I Must Confess

by Rupert Smith

  But however hard I danced, there was one great, growing sadness in my life. John had gone from bad to worse. He hadn’t worked for months, and barely ever left the flat. He didn’t even go to his beloved sex clubs any more. No, John had a new love in his life: heroin.

  I don’t know when he first started using the needle. He’d always loved drugs – he’d take anything he was offered at the clubs as a way of loosening his inhibitions and achieving that longed-for high. But now, he was using them in a different way: to block out reality. He’d stay indoors with the curtains drawn (the sunlight made him itch, he said), making insane drawings (he could have been a great artist) or, more often, just staring at the walls. He was still beautiful, I loved him more than ever, but even I couldn’t fail to notice that he was beginning to smell. Was that one of the reasons I went out at every opportunity? How many of the other revellers in New York’s discos were running away from a similar sorrow?

  But the party had to end sooner or later. The disco round was expensive, and money, as usual, was the one thing I didn’t have. I kept body and soul together with my thriving massage business (I had taken to doing ‘out’ calls at hotels), and it was possible to eat and drink as much as one liked at the clubs without paying for any of it, if you played your cards right. I was having fun, but I couldn’t fool myself for long. My life was going nowhere.

  The day came when I couldn’t scrape together enough money to get across town and into a club. Home was unbearable: John was frantic, almost violent, unable to ‘score’. So I went out walking, just walking. I drifted across Broadway, round Washington Square, through the familiar streets of the Village. I remember seeing a headline on a newspaper lying in the gutter: ELVIS PRESLEY DEAD. For a moment, I thought of Nutter, the first time I’d thought about him for years. I too felt dead – inside.

  I walked downtown, towards Wall Street, heading for the river and the beautiful view of Brooklyn. My heart was so heavy. I longed to go home, but where was home for me now? Avenue A, where the man I’d sacrificed everything for was now a hunted, stinking ghost? Cheyne Walk, my ‘marital home’, where Anna entertained her lady friends? Or my first home, where a grieving mother sat in mute reproach of her errant son? I leaned against a railing as tears misted my eyes. What had it all meant? Had I worked, struggled, for this? This . . . nothingness?

  The sound of my name jolted me back to reality.

  ‘Marc! Hey, Marc, over here!’ The harsh honk of a car horn. ‘Come on, kid, jump in!’

  I recognized the jowly features of Danny, one of my regular ‘punters’, a fat man with a chronic back problem that needed my constant attention. ‘Come on, Marc, let’s go uptown and make babies!’

  I was grateful – God, what depths had I sunk to! – for this warm gesture of human companionship. I tore myself away from the bewitching river – had I really intended to jump? – and climbed into the warm interior of the car.

  I don’t know what prompted me to confide in this man – he was a sleazy individual, I’d always thought – but after we’d finished the massage I poured my heart out to him. I was broke, I confessed, unable to find work, my boyfriend was a junkie and we were facing eviction from our home. I suppose I just wanted to tell somebody, and sometimes a stranger is the best person to confide in. But to my astonishment, Danny turned out to be a sympathetic listener and a pragmatic counsellor. He’d put me to work, he said (‘There’s always a job for you in this town’) in a new club he was opening, not as grand as some I’d been used to, but a place for guys to ‘hang out and relax’. He offered me the job of ‘hostess’ (I hated this campy talk, but was in no position to criticize), a meeter and greeter, providing a little gloss to what could easily have been a squalid enterprise. In return, he said, I’d be paid a small retainer and as much as I could make in tips, and, crucially, he’d make sure that John was kept happy with a regular, safe supply of smack. I made a deal with the devil. I agreed.

  Danny’s club, Diamonds, was close to home, right down in ‘funky’ Alphabet City. It was unpretentious – a small room with a bar down one wall, a few tables and chairs and a quiet back room. John took to it immediately, and brought a lot of his friends along with him. They sat nursing their drinks, occasionally disappearing to the back room that they had jokingly dubbed the ‘shooting gallery’, on account of its tiny cramped dimensions and lack of light. My job was to keep the customers happy, chatting with the loners, encouraging them to buy drinks, occasionally getting up and singing a song to liven the atmosphere up a bit. Strange to tell, I began to look forward to my nightly ‘spot’, thinking up little routines and putting together outfits that I thought the customers would enjoy. It gave me a purpose in life. I incorporated a few of my routines from Peter von Harden movies, a few dance moves I’d picked up from Moska. Occasionally I even mimed to my own much-requested hit ‘Bi Bi Baby’! Sometimes I was too tired to go on – it was hard to stay completely sober when surrounded by drug-users – but Danny would always make sure that I made it to that stage somehow. We were a good team, he and I. And John was happy; it was so good to see him out and about again, even talking about getting back to work. If I could just keep things together, maybe I could save him. Maybe one day we’d be back at the top of the heap – and together.

  But at the back of my mind there was always a terrible sense of foreboding. We were dancing on the brink of an abyss, fooling ourselves that everything was fine when we knew in our hearts that it wasn’t. Did I sense the devastation that would strike at the heart of this world in just a few short years? I think I did.

  But for me, the catastrophe came sooner. It was a normal night in Diamonds; the place was full, I’d given one of my best performances and was celebrating in the ‘shooting gallery’ with John and Danny and a few of the regulars. Suddenly the darkness was pierced by a beam of light and a harsh, barking voice. I looked up and saw a man dressed in full NYPD uniform, with handcuffs, a night stick and even a gun in a holster. It wasn’t an uncommon look around the gay clubs, but this one was taking it to extremes, I remember thinking.

  ‘Okay, fuckers,’ he spat. ‘Which one of you is Marc Lajoon?’

  I extricated myself from a huddle. ‘That’s me, officer.’

  ‘Get your clothes on, faggot. You’re coming with me to the station.’

  ‘Why? What have I done?’ Was this a raid? Danny had assured us that we were well protected against police interference.

  ‘You ain’t done nothing, sweetheart. We got a cable from London. It’s your ma.’

  The room span around me like an awful Hieronymus Bosch nightmare. ‘Mother? My mother?’

  ‘Yeah. She’s dead.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  The first thing I saw as I arrived at Heathrow was a newsprint poster announcing, in big black capitals, WINTER OF DISCO. I had to laugh: good old Britain, lagging behind the times as usual, had just caught on to the trend that I’d spearheaded in New York. Still, at least I should feel at home, and maybe there would be work. I felt quite cheerful. Then the coach moved off and the rest of the poster was revealed: WINTER OF DISCONTENT DEEPENS.

  The journey back into London was a shock. The country was deep in snow – the worst winter for years – everything was filthy, the great grey drifts matching the lifeless, careworn faces. As we approached the city I noticed piles of rubbish along the roadside – not just a few black bags here and there, but great mountains of the stuff, stinking and obscene in the feeble January light.

  The shock deepened as we came into town. I recognized the buildings – it hadn’t changed that much since I’d been away – but the people! A race of aliens had landed and taken possession of the souls of the British. Some of the aliens were easy to spot: creatures in studded leather jackets with colourful spikes and plumes of hair, rings through their noses and chains between their knees. But the rest of them were better disguised: the dead-eyed, hopeless souls who shuffled through the streets, never smiling, never catching your eye. When I’d left London, it seemed li
ke the bustling, creative heart of the universe. I had returned to a dirty, forbidding ghost town.

  I knew all about the punks, of course; I’d read about them in magazines. At first I felt hostile towards these insurgents. Who were they to destroy rock & roll, I thought? But when I heard their music, I understood. They’d taken my sound from the early seventies, mixed it up with the old rocker style that we’d introduced in the fifties, and set it in a modern urban context. As soon as I saw those dismal London streets, I understood punk perfectly. I felt like a father to them.

  I arrived home too late for my mother’s funeral. A hideous comedy of errors had followed her death. The hospital where she died had contacted my last known address at Cheyne Walk, to discover that I was no longer there and that Anna had moved on. Drawing a blank, the hospital handed the matter over to the police, who contacted one old ‘friend’ after another. All of them denied any knowledge of me. They finally ran my dear wife to ground after questioning Julian who, coincidentally, they had picked up for a completely unrelated offence. He’d led them to Anna’s new address in West Hampstead, and through her they’d learned of my temporary residence in New York. The case was handed to the New York police who, after an unforgivable delay, finally found me in Diamonds. How they could have taken so long mystifies me – I was, after all, a well-known downtown attraction.

  I was an orphan. Why had I spent so long running from my parents? Or was it they who had been running from me? Why had we built so many walls between us when it would have taken so little – just a word of love from a parent to a child – to bring us back together? Yes, we’d fought many times, but now they weren’t there any more I felt a terrible loneliness. I had no choice but to go back to Anna. And to be honest, after the madness of life in New York, I was ready to resume my life as a normal, married Englishman. After all, we were both older and (I hoped) wiser now. We’d played hard for years, and now we were both ready to take stock, even to settle down. I’d forgiven her for her last terrible betrayal. I longed for peace and stability after thirty years of chaos.

  Anna had a new home and an independent income: she’d set up in business as a psychotherapist, and shared the house with a constantly fluctuating group of female patients who paid her at a handsome rate for board, lodging and treatment. Such was the success of this arrangement that Anna was now referring to the house as a ‘therapeutic community’. Fortunately for me, there was a spare room when I arrived in London (I later discovered that one of her house guests had killed herself), and Anna bent the ‘women only’ house rule to accommodate me.

  The atmosphere was instantly familiar; it was like a cleaned-up version of the good old Portobello squat. But where once we had created a gypsy camp from colourful rags and tatters, Anna had put together a carefully designed ‘look’ featuring natural floor coverings, ethnic wall hangings and coarse, chunky pottery. She opened the door wearing a huge bottle-green sweater, which, she proudly announced, was made from ‘happy sheep’, hand spun and dyed by women crofters and knitted ‘in house’. She had aged in five years: the hair was now completely grey, still cropped short, and the crow’s feet and facial hair went unchecked. That aside, she was the same old Anna: beaming, content, self-satisfied. The rest of the household were identical copies of her.

  A waft of lavatory cleaner hit me as Anna opened the living-room door (I was later told it was eucalyptus oil) to introduce me to the group of sinisterly similar females huddled in earnest conversation. They resented the intrusion, particularly, I felt, from a man; Anna mumbled an apology and showed me up to my room, remarking that they’d just reached a crucial point in the afternoon’s ‘session’. This was her twice-weekly therapy group for women who had suffered abuse by previous therapists; later they would ‘heal’ each other with aromatherapy and massage. I offered to ‘do my bit’ with the massage – after all, I had years of experience in the field – but Anna chose not to hear me. Instead she left me in my room, quietly shutting the door behind her. I was glad to rest; occasionally I would hear the odd scream from downstairs, but that aside there was nothing to disturb my sleep.

  I awoke, refreshed, and took stock of my surroundings. It was a plain, cell-like room, the walls white, the floorboards bare, a simple white blind at the window. The atmosphere was strangely clinical; perhaps Anna’s tenants liked to pretend they were in hospital. But there was peace in the air, and that was what I needed. Idly, I started flicking through some of the literature stacked on the bedside table: Oral Herstory Workshop; Victims of Abuse: Healing the Silent Wound; Friendly Food: a Women’s Vegetarian Cookery Course. Then it hit me. Bereavement Counselling: the Psychic Approach.

  I don’t know why, but I suddenly burst into tears. Not the tears of rage and frustration that I’d known (so well!) during my life with John; this was from a much deeper well. I cried like I’d never cried before, great shattering sobs that left me weak and exhausted, huge rivers of snot coursing down my twisted face. What was happening to me? Psychotherapeutically speaking, I was an emergency case.

  As soon as I could see for crying, I picked up the leaflet and read it from cover to cover.

  Loss. Denial. Anger. Healing. These are the four stages of bereavement. Blocked energies mean that all too often victims get stuck in the denial phase, leading to depression, sickness and even suicide. The psychic approach opens channels of feeling to facilitate a full working-through of the grieving process, restoring the correct balance of emotions and the possibility for growth.

  That was me! Depression, sickness . . . all in the wake of my mother’s death. Had I really allowed myself to grieve for her? And what about my father? Why had I run away from his death? And why, even when I forced myself to think about him, did I feel so little? Perhaps I needed therapy – I, Marc LeJeune, the great coper, the pillar of strength on whom everyone else had relied. I wasn’t as strong as I thought.

  I kept a low profile around the house for a few days, getting used to a quieter, gentler way of life. The women impressed me as pleasant, considerate neighbours – for that’s what we were like, each in our little rooms. Anna delighted in her role as earth mother, of course, but at least she really did look after her little brood, making sure that nobody was hungry or lonely.

  It took a few weeks before I could talk to Anna about my bereavement. The pain had been so sudden and intense, and it was difficult to ask for help. ‘Everyone needs therapy of some sort or other,’ she explained, ‘it’s just that most people are too shut off from their own energies to realize it. But sometimes the bravest thing is to admit that you’ve got a problem and seek professional help for it.’ As we talked further, I began to realize that I had more problems than I’d ever suspected. It wasn’t just the death of my parents that was eating away at me, it was a fundamental self-hatred manifesting itself as deep-rooted misogyny, emotional and sexual sado-masochism. Anna made me realize how much I had to work through: my own destructive relationships, my sexual compulsiveness, even (she suggested) some profound and unresolved issues around racism. The more we talked, the more I confessed, the better I felt. I wanted her to know everything-to understand me and to heal me.

  I started attending a group that she was running three evenings a week, where half a dozen women (plus me) would explore their ‘personal stuff’ in a supportive and mutually respectful environment. At the first meeting, I sat quietly, speaking only when told to by Anna. At the second, I told a few stories from my own recent past, and was astonished by the rapacious fascination that gripped the group (whose own stories were pale accounts of sexual incompetence or thwarted love affairs). Soon my confessions had become the focal point of the group, as I spilled my guts hour after hour, weeping hysterically as I regressed further towards the ultimate source of my pain.

  For I had realized that there was something, somewhere, very wrong with me. What had led me into such abusive relationships? All the friends I had known, worked with, loved and lived with, had tried to destroy me. Possessive Phyllis, criminal Nick, ve
ngeful Pinky, mad Moska, confused Nutter, suicidal John. All of them had taken, taken, taken from me and given nothing but pain in return. Yes, even John. Far from him now, I realized that I had sacrificed everything – career, family and friends – to support a man who repaid me with anxiety and degradation.

  And then there was the sexual angle; that was what fascinated the group most. Why had I become involved with all these men? I’m not gay – that much I made clear from the outset – but there was some power that drew me again and again into the destructive downward spiral of male sexuality. Male sexuality, I learned, was all about death, the desire to possess and destroy, the oblivion of the orgasm. Surely I, in seeking out these relationships, was trying to destroy something in myself.

  I could feel some great revelation at hand. Three times a week, then four, then five (such was the involvement of the group) I dug deeper and deeper into my past, desperately searching for the key to the puzzle. I groped around in my subconscious, I seized on every tiny memory from childhood, I sent myself into hypnotic trances, and gradually something started to emerge. It was a memory – not even a memory, it was so deeply buried in my subconscious – from early childhood. A faint trace of a pain so great that I had repressed all awareness of it. And what was it? What was the image that returned again and again, like a nightmare struggling into the cold light of day ?

  My father. Always my father. Something that had happened a long time ago, that had set me off on the path to destruction, spiralling down, down into the dark, deathly hell of male sexuality. Finally, I had to face up to the truth, to the one thing that made sense of my life.

  At an early age, I had been systematically, possibly ritually, sexually abused by my father.

  As soon as Anna suggested this to me at the end of an intense session, everything fell into place. I could see it all as clearly as if it was yesterday: Daddy coming into the bedroom, sitting on the bed, pulling back the covers, no, no Daddy, it tickles, stop it, I’m scared Daddy, scared . . . I was amazed at how the details flooded back, tumbling over each other into consciousness. Why had I always feared my father? Why had I tried to hide from him, to prevent him from knowing anything about me? Why did I feel so little grief or remorse when he died? Now I knew. For a moment, it was too much. I would have given anything to take that memory away, to run away from it as I’d run away from everything in my life. But when I finally accepted it as the truth, it made sense of all the problems that I’d ever experienced in my life. It all came back to Daddy.