To the Ends of the Earth

by Michael Gouda

  Most of the other members of the form (Upper VI Mod) treated the task with a certain amount of latitude, if not lassitude, but I found myself absorbed in the doings of the Old Dynasty kings, Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, the self-aggrandized exploits of the self-styled Rameses the Great (18th Dynasty), and that strange pharaoh who founded a brief monotheistic worship of the sun god, Aten, and called himself Akhenaten.

  I got a special mention in my final report for that piece of work.

  And then we left school, throwing all our textbooks out of the top-floor library window in celebration.

  I was a man. I could vote. I could fight and die for my country. I could fuck or be fucked, suck or be sucked, and, unless I did the last few in public and got caught, no one could tell me nay.

  Chapter 3—University

  TO SAY I went mad would be putting it mildly. Pubs, clubs, saunas, gyms, cottages, trolling grounds like Hampstead Heath and Clapham Common: we sampled them all. With Jacob a not unwilling companion, perhaps not as bold as me, but well up there.

  Of course we took precautions: we had twelve-pack condoms each, and sometimes we used them all. It was the excitement, the danger of gay bashers, occasional police raids to “clean up” areas after complaints had been made, the searching, the groping, the finding, the stripping to whatever level was necessary, the entering, the plunging, the withdrawing, in, out, in, out, quicker, quicker, harder, farther—until the final screaming, or maybe controlled silence, of the orgasm, pumping semen into mouth, ass, hand, or just, like Onan spilling his seed, onto the ground.

  In more public life, Jacob in his supermarket hoped for promotion to manager; me waiting for and finally receiving good—no, great—results and applying for a place at Bristol University. I had put down tentatively, before I knew my exam grades, that I was interested in journalism. In my mind’s eye, I could see my name on the byline of the greatest scoop in history with one of the leading national newspapers—the Times obviously—but taken up by all the others—the Guardian, the Mirror, and the Sun—so I’d chosen journalism, BA (Hons).

  I also thought English, though my English is fairly good (another BA Hons), but what about a fun one, or am I setting my sights too high? There was a Film Studies with Languages—kill two birds with one stone as it were. I must stop writing in clichés, bad practice. I enjoyed films, so I put my name down for that. And of course there were the societies, the GLBT a must.

  Freshers Week and we all eyed each other up and down. That guy looks gay or else my gaydar is letting me down. Wow, that’s a hottie. There was the GLBT stand with a slim young girl behind it.

  I went over. “I’d like to put my name down.”

  “Which are you? G, L, B, or T?” She had a sense of humour.

  “Bi-curious! I’m curious why anyone could be bi.”

  She smiled, said her name is Sarah, that she was reading psychology, wrote down my name, and told me meetings were Monday and Thursday at the Small Hall. She pointed.

  “When do we have the orgies?”

  “By private arrangement only and never during the actual meetings, though we do provide sticky buns and coffee.”

  “Is that some pervy sexual aberration?”

  “I regret not.” She gave me a list of upcoming events, and I moved aside to let a heavy-set girl take my place.

  One of the events was a Gay Pride March. That would be interesting. but first I had to find out about my courses. Where and when were they held? Who would be my tutor? Would I like him/her? I guessed the obvious place to ask was Information, and I joined a mile-long queue (hyperbole, another figure of speech to avoid).

  Okay, introductions over. I’d got a room in-house, settled in. Met my tutors—a woman for journalism, serious, obviously ultra-efficient, was herself a journalist, mentioned several eminently forgettable publications she worked for, but I was sure impressed. She was Tuesday and Friday with occasional visits to publishing houses, printing works, etc.

  The film guy was young and ultra-enthusiastic. Would either become a bore or win me over with his emotional energy—we would see but gave him the benefit of the doubt at the moment. He was Monday and Thursday, which was great as the two courses didn’t clash.

  Presumably Wednesday was when I did the work!

  And weekends were for enjoying myself. Great!

  I phoned Jacob back in London and he went and hid himself in a corner of the warehouse to escape detection and listen to me wittering on. “It’s going to be great, and you’ve got to come down to join the Gay Pride March, and I’ll provide you with a suitably decorated placard to carry, and you’ve got to wear the gayest outfit you’ve got, and I’ll meet you at the station early, show you around my pad, well room, and….” Eventually I ran out of breath, and he whispered, in case anyone was listening to a voice apparently issuing from behind a huge carton of tinned pineapple chunks, “Glad you’re having such a good time.”

  He didn’t sound all that glad, but I understood his situation and sympathized with him.

  I had made a chum, not a bum chum, you understand, but just a guy with rosy cheeks, curly hair, and a sense of humor, who was on my film and language course and also in the GLBT. When I got to the first meeting, I found they’d added a Q to the title.

  “Why is that? Aren’t we all queer?” asked someone.

  “Exactly,” said someone else.

  At that first meeting, I was sitting between a willowy blond youth on my right and a butch-looking woman with short-cropped hair on my left. No one spoke until I said, first to the guy, “If you are G and I am B and”—turning to the left—“you are L, what is there that binds us together?”

  A voice from the opposite side said, “And I’m a T.” I turned to see the most beautiful silver-screen model with flowing blonde hair and an engaging smile.

  “T for transsexual or T for transvestite?”

  Her smile broadened even more. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  “You see, that’s the problem. Looking like you do, alluring, charming, whatever, you don’t turn me on at all. What I wonder is how I’d feel if you had something dangly between your legs.”

  “So that little bit of hanging flesh and two oval things would make that much difference?”

  “I really don’t know. What if the hanging bit was engorged with blood? Would that?”

  Sarah, the leader of the group, called us to order, and we talked of other things “on the agenda,” like the preparations for the Gay Pride March—pointless, practical things—while I lost interest until I found I’d been “volunteered” onto the Steerage Committee (whatever that was). Then the sticky buns and coffee arrived, and I chatted to my chum and also to the willowy youth, who seemed to have attached himself to me. Hey ho! Still he was really good in bed, and when he asked, “Are you really bi?” I said no way and hoped that I’d proved it.

  And he felt around a bit and then said, yes, he thought that I had.

  So the days passed and I learned about films, though I had to change my mind about Film Studies and Languages because the language part was teaching from scratch and I already spoka da lingo real good. Then I learned about journalism from scratch, and that was good because I had completely the wrong idea about it. I thought you just shoved a microphone under someone’s nose and then phoned the noises they made back to the paper, and it isn’t like that at all. No siree.

  Anyway, the real exciting thing was the march. I found that being on the Steerage Committee merely meant making placards and banners and stuff. You know, all the hard work. Oh, and I did have to organize the advertising via the university mag and posters round town and in shop windows of any that would take them.

  On the morning of the march, I met Jacob at the station as I’d promised I would, and the train was only twenty minutes late, which was good. He’d had to pull a sicky to get the day off and hope, if there were any TV pics, he wouldn’t appear. I said he could hide behind his placard.

  Mine said, “I’m pro
ud and I’m gay,” and his said, “I’m gay too.”

  He made a minor objection. “I’m proud as well.”

  “’Course you are, but it’s the juxtaposition when we walk together.”

  He said, “I see,” but I’m not sure he understood, and I wonder if I did either.

  We all congregated at the front entrance of the main building, and I dished out the placards and banners we’d made. I was pleased to see that lots of people had come along from the town, and they’d brought their own things to wave.

  There were a few boos from some homophobic louts, but they were quickly covered by our chanting, “I’m proud to be out,” which was good as it covered the Ls, the Bs, the Ts, and the Qs as well as us Gs all under one chant. Then the watching crowd cheered, and some slipped past the few police who were shielding us from possible antagonism and joined in. But really there was no need for protection, and soon the police themselves, both male and female, joined the march, a couple even holding the edges of the banners.

  There was a band organized by Sarah, I think, because I certainly wouldn’t have thought of it. They played tunes from the shows, both old and new, and people sang and had a fucking good time.

  I marched with Jacob, of course, on one side while the willowy youth, whose name was Christian, skipped along on the other. Occasionally he put his hand in my trouser pocket, which, I think, slightly embarrassed Jacob, but not enough to upset him.

  A lot of guys really dressed down for the occasion, some wearing little more than a wisp of cloth about their loins. They were roundly cheered and really played up to the crowds, making fairly obscene movements simulating coitus or their idea of it—but all in the best possible taste!

  We ended gloriously in Castle Park, where we danced and sang and sang and danced until we could do it no more and, drooping, we returned home. Jacob caught the last train back, and Christian and I (fuck buddies) made our final celebration of the day.

  What did we do at uni?

  Well, Mondays we watched a film. Though the session was only supposed to be an hour, we always watched the whole thing, except for a few reluctant students who had other sessions to attend and so crept out unwillingly?

  Which films? The great films, many starring those gay icons like Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, the Hepburns—Audrey and Katherine—Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, etc., etc., etc. Why do gay people idolize female stars? Who knows? When I was young, I had, at different times, yearning crushes on Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde and Richard Todd in The Hasty Heart, a film that starred, of course, the future president of the USA, Ronald Reagan, though I never fancied him. We even watched the original English version of Russell T. Davies’s Queer as Folk, and I was amazed at the explicitness of language and nakedness on BBC TV back then. Of course I enjoyed it too.

  On Thursdays, the films these actors were in, Sunset Boulevard, Gone with the Wind (four-hour epic), Casablanca, Brief Encounter, we pulled to pieces, “deconstructed,” the tutor called it, found mistakes (not many), and suggested how we might have made the films if we had been the directors. Fun, but I found it fairly unproductive. I wanted to make my own film, and that was exactly what we had to do for the end of the first year.

  I decided on a porn film starring Christian and another guy he was currently fucking. A porn film, but different. It’d probably been done many times before and called “soft porn,” but my gimmick was to make it as sexually arousing without showing a single erect penis or actual anal penetration.

  I think I succeeded. It certainly gave me a hard-on, and I noticed some of the male members of the group watching it with their hands in their laps.

  Journalism followed a similar course. We read on Tuesdays all the papers and discussed why one particular story was on page one of the Sun and page sixteen of the Telegraph. Obvious really.

  We discussed various interview techniques from the tentative via the sympathetic to the full-on, and the various shades in between. Then there was article arrangement on the page, easier to do on a computer but still fiendishly difficult. Should we cut this particular article or continue it on a different page? Where to put the pictures. How to get the pictures. Was a long-range camera legal to photo the bare-topped celebs or indeed royals as they sunbathed in the Maldives?

  Of course likewise we had to produce our own publication, limited to events around the campus, and this time I decided to exclude the sexual side, though Christian was, as always, very willing to contribute.

  My first story concerned a robbery from a room on staircase six. My interview with the student went rather like this. “Yes, it was my stock of weed. The whole lot gone. Bastards! No, I’d prefer not to give my name.”

  My next article was headed “Crisis as students return drunk.” Crisis, what crisis? The article went on, “Is this a real problem?” Finally I tried to dramatize the idea: “Your faithful reporter investigates what could be a growing problem, one of ‘Institutionalized Alcoholism.’”

  Finally I turned to the college as a whole. “Are the courses too hard, too easy? Are the tutors up to it?” I demanded, but then had second thoughts. Careful, I told myself, I could be treading on corns here. Would I be committing slander? No that’s spoken. Libel perhaps? Now that in itself could be a good story. “Student newspaper sued by university don.”

  I decided to leave it till tomorrow and curl up with Christian.

  Then I had another idea with more general appeal.

  What do the real football fans (i.e., Jacob) think of us privileged guys? I wrote him an email with a list of questions. Please answer ASAP, deadline to meet!!! Love.

  I got a long, rambling answer full of complaints. We were snobs, overindulgent, self-opinionated, and pampered (pampered! with student loans at £9,000 per annum, repayable once I earn a salary of £21,000 p.a.).

  Anyway, it seemed good copy, and I produced my newspaper, which was then deconstructed and my infantile errors exposed. I’m glad I’ve got a fairly thick skin.

  And so the undergrad years went by. Looking back, they did seem to have gone in the blink of an eye (and I’m still writing in bloody clichés). I got my degrees (Hons 2.1), both of them. My parents were happy, I was happy, and I think Jacob was happy, though he didn’t say much. But he must have been happy to see me, for he smiled and gave me a hug.

  Then I left university with a debt (plus 6 percent p.a.) so huge that I knew I’d never pay it off—unless I married a millionaire.

  Chapter 4—Falling in Love

  I WAS sorry to say goodbye to Christian. We both shed a few tears and promised to keep in touch, though I doubted if we would. The most important thing was to get a job. Jacob had done well, I thought. He was now a branch manager in Bristol, the youngest one they’d appointed in that particular company. Not sure how he managed that, but good for him. It enabled us to keep in touch and not just at the other end of a phone or Skype or email. We went to the pub to celebrate my degrees, his move, and his promotion. After a few drinks, and I had planned to get rat-arsed, he got maudlin.

  “I always wanted a job with more glamour,” he confided.

  I hadn’t known that so I said, “More bezazz?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  I didn’t either, so I tried to cheer him up. “Look, Jacob, you started at the bottom, got to shop manager, now branch manager. You could get area manager. You could get anywhere, become another Terence Leahy or Richard Branson, multimillionaire.”

  But he refused to cheer up. “No way. This is as far as I can get. I’ll stay here until they retire me at sixty-five or whatever age they’ve raised it to, if they don’t kick me out in favor of a younger man.”

  “Or woman. Look at the pressures on firms to be PC. No sexual discrimination. Come on. Have another drink, and we’ll go to one of the clubs and pick up two nice twinks and have arse-grinding sex.”

  But even that enticing prospect didn’t seem to have sufficient allure.

  “I think I’ll just
have an early night. I’ve got to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”

  I did my best to persuade him, but he could be really impossible to change once he’s got an idea in his head.

  So I went myself and got lucky, though it wasn’t with a twink but with a guy of about my own age called Lex, who had his own flat (rich parents). Lucky bugger, but the sex was good, and he didn’t just kick me out immediately after the first orgasm—or the second!

  The immediate urgency as I said was that I had to get a job. I was well qualified, in fact overqualified to start as the tea boy on a local paper.

  Lucky for me a job fell vacant for a journalist locally. I did of course have to attend an interview, but I thought it went down well and indeed was informed actually at the interview, no anxious waiting around, that I’d got the job on appro (which was fair enough). The guy I replaced had had a heart attack, so it wasn’t all that lucky for him. The salary was only £15K, which meant I didn’t have to start paying back my student debt straight away. I’d follow a senior reporter around for the first few days and then be on my own.

  At the start obviously I was sent on those trivial things that local papers have to cover, openings of garden fetes, minor traffic accidents, i.e., no one actually killed but motorway gridlocked, small house fire kills family pet (sad).

  Jacob seemed to have cheered up a bit and was pleased that I’d got a job, quite near the bottom. “You’ll soon work your way up,” he said with a smile, which was roughly what I’d said to him.

  Now everything new is either frightening or exciting, or both. So I was pleased when I got the frightening bit over and started on the exciting bits. Not that covering an opening of a garden fete by an unknown “celebrity” is particularly breathtaking, but I knew that if I did it well, or at least competently, I’d get better assignments later. Actually, I was lucky—and luck seems to run in my life, but I mustn’t trust on it. After all, hubris is followed by nemesis as we all know. The lucky thing was that the so-called celebrity had fallen ill with the flu or tonsillitis or something, and purely by chance, the organizers had managed to get hold of a real-life celeb, one whose name, if I told you before the paper got published, you’d recognize instantly.