by John Maley
‘It’s only a toke. Ye’d think I’d set the fuckin’ pub on fire.’
Gary giggled. He pushed the shades back up his nose again and drank his bottle of beer.
‘It’s good here innit?’
Harry didn’t look very enthusiastic. He began to appreciate how young Gary was. Late teens.
‘Fancy a drag?’
He pushed the joint to Gary’s lips. Gary puffed, and sucked at the joint like a baby to a booby.
‘Good eh?’
Gary smiled and nodded. Harry took the toke back.
‘You know I see aw the steamers an’ the speed freaks an’ the E posse an’ it makes me laugh. This is the only thing that’s cool. This is the pipe of peace, Gary. The pipe of peace.’
‘Can I get some more?’
Harry gave Gary another few puffs of his joint.
‘Nothin’ alleviates the stresses an’ strains of this poxy planet better than this.’
Gary began to look pale. As a ghost. He suddenly felt very nauseous. Harry looked him in the eye. You didn’t need a degree in dopeology to see that Gary was having a major whitey.
‘Oh,’ said Gary. That was all he was capable of saying, but Harry knew what he meant.
‘I think we should go tae the toilet, Gary son.’
They rose as one, Harry extinguishing the toke in the pink ashtray. He ushered the ashen-faced Gary through the bar and upstairs. Joanie moved in to clear away the ashtray and its evidence.
Harry took Gary into the toilet. By this time Gary had extended his vocabulary from ‘Oh’ to ‘Oh God.’ Harry propped him up against the wall beside the sinks. He ran the cold tap and dabbed at Gary’s face with a wet paper towel.
‘You’re okay. You’re okay, Gary. Jist took a wee whitey.’
There were a couple of guys in the toilet. They were intrigued.
‘What’re you doin’ wi’ that chicken?’
‘He’s jist took a whitey.’
‘Put his head between his knees.’
‘Put his head between my knees.’
‘I’m gonnae be sick.’
Harry helped the groaning Gary over a sink. He moaned and groaned. An older guy put a hand gently on Gary’s back.
‘There, there, pet,’ he cooed.
He dried his hands at the drier and marched to the door. He turned to look at Harry, who was helping Gary up from the sink.
‘Drugging chickens, whatever next?’
He shook his head and left. Harry knew the bitchy old queen was just noising him up. Gary began to recover. He moaned some more, then leaned against the wall. He smiled at Harry.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’
‘Ah gave ye a showin’ up.’
‘Nae ye didnae. Have you ever smoked grass before?’
Gary nodded.
‘A coupla times.’
‘Feelin’ better?’
‘Aye.’
Gary turned back to the sinks. He turned on the cold water tap and scooped up handfuls of cold water to drink. Harry watched him sup the water. He was a good-looking boy. He could see him better now that he’d taken those stupid sunglasses off. Or they’d fallen off.
‘Where’s your glasses?’
Gary looked up, wiping his hand on his trouser leg.
‘I don’t know. They must’ve fallen off.’
They had a look for the shades in the toilet but there was no sign of them. They were standing at the cubicle door when Gary suddenly kissed Harry. He took Harry by surprise. Harry put his arms around him.
‘I’m auld enough to be your da.’
Gary kissed him again, undeterred. He seemed to have made a good recovery from the whitey, the colour beginning to return to his cheeks. The resilience of youth, thought Harry.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Harry. ‘You smoked my joint. Why don’t I smoke yours?’
They smiled and bundled each other into a cubicle, Harry snibbing the door behind them. He enjoyed the smoke.
Heavy Losses
That Saturday night was the first time I’d been to Delilah’s for ages. Some places hold too many painful memories for me. But I felt I had to go there after I heard about the Admiral Duncan bombing. I wanted to remember friends and lovers I had lost. I wanted to go back to the place where they had been so alive.
First Kevin died, then Marie and then Sandy, all within the space of a year. That was four years ago. Now they’re talking as if you could live forever with HIV.
We spent a lot of time in Delilah’s, just after it opened. We treated it like a second home. We got quite proprietorial about it. It was our pub, and we had our seats. We’d sit there three or four nights a week. We’d make up names for people we’d see, people we fancied or were curious about. Kevin would stand at the bar gossiping with Joanie, to the point where it was useless sending him up for a round. We’d die of thirst.
I was seeing Kevin in those days. For the first few weeks of this fling, (that’s all I could really call it) I used to get quite jealous. On our nights out he spent more time talking to other people than he did to me. But after that unsettling period I came to understand that this was just Kevin’s way. He was naturally nosy. He had to find out everything about everybody. That’s where the connection with Joanie came in; the bitchy drag queen was a mine of useless information. No, that’s not fair. I liked Joanie, but going to Delilah’s, the scene in general, was like living in a goldfish bowl. Privacy just wasn’t possible. Kevin and Joanie used to talk about what people were wearing and shite like that. One hilarious evening they both dragged up in identical dresses and wigs and called themselves the Hairy Marys. They spent the night telling dirty jokes and we laughed ourselves hoarse.
One time Marie and I were under a table looking for one of Kevin’s contact lenses. Joanie came over shouting ‘Penny a skelp’ and smacked our arses with one of his poofy platform shoes. We never did find the lens and Kevin ended up staggering around with one eye closed, saying he was getting double vision. It was after that he got these trendy Giorgio Armani specs. Everybody thought he looked great in them except me. But I’d tired of Kevin by then and he of me. I wanted someone I could be serious with and I still don’t know what he wanted.
In Delilah’s, Marie was more like me. She was into spectating. She wasn’t what Kevin described as a ‘personality’, someone who was always drawing attention to themself. I’d always thought Marie was gay. One time I stood holding her coat and bag outside Club X for half an hour while she had her neck bitten by a Goth dyke who looked like Morticia from the Addams Family. I tended to judge Marie by the company she kept, which was fairly dykey. But Marie was bisexual. She apparently caught the virus from a guy she had been seeing, some guy from London called Richard. I knew she’d been going down there but I didn’t know he was the major attraction. The Richard affair had been going on for years. Marie ended up moving to London and I never saw her again. She came up twice, but I missed her. I think that was the start of everything unravelling. Shortly after, Kevin dropped out. We heard that he was in love and Joanie talked of being maid of honour at his wedding. There had never been a queer wedding in Delilah’s and Joanie was cruising for one. Joanie told us the whole romance and it seemed that Kevin had finally found a place for all that energy to go. Again, I felt jealous. It was a fleeting feeling; the feeling of being replaced. But then I felt happy for him. I’m happy for anybody who finds love.
I’d seen Sandy around on the scene for a few years. He was one of those faces that grow familiar if you’re a regular. I used to go out on the scene all the time. Once, at a karaoke night, we got talking and then started something. Sandy and I never actually fucked, it just never happened. But we had some good fun together, and I felt comfortable in his arms. When he tested positive, I was the first person he told. He had the actual, full-blown thing. He told me he had suspected it for awhile but was too scared to test. I felt a bit paranoid about it. He told me first, and then his mother. ‘Two people I love but haven�
�t fucked,’ he said, unsmiling. That night I sat in his living-room with my arms around him. It aroused so many emotions in me: fear, sadness, guilt, anger.
I had already watched Kevin die. A part of me wished the news had come too late and I’d have been spared seeing him, broken and almost unrecognisable. That’s pure selfishness because he had wanted to see me. He held court from his hospital bed. I expected him to be funny and brave, but he was serious. More serious than I’d ever known him to be. Yet it wasn’t a melancholy seriousness; it was just that I was so used to him being crazy and frivolous and full of fun. We sat and talked at his bedside. I never really said what I wanted to say, I was too scared of the feelings it might let out. Even at that desperate ending, I couldn’t shake off my reserve.
Marie had a friend called Chris who still lived in Glasgow. She was an English Lit lecturer at one of the further education colleges. I didn’t know Chris well. I’d only met her a couple of times in Delilah’s. Marie had once pulled me up for not speaking to her women friends. ‘Is it because they’re not sexually relevant to you?’ she mused over a cheap pint of Beck’s one hazy happy hour in Delilah’s. I’d replied with what I think is the truth – I’m no good at small talk and I hadn’t spent enough time with her friends to get to know them. Besides, I don’t think you should necessarily be friends with everybody your friends are friends with, if you get my drift.
It was Chris who told me about Marie. I had bumped into her one Saturday in Buchanan Street and she shook like a leaf and blurted out the news. We went for a coffee and sat crying across a wee round table. I noticed some people looking over, maybe thinking we were a couple breaking up or something. We sat talking about Marie. By the end of it, I felt Chris had described a completely different person from the Marie I knew. I wondered if Chris had been in love with her. We swapped phone numbers and said we’d keep in touch, but we haven’t. We only had one connection, and that’s a painful one. Her death didn’t seem real, it was such a bolt from the blue. On the bus home I thought of Marie with the Goth dyke under the neon sign at Club X.
So Sandy phoned me. I hadn’t seen Sandy for a while. I’d been living the life of a celibate hermit. The deaths of Kevin and Marie hadn’t made me determined to go out and live life to the full. They had kind of deadened me. I’d phoned Sandy a few times, but he had sounded distant on the phone and said something about seeing someone else. Our thing had faded away into acquaintance, with Sandy half-joking that I was cramping his style. That was another wound inflicted, Sandy going.
I stayed in on Friday, after I’d heard about the bomb going off, digesting the news. I actually found myself in tears at one point. There was a sudden sense of vulnerability, of being in danger.
On Saturday I read about the bombing in the Guardian. There was a front-page report with photographs taken in the aftermath of the explosion. Men stood around in shock, their lacerated arms held in odd positions. You could see the doorway of the pub, smoke billowing over ripped cables, and on the floor a man crawling, looking like he was trying to escape the carnage.
That night I decided to go to Delilah’s. I had thought about it all that day. I had thought about Kevin, leaning across the bar to do his double act with Joanie, and Marie, nursing her pint of cheap Beck’s and taking me to task over something or other. I even thought about phoning Sandy, forgetting he too was gone. I thought about how the nail bombing campaign had linked those two obvious bedfellows, racism and homophobia.
I had a shower using a bar of aromatherapy soap. It was Neroli and I was getting pleasantly used to the smell. When I got dressed I drank a couple of cans of lager. The thought of going into a bar sober and alone has never appealed to me. I shoved on a dance anthems CD. It was trash but strangely uplifting. It went down nicely with the beer. It was nearly ten before I left the flat.
Delilah’s looked the same. It had only just been painted the last time I was in and that sickly yellow was looking in need of a new coat. It was as smoky as ever, and through in the backroom the music was pumping. I bought a pint of lager at the bar and negotiated my way into a corner where I could put my glass on a wee ledge. It was a good vantage point. The clientele seemed younger but there was still a good range of ages and styles. Two old guys of about sixty stood along from me. One of them coughed and something clattered out of his mouth. He looked at the floor, mystified, while his pal laughed. I looked down at the manky floor and saw a denture, a pink gum plate with a false tooth, shiny with saliva, lying against the wall. I pointed it out to the guy, but I wasn’t about to pick it up for him.
The mood seemed upbeat, although I heard a couple of young guys talking about the bombing at one of the booths. There were a couple of Asian guys in, standing at the entrance to the backroom. One of them seemed to be mouthing lyrics to the music. As I looked around I began to see a few familiar faces. Guys I used to fancy, a couple of whom I’d slept with, a friend of Marie’s, and finally, surfacing at the bar with a huge honey blonde wig, Joanie. I tried to attract his attention but he couldn’t see me from where I was standing. I decided to finish my drink then catch him at the bar.
At that point three had been reported dead and as much as seventy injured. Some had terrible wounds. I looked at the punters in Delilah’s, here despite that carnage, determined, alive. I drank my pint quickly. I needed it. It had been a hot day. Then I went to get another drink. It was three deep and a big tall guy was using his superior height to muscle his way in. I waited, then when a couple of young queens in front of me moved slowly away from the bar, clutching what looked like a dozen bottles of alcopops, I stepped into the gap and put my hand out, wrapped around a fiver. Joanie came over and put his hand on mine. We smiled.
Normally I go straight to bed after a drinking session but that night I sat up and played some music low. I needed to think, and to remember. I thought of my friends and family and hoped they knew I loved them. I wasn’t brought up to go round telling people I loved them. I thought of all the lies I’d told so people wouldn’t know I was gay. These were wounds, too, these lies, these silences, avoidances.
I thought about the wounds, the endless wounds that ripped away at my right to live and love my life, the petty hate crimes that passed for decency or public opinion, the bombers with their stinking bibles, their poisonous bigotries, their smug prejudices.
I was nowhere near that bomb. But I felt the blast.
Rory’s Kitchen Drawer
The kitchen drawer in Rory’s flat was crammed with papers and objects, old bills, instruction leaflets, guarantees, receipts, and was jumbled up with buttons, pens, Sellotape, and tacks. There were even a few johnny bags (unused) amongst the mess. Don stood in front of the open drawer like a mesmerised child.
‘Fart in a trance.’
Don turned to look at Terry, who was carefully packing books into cardboard boxes.
‘We’ll be here forever if you just stand there like a fart in a trance.’
Terry was a fussy queen, but Rory had appreciated his organising skills. When Rory, before he died, had asked Terry to take care of things, Terry had agreed immediately. Don was glad he hadn’t been put on the spot. He knew that some people coped with grief by burying themselves in practicalities. He had watched his sister scrub their parents’ house like a demented Stepford Wife for two days after their mother died. Terry was like that. His manner at the funeral had been so officious he had pissed everybody off.
Don had always been a broody kind of guy. Opening the drawer in Rory’s lovely, bright, sunflower-yellow kitchen to see the little bits and pieces that bulged and dragged in a rough mass as he gave the drawer a final yank, he was just so sad. It was the very impersonality of it. He and Terry had already packed a box full of letters and photos, some they would destroy and some they would keep. That had been tragic, but strangely comforting. The anonymous flotsam and jetsam in the kitchen drawer were something else. The guarantees. There was one for a vacuum cleaner, an iron, a toaster, and a portable TV.
‘C
heck this, Don.’
Terry held up a slim paperback.
‘Giovanni’s Room. James Baldwin. This was a wee present from me.’
He read from the flyleaf.
– To Rory. Lots of love and a happy thirtieth. May 1990. Terry. Kiss, Kiss.
Don was silent. Terry sat hunched over one of the boxes with the Baldwin in his hand. For a moment, Don thought he was crying. But then he saw Terry place the book carefully into a box and go onto the next shelf, steady and purposeful. He was one particular poof. Don hated shopping with Terry because he was so fussy about things. If he liked a shirt or a jacket or even a pair of underpants he couldn’t just grab it, take it to the counter and crash the cash for it. He had to rake around until he found out exactly what it was made of, the washing instructions; he would even tug slyly at the seams to check the stitching. Once he had emerged from under a rail of shirts in Gap and declared emphatically ‘I’d never wash that at forty degrees!’
Of course he had to try everything on. Don had hovered in countless shops whilst Terry preened himself in the changing rooms much to the chagrin of store security guards. One had even joked about setting off the fire alarm to get him out of a changing room. Terry was unrepentant.
‘I know I’m a fussy cow, but I’ve yet to regret a purchase.’
Don put both hands in the drawer and rummaged about in an effort to appease Terry. He began to drop the obvious rubbish into a plastic carrier bag at his feet. He knew he should simply turn the drawer upside down into the bag and go back to the lounge to help Terry. He was stalling. It had all happened so fast.
Terry had got a call from Rory to say that he was ill and, as Terry had commented cryptically, ‘wasn’t going to get any better.’ Rory seemed to go down pretty quickly. Terry had naturally become his confidant and executor.
Don had imagined Terry stationed constantly at Rory’s sickbed, wearing a big black cloak and scribbling away with an old quill pen. But it was what was needed; someone to defuse the emotional time bomb (that was ticking louder with each passing day) with an increasingly tedious list of Practical Things That Needed To Be Done. Once, when Terry was discussing the need to put Rory’s house on the market, Don had seen a solitary tear trickle down Terry’s face. Terry had quickly brushed the tear away and said, ‘Tasks now, tears later.’