A Better Class of Blond

by David Rees

  AT A DINNER PARTY I meet another David, good-looking, male male; a respiratory specialist at a hospital. Twenty-seven. His marriage has just broken up; he’s slowly and carefully coming to terms with being homosexual. Sounds like Making Love (a movie I thoroughly enjoyed; the husband and wife scenes when he told her the truth were painfully authentic.)

  “You’re an extremely attractive man,” I say, and he’s kissing me. If he’s going to do anything, he says more than once, it will be with me.

  Hmmm.

  Gary writes from Spearfish: “I wish I knew what the future holds. David? My friends think I act like I’m in love with you. And I don’t even know the guy. All I say is yes I do.”

  Hmmm.

  ANTS MARCH IN COLUMNS HERE, chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp, as in cartoon films. I think of Andy’s dislike of them, how I’d tease him they’d advance on the kitchen, military fashion, and destroy our precious home-grown veg and fruit…

  At last I meet one of the monks. He’s in mufti and smoking the most enormous cigar I’ve ever seen. A Girona Corona, the sort that requires both hands to hold it. We talk of Reagan and Thatcher, the idiocy of the Falklands war. I’m disappointed he’s not as blotto as Harriet says they always are; stone cold sober in fact.

  “What’s that thing you’re wearing round your neck?” he asks. He’s hoping it will be a Christopher, a cross, some Catholic talisman.

  “Taurus the Bull,” I inform him …

  Sarah looks up from the paper at breakfast and says “Another earthquake yesterday, the fourth this week.”

  “What’s it all mean?” I ask.

  “There’s two different theories, both diametrically opposed. One group of experts thinks it’s a good sign: a lot of little quakes ease the pressure. The other party believes they’re the preliminary to the big bang.”

  We discuss for a while how nice it would be if an earthquake blew up the university; we’d not have to teach for months. And would this house stand in a repeat of 1906: it wouldn’t, she decides…

  Why am I so down? Recording this trivia, opting for living so quietly? The two women are oppressive. And I’m not well; I’m exhausted, mentally and physically. It might be roses if I had a lover in my bed.

  Sanity begins in the cock. Doesn’t it?

  MORE STRANGE MEMOS at the university. This is from the president, no less. The president—vice-chancellor in our terms—is a woman: has any British university ever appointed one?

  On August 11, 1982 the California State University requirement to fingerprint all new employees was abolished and in the future the decision to fingerprint or not to fingerprint is delegated to each campus president. It is my decision to eliminate the fingerprinting requirement at San José…

  PETER ARRIVES FROM ENGLAND for the Gay Olympic Games. He’s never been to the West Coast before and he’s as bubbly with excitement as I was two years ago. I catch up on the latest Brit, gay lit. gossip; drive him round the switchbacks of San Francisco and he’s enchanted with cable cars and glimpses of Alcatraz. He assumes I’m having a wonderful time: I tell him I’m not, that I’m listless, without energy, exhausted.

  We’re lucky: a fantastic sunset from Marin, Leggo City over the water glittering gold, sky colours dissolving through every shade of orange, purple, pink. Then a tour of Castro dives. Contrasts: the Café San Marcos does have carpets and tables and a certain elegance; we can sit quietly and talk. Badlands— Sadlands—is dimly lit, dingy, loud, full of bodies. I’ve never seen people cruising in Sadlands, busy though it often can be. The patrons are mostly alone, and they just stand there, jigging to the music, wrapped in their own private fantasies. They never look at anyone else.

  “It reminds me,” Peter says, “of comments and attitudes in—say—the 1940s: the twilight world.” These tags—“the homosexual subculture”, “the demi-monde”—that suggest gays are inevitably doomed to self-hatred and unhappiness seem, in this bar, to have a certain truth. Some of us cannot help rushing into strait jackets straights invent, just as the Jews, admiring German efficiency, quietly entered the gas chambers.

  The Midnight Sun. You’re bound to get picked up in here if you want to; and soon I’m talking with, and being kissed by, this blond—Wendell. Bright, amusing, intelligent. A lawyer. He’s meeting his room-mate, but let’s do something tomorrow afternoon, he says; he’ll give me a call at 10.30. He writes down my number. He doesn’t want us to go home to his place now: last week he answered the door and two men with sawn-off shotguns burst in and robbed him. He’s scared to sleep there at night; every little noise and he’s sweating with fear. He’s looking for another apartment, needless to say.

  Peter and I return to the San Marcos where we talk to three Swedes now settled in California. Eventually Peter goes home, and I’m in a quandary. The Swedes want me to go to the End-up disco; Peter wants me to meet him at ten o’clock tomorrow morning so I can get a Press pass for the opening ceremonies of the Olympics—he’s covering it for Gay News, and the blond has said he’ll ring at 10.30. The last is what I really want, so I drive to Los Gatos, randy and dissatisfied; and wake at seven with a rigid cock. Looking forward to the afternoon’s pleasures, I ignore it. A mistake, of course. I knew it would be. As I write this it’s half-past eleven and the phone has kept silent.

  At which point it rings. It’s him!

  TAPIOLA ON THE CAR RADIO. I’ve loved Sibelius always, this piece as much as any. Not real forests, not real snowstorms, as Vivaldi’s seasons are literal pictures in music, but the landscapes of the mind. I want my books, the California of this book, to be the landscape of my mind.

  TELEPHONE CALLS, and Tim says to bring Wendell to Oakland for the party; Paul says to stop at his place—with Wendell— overnight. (Dennis is in Portland, Oregon.) Saturday, but my blond is working till six; I’m to meet him at his office. No time for the opening of the Gay Games; I chat to Paul instead.

  Six o’clock, and work not yet finished; he’ll have to go in Sunday morning. He’s edgy, hyper-active, and generally cross with life. But even better-looking than last night; I’m itching to get his clothes off.

  “I can’t face a party,” he says. “Do you mind if I back out?” Yes, but I say it’s OK. Come to his apartment at eleven, he suggests, but will I call him first when I’m leaving Tim’s. He doesn’t explain the significance of phoning, and I forget to do so.

  Valencia and 14th: dubious territory. “I don’t like it here,” Paul wails. He locks both car doors and keeps the engine running while I walk down to the apartment. Rough, certainly; mean-looking blacks on the pavements. It’s half an hour before midnight. I’m not scared. I ring the street-door bell; no answer. Then a woman opens it, a dog behind her; she’s just going out, presumbly taking it for a walk.

  “What do you want?” she asks. I explain; “Go on up,” she says. “I don’t know if he’s in, but you can check it out.”

  I ring the apartment bell. A long silence. “Who is it?” someone shouts from inside.

  “David.”

  Chains rattle, bolts slide, and there is Wendell and his roommate. I have never in my life seen two men so frightened. They’d thought it was the armed muggers making a second visit.

  “Why didn’t you call?” Wendell asks, again and again. “Then we’d have known it was you at the door! I thought you’d call an hour back, and when you didn’t I assumed you weren’t coming!”

  They’re almost incoherent and can’t stand still for a moment: the adrenalin is racing so much. They tell me more about the robbery, and I begin to see why they’re so terrified. The thieves—blacks—were looking for drugs and money, but got annoyed when they didn’t find much of either. Mike and Wendell, forced to lie face down on the floor, were knocked about with the guns; the blacks then ripped the room apart. One of them said, prior to leaving, “Kill them both.” He meant it, Mike emphasized; all witnesses would then be removed. But an unexpected noise—the cat jumping through the bedroom window—alarmed them, and they fled.

  “Wh
y are you so sure they’ll return?” I ask.

  “Because we’re here!” Wendell says. “Alive! They’ll want to rub out the evidence—us!”

  He feels guilty about leaving Mike, but Mike insists he’s OK; he’s taken a sleeping pill, he’s drowsy already, he’ll bolt, lock, chain, and barricade the door after we’ve left.

  It takes an hour and several glasses of Paul’s whisky for Wendell to calm down, but at last we’re in bed. I’m sleepy and I’ve been drinking; I’m afraid I’ll be limp. But no problem. Hairy blond all over, suntanned—and he fucks superbly. God, I needed that! Orgasms the same split second. We smoke, drink bourbon, and talk till half past three.

  He’s really life in the fast lane: listening to him is an education in the worst aspects of America I’ve read about so often and never bumped into. He’s been mugged three times before, twice in New York and once in San Francisco. He was knocked about so violently that he has a permanent neck injury, a lot of pain. In New York, one of the muggers was a man he picked up for sex: afterwards this guy—a black—tied him to the bed, explained how to undo the knots (it would take ten minutes at least) and left him sixty cents to get the bus to work. “I have to admit,” Wendell says, with a rueful grin, “that he screwed fantastically!” He’s been on all the drugs at one time or another, including acid. Still on coke. San Francisco, he reckons, is nastier than New York. Life here is cheap, dangerous, and brutal. Behind the experienced face (he’s thirty, I guess) and the tired, cornflower-colour eyes I can glimpse the innocent country boy from Wyoming he must have been ten years ago.

  He lived with Gerald—another black—for four years. “I loved him. Totally. I gave him everything. He screwed around and gave me all the venereal diseases you can think of. Now he’s got Kaposi’s sarcoma.” Wendell, two years after the break-up, is still very bitter. “I hate him! Hate him!”

  I sleep as I sleep with Ulrich, wrapped round him like a question mark. He jabbers in his dreams, once turning over to twist my left nipple and shout “Are you satisfied? Eh? Are you satisfied?” By seven the sun is so brilliant I can’t even doze. I suck his cock and he smiles, opens his eyes; his face is lit up with pleasure. This time I screw him. Orgasm, once more, at exactly the same moment. As far as sex is concerned, we’re a perfect match.

  I drive him to his office, then go back to Paul’s. Cute, lively, interesting, is Paul’s verdict. No mean commendation; he’s a born cynic.

  “Do you want to see him again?” he asks.

  “I guess.”

  “And… ?”

  “I suggested next weekend. He’d like to go out into the country, he said, so I offered Los Gatos, the swimming pool, but he didn’t jump at the idea.”

  “You made love twice? And talked for ages, afterwards, both times? Of course he wants to see you again! I bet you he calls.”

  He doesn’t. I call him. Nothing.

  More than “When will I see you again?” is will I see England again? I’ve observed no violence, but I read of it in the papers, hear of it constantly on the radio, and my friends talk of it much more than they used to. Wendell’s experience isn’t unique— many guys I know in California have been mugged or burgled. The editor of the Castro Times was held up at knife-point and robbed last week in broad daylight. The street was busy; people eating in the deli looked out of the window and watched, but none of them came to his assistance. And Castro is not a violent area. Muggings and rapes on the university campus at San José: when I go to my night class on Tuesdays, Sarah advises, park the car at the nearest point to my room and don’t dawdle. San Francisco has had thirty-four murders committed by handguns in the last twelve months; Great Britain eight. Yet not many Californians agree with Mayor Feinstein’s new law forbidding the carrying of handguns. Some of this fear is neurotic. A parallel: everyone I talk to knows a man who has died or is dying of Kaposi’s sarcoma, but there are only eighty-eight recorded deaths from this disease in the whole of America. Fear is infectious, and though I wasn’t scared on 14th last night, I’m bothered by what I’m told and what I read. The instability of the earth’s crust worries me less than the instability of people.

  Wendell’s life-style isn’t in any way mine. I’d soon get disenchanted with the pace, the freneticism. And I can’t deal with a coke addict.

  IV

  THE NEWSPAPERS PUBLISH an opinion poll on creationism: ninety-one per cent of those interviewed believe that God created man, or that he evolved, guided by God. Only nine per cent, therefore, are atheist or agnostic. No wonder this country seems weird.

  I TALK FOR A COUPLE OF HOURS with Julian, who is a colleague at the university, a writer, gay, and Tim’s ex-lover. He thinks gay publishing in Britain is at the moment healthy and more exciting than it is in the States. At least a British editor reads your manuscripts and gives you his opinion, he says. Here they don’t.

  If your lover, he informs me, is years younger than you, the attraction on his part derives from a lack of structure in himself: he’s drawn towards someone who is, apparently, structured. You can spend three, five, eight years giving him the structure he needs, then he leaves you. And when you’re away from home, don’t imagine everyone and everything back there is standing still. You return to changes you hadn’t foreseen and don’t like. He’s commenting on his own current set-up, but… well… it gives me pause for thought.

  PERFECT SEPTEMBER WEATHER. Cloudless days, eighty-five degrees of heat and not a trace of humidity. The beaches are without fog and I make for San Gregorio, only thirty miles from here, but I have to cross mountain passes as high as Snowdon. My gas guzzler doesn’t like it, and nor do I : the vertical drops on the bends into nothing but fresh air are terrifying. I have to concentrate so hard that I don’t take in much of the scenery, but my mind snapshots towering redwoods in great caverns of forest gloom, the withered yellow grass of summits where sunlight hurts, glimpses of the distant Pacific so pale blue I feel thirsty.

  The beach is busy today. I sit in my driftwood cabin and exchange smiles with the passers-by. And eventually I’m talking to a man who’s not blond, not young, but probably my age; he’s been married too, and has a daughter aged nine. We share our pasts over home-made cookies and fruit juice. Some months ago the one gay relationship he’s had broke up. In the early evening, when the crowd has thinned, we make love. Sand, salt. He has some baby oil in his pack. The sun is a dazzling gold causeway on the sea.

  I drive home, a longer but much less tortuous route, feeling at peace with the world. A spectacular view of the Bay at nightfall, the Santa Gara Mountains burnt, smudgy and tired from the heat. Papery, like a child’s painting. Lights of the Bay cities more than a thousand feet below me: Saratoga, Cupertino, Palo Alto, San Mateo. Chimborazo, Cotopaxi…

  ODD, DRIVING TO BUY MILK in the nearest supermarket in Los Gatos, that I cross from one of the earth’s geographical plates to another. There ought to be some profound sense of change—or at least a marker, a sign-post. Nothing. The Santa Cruz Freeway roars under the bridge, along the fault-line.

  WITH PETER TO THE CLOSING ceremonies of the Gay Olympics. A crowd of about twelve thousand in San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium, a tremendous atmosphere of excitement and celebration. An event about which I’ll be glad to say, afterwards, I was there—even though the athletes parade round the track to, of all things, Pomp and Circumstance Number One. I see from the programme that Mayor Feinstein has officially proclaimed this week “Gay Games Week” and asks all the citizens of San Francisco to take note of the fact. Could this happen anywhere else in the world? She isn’t here, though. But our Congressman is. He needs the gay vote, of course, but in his speech he goes further than he has to, saying he’s pledged to fight all forms of anti-gay discrimination, particularly—it’s the matter of the moment—the court order banning our use of the word “Olympics”. And he outlines precisely what he intends to do—quite unlike a British politician.

  A lot of speakers. Rita Mae Brown says blonds are like gays: they usually have a bet
ter time of it. Hmmm. The homophobe is a “spiritual fascist”, but the famous who cower in the closet receive the brunt of her anger: “You find them in sport too, in tennis … ” Uproar. Cheers, laughter, chants of “Martina! Martina!” When she can resume, she says “They are liars, particularly to themselves; they are bent on self-destruction, and they particularly hate people like us.” I agree, as I do with Tom Waddell, the organizer of this first Olympiad, who says “We must fight with love because love is what we’re best at.”

  The finale is a gigantic disco on the grass, athletes as well as spectators joining in. Much more pleasant than a dimly lit club. Why do we have to put up with so much bordello illumination in our bars and discos? I guess it’s to pull in those who feel they’re unattractive, those who are comfortable only when partially seen. I’m struck on this occasion by how beautiful the men and women are, dancing in their tee-shirts and shorts (there’s no drag of any kind today), and how good it is to see them in their thousands, just enjoying themselves. I dance with a blond hairdresser from Berkeley (whose lover pulls him angrily away), with a blond athlete from Los Angeles (he’s wearing his silver medal), then with Dan, the blond barman I met in the Elephant Walk. He’s delighted to see me. How have I been? How’s the teaching? How’s Los Gatos? He’s moving back to Santa Monica—the surf tugs more powerfully than the delights of this city. He really is beautiful. Long, long, curly hair, and fantastic blue eyes. He’s dressed only in shorts and a garland of flowers— the last of the hippies.

  As I drive to his apartment on this day of heat and sunshine, and look from the hills at the coloured city beneath, I find it impossible to imagine violence and brutality can exist here.