by Will Self
—I don’t know, Fergus, I’ve got to stay clean, and the gay scene here – well, it’s saturated with drugs and a hell of a lot rougher than it is in London. The people I know play hard, and Dorian’s too tempting a plaything.
The Ferret first sniffed at this, then blew into his silk hanky. He certainly found what Baz said interesting; it was just that the Schubert was perfectly slumberous and the ambience absolutely torpid and he couldn’t quite forbear from allowing his head to nod towards the damask. Still, he did manage to make a few remarks on the way down… My dear Baz, I’m under no illusions as to how louche things can be in New York.
—There’s some kind of new disease around; it’s killing gay men on the west coast, and I’ve heard of a few cases here in NYC as well.
—Gay – must you employ the term quite so widely? It’s a ludicrous sobriquet, I so prefer ‘queer’… I’m well acquainted with this new malaise… They say it’s a function of too many poppers… or some such déclassé drug-taking. Not the sort of thing we expect from dear Dorian… Anyway, Baz, you’ll be around to look after him, won’t you m’dear…? Too kind… I’ll be here for a couple of weeks… You’ll keep me posted…
And Baz and Dorian strained for a few seconds to hear the pinhead drop, which it did, with an audible ‘clank’ on to the glass table. As if this were a prearranged signal, one of the Ferret’s heavyweight boyfriends materialised, pushing a wheelchair. He was a swarthy Mexican; an old knife scar across his Hispanic cheek had let out a little of the Amerindian stuffing. He gave the duo a cursory nod, manhandled the Ferret into the wheelchair, and pushed him away between the palms. The egregiously-shouldered women sent the little parcel of a man pitying looks as he passed by.
—Jesus, said Baz once they were gone, that was a quick flake-out even by his standards.
—Well, he can’t get the speed he likes here for some reason, so he’s doing cocaine instead. Pablo handles giving it to him, and even here at the Waldorf they take a rather a dim view of their patrons’ engaging in such practices in the public areas.
The waiter returned with a silver stand laden with ditsy eatables; he poured them tea, distributed plates and retired.
—So, how about it? Dorian said, rubbing his hands together with childish glee.
—How – nyum-nyum – about what? Basil was stuffing the sandwiches in three at a time, poor Gulliver at the Lilliputian court.
—How about introducing me to Warhol and Burroughs and that photographer guy? Y’know, all the people you told me you hung out with here? I’ve got the money, I’ll even set you up in your own studio again – we can create a scene together.
—Oh… well… I s’pose we can give it a try.
A pathetic rejoinder: ‘I s’pose we can give it a try.’ Difficult to conceive of this as the beginning of one of the great avant-garde scenes: ‘I s’pose we can give it a try.’ Hard to imagine that this inauspicious beginning (‘I s’pose we can give it a try’) will none the less become a rallying cry for disaffected youth from all over the eastern seaboard and then the wider world; or that this downbeat encounter will, in time, come to be deemed as significant as the first meeting between Rimbaud and Verlaine. Hard – because it won’t. By the early 1980s the avant-garde was busy being franchised and sold off to a series of designer labels and purpose-designed emporia. Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci. Only somebody as staggeringly ill-informed as Dorian Gray could have imagined that there was still a ‘scene’ to be created in Manhattan.
Oh no, what happened to flagrant queers and uppity blacks and defiant junkies in America was that they got absorbed, then packaged and retailed like everybody and everything else. In America in the 1980s the counter-culture became the over-the-counter culture with sickening alacrity, and Andy Warhol – poor Basil Hallward’s name-dropping nemesis – was the acned acme of it all. When the domestic market was brand-saturated they re-exported it all back to Europe, just in case there were any little pockets of resistance that needed mopping up.
A ‘scene’. Laughable. Impossible to imagine Baz Hallward, with his mouldering collar-length hair and mildewed pate, strutting his stuff on the dance floor at Studio 54. No, it was too late for those lofty heights; Baz only just about had the cachet to infiltrate his beautiful protégé into the loft of Bobby Mapplethorpe, who, when all was said and done, would say anything and do anyone.
‘Naturally,’ Baz grabbed his tale back and brought it twisting into the cubicle, ‘Bobby wanted to photograph Dorian in poetic positions. Dorian erect, Dorian among the nightingales, Dorian penetrated by black cocks and arms, while his face betrayed nothing save wry amusement. But while he made an impression, securing invitations to soirées of artists and intellectuals, he was quite as taken… by being taken. He seemed, Henry, to positively enjoin the people he met to handle him without care, to fold him, to spin-dry him… it’s a wonder, considering the way he put himself about, that he wasn’t mutilated.
‘To begin with I’d go out with him at night, down to the Mineshaft on 12th Street. It was strange the way he not only adopted the typical clone costume of biker jacket, white T-shirt, and jeans, with greased-back hair under a peaked cap, he even made it his own. All the clones I’ve seen since then – even the ones I saw walking through Soho on my way here – seem to me to be clones of Dorian. The streets of downtown New York were fucking rough, full of homeless guys, and crack was beginning to cut its swathe through the city. On 12th there’d be empty coke vials crunching under our boots. It was the meat-packing district, so the air smelt of blood and the paving stones were sticky with it and worse. I tried to warn him…’
‘I can imagine…’ Wotton drawled from the bed.
‘Imagine? Imagine what – the Mineshaft?’
‘No, not that, I never went there’ – he groped for another cigarette – ‘but I bet I could write your dialogue so that it had greater authenticity than when you actually spoke it in Manhattan.’
‘Don’t they ever object to your smoking in here?’
‘They object to just about everything I do in here, Baz. It’s peculiar how terminal illness is so constrained; it explains what martyrs mean when they describe death as a “liberation”, hmm? Pass me that ashtray and I’ll get on with my imagining. You tell it how it was, Baz – I’ll listen to how it should’ve been.’
The two men stood outside the Mineshaft, feeling the heavy heart of the city beat in the darkness. Listen, Dorian, Baz admonished him, you can play catch-as-catch-can in the bar, but even if you pair off, downstairs and in the back anything can happen, it’s a fucking meat rack in there – I can’t keep up with you… I won’t –
—And I don’t want you to, Baz. I’m a big enough boy – you know that – and I can look after myself.
—You can’t, Dorian; this isn’t Bobby’s playpen, this isn’t a controllable situation at all –
—Shut up!
—What?
—Shut the fuck up! Shut up! You don’t understand anything, Baz, you don’t know anything. I can do what I please – I can do what I bloody well please. I’m inviolate, Baz – I’m fucking immortal! And Dorian began to laugh wildly, before grabbing Baz by his jacket and dragging him into Hades – or at any rate some realisation of it art-directed by Hieronymus Bosch but cast by Kenneth Anger.
At the top of a short flight of stairs stood a grim apparition, a leather queen so withered and ravaged he might have been Old Father Rim, the primordial sodomite. He was vetting the queue, beckoning some in, while rejecting others who had failed to observe the dress code with the petulant squeal, You can’t come in! Disco drag! Disco drag!
Dorian and Baz passed muster and entered the main room. It was gloomy, and through its slimy confines gusted the hysterical, chemical stench of amyl nitrate. In one corner a makeshift bar had been knocked together out of plastic crates and wooden boxes; behind it stood a shaven-headed giant serving liquor and beer. In another corner a crude canvas sling swung back and forth, its bare-assed occupant yelping as he was buggered
by a fat trucker type. The clientele – to a man – were mustachioed leather queens, pumped up in every way. The only sound was a disturbing susurration; there was no music – and besides, the bar-room had no dance floor, only space for a freeform ruck. The beetle men in their leather carapaces grabbed at each other’s shoulders; they tossed back shot glasses of vodka and bourbon, while wheeling around in an aggressive parody of sociability, closer to a football scrum than any other interaction. There was the reek of sweat and the creak of leather, there was a drunken intensity of leering, and a veritable spumescence of testosterone hovered over the whole scene, as shaven heads clashed and the acrid clouds of cigarette smoke were pierced by spotlights.
Dorian sprinted straight into this garden of unearthly delights. He not only accepted the hands grabbing at his crotch, the drinks shoved in his mouth and the tongues pushed into his ear, he revelled in them. Baz struggled to stay by his side. Don’t forget, Dorian, Bobby said he’d take us to meet some friend of his uptown if we were back at his studio by midnight.
—Don’t be ridiculous, Baz – he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of his watch! And that’s what he did: he loosed the strap of his chunkily expensive diver’s watch and thrust it into the hand of a deranged clone, who was so taken by Dorian’s beauty that he licked the face. Baz gave up; he shouldered his way to the bar and stood there contemplating his own worn features in the mirror behind it, his own runty figure crushed between flanking Visigoths.
Baz felt a tug on his trousers at the back of his knee. To begin with he ignored it, but it persisted until eventually he turned and looked down. It was a tiny leather dwarf, complete in every detail of chains and jacket and trousers, but no more than three feet tall. The leather dwarf had a five-dollar bill tucked in his hand, which he poked up towards Baz with the pathetic entreaty, Can you get me a drink?
‘Well, Henry.’ Baz paused, and with a profound shudder of relief and revulsion he took a sip of cold tea from an apparently unsullied beaker. ‘They say now that those few short years between the Stonewall Riots and the arrival of AIDS were characterised by a mounting sense of liberation, that we gay men felt the time had come to be ourselves, to express ourselves, to live as we truly wanted to live, free of guilt, free of convention, free of interference. They say now that the disease is a ghastly, one-off, one-act play. Apiece of incomprehensible dramatic irony, inflicted on us happy Arcadians by a god who doesn’t even exist. They say now that those damp bath-houses and fetid gyms, the bloody meat racks and the shitty cottages were the perfect places for the virus to fester, to replicate, to pump its own iron. The glory hole turned out to be a gory hole. They say HIV may have been present for years in the West, and that it was only this ever lengthening conga line of sodomy – with jet travel connecting cock from San Francisco with asshole in NYC, cock from NYC with asshole in London – that allowed it to get so out of control. They say a lot of things, but for those of us who were there it was simple. Simple to observe that for men who were meant to be free, how readily they draped themselves in chains…’
They were draped in chains, the men who jostled and clinked in the Stygian chambers beneath the bar-room at the Mineshaft. Dorian penetrated this sphincter of darkness. He stopped to try his cock in a glory hole, he paused to watch while two men fucked a third at either end, he moved to join a circle of happy flagellators, he critically pissed on a naked performer in a bathtub. On and on he went; darker and danker it became, as wonkily partitioned room succeeded warped vestibule, each filthier and ranker than the last with the odour of faeces and semen and poppers. All around was the thwack of flesh on flesh, with its ragged accompaniment – the grunts and groans of effortful coition.
But as Dorian progressed from one rigorous knot of men to the next, there was always a trio who peeled away to accompany him. Their leader was an ultimate leather queen, a big moon-faced man complete with the craters. With him were two snickering incubi, both chubby, both shaven-headed, who affected the same Gestapo uniform of full-length leather coat and chain choker. When at last they reached a zone of near-privacy, this trio surrounded their victim. One of the incubi offered Dorian a popper, the other caressed his crotch. The two of them helped him out of his jeans and encouraged him to his knees. While they kept his head occupied, Moonface moved in on his rear. But when one huge hand – replete with studded wristband – grasped Dorian’s golden oiled curls, he suddenly reared up and, getting hold of the incubi by their thick necks, cracked their heads together.
—Why, you piece of shit, screamed one, I’m gonna have to cut you! And he had the knife for it, an evil six-inch switchblade.
—On the contrary, Dorian snarled, if there’s to be any evisceration, I think you’ll find that you lack the guts for it. He wrenched the knife away from the man, reversed it, and in one bravura act of savagery sliced him clear across his belly. Blood gushed from flaps of cloth and flesh. The incubi retreated, keening like terrified dogs. From somewhere Dorian had got a handful of poppers; pirouetting round, he rammed these into the Moonface. Then it was the leather queen who was hobbled by his trousers, the leather queen who was being forcibly sodomised by the pretty blond boy. Dorian smashed the man’s head against the floor with his hand, again and again, until there was a pink mist of blood in the air. In Dorian’s fevered head the blood beats doubled up, tripping over one another until this cardiac timpani reached a crescendo. His whole consciousness of the world swelled and whooshed and wobbled and dilated as amyl nitrate swirled in a vast anticyclone over the face of the earth.
8
The mid-afternoon sun beat down on a small but perfectly-formed Riviera harbour. Within the semicircular quay there was the brittle rasping sound of the mistral agitating metal rigging on the yachts, flapping their canvas and slapping wavelets against their hulls. Light rays bounced off the aquamarine water and coruscated from every reflective surface – windows, glasses, bottles and forks.
Specifically the upheld forks of some late lunchers at an opulent party. A repast that had been set out a long while before, on white linen, on the terrace of a restaurant which was exclusive in the way that only a French restaurant can be, namely, by virtue of content as much as form. True, there was a hefty prix fixe and a haughty maître d’, but it was in the great middens of Crustacea shells that the evidence of full-blown luxury lay. In these, and in all the myriad shiny implements required to poke, probe and scour the flesh from them; and in all the ice buckets containing bottles of premier cru white wine and Champagne; and in all the overflowing ashtrays; and, of course, in all the diners themselves. Diners who, while hailing from more northern climes, still looked considerably better than they did in their usual habitat, once they’d been tanned and masked with sunglasses, then draped in cream linen and creamier silk.
‘I’m absolutely certain, Batface,’ said Henry Wotton, who was sitting at the head of this table, ‘that I have no inclination to visit the Principessa. Why ruin a perfect day by hammering in this heat all the way into Toulon on the bloody péage? Besides,’ he continued, puffing expansively on a Cohiba, ‘what’s a Medici doing in Toulon? Nobody lives in Toulon, it’s where the French Navy docks.’
‘Um… w-well… yes, you say that, Henry,’ Batface replied from the foot of the table, ‘but she’s not at all what you expect from a M-Medici, no… er… air of power about her at all. Incorrigibly bourgeois, in fact. Lives in a little apartment with far too many cats. Incorrigible gossip as well… but only about her neighbours. I did say to Mummy that I would look her up –’
‘Well, you do that then. But I’m going to Aqualand. No, correction, I’m going to drop some acid, then I’m going to go on that mini-submarine trip over to the island, then I’m going to Aqualand, where I shall ride the big twister chute. What’s it to be, Dorian’ – he turned to his protégé – ‘the revolutionary big twister chute or the petit bourgeois Principessa?’
For Dorian Gray’s European sojourns he still needed Henry Wotton – or perhaps that was something his one
-time lover imagined. Maybe Dorian simply liked Wotton, or had the need of a refresher course in the older man’s mastery of bons mots, which, like boomerangs, invariably returned to his mouth, so that they might be hurled forth once again on some later occasion. Certainly, by the mid-eighties Dorian was moving in the most elevated and catholic of circles – Claus and Sunny, Mick and Jerry, Donald and Ivana – whomever he wanted to associate with wanted to associate with him. None of these luminaries could have said exactly what it was that they found so agreeable about Dorian Gray, because to have mouthed ‘money’ and ‘beauty’ would have had the prosaic character of the truth, something they avoided at all costs. As for Dorian’s charm, it existed, true enough, but then there’s nothing more charmless, ultimately, than charm alone.
Whatever the reason, during those years when the Wottons retreated for the summer to a villa set among the dusty vineyards in the back of the Côte d’Azur, Dorian would often happen along. Usually he’d have a titbit on his arm, a beautiful straight boy he was in the process of subtly warping, or a respectable wee wifey whom he’d encouraged to slip the noose. In the course of becoming who he truly was, Dorian had reacquired a prodigious sexual omnivorousness.
He told Wotton about the man he had killed in the Mineshaft, except ‘killed’ wasn’t how he put it; rather he asserted that he’d murdered him. This Wotton was disinclined to believe. While he considered that Dorian was one of those unusual beings who make a reality out the fictions they cannot write (so much more diverting than those poseurs who write the fictions they dare not realise), he very much doubted that the incident was anything more than some rough-housing gone wrong. Wotton liked to think that Dorian intended his boasts to be found out for what they were, and that like him, his protégé had far too much amour propre not to thrill to being ridiculed.
That particular afternoon at Cassis, in his summery incarnation, Dorian affected the palest nicotine shade of linen suits, the softest of silk shirts, the floppiest of spotted foulard ties. With his golden hair frothing from beneath an immaculate panama, and his profile imperious yet elegant, he sipped a glass of wine, cracked the claw of a lobster and thrust the filament of white meat at his companion, who was an ethereally lovely thing, all ash-blonde locks, scattered freckles, tip-tilted nose. ‘Suck it!’ he exclaimed.