lola hasn’t been boring you, has he? Droning on about how Jesus was really an African lesbian?”
Everybody cracks up, even Lola, who whisks himself off to the now-crowded bar.
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