A Better Class of Blond

by David Rees

  It’s slick, amusing, and extremely well done. Multitudinous costume changes and the most bizarre hats. I’m as caught up as any native in the mood of it. Native? I now have an entry in the local telephone directory. I, too, belong!

  A WEEKEND AT CLEAR LAKE, at a gay motel next to a gay bar in a village of only thirty houses—something impossible to imagine anywhere else than in California. Clear Lake is in the mountains, three hours by car north of San Francisco. We drive over the Calistoga Pass: fresh green May leaves on all the trees. It’s not high enough for snow. It’s hot: I sunbathe nude by the motel’s open-air jacuzzi, and the little white strip normally covered gets burned and blistered. Meals out; walking in the mountains; young bird life on the lake: ducks with cortèges of ducklings, fluffy yellow toys. The bar is run by a pleasant Scots-Yugoslav and his Mexican-Filippino lover; on the Saturday they throw a party to which we’re invited, and all the rural gays from the remote mountain fastnesses arrive, looking for someone to spend the night with. So, suddenly the motel is full of just-met couples, and our sleep is punctuated with groans and pants through the paper-thin walls.

  We talk incessantly about our relationship—I have to return to England in September; is that the end? What commitment on my side, on his side? The discussion ranges from warm, amiable companionship to heated arguments: (The latter when we’ve been drinking.) I can’t articulate my thoughts properly until the journey home. Yes, Phil might be the man I want to spend the rest of my days with. I don’t know. I’d need not months, but a year, two years, more perhaps, to say to myself: this is so obviously true and so obviously important I’d give up everything to share my life with him permanently in California.

  Then he produces his bombshell. He’s decided not to come to Los Gatos at the end of June, but to stay in San Francisco. Katya’s house is inconveniently far from his work, and … if we’re living apart, he’ll feel the pain of the six thousand miles of our separation in September less acutely. He’ll return to his room at Robert and Matt’s (still empty) and force himself into some kind of independence from me. I produce every argument I can think of to dissuade him, but he’s adamant. We’ll see each other at weekends, he repeats over and over, just as we did last fall. Wasn’t that the best time? We’ll go to Reno for the gay rodeo, in August.

  I feel bewildered and hurt, then tell myself: David, it’s what you deserve. It’s entirely your own fault. What have you chucked away?

  He’s crying, silently , and I pull off the road. In a green damp field we make love with such thoughtful sweetness I can’t recall anything so tender.

  “I love you, I love you,” I say. “I love you!” And mean it more than I’ve ever said those words to anyone.

  MID-AFTERNOON, walking down Collingwood, I glance at a window and see the blond to whom I sometimes wave, reading a book I guess, though all that’s visible is his head and shoulders. He looks up; I walk on, glance back—he’s still looking, so I slow down, stop. A long mutual stare. He stands; he’s wearing nothing but shorts, and he’s drinking a glass of white wine. He beckons to me. I go up the steps to the house. A minute later we’ve ripped off our clothes and are in bed. A first-class fuck.

  The utter casualness of this encounter excites me much more than the hunt—so deliberate—at the baths.

  He phones, and we agree to meet. Another Yugoslav. “I want to play some rather more sophisticated games next time,” he says.

  HOW DO I RECONCILE that experience with the damp green field on the way home from Clear Lake? I can’t. Do I have to? I don’t know.

  SEATTLE. I spent a long weekend here in September 1980, staying with an old friend, Hugh, and his wife, Ellen. I was stung by a fierce North American bee. My antibodies can cope with a British bee, but not the Washington State variety: my left foot was so swollen I couldn’t wear a shoe, nor a slipper, and finally not even a sock. Descending from the Greyhound bus in San Francisco at 7.30 in the morning, I limped home, one foot bare, the other shod; Sin City’s commuters, reconciled to almost anything one imagines, gave me a wide berth. I was virtually unable to walk for a week.

  Nothing so unpleasant this time; just clouds which obscure the Olympic and the Cascade Mountains, and the coldest June temperatures I’ve ever experienced. In 1980 Mount Rainier seemed to float, pink, white and serene, and the jagged Olympics were black against the evening sun. All this from Hugh’s bathroom which has some of the finest panoramas in Seattle, a city almost as fine for its Views as San Francisco. For it, too, has hills, albeit less dramatic, and water—the vast calm of the Puget Sound—and white clean architecture, and the Space Needle, which rivals our Trans-Am Pyramid as a remarkable essay in how concrete can become eye-catching fantasy. The Space Needle, like the Pyramid, is the city’s most well-known distinguishing mark. It looks a bit like London’s Telecom Tower, with lifts and a revolving restaurant; but it’s much more appealing. The background to Seattle’s bold white architecture in summer is not Californian burnt grass and ochre earth, but greenness—fir forests, fields and moorland that are as familiar with drizzle as is a Scottish brae. After San Francisco and Los Angeles it seems peculiar to find a modern American city in a landscape like this, as if Seattle were where the Kyle of Lochalsh usually is.

  Hugh and I follow old interests—we eat Japanese, get drunk, listen to opera, and he smuggles me into the Press box of the Kingdome, the luxurious stadium of the Seattle Sounders, whom we see beaten by Fiorentina of Italy. Some very good-looking footballers on the pitch. Hugh teaches at Washington State University; Ellen says he is acutely depressed. His work no longer satisfies: he believes he’s an old fart. I’m afraid my visit will not help; my “success” (I wouldn’t call it that, but he may do so) is not likely to improve things. However, she says I’ve cheered him immensely. Soon they are going to Europe, for a year, renting a decrepit palazzo in Venice. Which, she hopes, will give him the impetus he needs.

  Gay Seattle. Kinnear Park I nose out by chance—not empty even in mid-afternoon despite the wild, wooded, almost inaccessible cliff where only the sex drive would drive men; old ladies and their dogs stay on the more level ground below and above. The Continental Baths has the biggest jacuzzi I’ve ever bubbled in, positively Roman in size. AIDS has not become the scare it is in San Francisco; this is like old times—busy ! For me, its most exciting feature is its gloryholes, and I spend hours having my cock sucked by anonymous Seattle mouths. But eventually come with a curly-haired blond on a bed, a macho footballer with girl-friends. “I don’t often use this place,” he says. I hope he’s enjoying it enough with me to think of the pleasures he could have if he’d emerge from the closet. Who’s he trying to kid? I’m not the first man whose load has shot in his throat.

  I CAME TO SEATTLE in 1980 from Vancouver, in a car with three young lady librarians; we had all been at a book conference. Vancouver I did not find the beautiful city everybody said it was, apart from the refurbished nineteenth-century quarter, Gastown; but the splendid backcloth of mountain and evergreen forest can be observed from most of the dull urban streets. I bought a cast-iron frying pan here which I lugged home to England, and a necklace with a jade killer-whale pendant. I stumbled, again by chance, on the gay beach, and had sex—but with whom and how I can’t remember. I do remember a trip to Vancouver Island: a long, long journey by coach and boat. Narrow inlets like Norwegian fjords. Victoria, the capital, I was told was so English, but it isn’t—a pleasant enough city, however. The Bouchart Gardens, a rich old woman’s folly left to please thousands of tourists with almost every variety of flower one can think of. The sense of remoteness—nine tenths of this island is not only uninhabited, it’s virtually unexplored. I have a very distant relative by marriage, Ada, who lives in a cabin in the forests, far from roads, supermarkets, TV, all aspects of twentieth-century civilization. Why, how is she here?

  ON THE FLIGHT FROM SEATTLE to a San Francisco of eighty-one degrees I see Mount Rainier, an extinct volcano gleaming with snow, majestic and aloof: and all the other su
mmits— Mount Hood, Mount Jefferson, Mount Adams, Mount Shasta. And Mount St Helens, grey ash, its top blown to the stratosphere, the whole landscape to the east devastated. It exploded on my birthday three years ago. When I flew above it two months later it was still very happily puffing, and spewing out vast quantities of debris. Ruining the world’s weather. It’s difficult today to believe that: a picture postcard sunset, Clear Lake and Great Crater Lake (which must have been a huge volcano) beneath us in absolute clarity. As we descend to SF International I can see everything in minute detail—the fog swirling into the San Andreas, the light on the water, fears on the bridges, our house on Douglass. It all looks not far short of paradise: I’m glad to be home.

  JANOS’S FATHER WRITES “I love you, son—but I can’t accept that a man who takes another man to bed is choosing to do something natural and normal.” Choosing? He’s very welcome to go home whenever he wants, but he mustn’t bring any of his “friends”. A case, I think, of love meaning “I’ll love you when you’re more like me.”

  Janos is hurt and angry.

  SOME ILL-INFORMED DIMWITS in the San Francisco police department have written to Mayor Feinstein suggesting that the Democrat Convention (scheduled here for the summer of 1984) should be held in another city, in case the delegates catch AIDS. The mayor is furious. But the leader of the North Carolina delegation (also a woman) says all the North Carolinans are coming, whatever.

  “California, we hear, is Nutsville,” she says. “Life in the Carolinas is so boring that we’re going to San Francisco to get some of the action. Be damned to the consequences!”

  The epidemic has reached a new stage—public hysteria. The TV and the Press are, in part, responsible for this—their reports are often sensational or misleading. A TV programme the other night left a suggestion in viewers’ minds that AIDS could be caught by casual contact—bumping into a sweaty body on a disco floor. The chief AIDS specialist from San Francisco General Hospital, however, emphasized this week, on the front page of the Chronicle, that it was a very difficult disease to catch. An exchange of body fluids—semen passing through minute cracks of the anus or the wall of the rectum into the bloodstream—is an essential prerequisite. Not sweat or saliva. There is no evidence that kissing has ever given anyone AIDS (and therefore, I assume, having your cock sucked is harmless). Many live-in long-term lovers of AIDS victims do not have the disease.

  But some of the victims have been thrown out by their lovers, been banned from appearing on TV (the camera crew might get it!), turned off buses. And looming over it all is the straight backlash—this terrible condition has been spread by homosexuals. That the annual gay parade should be prohibited and the bath-houses closed are two of the milder reactions. Nurses in San José have resigned rather than come near the city’s one AIDS patient currently in hospital. Some people even believe it can be caught from doorknobs and toilet seats, and the police department (always San Francisco’s most unintelligent authority) has distributed masks for its men to use when handling suspects who may have AIDS,

  It’s not easy to avoid the general fear—you imagine every new spot or pimple could be Kaposi’s sarcoma, when it’s obviously acne or an insect bite. Sometimes, as I look down at Castro from 22nd or Liberty, I say to myself “That’s Aidsville”—or wonder, in a crowded bar or disco, how many men there have the disease and don’t yet know it. I think of London just before the Plague struck in 1665 and ask myself if San Francisco is on the edge of a calamity of similar proportions.

  Then try to get it all into some kind of perspective. There’s a much greater risk of being killed in a car crash or dying of lung cancer.

  XV

  THE LONDON SYMPHONY of Vaughan Williams. It’s so long since I heard it that it’s like listening to an absolutely new piece. Even in this early attempt the musical language he forged for himself and used with little variation for the rest of his life is there, and obvious—the clusters of pentatonic chords, the uneasy shifts from major to minor in the same key, the ability to disintegrate what he has built up by galloping, runaway rhythmic chaos. The trouble is that there are several Vaughan Williamses—the folksy Englishman; the rhapsodic dreamer; the gruff angry commentator. When all the different personae appear in the same work the result is unsatisfactory, as in this symphony: it is a stylistic mess. The most interesting Vaughan Williams is, with the exception of the Tallis Fantasia and the Pastoral Symphony, the gruff angry commentator. The fourth and sixth symphonies are his great achievements, rare examples in the twentieth century of symphonic music that has a strong non-musical point. I don’t mean they have, in the conventional sense of the word, a programme, but they do seem to be reactions to the political events of the time—the rise of Fascism, the Second World War. Indeed, nearly all Vaughan Williams’s music is “about” something: evident in the symphonies that have titles—the Sea, the Pastoral, the London, the Antartica— but those that are untitled have a cause, or response, or meaning, too.

  The fourth symphony I think one of the half-dozen real masterpieces of the period. It is one long cry of agony, without let-up, an implacable, pitiless marshalling of forces; a musical Guernica. I don’t know anything quite like it—nothing in Stravinsky, Bartok or Shostakovich comes near to matching its explosive, destructive power. The pitilessness recurs in the one excellent movement of the Antartica—where Scott reaches the glacier. Destruction and chaos are also there in Job; the great moment is the “Dance of Job’s Comforters”. Both passages make brilliant and unexpected user of gongs and an organ. Curious that he should have been so good at depicting the negative—and mostly unmemorable with the positive emotions.

  RANDOM THOUGHTS. Gay Men’s Press still haven’t paid, and though I’m not in any immediate financial difficulty, I soon will be.

  People who’ve read The Estuary tell me they like it. Janos, only half-way through the book, calls to say how much he’s enjoying it, that he thinks it’s my best novel so far. One needs kindness like that.

  Writing every day, at Katya’s or here in the city, a new novel—Out of the Winter Gardens. It seems to follow laws of its own, for nothing I plan in my head gets down on paper. The work, as usual, is done in the actual writing. My hero, at the moment, is too old for his years; in chapter one he’s not old enough; the dialogue is OK but there’s too much of it; and the whole thing is full of flaws and inconsistencies. But I shall enjoy the effort, later on, to pull it together.

  Katya’s daughter Varvara is in the pokey for picketing a nuclear power station. Katya writes angrily to the Chronicle— and the letter is printed.

  Phil is sick, on and off, for three weeks—a viral infection of the bowel and inflammation of the prostate. Not an easy patient, but I know well the depression that’s caused by being ill, and sympathize. When he recovers we sunbathe for hours on the nude beach at Land’s End, and in the evening dance at the I-Beam.

  Dinner with Dennis and Paul. Brunch at Tim’s. Bridge with Dennis, Alan and Nils. A party with friends at Woodside: a Hockney swimming-pool scene, the California of one’s fantasies—heat, sun, wine, beautiful bodies, laid-back talk.

  Not a word from Spearfish. I’ll pre-empt this situation, soon.

  It hasn’t rained for seven weeks. In the city, fog night and morning, and a strong afternoon wind that chills the sunlight.

  SARAH HAS GONE. To a room in Peter’s house. Harriet, distraught and thrown completely off balance by this, has decided not to spend the summer in Greece; she was to be co-leader of some tourist group, but says she can’t now cope with the work involved. Maybe by staying nearby she expects to lure Sarah back.

  I MEET A TALL, LANKY BLOND one mid-day on Castro and induce him into my bed. He’s from Santa Barbara, a student aged twenty-one, German in origin—blue eyes, a fit, suntanned body. He tells me his life story, and I think, as I so often do when I listen to young gays talking, that growing up now can be very different from when I was a kid—if courage and belief in oneself come early. His lover lived with him for a year
in his parents’ house when he was nineteen, and the parents were happy with this. Before that, he nearly got married (and loved sex with the girl, though, he adds, he wouldn’t now): he’s screwed around a great deal since he broke up with the lover, in America and Europe, and immensely enjoyed himself.

  No point in regretting that I didn’t, or couldn’t, live like that in my teens. I’ve made up for it since.

  THE LAST SUNDAY OF JUNE—the Gay Parade, the biggest gay parade in the world, the biggest annual gathering of any kind in San Francisco. The police and the Press report that numbers are down this year because of the AIDS scare, only two hundred thousand people. Three hundred and fifty thousand, the organizers say; the truth, as usual, is probably somewhere in between. Market is closed to traffic—the parade processes along the whole length of it. The pavements on either side are packed with bystanders twelve deep, and many more are watching from the windows above, or clinging to lamp-posts and sitting on the tops of temporarily redundant traffic lights. Strangers talking, laughing with each other; beer is being consumed in great quantities. Pungent smells of marijuana. The weather is beautiful—warm and cloudless.