More than ever, I needed somebody I could turn to, somebody I could talk to. Schuyler was Schuyler, a human tautology. As for Ralph Macavoy, he had only ever flitted over the surface of my existence. So there was no one else but Mick – Mick who had conducted himself gracefully and affectingly during that awful night at Ferey’s and who, despite what I still thought of as his phoniness, turned out to possess a sweeter nature than he’d probably have wanted anybody to guess at.
The funny thing about Mick was that, even if the specialised nature of his own ‘proclivities’ – his word, not mine – must have struck him as having put his life more at risk than most, he had always been the most stridently vocal of any of us about the attitudes and platitudes, the crises and hypocrisies, of the Aids discourse, about what he insisted was the covert homophobia of anybody, gay and straight alike, expert or layman, who had attempted to sound the alarm. I can still hear him arguing in that sometimes grating drawl of his about how spurious were the risks we had all allegedly started to run. ‘Jesus, Schuyler, don’t tell me you’re so fucking naive as to swallow that?’ he would ask across the table more than once, when in truth, on the Parisian gay scene, reluctant as it had initially been to face facts, support groups had at last been set up and Samaritan telephone lines organised. For the longest time he refused to budge. When Schuyler ran his forefinger down the obituary page of Mick’s own copy of Variety, snapping it whenever he noted a ‘following a lengthy illness …’ or a ‘survived by his parents …’, he, Mick, would exclaim, ‘Can’t you get it through your thick skull that that kind of euphemism doesn’t reduce panic – it aggravates it?’ He once came up with a rather good mot on the subject, if one that had long since been overtaken by events. He proposed that the only gays who had cause to worry were those who already had ‘angst in their pants’.
Even Mick, though, finally got the picture, and it was then he and I started to see more of one another. He would invite me, if his last class ended ten or fifteen minutes after mine, to order a coffee for myself in the downstairs café so that we could afterwards go on to dinner together. For much of the time he was still the same salacious Mick of old. He still delighted in provoking me, over a steak frites and a pichet de rouge at Drouot, by complacently cataloguing the extensive gamut of his kinks and quirks. He told me, for example, that as a little boy he had secretly enjoyed pissing in his underpants and now, a big boy, it was other men’s underpants he liked to piss into. ‘Urination will be my ruination,’ he joked – not, I suspect, off the cuff – and we both knew it was a joke he could make only because, of all the sexual high jinks he got up to, that one was among the less dangerous.
But we also gradually began to have more serious conversations, often late at night on the terrace of the Flore. Divesting himself of his campy mannerisms as abruptly as a quick-change artist, he would speak to me of his efforts to carve out an entrepreneurial pop-music career for himself modelled on that of his hero Malcolm McLaren (who, it seems, was unforgivably condescending to him the one and only time they met), of his coke addiction and subsequent detox, of the unbroken sequence of failures that had dogged him since his late teens, when he had apparently (this I could believe) edited a magazine at his public school so brilliantly provocative even his headmaster, who had been horrified by the publication in it of some vaguely homoerotic drawings of the sexiest sixth-form boys, predicted – wryly, I suppose the word has to be – that Mick would go far. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d achieved nothing of what he’d planned to do with his life, not even – he allowed himself the ghost of a smile – managing to put an end to it. (He wouldn’t elaborate.) I liked him at last.
One night, after a session at the Flore, Mick asked me whether I’d care to accompany him to a partouze, an orgy, to be held in some luxuriously large apartment on the rue du Bac whose joint proprietors were a Lacanian psychoanalyst in his forties and his much younger, privately wealthy lover, an Argentinian. I instantly agreed, even if it was amazing to me that there were still such things as orgies. I was also troubled by how rigorous its etiquette would be. Mick impressed on me that whoever, during the night to come, I found groping me, or sucking me, or fucking me, or, maybe worst of all, kissing me, I was prohibited from rejecting even the most unsavoury of comers. If I agreed to go, I’d also have to agree to shed all my sexual hang-ups, all my personal tastes and distastes, along with my clothes.
It happened to be his own first visit to the apartment (the fact that he wasn’t personally acquainted with either of its owners seemed not to matter); but though we had no problem getting into the building, he had mislaid the scrap of paper on which he had scrawled the specific number we were looking for. So we wandered up and down a grandly curving, lushly carpeted and totally deserted staircase that slowly revolved around us as in a dream or a film, all five storeys of it, and we were actually about to call the whole thing off when, on the fourth floor, I heard him shout ‘Aha!’ behind me. I turned. He was bent double over one of the landing’s three green household doors. He pointed something out to me. I too bent double and saw, taped to the door at no more than an inch above floor level, a square white card on which was written, in the teeny-weeniest of block capitals, ‘OUI, C’EST ICI.’
Mick had to ring the bell several times before a vertical crack opened up in the doorway, a crack in which one of our hosts, if that’s who he was, was just visible. He was forty-fivish and had the curdled allure of a prewar matinée idol; his gleaming mouthful of teeth was underlined – more precisely, overlined – by a pencil-fine moustache; and, over a menorah-shaped bush of silver-grey chest-hair whose wispy upper branches circumnavigated his nipples prior to heading for the navel and points south, he wore a yellow terry-cloth robe bespattered by what resembled bullet holes but which were probably cigarette burns. He looked first at Mick then at me and waited for one of us to speak.
‘Je suis l’ami de Serge,’ said Mick.
‘Ça va,’ said the other; then, without a further word, he opened the door and let us in. We stepped inside and silently walked behind him along a narrow hallway. On either side of us, on the pale-papered walls, was an identical row of evenly interspaced oblong patches where paintings of monetary or sentimental value or both had been unhooked to be safely stowed away for the duration of the partouze. Halfway along the hallway, the door to a bedroom stood ajar.
‘Laissez vos vêtements là,’ we were told. ‘On est dans le salon.’ And indicating another door that lay directly ahead, negligently knotting the cord of his robe about what we were now aware was his head-to-toe nakedness, he took his laconic leave of us.
Though the drawing-room door was closed – before reaching it, our host had taken a right turning, maybe into a kitchen or bathroom – I identified the music we could hear from beyond it. It was an old hit song, ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’, by Johnnie Ray, a sometime crooner or bobbysoxer, whatever the word was, of the sub-Sinatran school, famous for being deaf (he wore a conspicuous hearing-aid on stage) and, I fancy, long since deceased. If I knew both him and his hit, it was in part because he’d been one of my mother’s favourites and in part because, as a boy, I’d been told by cousins Lex and Rex, while we were all sifting through mother’s record collection for just one album we could bear to listen to, that he’d once been arrested for soliciting in a public loo in Detroit or Duluth. I recall thinking it strange that Ray should be a solicitor (like my own father) as well as a singer, even stranger that he would choose a lavatory to conduct his business in, but I couldn’t see why it deserved to be considered a criminal offence.
Anyhoo, Mick and I entered the bedroom, whose canopied bed was already heaped high with male underclothing and overclothing, and proceeded to undress. We started by stripping down to our indoor clothes. But that, naturally, was just the beginning. Instead of our stopping there, as though we were then about to go, arms linked, into dinner, off came our shirts, socks, shoes, trousers and finally – I cannot convey how unbelievably perverse t
his felt – our underpants, until we stood buck naked in front of one another.
‘You okay?’ Mick said to me.
I nodded, nervously game.
‘Allons-y.’
As we started walking towards the salon, I got it into my head that when Mick opened the door everybody inside would instantly take time out from what he was doing to size us up and mentally determine which of the two of us was the more fuckable. (I was better-looking, I thought, but there could be no argument as to who was better-hung.) Well, not for the first time, I was wrong. When he did open the door, and the closing bars of Ray’s dirge blasted out at us, louder than life – ‘he told me he was very lonesome/ And no one cared if he lived or died/ The little white cloud that sat right down and cri-eeeeeed!’ – nobody looked up, nobody at all.
‘Pity we didn’t keep out clothes on,’ I murmured to Mick. ‘We might have got more attention.’
What met our own eyes, meanwhile, was almost indescribable. There must have been a good two dozen men in that room, the majority of them, hooked up to each other via every conceivable type of conjugation and copulation, stretched out on the floor. But two guys were squatting on the salon’s sole remaining armchair, one of them fellating the other, the servicer’s head, like one of those tactically and tactfully stationed vases of sunflowers or ping-pong bats by which genitalia used to be obscured in naturist magazines, masking what I could only suppose, since I couldn’t see it, was the servicee’s tumescent cock. There were a trio of overweight men squeezed on to a divan almost as wide as it was long, but (maybe just as well) it was impossible to work out what they were up to. And there were yet another four, younger and fitter, thank God, performing a hip-grinding conga around the edges of the room – by now, the music had switched to a jolly, jazzy polka by, I think, Nino Rota – each of them, like elephants trunk-to-tail in a circus parade, clasping the cock in front of him by an arm extended through the furry underpass of its owner’s buttocks.
I noticed, too, pushed back into a corner, a bamboo coffee table on which, next to what was presumably somebody’s gift to our hosts of a Barbie doll still in its miniature cellophane coffin (sequinned evening gown, blonde candy-floss hair, formal elbow-length black gloves), three small bowls had been placed side by side. In the first was a dry white powder; in the second, poppers; and in the third – which, visibly, had had few takers – condoms.
Waved at from across the room, Mick left me after a few moments to greet a friend – Serge, I supposed – who was sitting on the floor, legs splayed, with someone else’s legs, one to the left, one to the right, dangling over his two shoulders, this same someone else’s feet cradled in his hands. As soon as Mick joined him, they sank out of my sight into the gyring and gimbling roomful of slithy toves.
Now alone in the doorway, seemingly of no interest to anybody, I felt more exposed – the word may appear an ill-chosen one under the circumstances but it’s the only word – than I’d ever been in my life. A tide of memories swept over me of early, solitary excursions to clubs and bars in London, when I’d had to pretend to be the wilful loner I was trying so hard not to be: memories, though, which were as nothing compared to the nightmarish reality of my present plight. I was, after all, not only alone but stark naked, the stuff of nightmares indeed, the more so as I couldn’t shake off the impression that I was the sole naked guest at some fashionable, fully-clothed cocktail party. (I actually found myself cupping the palms of my hands over my crotch ‘to cover my shame’.) What to do? Even at conventional get-togethers I’d never been blessed with the kind of suavity that allows one to insert oneself into some self-sufficient little circle of strangers whose conversation, in full swing, one casually interrupts to introduce oneself. So how in God’s name, taking to a whole new level a socialising skill I already didn’t possess, could I be expected to approach somebody I didn’t know from Adam and, without even preparing the ground with the small talk of foreplay, start sucking him off? That, I knew, was the way it should be done, the way it had to be done if it were to be done at all – nobody else, it was evident, was about to take the initiative – but I just couldn’t bring myself to make the first move. Moreover, my solidarity with the condition of homosexuality in its every manifestation, even the most kinkily extreme (nothing gay, to paraphrase the philosopher, was alien to me), had just been put to the severest test – by that conga – and failed it. There was something so ugly and demeaning in the sight of those gay gargoyles, those dancing, prancing, mincing, naked grown men (‘Grown men!’ – that was what my father would sneer when the rest of the family used to settle down to watch on TV the weekly cavortings of Benny Hill and his stooges), that I was, I admit, for the first time since my evening at The 400 Blow Jobs, ashamed to be gay. Ashamed to be what I was. Ashamed to be seen with such loathsome freaks. And when I realised that my cock had become as much of a shrinking violet as I myself was – I had to tug at it like a recalcitrant shirt-front to keep it a presentable length – I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay in that house a second longer.
Without alerting Mick, I darted back into the bedroom, quickly dressed – as I was the first to leave, my clothes were still top of the heap – and quietly let myself out.
After Ferey the second of my gay acquaintances to depart the common room, a few months later, was Chris Streeter, who, once I’d been introduced to him in my early Berlitz days, had dropped out of the circulation of my life, as he has out of this memoir of it. He was rosy-cheeked, I think I’ve already said, and so far as I was able to judge had the kind of pleasant, bovine personality usually associated with a spanked-bottom complexion. I’m aware of no reason why we never got to know one another better. It may have been little more than that, during my first formative weeks at the school, the schedule of his classes was out of sync with that of mine and, once the moment had passed, there was no catching up.
So I was unprepared for the news I heard one morning from Schuyler. Chris had been – not dismissed exactly, but discreetly invited to quit when one of his students complained of having noticed a row of prominent bluish bumps on what were already abnormally reddened hands and wrists, and another student, just three days later, reported that he’d had to wind up a class halfway through because his forehead had erupted in beads of sweat and he’d even had to grasp the back of his chair to prevent himself from fainting. Both of these students (and once a precedent had been set, others were to follow suit) hated to rat on a teacher for whom they claimed they had nothing but esteem and neither of them, heroically, made mention of Aids. But the situation soon reached the stage where more and more members of his classes owned to having felt unease at handling exam papers after they’d been corrected – read ‘touched’ – by him.
What Schuyler couldn’t tell me was whether Chris actually did have Aids and had left without offering any resistance to his summary sacking or else had been threatened with exposure to his family: when hired by the Berlitz we had all had to sign a form notifying our employers of our next of kin, and I wouldn’t have put it past them to exploit such information against us were ever the need to arise. But when I begged leave to doubt that he’d contracted a disease that, we now knew, presupposed the kind of violent sexual activity nobody could imagine him getting up to, so soft and girly had he struck us all, Schuyler revealed that Chris, in his cups, had once told him how, two or three times a year, he would fly off to some impoverished Central African country where, for a song, he would be free to satisfy and even satiate his lawless taste for seriously underage boys, for shiny little black green apples. What’s more, the reason he’d left England in the first place was that he’d been caught in flagrante with one of his thirteen-year-old prep pupils. ‘They didn’t believe me when I told them we were just good friends,’ he had tipsily grumbled.
It seems that Schuyler, who’d got to know Chris rather better than most of us, had been present, as always, early one morning when the latter had re-entered the school, four days after his official dismissal from it, to stu
ff into a TWA flight bag the few personal articles he kept in his casier. When he was ready to leave the common room, empty as yet except for Schuyler, Chris held out a friendly hand.
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
Schuyler stared at me.
‘You schmuck,’ he said serenely, ‘I shook it.’
Ultimately, though, not even cool, unruffled Schuyler would prove immune to panic and paranoia. In the next few days I noticed how he started to resemble, so to speak, a camel in reverse. For exactly as it’s said of camels that they’re capable of travelling several days without water, so Schuyler now never appeared to have to go to the lavatory. Not once thereafter did I – nor did anybody else, as I learned on exchanging notes with colleagues – find myself peeing beside him in the Berlitz’s admittedly far from pristine WC. How, given his consumption of coffee, he contrived to hold it in all day I’ll never know, but contrive to hold it in all day he did.
Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires Page 10