by Tim Anderson
Around 1988, Manchester was ground zero for a music scene whose purveyors were white dudes in baggy clothing dancing around with neon toys and singing drugged-out party anthems about waterfalls, doing drugs, being lazy, having sex, and going to Ibiza to look at waterfalls, do drugs, be lazy, and have sex. The “Madchester” scene lasted into the early nineties, when the drugs ran out or the sex stopped working or the laziness turned into cancer. By 1993, the comedown had settled on the city, just in time for my arrival. But one result of the Madchester scene was that it boosted the city’s nightlife cache, and one fortunate byproduct of this was the formation of a section of town called the Gay Village, where Lycra shirts could roam free. Formerly a run-down area by Rochdale Canal that secret gays would use at night for, in the words of Greater Manchester’s former chief constable (such an adorable word), “swirling around in a cesspool of their own making,” it was now a burgeoning gay neighborhood where both secret and unsecret gays could gather to drink, socialize, boogie, and decide which cesspool to go to next.
So my new favorite thing became going out in the Gay Village. Sure, I’d never really felt at home out on the gay scene, but I’d never had an entire village of options, either. And besides, I’d already learned from my inaugural visit to Heathrow that romance—or at least a quick and frenzied five-minute affair with a gentleman old enough to be your father’s boss—can happen where you least expect it. And, let’s see, what would happen if amphetamines are added to the mix?
I found out exactly that when I went to Flesh for the first time. Flesh was the monthly gay extravaganza at The Haçienda, a club owned by Factory Records and the band New Order that became world famous during the Madchester days and that was apparently swimming in substance abuse. This club had everything: a coat check, alcohol drinks, split-level dance floors, swirling neon lights, a smoke machine, probably a glow stick closet, and lots of patrons wearing not much more than, say, an Indian headdress. It was what American gays would call “fierce” or “fabulous” or “sick” and what British nancies might call “quite good, actually.”
Tracy and I went one night after I begged her to go with me by laying it on thickly with The Smiths references.
“Can’t you feel the soil falling over our heads?” I sang-moaned forlornly, adapting the lyrics to “I Know It’s Over” for my own selfish ends. She wasn’t biting. If we had been in a Smiths musical I would have sung this to her while backing her into a wall, playfully gyrating my hips with my shoulders pressed forward and my butt tight enough to bounce a pound coin off. But she was busy sitting on the floor putting more eyeliner on, so I just sat on her bed and made my case.
“But everyone there is going to be gay,” she said. “What’s in it for me?”
“Probably some drugs—that place is apparently crawling with them.”
“OK, let’s go, hurry up.”
“Plus,” I continued as I put on my faux leather jacket that I’d bought at a shop in the Corn Exchange, “I’ve heard it’s a popular club night for breeders, because of all the drugs and nudity.” We hopped a double-decker bus and powered down Oxford Road through the rain.
Flesh that night was fierce and quite good, actually. We arrived and while we were in the queue for the coat check we met some guy dressed as a tranny flapper harlequin and he had pills in his cloche hat that he was ready to negotiate away, so very early on we were set for the night. (Negotiating with a harlequin is pretty straightforward, surprisingly.) We sauntered around the edges of the main floor, going up the stairs where revelers were clustered here and there appreciating/critiquing each other’s scanty wardrobes and braiding each other’s nipple tassels. I felt the first jittery surge of the magic pill I’d taken just as we made it to the other side of the long balcony, where a grand staircase beckoned us back down to the main bar on the ground floor. And who was standing there at the bar sipping on a drink? That’s right: Bernard Sumner, the lead singer of New Order. Was he staring at me from the bar with a come-hither glance and holding a cocktail out toward me so as to coax me down the stairs? No, he was not doing that. But there was a space right next to him at the bar that someone had just vacated, and that space would be mine. And, soon, just maybe, so would Bernard, because I was now officially hopped up on speed, and everything was suddenly possible.
I stepped down the stairs like a jittery pageant contestant, and as I did, some jerk—his head of hair so thick and wide and full of body that it had to be fake—slid into that empty space next to Bernard and started flapping his gums at him. Dammit. And my Bernard was talking back and laughing. They appeared to know each other—what a disaster. Then, as I alighted on the ground floor, I realized that the moppet with the hair was no ordinary gentleman. It was the lead singer of Simply Red—the “Holding Back the Years” guy. As if to rub this realization in my face, at that same moment Mr. Red tilted his head back, laughed, and whipped his luscious locks out of his face in slow motion. That hair was real.
“Tim!” I turned around, and there was Tracy. She was pointing out toward the corner of the main floor. “I think that’s one of the Pet Shop Boys!” I looked where she was pointing but couldn’t make out who she was talking about. All I saw were swirling lights bouncing off a tumble of gyrating bodies and a couple of boy toys with matching thongs and sailor hats doing the Hustle.
“Which one?” I asked.
“I don’t know, the singer maybe?” Oh, Tracy, I thought. Don’t you know your Pet Shop Boys? They’re very different people!
“I don’t see him!” I screamed sadly over the propulsive house beats thudding against my brain. She pointed again, and I followed her finger, stepping onward to the edge of the dance floor. I turned around to check to see if I was in the right general area she was pointing at, but her finger was now wandering into the hallway, pointing farther and farther away from where I was standing. I tried to follow her fingertip, bounding into excitable punters gulping down their bottled waters and slamming against various striped poles that were scattered around the dance floor. I wandered around mesmerized, the red and blue and green and purple lights cascading all around as I searched and searched for my lost Pet Shop Boy.
I wandered down a hallway and into a wonderland of writhing bodies. I looked and saw a face smiling at me, and that face was connected to a torso being clung to by a dripping wet tank top and undulating like a palm tree in a hurricane. All of a sudden my face and his face were stuck together at the mouths, and we noshed on each other’s lips and chins and cheeks for a few glorious minutes until we felt like we were done, then as poetically as we were brought together, we were torn asunder by a new surge of humanity making its bulbous way like a big love blob into the hallway, and we parted forever. I moved onward, jostled this way and that, and suddenly remembered I was still on the hunt for a Pet Shop Boy of some sort. I looked around at all the smeared and glistening faces, seeing no Boy among them. My adrenaline peaking, I determined it was time to dance, and dashed back to the dance floor and gravitated toward the back wall where I could get a better view of all the slippery hunks of flesh jerking and grinding against each other.
I sidestepped toward one grouping of evidently available gentlemen and offered myself up for some grabbing and groping, jumping whole hog into a series of short-lived love affairs with blokes probably named Ian or Nigel or Arthur or Fergus, and they were all really nice. Then I did something I’d never done before ever in public unless forced to by society norms: I took my shirt off. And when I did I heard sirens wailing and the crowd hollering their approval. Were they hollering for me? No, they were yelping at a drag queen who had just taken over one of the cube platforms and was gyrating up a storm. Suddenly I felt a hand against my wet back and turned around, expecting to find another British face offering to clean my molars with his tongue. To my surprise there stood Tracy, fully dressed and bouncing like a pinball among the cluster of dancers surrounding us.
“Hey, I’m gonna go,” she said, wiping her hand on her plaid skirt. “I�
�m tired.”
“Really? But we haven’t found our Pet Shop Boy yet!”
But she was not in it to win it, as I was. Can’t say that I blamed her: There were very few men here that she could win it with, unless she somehow found Bernard again, because though he seemed gay, I was pretty sure he was just English. Or the Simply Red fellow, but that’s a lot of hair to have to put up with. Tracy left, and I returned to the comforting womb of the dance.
It felt like only a few minutes later that the lights came up and the night was over.
What? I thought, looking down at my watch. It’s only five in the morning! I was crestfallen as everyone around me stopped bumping and grinding and started gathering their things and heading for the doors. I couldn’t stop, though. My body and, more specifically, the amphetamines raging within it, wouldn’t allow me to stop. I jerked myself over to the coat check and joined the queue, but I was unable to stop moving. You don’t tell amphetamines when you’re done, apparently—they tell you. And my speed-addled body demanded more dancing. In the line I heard talk of an after-party at a club down the road, so I got my coat and followed the trail of Haçienda refugees to the next cesspool.
I danced and danced and danced—the word “dance,” of course, being broadly defined as both rhythmic and arrhythmic movement of the body to whatever beat is available at any given moment. Boys filled the floor, loving up on each other in a most unconventional fashion. I had a few more sloppy and short-lived love affairs with an array of dehydrated dudes with kaleidoscope eyes, first in this corner and then in that corner and then in front of the bathroom mirror on the sink and then at the bar, intermittently dancing and grinding my teeth, before I had finally, finally run my body out. At eight a.m. I stumbled out onto the street, where folks were hustling through the drizzle to their offices, like responsible English adults. The majestic/soggy Manchester morning had already fully unfurled, and, now, having left the upper stratosphere of Planet Dance and safely landed back on Earth, I was finding it difficult to move my body in a simple forward motion without the guidance of The Beat. I staggered down Oxford Road, trying mightily not to jerk my arms around constantly and shake my hips and head around like a drunk marionette. I was partially successful, but I wouldn’t really be able to say which part.
I knew that my comedown was going to be epic. Those who disco and suck face in zero gravity fall the hardest, or whatever the proverb says; I could barely see straight, give me a break. I would go back to my flat now, fall flat on my tiny prison bed, then wake up in a few hours alone, sad, and paranoid about what I’d done out in public in full view of Bernard Sumner and one of the Pet Shop Boys.
I didn’t care what the lead singer of Simply Red thought, to be honest.
“I think she is!” Tracy whispered excitedly. “Oh my God, I think she is!”
Tracy and I were sitting in the university cafeteria training our American eagle eyes at a doddering old lady clearing tables, placing used dishes and cups into her rolling cart, and giving the tables a wipe with her dark rag. There was a rumor going around that this woman was none other than Morrissey’s grandmother. Thus far my glimpses of her had been fleeting, usually captured just before she left the dining area and disappeared into the back. But right now we had an excellent, sustained view of her as she did her work a few tables over: We saw her from all sides, and it was amazing how much she favored Morrissey. The pallid potato face, the massive, sloping nose ridged in the middle, the coif. OK, not the coif. But oh, the potato face. It was as if, right before our eyes, doing menial work like some commoner, and wearing an oversized apron, a paper hat, and a fat suit, was the man who once had a girlfriend who was in a coma (it was serious). The very one!
“Wow, she really does look like him,” I agreed. I noted the barest hint of a smile curl itself on her lips. She knew she was being watched. Whether she was Morrissey’s grandmother or not, she was enjoying the attention this famous young fop was garnering her.
“I want to bleach my hair, I think,” I said. It seemed to be a thing that gay guys were doing, and I’d always been a sucker for Billy Idol. Maybe if I’d gone white-hot-blond back home it would have distracted guys from my thoroughly judgmental face.
“Oh, you should! It will electrify your whole head!”
“But what should I use?”
“Oh, any old hair bleach will do the trick.”
“But won’t some of them peel my scalp off?”
“Only temporarily.”
“Hmmm.” I wondered if I should be taking advice like this from a girl who pulls out her eyelashes. Perhaps I should get a professional to handle it.
“You going out tonight?” I asked her.
“It’s Wednesday.”
“Oh,” I said, not understanding her point. Then I got it. My social inclinations had totally changed since setting foot in Manchester. I was living in a flat full of “freshers”—first-year students who, because of the exigencies of the British university degree system, didn’t ever have to do a damn thing because all of their coursework for the entire year would add up to only two or three percent of their entire degree. So they spent days on end in the front room playing video games, smoking Olympian amounts of hash, and having the most hilariously articulate conversations I’d ever heard about the space-time continuum, the coming communications revolution, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they never ever went to class. Ever. And their lack of any scholastic ambition whatsoever was rubbing off on me. I was shedding my “responsible student” shtick, and, as the sun began setting at 3:45 in the afternoon, all I could think of was where I was going to go out and get bladdered. Sometimes I would go with friends; sometimes I would go by myself. Sometimes I would pass out on the floor of a pub and have to be carried home or rely on the kindness of strangers to put me in a cab and not rob me. These things happen. But I always bounced back the next night and was ready to rumble.
I couldn’t interest Tracy or anyone else in going out with me that Wednesday, so I set out on my own, down Oxford Road on the 147 bus to Charles Street, where a short hop, skip, and jump later I was entering the hallowed walls of the Paradise Factory, a giant gay club downtown. It was surprisingly hopping for a Wednesday night, so I got a drink and made my way up to the second floor to check out the proceedings.
A few drinks later I was sitting on a bench along the periphery of the third-floor dance floor, nodding along to the music and sucking down a glass of Woodpecker Cider that was profoundly diabetic-unfriendly.
“Are you out on your own?” a female voice beside me shouted into my ear. I looked over at the curly-haired young lady sitting next to me.
“Yeah,” I shouted back at her. “You know, it’s Wednesday.” I shrugged my shoulders in an exaggerated fashion.
“Are you American?” she said excitedly.
I nodded.
“What on earth are you doing in Manchester?”
“Going to school.”
This didn’t seem to make sense to her, but she nodded anyway.
“I’m Janet, and, oh, this is my friend Stephen.” She gestured to the handsome young man on her other side tugging on a cigarette. He extended his hand and shook mine, leaning over his friend to shout “Nice to meet you!” Janet excused herself and took off for the bar, and Stephen scooted over.
“You’re American?”
“Yeah, sorry,” I said.
“Oh, you shouldn’t be sorry. I love Truman Capote.” Ca-PO-tay, he pronounced it.
I’d never read Truman Capote, and knew nothing of his work. I now knew, though, that he was American, like me, and I knew that I should know him, so…
“Oh, I do, too!”
“He’s my favorite author full stop,” he slurred into my ear. This boy was already sloshed. He was way ahead of me. Thankfully, Janet came back from the bar with four drinks, two of which she handed to me.
“Here you go, doll,” she said. “You need to catch up.”
“What are these?” I asked, looking a
t the plastic cups of clear liquid over ice.
“Vodka,” she said. “Americans like vodka, right?”
She sat on the other side of Stephen, and he kept leaning over and slurring things into my ear that I couldn’t really understand, except for the word “CaPOtay.” This boy really liked our Truman.
“Breafasssst at Tifffany’ssss is loike moi favorite book of all toim, reeeaally.”
I sucked down the two vodka drinks, and soon enough I was giving back to Stephen as good as I got, slurring like a champ.
“It’ssss funny that Capote issss your favorite author, becaussssse myyyyyy favorite author isssss Charlessssss Dickenssssss!”
He nodded, then looked puzzled.
“Why isssss that funny, then?”
“Becausssssse,” I started, forgetting why it was funny (it wasn’t funny), then remembering, “Capote issssss American and Dickenssss isss English.” He stared out at the boys and girls hopping around on the dance floor to The Stone Roses, nodding, then tilting his head quizzically.
“You know,” I pressed, “Capote issssss American but you’re Englishhhh and Dickenssss isss English but I’m Amer[hiccup]ican.”
“Oooooh,” he said, nodding. “I guess that’ssss kinda funny, maybe.” (It wasn’t funny.)
With the amount of time we were spending leaning into each other’s ears to slur-shout nonsense about Capote and Dickens, we were bound to knock heads at some point. We did this. We were also bound to find ourselves at the optimal angle to start sucking face. We also did this. We did this a lot. For minute upon minute. Did Janet even exist anymore?