by Zack
For Mark and Phil
INHALT
Foreword
Chapter 1: Driving Horny
Chapter 2: I Love London So
Chapter 3: Satan’s Blood
Chapter 4: Bar with a Bite
Chapter 5: Crisp, Deep, and Even
Chapter 6: Marrakesh Express
Chapter 7: Anyone for Tennis Boys?
Chapter 8: All TooWilling
Chapter 9: Falling Over the Cliffe
Chapter 10: Snow in the Wings
Chapter 11: In the Cock Pit
Chapter 12: Checking Out the Yank
Chapter 13: Mixing It with Sound
Chapter 14: A Load of Puppetry
Chapter 15: Ups and Downs
Chapter 16: Coercion or Extortion
Chapter 17: Endgame
About the Author
About the Book
Other Books of the Author
Imprint
Foreword
In the Britain of 1982 an 18-year-old boy could purchase alcohol and cigarettes, vote in elections, and die for his country. What he couldn’t do without facing possible criminal charges was have sex with another male, not until he attained the age of 21. The age of consent for homosexuality was only lowered to 18 in 1994 and 16 in 2000.
Chapter One
Driving Horny
Gil Graham’s last words rang in Mike Benson’s mind. Okay, not exactly his final words before leaving, but the last on the subject they’d been talking about …
All I could think of as we lifted off was “Aberdare Gardens, here I come. I’m coming home!” And I was.
Mike strolled across the expansive Hotel Amarano suite and stood at the floor-to-ceiling triple-glazed window to watch the traffic swishing past on the Ventura Freeway below and off to the side. Opposite, a small mall with its parking lot made an untidy backdrop to the hotel’s elegance. For half a minute he studied the tattered billboard above the mall’s Starbucks, which advertised the 2012 L.A. Irish Film Festival in Santa Monica. It seemed bizarrely out of place all the way up in Burbank. He glanced down at the much quieter North Pass Road four floors below. A taxi rolled off the street onto the hotel’s wide forecourt and stopped beside the main entrance. After a moment’s pause Mike saw a guy jump from the back with an easy grace and disappear from sight underneath with a backward wave at the invisible driver.
As he stepped back, he caught his faint reflection in the glass, three slightly out-of-synch Mike Bensons staring back. The expression in the eyes shaded to dazed, and no wonder. He had just spent a night of almost non-stop sex with a man more than twice his nineteen years. And it wasn’t so much that it was his first gay experience, nor that he enjoyed it—which he really did—but that fucking with one of Hollywood’s top producers could only be good news for a lowly Burbank TV trainee floor assistant wanting to get ahead in the cutthroat movie business.
It was a happy accident that Mr. Graham—he still couldn’t quite think of the renowned director-producer as plain and simple Gil—wanted his company after they’d wrapped on a major TV series for RKW. Mr. Gra— Gil, invited him for a late supper and they’d gotten on well. As the meal progressed he became aware that Gil had an interest in more than his paltry experiences of life. He, lowly Mike Benson, got hit on, and he hadn’t minded.
He turned and headed for the bedroom and the full-length mirror to check that he looked okay. Jeans and shirt a bit rumpled (they had come off rather quickly and with no due care for where they fell). At least his damp hair glistened in dark highlights from the shower. A bit pallid around the cheeks. He pinched each quickly, and then did it again to see if he was real. Yes, it hurt. Was it really true? He had hoped for a helping hand up the tough ladder and then this happened. Amazing, but true.
Gil Graham wouldn’t be back for at least a couple of hours. “I have a few loose ends to clear up in the production office,” he’d said. Mike was touched at the man’s sudden shyness as he hesitated, hand outstretched for the door. “Why not stay here? We can make a late lunch, maybe take a drive out after …?”
Mike struggled to avoid looking too eager at this offer to extend the relationship. And he realized with some surprise that it wasn’t the thought of any possible advancement this might bring that gonged in the hollow of his stomach. It was the man himself. He wore his mid-fifties well: he was fit, lean, and handsome, almost boyish under a thick thatch of naturally straw-colored hair and it hadn’t been any hardship in bed with him. No, it was Gil’s own story that warmed Mike the most. His tale of how he, as a gofer, wet behind the ears, had gotten ahead in the movie business, from a lowly start in Rome way back in 1980. Of his all-consuming love affair with the English boy Mike Smith, who Gil said he, Mike Benson, resembled in some degree. Of the disaster that ripped them apart when the legendary bad-boy producer James Rosen took revenge for slights given him in Rome. From his reading, Mike knew of Rosen, but nothing in the literature spoke of his being gay, his vicious streak and drug dealing, which had been the reason for his death so long ago, according to Gil. That he and Mike Smith were reunited and Gil returned to London was due to Mike Smith’s persistence in hunting Gil down and convincing him that the break-up was not his fault or what he wanted.
At that moment the door chime sounded.
Shit! Room service …
He glanced up at the disaster of sheets and coverlets reflected in the mirror behind. They had used up just about every inch of the oversize bed only an hour ago … and, well for most of the night, really. He went out to the sitting room frowned at the wreck of the room service breakfast still lying on the table. He sighed in resignation and went to open the door.
It wasn’t housekeeping.
From the color of his hair and bearing, Mike thought the man facing him on the thick pile carpet of the hallway might be the one he saw getting out of the taxi. Somewhere in his fifties, some faint streaks of gray ruffled at the temples in his otherwise unruly black hair. The man’s initial expression of surprise slowly settled to one of interested amusement.
“Can I help you?” Mike wondered at the wisdom of opening the door without first checking at the peephole, but he sensed no threat from the stranger, who rocked up and down on his toes twice before answering with a sideways tuck of his head.
“I was expecting to meet Gil, but I suppose he’s forgotten.”
The delivery, accompanied by a slight roll of bright greeny-brown eyes, came across to Mike as confident and somehow intimate, as though the speaker knew Gil all too well. And then there was the English accent …
“He … he had to go out for a bit. Should be back in a couple of hours, if you want to come back …”
Mike faltered at the man’s slow smile. The expression unnerved him. The man tilted his head again as he regarded Mike, and then his gaze slid over his shoulder and the smile widened. Mike realized with a stab of embarrassment that the remains of breakfast and the disarray of the bedroom through the open door were on full view behind him.
“I don’t think Gil will much mind my coming in to wait for him, er …?”
Brought up to be polite, Mike responded automatically. “Mike, Mike Benson.” He wasn’t even aware that he’d stood back to let the man past until he caught the raised eyebrows as they went past and the flash of a silver stud in the ear.
“Another Mike, hey?”
And the penny dropped in unison with Mike’s jaw
“You … are you … Mike Smith?”
Halfway to the breakfast table the visitor looked back. “I am, indeed, Mike Smith. How did you guess?” He moved on and bit into the croissant he deftly lifted from its wicker basket.
Mike let the suite door click shut as the other Mike settled himself comfortably in one of the chair
s at the table. The one Gil had sat in. He looked up expectantly. Mike felt tongue-tied at being confronted by the very legend he’d been hearing about; the other half of Gil’s story.
The Englishman let him off the hook, but only for a second, as he waved a hand lightly over his shoulder at the open bedroom door. Mike felt the probing look slice like a surgical laser right through him and stall any deflective remark he might have made, had he the voice or wit to do so. His blush told all.
“No need to be embarrassed, Mike Benson.” The heavily lidded eyes swept up and down Mike’s body and seemed appreciative. “Gil always had good taste, and I can see what he sees in you.”
“I think he sees himself in me,” Mike blurted, and the words were out before he could stop them.
“Ah, hah!”
Mike Smith snapped his fingers and Mike Benson couldn’t tell whether the expression signified triumph or a different kind of conviction altogether. But he recognized from Gil’s description the natural jauntiness of his one-time English lover.
“How did you know Mr. Graham would be here? He never mentioned you were in town or anything.”
Mike Smith raised an eyebrow in amusement. “Oh, that’s easy. He always has this suite when he’s in Burbank. Now, come and sit down and talk to me—”
The door chimed again and a muffled voice said, “Housekeeping!” with a distinct Mexican accent.
Mike dipped his head apologetically and went back to let the maid in. She bobbed her head at Mr. Smith and swiftly gathered up the sides of the table and rolled it out. “I come back later, yes?”
Mike nodded his thanks. The door closed behind her. He turned back. Mike Smith now looked faintly absurd, seated on a hard chair in the center of the room like an actor in a monologue piece. He obviously felt the same because he abandoned the chair and went over to the long sofa and folded himself down comfortably. “So, how did you know who I was?” He patted the space beside him.
Mike went over and perched on the edge, turned slightly sideways so he could face the other. “Accent: English. Name: Mike. Single stud in the left ear. And you seem to know Mr. Graham well … I guess.”
“And he’s been talking about me?”
The words were said in a kindly way, although Mike thought he detected an underlying pride. He relaxed a bit, and nodded his head in acknowledgment. “Yeah. He told me lots. Sorry, I was interested.”
“How long have you known Gil?”
Mike gnawed his lower lip, then wrinkled his nose. “Last night. I mean, I been working on Second Sight with him, except … well, he wouldn’t have known me, just a gofer on the studio floor, if I hadn’t been the last out yesterday and went up to the gallery to see if he needed anything before I left.”
“And the rest is history.”
Mike looked up sharply at the needling tone, but saw only amusement in the other’s expression.
“So, you know all about me and Gil, then.”
“Oh, Mr. Smith, I don’t. He only got to the point where he went back to London after you found him here in L.A. and …” He realized he was babbling. “You must think me very rude.”
Mike Smith narrowed one eye. “I think of you as curious, which isn’t necessarily bad.” He gave a faint sigh. “Well, if we have a couple of hours to wait before Gil remembers he’s supposed to be seeing me this afternoon, I might as well carry on with the tale. Gil and I have never had secrets, always told each other what we’re thinking, what we’ve done and experienced, even when necessity forces us apart physically.” He leaned back into the sofa and stretched out long legs. “That’s if you want to hear?”
Mike swallowed. “Oh, yes, sir. But tell me it has a happy ending. I like happy endings.”
The Englishman threw him a quizzical look. “A happy ending? Well, I’m still here and so’s the story. I don’t know if that’s happy or not. One thing I can say is that Shakespeare had the right of it when he had Lysander declaim: ‘For aught that I could ever read, could ever hear by tale or history, the course of true love never did run smooth.’ ”
“It didn’t? After all you’d been through?”
Mike Smith gave him a wolfish grin. “Not … exactly. Thanks to the intervention of a certain Nathan Cliffe—ah, you recognize the name, and why shouldn’t you?—our river of romp bounded over several rough rapids. I think Shakespeare’s ‘course’ of true love is a metaphor for a river, running its violent course. But I’m getting ahead. You say Gil took you as far as his setting off for London in 1981?”
Mike nodded.
“In that case, I should begin on the M4 …”
~ ~ ~
The weather was horrible, but Mike didn’t care other than it slowed down the westbound traffic on the M4, and the spume thrown up by the bigger trucks made driving a misery. Soft Cell’s Bed Sitter fought with the exterior noise of traffic, wet tires, and drumming rain. The Alfa Romeo’s windscreen wipers slapped heavily with every rotation. And then he had to slow right down to a crawl with the slow-lane traffic to take the airport slipway, the inner lane clogged with vehicles getting ready to turn onto the M25 a mile farther on. With some relief, Mike switched to the airport tunnel road and accelerated to eighty. Horny—the Alfa—preferred the higher speed and Mike loved to make the car “laugh” on cornering. The slick roads and churning traffic prevented any tire merriment today. Bed Sitter faded with the pips, and the voice of the Radio 1 newsreader announced that it was nine o’clock on Tuesday the eighth of December, 1981.
I wonder if he’s having breakfast. Must already be starting the descent.
Even though he’d just heard the time, he glanced at the dashboard clock and realized how early he was.
He gulped down a dry swallow. Nerves. What nerves? Fuckssake, it’s not like we’re strangers. But Mike worried at some non-verbal level that in the short time since he’d come back from Los Angeles Gil might have slipped away from him again. Perhaps even now he was regretting the decision to come back to London and to … Mike.
With a rapid change down and a split-second glance to the right, he slipped easily into the stream of cars circling the roundabout, and then into the tunnel which ran under the north runway. The newsreader fell silent after a short burst of static. The repetitive flash of the overhead lights at a steady twenty-five miles an hour matched the slow rollover of his stomach. He should have eaten some breakfast himself, but even a yoghurt held no appeal. The line of cars came out into the dreary gloom of the morning by Terminal One and the radio woke up with Abba’s One of Us —number 6 in the UK chart, the deejay informed. Mike went around the central complex of Heathrow to Terminal Three as fast as other drivers—sluggish or confused as to where they were going—allowed. He followed the “T3 Short Term” signs.
At forty-five pence an hour, the charge was stiff, but that was airports for you. At least he got a couple of Hollywood-style car-chase laughs out of Horny’s tires cornering on the smooth concrete floor in the echoing cavern. The first three levels were solid, but he found a space on the fourth. He rubbed a hand in affection over the Alfa Romeo’s front wing and then bent to wipe a smudge from the license plate—HRN 762 Y—and remembered how Gil had laughed at his naming the car after the plate. A wide-access roadway separated the car park from the grandly named Oceanic building, as Heathrow’s third terminal was known. Mike remembered when people used to refer to the complex as Heathrow Central, to distinguish it from the clutch of one-story wartime buildings called Heathrow North which served the airfield when he was just a kid in short pants.
No shorts today on this miserably wet and windy morning. He ran across the road, dodging the odd black cab, and through the nearest swing doorway under the abstract enamels the architect had interspersed between the upper story windows. They symbolized the freedom of the airways, the sense of warmth, light, and bright colors to be found at the end of every international route, and a far cry from dismal Britain in winter. At least the main concourse felt warm, and of course he was far too early. Well, given t
he queasy excitement making every muscle and sinew quake, that was a given, wasn’t it?
CHAPTER TWO
I Love London So
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
That I love London so
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
That I think of her wherever I go
I get a funny feeling inside of me
When walking up and down
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
That I love London Town.
The song wouldn’t leave Gil alone. It was Trevor used to sing it, probably to irritate him, and then Mike took it up after he’d hummed the stupid tune Trev had speared into his head. Vaudeville, music-hall nonsense. Gil hadn’t thought of it for a year now … almost twelve Mikeless months. Three hundred and twenty-seven days to be exact. Seven thousand, eight hundred and forty-eight hours. Four hundred and seventy thousand, eight hundred and eighty minutes of soul torture.
Give or take a whole load more, depending on whether the flight gets in on time.
At the thought of Mike, Gil felt a familiar flutter of pleasure emanate from his loins and was content that the physical evidence of arousal was at the moment neatly tucked into his jeans and restrained by the fastened seat belt (in case of unexpected tumescence—no, turbulence). His throat felt dry, which might have been the dehydration of high altitude, but he knew better. After everything that had happened, the awful break up with Mike in London, the months of sheer incomprehension at what had occurred, and then Mike’s sudden and unannounced arrival in Los Angeles … To have come home after a hard day working on Blade Runner to find Mike standing there in the kitchen with his mom … It still took his breath away every time the image shoved unbidden into his head. No, what Gil felt were the shudders of desperate hope battling with fear.
When he’d waved Mike off at LAX three weeks before, they seemed reconciled. Gil had learned to accept and trust Mike’s explanation of what lay behind the sudden and savage rejection of their love, that Mike had been coerced by James Rosen and done what he had to do to save Gil’s life. It sounded so far-fetched, melodramatic, like a really bad episode of Columbo. But his friend Jeff, the camera operator who knew Mike well enough, persuaded Gil that Mike was straight—at least as far as telling the truth was concerned, hem-hem. Gil boarded the Heathrow-bound flight in high spirits, hardly able to endure the transit to be back in Mike’s arms again; but then that chill spilled through him.