It paid off. Not always, but often enough for me to persevere. I would be sitting there nursing a coffee, struggling with France-Soir, struggling, too, to resist watching the Berlitz exit, its ‘stage door’, as we called it, too intently, lest I be caught in the act of doing precisely what I was doing – looking for somebody to talk to – when I’d suddenly hear a sound for sore ears, a voice I recognised, Fereydoun’s or Mick’s or Peter’s.
‘You still here?’ Ferey – let’s say it was Ferey – would ask.
I’d glance up, so surprised to find him standing over me.
‘Oh – hello!’
‘Just can’t bear to leave, can you?’
‘Hardly,’ I’d laugh. ‘I was dying for a real coffee, not the mud we have to drink at school.’
Now for the decisive moment. Would he say, ‘Yeah, well, okay then. See you tomorrow,’ and be on his way? Or would he indicate the empty seat opposite mine and ask, ‘Mind if I join you?’
Mind if I join you? Sometimes, if it was Ferey, whose tendency was always to apologise for imaginary rather than real slights, I’d hear him add, tentatively, ‘But maybe you want to be alone? Tell me if you do.’ Dear Lord, has anybody ever been as misunderstood as I?
If Ferey did join me, it was only, as I knew all too well, because he himself had no date, nothing lined up for the evening, a humiliation – I mean not his but mine, in so abjectly praying for him to be dateless – I rejoiced in (even if it pained me), as making it all the likelier that after our coffee we’d go on to have a meal together.
Generally, we’d dine at either one of two restaurants in Montmartre, Drouot and Chartier, familiar to all Berlitz teachers, students, labourers, pensioners, the unemployed and anybody else in quest of a cheap, nourishing meal. Cavernous hangars both of them were (and still are), with shuffling waiters like living caricatures by Sem or Forain and big-haired, bosomy cashiers flaunting their blowsy barmaidenly charms – les belles caissières, as Colette identified the species, each with a face like a breast on which somebody has scribbled a face. In fact, Chartier and Drouot were so exactly alike that, were you led to one of them blindfold, it would be impossible, once inside, to work out which of the two you were in. Most of their habitués were rancid old codgers (in establishments of this kind it’s the clientele not the food that’s greasy) who took forever to inspect the unchanging menu, one they must have known by heart; then, without fail, would order a steak frites followed, also without fail, by a petit camembert. Whereupon, to our amusement, they’d make just as much of a meal over ordering the wine, only to request, at the end of all these lengthy, picky deliberations, a pichet de rouge.
If there were no such thing as happiness, the world would be a happier place. As I now look back on that period, I have to acknowledge that I was happy up to a point. I wasn’t poor but – it was Schuyler who explained the distinction to me – broke, a very different category when you’re young and healthy and everything still seems possible. I lived in Paris, a city I’d always dreamt of living in. (I liked to say I was a francophile even in France.) Above all, I flattered myself that for the first time in my life I was part of a ‘set’. How at school I’d longed to belong to a set! Now I did, and the idea so tickled me that I’d gaze at other sets, at other groups of friends, strangers to me, whom I’d study while they huddled and cuddled in cafés and restaurants and cinema queues, and I’d wonder how they could bear to go through life without knowing, missing or envying me and my own friends. (Does this make sense?)
There was, however, a however. (There’s always a however.) I was not, as the French put it, ‘at ease in my skin’. Yes, I told myself, I was happy, reasonably happy. But, as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons of which reason itself knows nothing. Not just the heart, I discovered, but the cock.
Consider one boy I did go to bed with, somebody I met not at any of the gay clubs I lucklessly frequented but in front of the Drugstore Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a notorious haunt of rent boys. In fact, it was because I stupidly took him for a pro on the lookout for a trick that it was I who made the first, maladroit but unambiguous move.
He was magnificent, a slim-hipped thoroughbred with ripe, pouty lips, fiery brown eyes and a long swanlike neck that would expand when he lost his temper (which he later did with me). He was also beautifully dressed and, even if, by hovering as close as he did to the lineup of male whores outside the Drugstore, he seemed to be inviting one to misinterpret his motive for being there, I must have been nuts to imagine that so precious and poised a creature, so clearly de bonne famille, could have been on the game.
Though I had just received my Berlitz salary and was ready to pay whatever it took to satisfy a fantasy, one which nearly caused me to ejaculate there and then into my grey flannels, of commanding him to sit bare-bottomed on my face, I hadn’t actually gone so far as to bring up the subject of money when I realised it was only just dawning on him what I’d taken him for. Yet for a reason I still haven’t fathomed, unless he’d decided on a whim to be amused instead of outraged by such an insulting faux pas, and even if I knew as well as he did that I wasn’t in his league (I noticed him archly giving me the once-over as we spoke, as though he himself found it difficult to believe he was about to descend so low), he ended by inviting me back to his place.
He lived nearby, in a modern apartment block in the rue de Buci. I followed him along a corridor carpeted in spongy deep pile, waited silently behind him while he unlocked his front door, then followed him again through a parquet-floored hallway into the salon. It had ceiling-high bookshelves on two of its walls, as well as one of those sliding ladders for plucking volumes off the top shelf; a baby grand piano; a beige, L-shaped sofa; a wilted potted plant gasping for air near the closed window; and, in front of the sofa, a coffee table on whose transparent glass top sat a vase of white tulips, a French-language paperback copy of Manuel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and two framed snapshots. One was of a clean-cut, bare-chested youth, eyes squinting into the sunlight, posed against a misty lake-and-mountain setting (even though the photograph cut him off in mid-torso, it was somehow possible to tell that his nudity didn’t extend beyond the waist); and the other, peeking over its shoulder, was of my companion himself standing sulkily alongside an expressionless Andy Warhol.
Yves-Marie – he told me his name on the way to the apartment because I asked him, but when, after about twenty seconds of silence, he asked me in turn what mine was, I had the impression it was purely for form’s sake – marched straight into the bedroom, then into its en-suite bathroom. He switched the light on, turned his back to me, unzipped his flies, pulled his penis out and, one hand on an insolent hip, peed into the toilet bowl. Without any visible wriggling of his buttocks – I mean, without his making any effort to shake off the odd stubborn droplet – he came back into the bedroom, his now half-erect, uncircumcised, balaclava-sporting cock poking out of his open flies in a way that couldn’t help reminding me of Mapplethorpe’s black model (except that Yves-Marie was neither wearing polyester nor was as phenomenally hung). Then he cast himself backward on to the bed, pulling his trousers and sky-blue underpants down to his thighs and drawing his darker blue shirt-front up over his hairless chest as far as his nipples, which left his penis free to fall back on to his abdomen, just as Gary’s had, lying there as though it were scotch-taped to his pubic hair.
I omitted to mention that he had a lisp, one he made no attempt to disguise. Quite the reverse: he appeared to seek out those words and phrases calculated to call attention to what he patently saw as a quaint, upper-crust imperfection singling him out from the crowd. ‘Je voudrais,’ he said to me in a sleepy voice, ‘que tu me thuthe.’ Or, in English, ‘I’d like you to thuck me off.’
I had to strain to keep my own cock from getting too excited too soon, as the last thing I wanted was a replay of earlier incidents, one of which I’ve recounted here. I realised too that, even if I’d had it done to me, I myself had never given a blow job in my life. And though
I knew there were boys for whom inexperience in a sexual partner was unimportant, even added to his charm, I also knew that Yves-Marie was not such a boy.
I walked over to the bed and, after a moment or two of hesitation, clasped his penis by its roots. Obviously I was a bit too rough: his whole body gave a violent twitch and, without opening his eyes, he cried out, ‘Mais fais attenthion! Tu vas la cather!’ (‘Careful! You’ll break it!’) Bending over him, still trying to keep my own penis under control, yet already wise to a faint moistening on my thigh that warned me I was slowly starting to ooze out of the right nostril of my underpants, I lifted up his hot, top-heavy member; but instead of letting it gradually slide into my mouth I stuck it in all at once.
That, I could tell, wasn’t the way to do it. I started to gag on this pulsating barrel-shaped tube and, almost choking, brought my teeth down hard around it. I could actually feel the serration of my lower front teeth scratch its veiny underside.
Eyes now wide open, Yves-Marie shrieked. I withdrew as swiftly as I could; but when his penis slid back out of my mouth, it was still along the ridge of my front teeth, so that he didn’t stop shrieking until it was right outside. Ashy-faced, he held the bruised thing up with both hands and, gingerly twisting it over to one side, bracing himself just to look, he peered at it to find out whether or not it was bleeding. It wasn’t, thank God. But even from where I stood, right at the end of the bed, I could see how inflamed was its circuitry of vertical veins.
‘Ath-hole!’ he spat at me in English; then, aware of the ridiculous pose he was striking, he edged himself off the bed with his underpants still at half-mast and his trousers curling round his ankles.
I myself was humiliatingly detumescent. I don’t just mean my cock, which was now less a phallic symbol than, as Yves-Marie might have said, a phallic thimble. My whole body, my very soul, had shrivelled, and I could only repeat, ‘Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Je suis très, très désolé.’
He looked at me with loathing. And then he said it.
‘Toi, tu ne vas jamais plaire.’
Toi, tu ne vas jamais plaire. Not ‘You aren’t my type’, but the terrifying ‘You’ll never be anybody’s type.’
And before waddling back into the bathroom and slamming its door on me, he added, ‘T’es vraiment pas theckthy, tu thais. Et puis – et puis t’es thale!’
I went white. This was the worst yet. This would keep me awake nights. This I’d never, never be able to joke about. I wasn’t anybody’s type. I wasn’t sexy. And I was dirty.
When I got back into my room at the Voltaire, I threw off my clothes and examined myself in the mirror above the washbasin. I even drew my one little upright chair over to the basin and stood on it to inspect myself below the waist. I sniffed my armpits, sniffed the soles of my feet and between the toes, lay flat on the bed and, pulling my two legs right up over my head, managed to sniff not only my genitalia but (or just about) my rectum. I satisfied myself that I was clean, though I was still troubled by the fact that my hotel room had no private bathroom – whenever I wanted to take a bath, I had to ring downstairs to have a maid unlock the communal bathroom along the corridor – and that I bathed only three times a week, not every day as I’d done at home. There was absolutely nothing I could do about that, since each bath added a few extra francs to my monthly bill and I couldn’t afford the luxury, but I vowed that from that day on, and every day, I’d wash myself thoroughly, all over, in cold water if need be, at the basin.
So calling me dirty was, I decided, nothing but malice on Yves-Marie’s part. Was I sexy, though? Wath I theckthy? Physically, I was no John Travolta. But who is? (Not even Travolta himself, I suspected, in real life.) And, anyway, sexiness is predicated on more than just a pretty face and a wiry, jivy, hippy body. It’s a je ne sais quoi which is in reality a je sais très bien quoi. You know it when you see it. And when I gazed at myself in that washbasin mirror, like the wicked Queen in the fairy-tale, I didn’t see it.
I wasn’t looking for love – love could wait – I was looking for action. But my sexual clock was ticking away, and each miserable misfire of an encounter so drained me of the already paltry confidence I possessed, it guaranteed that the succeeding encounter, whatever form it took, would be even more humiliating. So it proved. I may not have smelled (did I, though?), but I exuded failure, that I did know. As time passed, and my lack of experience and expertise grew all the more flagrant, my gaucheness, that gaucheness that can be so endearing in some gormlessly grinning seventeen-year-old game for anything, became more and more of an embarrassment to me. I told myself that if two gay men in their twenties go to bed with one another, then each will expect the other to know how to suck a cock without either scratching it or vomiting over it, know how to stop himself ejaculating before his partner has got himself erect, know what ‘bagpiping’ is, and a ‘daisychain’, and a ‘dirty Sanchez’. I didn’t. They could have been the newest dance crazes for all I knew about them. I continued to be as unsure of what was expected of me as I’d once been with my ‘girlfriend’ Carla (except that then I’d had the excuse of being myself as inverted as those commas). And on the rare occasions when I did get myself picked up and taken back to some young guy’s apartment, and after he stripped off and opened a bedside drawer to remove a jar of vaseline, I would see something suddenly die in his face as he understood that he’d saddled himself with that dullest of sexual playmates, a not-so-very-youthful amateur. I might have transformed this drawback – my ignorance of the codes and practices of consensual gay sex – into an asset by playing the seasoned heterosexual interested to know at first hand how the other half screwed. Deflowering a straight man was, I knew, a potent turn-on for many a homosexual. But, once more, I was just too ingenuous at the time to deploy such a tactic – and I began to have the same conviction that I long believed my mother had had, the conviction that absolutely everybody but me was having fun, fun, fun, fucking fucking fun.
*
It may be a strange thing to say, given how single-mindedly I’ve been focusing on my penile anxieties, but I wouldn’t want anybody to be left with the impression that I was the kind of gay man who, as the gai monde itself puts it, thinks with his cock. I went to the movies like everybody else, generally to the same movies as everybody else. I went to exhibitions, concerts, even the opera whenever I could afford it. I read all manner of writers, almost none of them homosexual. In fact, I have an aversion to those solipsistically self-absorbed gays, and heaven knows they exist, who are content to let their lives be not only coloured but conditioned by their sexual tastes. (For most people, a penis is something attached to a man; for the type of homosexual I’m talking about, a man is just something attached to a penis.)
I soon had an opportunity to air that aversion, for chance willed it that I was the only one of our set to dismiss as worthless trash a graphic porn movie, made in Germany, which we all went to see, Frank Ripploh’s Taxi Zum Klo. It was less the characters’ sexual shenanigans that revolted me – pissing into each other’s mouths, etc. – than the fact that, between these bouts of urinary lovemaking, the only books they read were gay-themed novels, the only films they saw hardcore gay porn, the only television they watched softcore gay porn. I thought Ripploh’s portrayal of homosexuality crass and claustrophobic and I argued the case one day with Mick, Ferey and Schuyler, who had all fallen for his tacky candour.
Mick, typically, just didn’t get what I was going on about, but why should he have, since he so slavishly identified with the hero’s life-style? How often had we heard him describe his ritual preparations for an evening of sadomasochism – the self-administered enema as the obligatory prelude to being fistfucked, the insertion of the cock ring, the whole pseudo-satanic paraphernalia of chain-swathed black leather? Ferey, sweet, reasonable Ferey, made the point that the movie was valuable if it helped fascinated straights to understand that being homosexual meant more than preferring sexual partners of one’s own gender, a point I countered by suggesting that
in my experience – in my experience? – straights, when not actually hostile, were usually indifferent to or merely bored by gay self-trumpeting. Finally, after listening to the three of us without offering a word in support of any of our positions, Schuyler remarked that, in his view, ‘Being homosexual is like having red hair. It’s not something you asked for or can do anything about.’
‘If being homosexual is like having red hair,’ I said – and I was aware, when I spoke, of my voice sounding abnormally shrill – ‘then why do you all keep talking about it? Red-haired men don’t endlessly go on and on about the colour of their hair. They don’t make a beeline for movies starring other red-haired men. They don’t parade the streets telling the whole world they’re glad to be red-haired. They know that nobody else has any interest in the colour of their hair just as nobody else has any interest in the nature of our sexuality.’
Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires Page 5