by Will Self
Baz, despite himself, had ended up sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down at Wotton, who was nodding out, his chin on his chest, the ash from his cigarette falling in grey flakes. He held the little iceberg of crack aloft, turning it this way and that, so that the glare of the Anglepoise glissaded across it. ‘Jesus, Henry’ – Baz betrayed a grudging admiration – ‘you’re smacked out of your fucking gourd.’
‘Ah, that’s more like the old Baz, the Baz we hate to love. Wouldn’t you like to join me here, Baz? Smacked out of Henry’s fucking gourd. It’s a fine place to be, yes indeed.’
But instead of replying, Baz took the dying cigarette from Wotton’s mouth and dropped it with a fizz into the dregs of his friend’s ’poo. ‘You’re too stoned now,’ he said, ‘to come up with anything worth hearing.’
‘I both resent that, Basil… and accept it… But light me another gasper and I think you’ll find I’m still a very capable listener. Tell me what happened in the States, Baz, because he kept going back and forth, didn’t he?’
9
This sun didn’t so much beat down as hammer the wide sand beach, choppy ocean, tussocked dune and distant pines into two ductile dimensions. A strip of reality that was wound around the bronzed shoulders of a group of near-naked young men, who, like the good Prometheans they were – this was, after all, Fire Island – tended a small conflagration of driftwood, oily planks haloed green and blue. An old radiator grille propped in among the embers did service for a barbecue.
Dorian Gray, his hair a flaming aurora, his skin flawless, came tripping up the strand. Even here, in this open-air festival of self-love – the pecs oiled and shaven, the abs burnished and buffed – he still stood proud of the rest. His every carefree movement blazoned the fact that he – unlike them – wasn’t even trying.
He joined the colloquy of modern Platonists with their modest picnic. A ghetto blaster tootled out Bowie, who weedily inveighed at the company, ‘Let’s dance.’ They rearranged themselves to accommodate Dorian, but only grudgingly.
—What ho, Dorian, said one of them, Roy, a beetle-browed chap, whose heavy shoulders and Gaulish mustachios gave him the appearance of an epicene walrus.
—I’m sorry? Dorian was blithe.
—I said ‘What ho’, old man – isn’t that your Brit jive?
—Yeah, whatever you say, Roy.
—Are you going to the party tonight, Dorian? put in Stan, who was rawboned and nervy; his right-angled ears were sunburnt, while patches of rough hide at elbow and knee suggested eczema or worse.
—And what party would that be?
—The wake, man, the fucking wake for Brucie – Stan convulsed himself upright – he was only one of the guys who made this place, Dorian, who created the fucking scene here. Jesus, you knew him, man. I saw you talking with him – I even saw you boogieing with Brucie, making love with him, Dorian.
—I’d hardly describe it as making love, Stan; what most men around here do is copulate to avoid violence. Without asking, Dorian detached a can of beer from its plastic webbing, cracked the ring-pull, took a pull and began to expatiate in the manner of his mentor: When any group of aggressive predators are confined together, a hierarchy rapidly emerges; dominance and submission rituals ensure order. Mock mating is often one of them. The only peculiar thing about the homosexuals of Fire Island is that there’s nothing mock about our mating. May I have a chicken wing? He took one anyway, seemingly oblivious of the simmering aggression his remarks on aggression had provoked.
—I dunno what you’re saying, man – Roy took up cudgels – but I don’t like the way you’re saying it. It’s a wake, Brucie’s dead; we’re commemorating his life, saying who he was.
—It all sounds a little too morbid for me, Roy; I’d sooner say who I am and remain in the tense present.
—You don’t give a damn about anything, do you, Dorian? Stan was appalled. You don’t do anything for anyone who’s sick, you don’t seem to care about how you behave – what is it with you?
—You’re all delicate little flowers, aren’t you, boys. The whole death thing shakes you up so, and that nasty moral majority saying it was all your own minority fault. That it was all that rimming and writhing and buggering you did, which upset sweet Jesus and his sour daddy. Now he’s not going to let you sit on his right hand so he can slip a finger in. But I’m not like you boys, not like you at all. I don’t shudder to think – I think to shudder. Dorian, the very picture of health and vitality, did shudder. He chomped into the greasy, flame-grilled limb and gave a delicious writhe to his perfectly-proportioned shoulders.
This was too much for Roy, who jumped to his feet, fists raised. I’m not so much of a faggot that I can’t fight. Get the fuck outta here, Dorian – get the fuck out! The other loungers were upright as well, making a petrified tableau of muscle and sinew.
Dorian was, of course, amply confirmed in his zoological analysis of Fire Island society, and chillingly he preserved his cool: I know when I’m not welcome, boychicks, and that’s a decided improvement on you, who welcome not knowing. He threw the half-eaten chicken wing on the fire, slowly rose, and sloped off along the beach.
Even as the others watched him go, shimmering into the heat haze, they saw him pause by another colloquy, exchange a few words with another young man, extend an arm and pull him upright. So, it was as one of a couple that Dorian wavered into insubstantiality.
It was night-time now on Broderip. Gavin had been by to say goodbye and the incoming duty nurse had come to say hello. Neither, on seeing the two men in earnest conversation, had felt inclined to interrupt, and besides, there were nebulisers, and drips, and pumps aplenty to change. There was workmanlike dying going on.
‘As the gays in NYC fused into a closer community,’ Baz continued, ‘the better to deal with this awful scourge, so Dorian managed a rare feat. Despite being rich, beautiful and seemingly eternally youthful, he became a pariah. People got to hear about him, Henry, and his name became associated with all the guilt and shame surrounding the old bath-house scene. It was even rumoured that Dorian was the AIDS Mary, the malevolent and intentional transmitter of the virus.’
‘But what of you, my dear Baz? Did Dorian create a little scene for you, as he said he would?’
‘He set me up in a studio in the Village – if that’s what you mean. He even threw money around, got me to assemble a little coterie of artists to put on group shows and the like. But I was fucked up on drugs again within a matter of months; the mid-eighties were just another smear on the windscreen so far as I was concerned. By the time Andy died at the beginning of ’87 it had all gone bad. Fucking dreadful.’
To be precise, it had gone bad in a loft on Mercer Street. A loft that had high windows with the requisite vast fanlights, through which all the dizzying vertiginousness of downtown Manhattan could be seen rearing up into the heavens. The twin towers of the World Trade Center, like the severed legs of a brutalist robot god, were having their feet kissed by lesser buildings with neoclassical façades, featuring not one or two but twenty or thirty friezes. Manhattan – like Ancient Rome with a pituitary disorder.
Inside, the large, foursquare, whitewashed room looked superficially trendy and tidy, but this was no more than arty camouflage thrown over the very real patina of grime that coated the fixtures and the two slashed leatherette sofas which were the only fittings. As if there weren’t enough filth in situ, small drifts of trash had built up in all the corners and crannies.
Baz and Dorian stood in the middle of this shabby atelier. The former was – once again, as in the beginning – a sweating, shaking, stuttering morass, all the chemicals agonising and antagonising inside him. Dorian, on the other hand, was poised in midnight-blue velvet, a Hermès scarf frothing out of his breast pocket. He tapped oval-rimmed fashion eyewear against his oval lips. They were contemplating a plywood pedestal, upon which sat a sculpture made from a welded tangle of bent and burnt spoons. It looked like the model of some undeniably complex but for all
that dangerously unstable molecule.
On one of the sofas sat a black kid with his hair bound into sloppy antennae. He was moodily cooking up a fix in a spoon that had become detached from the artwork. A brittle Hispanic girl in a little bloodstained dress contemplated him with hungry eyes. From a single giant speaker – devoid of a cabinet and lying on its side – came peculiar hurdy-gurdy music, as if this sordid scene were some fairground unattraction.
—It looks like it took him about an hour to make.
—Don’t be crazy, Dorian – look at the sheer number of welds involved in the thing.
—OK, it took him a hundred hours and he’s truly untalented.
—No, I don’t think you’re right there, Dorian. You never get Manhattan do you? You don’t quite grasp how far image and aesthetic are the same thing here. This is the city where the multiple sets the standard for the artefact. Why paint one portrait when you can print a hundred? Why bend one spoon when you can bend a thousand?
—Yeah, and why ponce one dollar off me when you can ponce ten thousand, eh?
—The point is that Gary here is very much of the moment – he’s a pal of Jean-Michel’s, he’s got a show coming up in Chelsea, at Gallery 7. He is, to all intents and purposes, the toast of the town.
—He’s a plaything of Andee’s – that’s what you mean.
—He’s been doing some collaborations with Andy, that’s what I mean, exactly like Jean-Michel.
—Titivating the King Queen of Manhattan – that’s what I mean. Jesus, Baz, when I heard you going on about Andee five years ago in London, I thought there might be a certain cachet to him and his precious scene, but now I’ve seen them and they’re as dull as any gaggle of old faggots anywhere in the world. Bloody wizened old stick, with his acne scars and his white Rasta wigs and his tape recorder and his dumb Polaroid. Lisping on about this celebrity and that celebrity: ‘Gee, Dorian, don’t you think so-and-so is fantastic…’ Fan-fucking-tastic – when it’s some Z-list TV actor he’s salivating over.
—You just don’t get it, Dorian.
—Get what? That he’s dead already but won’t lie down? What was that bullshit TV show he was in last year? Love Cruise?
From the fake depths of the sofa, Gary, who’d had his hit and was now disposed to look favourably upon everything, said, Love Boat, man, Love Boat – an’ he was awesome in it. Yeah, the dude is the man.
—The dude is the man? Baz, do I have to listen to this crap?
—You have to’ve been here in the sixties and seventies, I suppose, Dorian – things have moved on.
—Yeah, right, moved straight into the fucking morgue.
—People aren’t well, Dorian, they’re dying. But I’ve heard that you keep right on doing all kinds of stuff, riding bareback –
—Well, what d’you expect me to be like, Baz? Andee, who has a hissy fit if his telephone hygienist doesn’t clean the receiver properly?
—He has his foibles.
—Foibles? He’s like some hideous mad old maid, who’s terrified a roach is going to crawl into her piss flaps.
—Dorian, you’ve become somebody I don’t recognise any more.
—You mean I don’t resemble your stupid, lousy, derivative installation?
—Well, if you wanted to revitalise the gallery you could always exhibit Cathode Narcissus. With your reputation on the scene it would be a big hit.
—Bigger than the hits of smack and coke you’ve ponced off me?
—What is this, Dorian, this vituperation? Not even Henry is as big a bitch as you’ve become.
—Not even Henry is as big a ponce and a junky as you are, Baz.
Then Baz went and spoilt all this fabulously nasty repartee by saying something silly, like, I thought we had a relationship, Dorian… Unbelievably, he was on the verge of tears… Fuck it, we used to m-make love…
—In order to enjoy having sex with you, Baz, I had to become a masochist. Dorian circled the spoons, putting thirty-odd more between himself and Baz.
—Bring over Cathode Narcissus, Dorian – that’ll make things right with us, with everything.
—I couldn’t even if I wanted to, Baz. No, it’s over between us. Over the years I’ve come to loathe your sensitive face. I’ll tell you another thing, Baz. When you clear out of this joint – because I’ve given up the lease and you’ve got to be gone by tomorrow – do me a favour, and take the fucking cutlery with you. With this Dorian grabbed one of the spoons protruding from Gary’s sculpture and yanked it out, which brought the whole clanking pile tumbling down.
—Hey! yelled the artist. You’ve bust my sculpture, man – you can’t do that!
—Can – and I bloody well have. So what’re you gonna do about it, man, make a distress call to Andee?
Gary lunged up out of the squashy embrace of the sofa and the two men began to circle it, both of them in fighters’ crouches. Then Dorian went and spoilt it all by laughing uproariously. He chucked the spoon in Gary’s face and bolted out of the door. His cackling and his footfalls retreated down the stairs. Gary sat back down. The Hispanic girl sobbed. Baz sank to the floor. The hurdy-gurdy music swelled, encompassing the futility of it all.
Tenderly, Baz removed the cigarette butt from Wotton’s lips and dropped it into the teacup. There was another fizz. He looked down at the waxen face. The ill man’s veined eyelids twitched and his lips parted to reveal yellowed incisors. He whimpered, as might a sleeping dog that was hunting in its dreams. ‘I wonder if you heard that, old friend, before you gouched out?’ Baz murmured. ‘I say “friend”, Henry, because I think of you as a friend, whatever it is that’s happened between us. I think of you as a dying friend, someone just like me.’
Baz sighed, rose and went over to the glass partition. He peered through into the next room, where the remains of another young man’s life were being meted out by the mechanical ‘choof’s of a respirator. He returned to his bedside vigil. He ran his hands over his crew cut and ground his fists into his eye sockets. He felt he had to appease the ghosts of his and Wotton’s tumultuous past. He felt he needed to protect himself from his old friend’s madness in the present. The future was simply terrifying. He felt – and that was the worst thing of all. A swollen emotional dyspepsia, compounded in equal parts of love, pity, fear and a desire for self-preservation that – all things considered – seemed ludicrously out of place. Still, at long last Basil Hallward had a measure of calm; there was nowhere to race to or escape from any more. He readied himself to soliloquise.
‘Perhaps it’s worth speaking to you now, Henry, speaking to you in a way that I’ll probably never have the guts to when you’re awake. Who knows, maybe you’ll hear me. Fuck it – believe me – I’m not doing it for you or me, I’m doing it for us both.’ Baz took a deep breath. Even when he was unconscious, Wotton’s expression was mocking. ‘Look, I think I know you, I think I know what that mask of cynicism obscures – a child, desperately frightened of his own capacity to feel and to be felt, to love and be loved. I was like that, and the mask had to be picked away at, and picked away at… as if… as if it were a hard scab protecting my raw features, until the vulnerable Baz underneath was exposed.’ He got up again and began to pace around three sides of the bed.
‘I escaped from New York, Henry. Or rather, one of the guys who’d been on the fringes of the scene, a wealthy gay guy with impeccable ethics – yes, such people exist – paid for me to go to rehab in the Midwest. I’m not saying it was easy – it fucking wasn’t – but it was the beginning of my recovery. When I got there, Henry… it was as if I’d woken up in a surreal orphanage… All these people wandering around… They’d been devious fucking addicts and brawling drunks on the outside, but in this place they were children… Arrogant children screaming defiance – I want my sweetie drugs! As you can imagine, I was one of the loudest.’
Wotton’s eyelids moved more rapidly. Was he asleep, or merely dreaming that he was – his opiated visions interleaving themselves with Baz’s word pictures
to create a flick-book that could be viewed only from an exact angle? From a point in between him and Baz, here and there, now and then.
It was a wooden room full of splintered people. There was pitch-pine cladding and polished pine floorboarding. Outside, evergreens shaded in the mid-ground and cancelled out any background altogether. In the foreground crouched more hutments, obviously part of the same camp. In this one there were slogans on the walls – ‘I Can’t – We Can’, ‘Keep It Simple’, ‘Just for Today’ – that cumulatively implied the marketing of a suspiciously intangible product, such as invisible snake-oil. The strip lighting, the fire extinguisher, the laminated card printed with directions saying where to point the squirty foam, everything in sight screamed ‘Institution!’; and while everybody in the room had their mouths shut tight, nevertheless their fidget language was strident. The motley collection of ten deadbeats sat in a loose circle of plastic stacking chairs, scratching, picking, jiggling and rubbing. Clearly, shit had been going down, and the one who appeared most dumped upon, most curled up in his chair, was Basil Hallward.
Billy, who had hair pressed into frizzy earphones by his baseball cap, and acne the same red as the fire extinguisher, felt moved to speak. You’re full of shit, Baz, all you wanna talk about is the celebrities you’ve hung out with, an’ all the ass you’ve had –