A Young Man's Passage

by Julian Clary

  Meanwhile, I had some modelling shots done for an agency, and continued to apply unsuccessfully for acting jobs.

  THE FARNDALE AVENUE Housing Estate Townswomen’s Guild’s Amateur Dramatic Society was in reality a company called Entertainment Machine run by a worried-looking man called David McGillivray. Their particular niche was the excruciating but hilarious world of amateur dramatics, where sets fell down, incompetent actors forgot their lines and the raffle was more important than the plot. Janet Sate, an actress I’d worked and bonded with at Covent Garden, was on tour in 1982 with their French farce, Chase Me Up Farndale Avenue, S’il Vous Plaît! The actress playing Mrs Reece was so dire I was smuggled in to rehearse in secret for a couple of days before she was given the boot and I took over.

  Mrs Phoebe Reece was the chairperson of the dramatic society and took her role very seriously, interrupting the play to recall past productions: ‘More senior members amongst you will recall with pleasure I expect such extravaganzas as A Woman’s Mission, Cave Girls, It’s Miss Wimbush! and, of course, our big success, Brown Owl Pulls It Off.’ She also announced, ‘After a very heated committee meeting, we’ve decided to mount our first bisexual production. It’s high time we gave one or two of our younger actresses the chance to play with a male member. And I’m certainly looking forward to trying my hand at it as well.’

  There were a lot of lines to learn and I was far from ready on my first night at the Prince Regent Theatre on the Isle of Wight. Instead of saying, ‘That was a narrow squeak,’ I came up with, ‘That was a short quack.’ I also had a large explanatory speech to reel off in act two which was vital to the plot. My cue came from David, who was playing the part of Gordon. The time came and he said, ‘But what shall we do when we get to the bistro and Mr Barratt isn’t there?’

  ‘That’s your problem,’ I said, and promptly left the stage.

  Despite all this, the theatre manager Brian McDermot was full of praise: ‘Come to the bar and be lionised!’ he said after the show. Over drinks I told him about my Gillian Pie-Face act and he booked me. I accepted his offer to do a full evening’s entertainment despite the fact I still only had 20 minutes’ worth of material. I’d worry about that nearer the time.

  David McGillivray, our author and director, seemed to thrive on drama. The tour took us all over the country. The day after my first night on the Isle of Wight we were booked in Irvine in Scotland. Our means of transport – a sad little van for set and actors – broke down in Portsmouth and the AA and British Rail had to pull out all the stops to deliver us in the nick of time. Our performance in Harlech had no business taking place either, when following some hold-up on the Severn Bridge we didn’t arrive there until 7.45 p.m. Wild-eyed and breathless, David explained to the audience that there would be a delay until 9 p.m. if they could possibly bear with us. This being Wales, where there was nothing else to do, they waited. Travel-weary and hungry, we began hauling the set into the theatre past bemused punters. Fortunately I had one of my opportune nosebleeds and could only watch and encourage.

  Our accommodation was always cheap and cheerful: nylon sheets and candlewick bedspreads. After a show in Cumbernauld, we sat in the lounge admiring the knick-knacks and making small talk with the landlord. When I offered him a cigarette, he said, ‘No thanks, I’m a pipe.’ Before we retired to our rooms, he asked if we’d like a cooked breakfast in the morning. ‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘I’m a corn flake.’

  When the tour finished, I returned to the Isle of Wight to do the one-man show as promised. I cobbled together Gillian, May and Mrs Reece and hoped for the best. It was a disaster, the bemused punters shuffling out in silence after 40 sweaty minutes.

  I returned home, back to the dole, the occasional gig at the Earth Exchange my only prospect.

  But if work was thin on the ground, men certainly weren’t. They were coming thick and fast.

  SIX

  ‘Say, boys, whatever do you mean, When you wink the other eye?’

  ‘WINK THE OTHER EYE’ BY GEORGE LE BRUNN AND W.T. LYTTON

  I MET A Boy called Mark one evening on the train home from Charing Cross. He lived just down the road. He had a rugby player’s face and pale, freckled skin. I didn’t fancy him, but he had other attractions. He knew how to enjoy life, and we became sisters, cruising companions and friends. We seemed to go out most nights, but as he was a student and I was on the dole, money was tight.

  Here’s how it worked. We’d meet about 9 p.m. at the bus stop on Blackheath, each with a £5 note and no more. The bus stop was just before some traffic lights, and Mark would tap on the passenger window of a waiting car and ask the single male occupant if he was driving into town and could we cadge a lift? Once in town we’d skim through the Soho bars, have a drink if anyone offered to buy us one . . . ‘And this is my friend Julian, he’d like a pint of Grolsch too,’ kind of business. We’d enter Heaven nightclub, our fiver still intact, either with a free entrance voucher from one of the trashy gay mags or because Mark had somehow wangled us onto the guest list. Inside there’d be more shameless cruising for beverages.

  As the evening wore on we might be reduced to collecting the dregs of other revellers’ discarded drinks. That’s the horrible truth, pain me though it does to reveal it. I think I even stole the odd glass from those frisky enough to take to the dance floor and leave their refreshments unattended. Cheap, I know, and I’m full of retrospective horror and can only apologise. Then it was Pick-up, especially if he had a car, and one could say goodnight to one’s sister and leave, flourishing the fiver in triumph for good measure.

  Far-from-tantric sex inevitably followed. The earth may not have moved very far, but it would round an evening off nicely. Occasionally there would be an encore. A half-hearted attempt at ‘going out’ even, but it would always end in stony silences or unanswered calls.

  I was obsessed for a while with a man I’d slept with called Henry. He was posh and whisked me back to his Cadogan Square flat in Chelsea to be ravished. The flat was full of antique furniture, but the sheets were dirty – there was a grey mark on the antique linen pillow where he lay his beautiful head. But Henry wasn’t interested in an encore and didn’t answer my calls. Not good with rejection, even then, I wrote the obligatory poem.

  Like the cock on a windless day

  Grimly pointing out yesterday’s weather,

  I am old news.

  A motherless goose,

  Hatched and blinking by chance at you

  Yet having no instinct to beg,

  I falter, fret but cannot follow.

  Mark chivvied me out of my wistful state by taking me out again. ‘Let’s go and look for Henry!’ he’d say. We never found him, but I was pleasantly distracted by fresh faces along the way. ‘Looking for Henry’ became our coded phrase for going out on the tiles.

  In those pre-AIDS days using a condom was regarded as a kind of weird hygiene-related fetish. The lottery had started but we didn’t know. Rumours circulated about a deadly virus you might get if you slept with an American. Bars would fall silent if a Yankee accent was heard. Eyes would roll, backs would turn.

  I specialised in Spanish, Italian, Greek and French gentlemen callers. They seemed exotic and lusty, and if there wasn’t much joy to be had from conversation, so much the better. Sometimes I’d get exasperated, though, if I said something funny and wasn’t rewarded with a laugh. My particular brand of spontaneous comic quip has never stood up well to any form of deconstruction. Any requests to explain my remarks or translate into a beginner’s vocabulary got very short shrift.

  ‘You’ve simply no idea how witty I’ve just been!’ I’d snap.

  ‘Que?’

  It was a bit like doing a gig in Chatham.

  On Monday nights I usually went to Bangs on the Tottenham Court Road. It was there I met Siro, an Italian passing through London on his round-the-world adventure. His English wasn’t great but he could make himself understood. He wanted sex every 15 minutes, and by Wednesday I could tak
e no more and made my excuses. Before I fell into an exhausted sleep, I wrote down one of his many monologues:

  ‘Portugal, America, Paris, London – I search for love, for happiness, I don’t know what. I like to make people happy. In the gay sauna in Boston I let 30 men fuck me. The 31st he call me a slut. I am not a slut. I like to fuck, so I do. I think I give a lot of pleasure. I am very sexual person. You just touch my arm and my prick is jumping bigger. Always it is this. Sometimes I just touch my arm with myself and it is doing it. So. It is the way I am. It is not wrong. Sex is like water. I am thirsty, I drink. Some people drink three or four drinks, some seven or eight. It doesn’t matter. I want sex, I have sex. Always I am ready. It is not love, I know this. Sex without love is just water. Sometimes you have water with the gas. This is sex with love. So.’

  That’s as may be, I thought as I drifted off. But – moral judgements aside – didn’t the marathon in the Boston sauna make it difficult to walk the next day and therefore hinder rather than help the ‘search’ for love?

  Another cruising sister was Stephen. Linda and I met him when we took to frequenting the Dover Castle. Gone now, but then a drag pub on Deptford Broadway. Stephen was from Belfast. Twenty-one, black hair and startling blue eyes, full, wanton lips and an arrogant jaw. If you’re thinking I put it about a bit, then Stephen made me look like Mother Teresa. Always ready with an anecdote about that day’s conquests. ‘He was covered in tattoos, so he was, and he came all over the window.’ He enjoyed making several dates for the same evening at various bars in Soho so he could decide later which one to grace with his company. He was on the lookout for sex day and night. In the days when train carriages were divided into small eight-person compartments, the journey from New Cross to London Bridge, a good seven minutes, was particularly fruitful. But so were public lavatories, parks or almost anywhere. Stephen radiated charm and sex appeal, and the look was spruced-up barrow boy with a few too many buttons carelessly left undone. ‘After dark London belongs to the homos,’ he would say.

  He always referred to his sex life in terms of ‘portions’. ‘I’ve had three portions today already so I won’t be picking anyone up tonight,’ he’d tell me when we were going out. I had only to say ‘Three?’ enquiringly if I felt like hearing more. ‘I had a portion with John this morning before he went to work, I had my seconds in Charing Cross public conveniences and then I met a man from Glasgow in the Brief Encounter and we went to a derelict building site for sex. That’s three portions I’ve had.’

  Stephen divided all of his life up in that way, as if it were so much quiche. There is nothing wrong with this method – you can apply it to anything. At the end of an evening out, Stephen could give you a résumé of what he’d eaten, how many drinks he’d bought, how many were bought for him, how many men talked to him, looked at him, asked him home, gave him their phone numbers. ‘I could have gone home with six or seven,’ he’d say in a triumphant Belfast twang.

  He had a live-in boyfriend called John for a while, but didn’t let that stop him. He’d crush up sleeping pills and dissolve them in John’s tea, then wait 20 minutes until he’d nodded off before going out. He was suspicious of John, too, and with good reason. He told me he followed him one afternoon. John had gone to a public loo that was a notorious cottage. Stephen waited five minutes then went in. He stood on the toilet seat and peered over the wall into the adjoining cubicle and caught John having an intimate moment, not to say mouthful, with a stranger. ‘Coo-ee!’ said Stephen.

  The Dover Castle featured acts such as the Trolettes, High Society, the Playgirls and a trio called LSD, who were Lily Savage, Sandra, and Doris aka David Dale. Their finale was an appearance as Andy Pandy, Teddy and Looby Lou. Our favourite was Phil Star, a polished and wonderfully vulgar performer, expert at bitching other acts. ‘Lily Savage was waiting at a bus stop the other day. She got raped three times and still she never lost her place in the queue.’

  When it closed there we could, if we wished, move on to the Ship and Whale in Rotherhithe. Open till 1.30 a.m. and a disco thrown in. Much the same crowd as the Dover Castle, but drunker.

  It was here I met Andrew, a car mechanic from Upminster. He had thinning hair and a rather flat face and was a victim of some unfortunate condition that caused his teeth to be black for a good quarter of an inch round the gum region. He wore a very Essex big knitted jacket with frightful leather panels, and cheap underwear from a supermarket. He was very rough and told lies all the time. You always knew when he was lying because his eyelids went into a kind of involuntary flutter and his irises disappeared upwards. An inconvenient physical tick, one might think, and enough to render lying pointless. Seemingly not, in Andrew’s case. I enjoyed inducing the lies. I’d corner him about some contradictory information, some fading love-bite not fully concealed beneath the collar of a garish shirt from Upminster market, say, and stand back. He’d sometimes get through a sentence before the fluttering began, sometimes not. When the whopper had been unconvincingly told, he’d fix me with an insolent stare. If I could be bothered, I’d ask a supplementary question and the whole process would begin again.

  But I liked him. There was a common gangsterish charm to him. His brother was in prison for GBH, which rather added to it. He would turn up unannounced late at night, park some dodgy motor outside my flat and stagger in drunk, wanting sex and a can of lager. He’d say ‘screw’ rather than ‘fuck’ too, which endeared him to me. We ‘saw’ each other for a while, as they say. We didn’t exactly ‘go out’. I’m sure you know the difference.

  It all ended in tears, I recall, one Sunday night at Benjy’s nightclub on the Mile End Road. There was a ‘scene’. A few weeks before Andrew had asked for a photograph of me and I’d given him one of my new modelling shots. Anyway, that evening he had a friend with him. I was introduced to the chubby smiling dark man, who nodded a lot in a significant way and looked meaningfully at Andrew. I didn’t know what was going on. Later, just before the club closed, Andrew ushered me over to one of the intimate curved couches. A fresh pint of lager for us both.

  ‘What do you think of Sasha?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He wants to sleep with you. Will you do it for me? You know I love you. Go home with him and I’ll come round later. Or if you’d rather I’ll come with you and wait. Do it. I really love you . . .’

  What upset me was the casual nature of the request. So I picked up my pint and poured it over Andrew’s head. He didn’t dodge out of the way, and the lager, poured with enthusiasm, fanned outwards at 90 degrees, drenching innocent homosexuals, who arched their backs and squealed with indignation. He looked as if he might kill me. I was asked to leave.

  THE FACT THAT I did not contract the HIV virus during these years is entirely down to luck. I was young and gay and having sex with lots of different men, but I stopped having anal sex. This wasn’t a preventative measure on my part, but because I had an embarrassing problem that wouldn’t go away. A nasty business: anal warts. It’s pointless speculating as to who gave them to me (this is a memoir, not a phone book), but one penis I remember in particular may be the culprit. I met a skinhead type at Heaven who took me back to his south London council flat. He gave me a tab of acid and loosened his braces. We had sex for hours on his bed beneath an open window. I remember watching the night sky lighten, the clouds drift past, dusk and then night again. I thought the trip would never end but I seemed unable to move from the bed. At one point I became enthralled with his penis and examined it closely. Tucked away under the folds of his foreskin were several small, white, bogey-sized lumps. The clouds that floated by the window were now in the room with us, attached.

  A month or so later a personal itching problem forced me to get a mirror, spread my bum cheeks and see what on earth the problem was. There were the small fleshy lumps again.

  A trip to the STD clinic named and shamed me as the carrier of anal warts. I was mortified, and wrote a poem.

  This gay life that I lead is
now due for inspection,

  I haven’t gained a lot except venereal infection.

  If I have lots of one-night stands and take them lying down,

  I must expect a little keepsake, there’s so much of it around.

  A weekly treatment of ‘freezing’ the little bastards ensued, but they seemed to flourish – fertilised, if anything, by their ordeal, and ever increasing. After a while I learned to live with my dark discomfort and re-entered the sexual arena, sternly brushing away any gentleman caller’s hand or other body part that sought to investigate my nether regions.

  Thus during those dangerous years my sexual activities did not, at least, put me into the high-risk category. That’s the only reason I’m still here, I suspect. Anal warts. God bless ’em. They are easy enough to hide, and no one knew. By 1985, however, they had got out of hand, described by one doctor as ‘like a bunch of grapes’. I felt like a hybrid baboon. He even took a photograph of them as such ‘beauties’ were rarely seen these days. I’m probably due considerable backdated royalties by now from some illustrated medical journal or other. He referred me to a specialist and a few weeks later I went secretly to hospital for a few days. The troublesome blighters were surgically removed, never to return.

  I’D BEEN ON the waiting list for a council flat since I arrived at Goldsmiths, and in 1983 I was offered a ‘hard to let’ flat on the Brook Estate in Kidbrooke. Lynda the landlady had returned to Hardy Road, pregnant if you please, so it seemed a good idea to move on. Twenty-seven Ridgebrook Road was my first home of my own. It was a one-room flat with a kitchen and separate toilet. There was no bathroom, but if you lifted up the kitchen counter there was a cunningly concealed bath. I could soak in the bath and keep an eye on my boiled egg at the same time. The only real problem was that there was nowhere to keep your towel. Bottles of shampoo and hair conditioner stood side by side on the windowsill with washing-up liquid and cooking oil. I sanded the floor and my mother bought me a sofa bed. It was rather cosy. I was on the first floor and I trained Fanny to take herself down to the grass verge when she needed a wee.