Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires Read online

  What most excited me about watching him dress was not just how he would put his clothes on – like everybody else, I realise – in uncannily the way you play a game of solitaire (blue shirt on white vest, brown leather boots on red socks) but also how the upper portion of those clothes (vest, shirt, school tie, braided school jacket) would be draped downward from the upper half of his body, over his shoulders, while the lower portion (pants, trousers, socks) would be tucked upward into all its snug clefts and crevices. When, in private, I reran the tape of this sequence in my mind, my masturbatory whimsies took a truly baroque turn. I would imagine myself playing neither his lover nor, as had sometimes been the case, his ravisher, but, and I blush to remember it, his anthropomorphised shirt (being his shirt, you see, would let me embrace, at one glorious go, his shoulders, shoulder-blades, back, arms and slender, tender waist), his socks (being his socks would force me into mindblowing intimacy with what I suspected were his gamey feet) and, supremely, his underpants (the thought of being those heavenly white underpants of his, not just handling them, sniffing them, plunging my face into them, but actually being them, would cause me to ejaculate, in my fantasy, almost immediately on to his own astonished prick).

  As I grew older, though, and turned nineteen, Gary and I parting for ever without either a word or gesture of farewell, voyeurism became as frustrating as it was ephemerally fulfilling and I determined to know at first hand what I had only ever dreamt about. That, at the start, meant getting up to London more often. Then, when I’d already decided I wouldn’t go to university but, instead, find a job allowing me to live in Paris and, as I hoped and planned, become a writer, I was hired as an assistant in Foyle’s bookshop.

  In those dreary days London looked as though it ought to be sold off cheap at a jumble sale. It was tatty and unsexy. Piccadilly Circus, once the heart of the Empire, was now the backside – and it needed a wipe. But as I was to discover by surreptitiously riffling though a Spartacus guidebook in another department of Foyle’s (I had been assigned to the performing arts), it did have a number of gay, or gayish, pubs – the Boltons, the Coleherne, the Salisbury – and a cluster of definitely gay discos, the most promising-sounding of which, off the King’s Road in Chelsea, was The Scarlet Pimp. That was to be the site of my third type of sexual experience.

  On my very first night there, it all seemed about to happen for me. The Pimp, as everybody referred to the place, had a minuscule box-office at street level, from which one walked down a sombre staircase to a dimly lit dance-floor and bar area. I had bought my ticket, had stuck it as requested on to my suit lapel (I was, it at once dawned on me, absurdly overdressed) and had begun to go downstairs, squeezing past a stream of mostly mustachioed young men, for it was the period of the clone look, coming upstairs, beefy and flushed, in teeshirts and jeans, with identically bulging crotches and identically shaped sweat-patches on their identical white vests, for a breather on the pavement – I had begun, I say, to go downstairs when I felt (I already felt!) the tap of a friendly hand on my shoulder. I immediately presumed a pass was being made at me. A pass, and I wasn’t even inside the disco proper! But when I turned round, I was confronted by the fellow from the box-office. He was holding up a crumpled five-pound note – I’d given him a ten – and he did not display on his supercilious features, moustachioed naturally, the slightest interest in me either as a sexual object or simply as a human being.

  ‘You forgot your change,’ he said. So much for God’s gift to gay manhood.

  That night and those that followed I would disconsolately stand in the wings of the Pimp’s dance-floor, rolling an ice-cold glass of Bacardi-and-Coke across my dripping brow, from left to right and back again, ignored by everybody, emitting the wrong signs, the wrong messages, the wrong vibrations, fanning myself with a cardboard bar coaster, feigning exhaustion from a surfeit of voguing, frugging or whatever was the disco craze of the moment, trying unconvincingly to convey the impression that it was out of choice rather than circumstance that I wasn’t dancing. If I had to go to the club’s lavatory (on whose sole unmirrored wall hung a huge framed image of a pallid St Sebastian, who looked barely more discomfited than if he were undergoing acupuncture), I’d behave just like the infant I’d been when catching illicit sight of the pile of embargoed Christmas presents. I’d strain to be casual but, glimpsing two clones noisily masturbating each other inside one of the cubicles whose door they hadn’t even bothered to shut, or else, in another, also open, spotting a suede-jacketed youth on his knees servicing a man old enough to be his grandfather, I couldn’t prevent myself from instantly closing my eyes as though I were guilty of an indiscretion, even if those open doors were sending out an unequivocal signal that the cubicles’ lovers wanted to be watched.

  I mustn’t exaggerate, however. If through my timidity I missed a lot of the fun I saw being enjoyed around me, I gradually did start to be intrigued by these antics. What I took longest of all to get used to was the sight of two boys kissing. Just kissing. Fucking and rimming, fistfucking and cocksucking, all of them practices I thought of as hyper-masculine because doubly masculine, uncontaminated by what I already despised as feminine sappiness, I accepted as the potential norms (or abnorms) of my own burgeoning sexual orientation. Kissing, on the other hand, I regarded as the servile mimicry of a heterosexual cliché. I thought it obscene (if you’re a genuine vegetarian, you eat vegetables not nut cutlets) and the more affectionate the kisses the more obscene I thought them.

  Nor, finally, do I wish to leave the impression that, when I departed for Paris seven months later (I worked at Foyle’s till the following November), I had had no sex at all. Yes, despite an obstinately glum demeanour I could do nothing to eradicate – how many times in my life have I been told to ‘Cheer up. It may never happen!’ – boys would accost me, would chat me up, in The Scarlet Pimp. And as I had a room in a Bayswater flat which I shared with three other renters – a trio of straight, randily promiscuous students – and so couldn’t take anybody back to ‘my place’, they would take me back to theirs, which were mostly bedsits, as I recall, bedsits or the next best thing. Without exception, though, these encounters were profoundly unsatisfying when not disastrous.

  I wince at the recollection of two of them in particular.

  The first involved a boy named Howard, twenty-two, a BBC trainee-editor with hippie-long hair, who invited me to his lower-ground-floor flat in Camden, where, no sooner was the front door closed, he peeled off completely, revealing on the dimpled dip of his abdomen the tattoo of a tiny tiger that appeared to stalk through the tangled grass of his pubic hair. Already stiff, he shoved his hand down the front of my new jeans and squeezed my cock sadistically hard. This sudden laying-on of icy fingers made me come at once, totally without warning, my penis erupting into the off-white cotton cup of my Y-fronts like an uncorked champagne bottle stanched by a waiter’s napkin. A scornful Howard withdrew his sticky-damp hand, muttering, ‘Well, that seems to be fucking that.’ Since all I could offer him was a strangulated apology that trailed off even before I’d finished it, he shrugged his beautiful naked shoulders. I hastily let myself out, aware that, as I slunk away along the harshly lamplit street past his pavement-level window, about the only part of me he would be able to see from inside his flat was the semen-stained crotch of my jeans.

  The second encounter, with a Japanese boy, Yoshimoto, twenty years old and as lanky as a Harlem Globetrotter, occurred not at the Pimp but at Foyle’s. A modern-languages student, Yoshi was trying to track down French translations of Tanizaki, Kawabata and Mishima, which he intended to read side by side with the original texts. I couldn’t help him with that, but we got talking (in a sense – his English was almost unintelligible), had bacon and eggs in a fry-up café and took in a film that same evening. Yoshi was lonely in a city in which he had no acquaintances, either English or Japanese, and he clearly longed to be befriended. We saw quite a lot of each other in a harmless fashion, until late one evening, emboldened by more red w
ine than I was accustomed to, I suggested we go dancing. He seemed keen (I was the more nervous of the two), and he was also, to my relief, unfazed by the spectacle, on the Pimp’s dance-floor, of its all-male clientele.

  For an hour or so we danced, though with not a soupçon of the violent crotch-groping which was going on all around us and of which, given how blatant it was, he couldn’t have been unaware. It was, as it happened, a Friday evening, one on which all three of my flat-sharers had taken themselves off to their families; and as Yoshi lived in Golders Green, in the far north of London, I ended by proposing untremblingly (the wine) that he spend the night in my room. Following some inscrutable ponderings, he agreed, we hailed a cab and were in Bayswater twenty minutes later. I had already decided that the time for the oblique approach was over; added to which, it was past midnight and the half-drunk Yoshi looked about to curl up and fall asleep on the floor. He collapsed on to the living-room divan, splaying his supernaturally long legs, a rungless stairway to paradise, over the carpet. I went into the bathroom and undressed. Then I took a deep intake of breath, walked back along the corridor and, now gratifyingly erect, stood in the doorway. Yoshi, who had been sleepily fiddling with the divan, trying, as I realised with a sinking heart, to figure out how it converted into a bed (it didn’t), failed at first to look up. When he did at last, his eyes opened wider than I believed any Oriental’s ever could. He opened his mouth wide too – to say only, ‘Aw, surplise!’ Then he gulped – I actually heard him gulp – and, crying, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! No unnerstand!’, he gathered up his anorak, which he’d let indolently slide on to the floor, and exited both the room and the flat.

  During the time I spent in London I had other experiences, most of them at least slightly less crushing than those I’ve described. All of which may strike the reader as pathetic, except that there are many more people in the world, whatever their sexual persuasion, who think of love without making it than there are people who make love without thinking of it. In any event, after my preliminary trip to Paris, then my Christmas at home, when I began packing for the definitive move immediately after New Year’s Day (and also, I might add, when I noted the disappearance of a couple of gay magazines that I’d secreted in one of the drawers of my bedroom chest-of-drawers then forgotten about – so my mother and I were quits), I could count on the fingers of one hand those very few sexual adventures of mine of which I had other than humiliating memories, the fingers of that same hand that had laboured so much more effectively than any of my partners to arouse me. Feeling alone and unloved, possessing neither roots nor branches, I couldn’t wait to leave.

  I arrived in Paris, as I said before interrupting myself, on the second of January 1980 and moved straight away into the Hôtel Voltaire. I’d given myself seven days’ grace before I was due to take up my post at the Berlitz, one day of which was to be devoted to a probationary training course (which went off without incident). The remaining six I spent exploring the city that was to be my home for – how long at that stage I couldn’t have said, but I hoped for ever.

  It had been snowing before my arrival and there were still cars parked in the streets sporting white crewcuts on their bonnets, cut short-back-and-sides in the American Marines style. It was cold and cheerless, yet it was also Paris and even if in my first six days I spoke only to waiters and bank clerks and shop assistants in boulangeries – why, I don’t know, but I found myself ravenously gorging on pains aux raisins and croissants au chocolat – I was delighted just to be there.

  That first whirlwind week I visited the Louvre, Beaubourg and Sacré-Coeur. I opened a bank account at the Crédit Lyonnais. I bought a fake fur overcoat for myself at Kenzo’s winter sales. I strolled up and down the Seine embankment as far in one direction as the Ile Saint-Louis and in the other as the Trocadéro esplanade. I went to the Cinémathèque Française to see René Clair’s Le Million and the Comédie-Française to see Corneille’s Cinna ou la Clémence d’Auguste, the most boring evening, bar none, I have ever spent in my life.

  As a newcomer to ‘abroad’, I shamed myself three times.

  In a brasserie on one of the grands boulevards I found myself on the receiving end of a waiter’s sneer when I asked for the steak tartare I had ordered to be bien cuit. Later that same day, caught short in the rue de Rome, I sought relief in the Gare Saint-Lazare, in front of whose public toilets I queued up, fidgety as a schoolboy. When it came my turn, and I hurried into the cubicle, I discovered – nothing at all. Just a hole in the ground where the lavatory bowl ought to have been. Cursing my misfortune, I came back out again and, in my then hapless French, advised the next in line, a man I’d already noticed keeping an anxious eye on a car, his own, which was illegally parked on the station forecourt, that this particular cubicle was, as I phrased it, complètement vide. He stared at me as though I were mad, raced into the lavatory and locked its door. I waited smugly for him to re-emerge at once, unrelieved. Instead of which, my guffawing fellow-queuers and I were treated to an 1812 Overture of intestinal explosions, shamelessly unmuffled, and I realised that if I were ever going to settle in France that hole in the ground was something I’d have to get used to. (I never have.) Finally, I had long been puzzled, during my ambulations, by loud appeals, nearly out of earshot, for somebody called François. ‘François! François! François!’ was what I kept hearing, and I would turn my head at crowded street corners, wondering who this elusive François was with whom so many people in so many different quartiers appeared to have urgent business. I registered at last who or, rather, what it was when I not only saw but heard a newspaper vendor on the Champs-Elysées. The newspaper he was selling was France-Soir.

  By the week’s end I could already feel myself going native. I had begun to buy France-Soir myself and was able, just about, to decipher it. Stubbing my toe, once, on the raised step of the doorway to the Voltaire bar, I yelped not ‘Shit!’ but ‘Merde!’, my first spontaneous ‘Merde!’ And when by Friday I’d received a cheque-book from the Crédit Lyonnais and written out my very first cheque, for a pot au feu at Lipp, I decided that, to celebrate the new, Parisian me, I would sign my surname’s initial A, rearing up from my signature like a sudden leap on an anaesthetist’s oscillograph, with a miniature Eiffel Tower. I still do.

  The time has come for me to speak of the Berlitz and, specifically, of the peculiar atmosphere of its male common room: in the school’s recreation quarters, I should say at once, the sexes were always segregated. In fact, during the four years I taught there, I was on more than mere nodding acquaintance with just one of the female teachers, a dark, spinsterish yet obscurely seductive Spanish woman, Consuelo – I never saw her complicated, hyphenated surname written down and never succeeded in getting my tongue round its pronunciation – and that was only because, having a coffee and cigarette one evening on the terrace of a café on the boulevard des Italiens which I used to frequent after classes (for a reason on which I’ll elaborate later), I asked her for a light without realising that she was one of my colleagues.

  So – the male common room. It contained all in all a long central table and eight chairs, a few other waiting-room chairs aligned along the walls and a cabinet of what we called our casiers, the locked metal safes in which each of us kept his ‘things’. There were no pictures on the walls nor ornaments on the table, except for three chipped yellow Ricard ashtrays. Coffee, which was lousy, was obtainable from a distributor used by both the male and female staff and situated outside in the corridor that led to our classrooms. (The female common room, which wasn’t officially off-limits to us males but which for some reason we treated as though it were, was directly opposite ours.)

  Though there were teachers of every language, of every nationality, of every age, daily coming and going in the common room, most of them were no more than extras in my life. With the non-English-speaking faculty I remained on such superficial terms that I never advanced beyond the stage of reducing its members to a series of coarse and usually racist stereo
types. The Spaniards were the swarthy ones with Zapata moustaches, the Russians were the granite-jawed ones with garish string ties and cheap drip-dry shirts, the Chinese were the ones who looked Chinese. As for the French teachers (for there were some), none of them seemed to want to make close friends with expatriates who were unlikely to stay around too long, like those companies reluctant to hire overqualified candidates for a job they’ll be bound to quit the instant something better comes along. It was only the English speakers whom I truly got to know; who became my first real friends in France; who, being in the great majority, had commandeered one entire half of the common-room table; and virtually all of whom, I was soon to discover, were gay. I discovered, too, that what had caused them all to fetch up in Paris, just as I myself had, was a not uncommon conflation, in those days, of two philias, franco and homo.