Over the next couple of weeks I had a crazy, tempestuous long-distance affair with Dale. We spoke dirty to each other every day for hours. I found out he had a boyfriend named Kenny, who he had been with for twenty years. They lived in the Ninth Ward, an area that would be obliterated by Hurricane Katrina years later. He told me he was a florist. I wasn’t expecting that as I had imagined he worked in construction but I pushed that thought to the back of my mind. Surely I had met many macho florists over the years . . . hmmmm . . . actually no, I hadn’t. In fact the only other florist I knew well was Godfrey’s old business partner back in NYC and he was as camp as Christmas. Anyway after one particularly filthy phone conversation with Dale over the phone I knew what I had to do. I called up Conn and told him I was moving to New Orleans to be with Dale.
“Have you lost your mind?” he spluttered. “That guy you met on the last night who shagged you by the pool?”
“I’m in love!” I simpered “You don’t understand, Dale is my soul mate.”
“Listen, its coming up to summer and its going to be hotter than hell in New Orleans, you have nowhere to live, you have no job, you’re doing really well here. . . . ”
“I’M IN LOOOOOOOOOVE!” I wailed down the phone.
“Do what you want,” scoffed Conn, “but don’t come crying to me when it’s all over and he’s broken your heart.... You only met him once.”
Of course I knew Conn was insanely jealous otherwise why would he try to keep me from my one true love? It didn’t occur to me that I was absolutely INSANE. So I locked up my London apartment drew my savings out of the bank, kissed my friends goodbye and informed them all they could contact me in New Orleans.
“You’re bloody mad,” said my girlfriend Karen, “Where ya gonna live?”
Karen was a personal trainer at Earl’s Court Gym, a pretty blonde girl from Middlesbrough who spoke her mind. We would go out dancing every Friday night and get wasted on wine spritzers and flirt with all the local doormen on the doors of the pubs in Earl’s Court. Her boyfriend Danny sold hashish so we were constantly stoned.
“Dale will help me find somewhere to live,” I assured Karen.
“What are you going to do for a job?” Karen raged.
“I’ll escort like I do here.”
“YOU’RE BLOODY MAD!” screamed Karen again, her thick northern accent suddenly growing twice as thick out of concern for me.
I smiled at her beatifically, as if she were the mad one, and kissed her on the cheek.
“I’ll call you from New Orleans,” I said and off I went to the airport. “Tell everybody in the gym goodbye.”
New Orleans turned out to be a nightmare. Who in their right mind moves to America to be with a married florist who gave them one good shag under a magnolia bush whilst drunk on mint juleps?
It started out great. Dale picked me up from New Orleans airport and he looked just as sexy as ever. He drove me around to his friend’s house where I would be staying. We knocked but no one was home. Dale had a key. Once inside we made mad passionate love. It was just as fabulous as I remembered it. He then dressed and left for work. With nowhere to be I got up dressed and wandered around the French Quarter. I didn’t know anybody but soon the bars were jumping and I was sure there would be no problem getting work as an escort . . . WRONG!!! . . . . I soon found out that New Orleans wasn’t London. There were no escort agencies for guys and nobody ran ads. Everybody seemed shocked at the thought that I would even attempt to do something like that, so I didn’t.
After two weeks his friend could no longer stand the sight of me sleeping on his pullout couch in his den so he told Dale I had to move out. I packed my bags and waited for Dale to pick me up.
“Dale,” I whined. “Where am I going to live?”
“Don’t worry, I think Kenny will let you stay with us.”
I still hadn’t met Kenny but I imagined he didn’t have a very high opinion of me. I was, after all, having an affair with his boyfriend. We drove to Dale’s house. Everybody in the neighborhood was black, absolutely everybody. I felt like I was in Mozambique. The house was small and cozy. Dale led me up stairs through the first bedroom and into the second. There in bed lay Kenny. He wasn’t bad looking, sort of an older, hairy Bruce Springsteen look-a-like.
Dale had told me that if Kenny liked me I could stay with them. I knew what he was implying. Kenny looked at me with big dark sorrowful eyes and all of a sudden it was as if the Universe shifted. I understood immediately that Kenny was and always would be madly in love with Dale and that he would do anything to make Dale happy including letting me share Dale’s bed. Knowing this I took off my clothes and climbed into bed with Kenny. After our sad three-way Dale told me that I could sleep in the bedroom next door.
Over the next couple of days I learned much more than I needed to know about Dale Shaw from his friends who would drop by “unexpectedly” to gawk at the crazy British kid who had moved to New Orleans.
Dale had been born in a poor New Orleans family. When Dale’s father left his mother, she got remarried to a strict religious man. Dale’s stepfather ruled with a rod of iron and was so worried that Dale would grow up gay that he wouldn’t even allow him to shampoo his hair. Instead he made Dale wash his scalp with soap, all the time making him give him blowjobs while his mother slept. Dale was exceptionally good looking and soon began hanging out in the French Quarter. He was courted by everybody; including the playwright Tennessee Williams himself.
Kenny came along when Dale was twenty and immediately moved Dale in with him. They began a daddy/boy relationship with Kenny effectively providing everything for Dale. It turned out Dale had ADD and found it impossible to hold down a normal job. He drifted from one thing to another until he finally got a job working for a florist who decorated the houses of the wealthy in the Garden District, the posh part of town. Kenny gave Dale an allowance and took care of all the finances. Over the years they had become like an old married couple. Dale ran around New Orleans and Kenny was content to let him as long as he returned home every night. I discovered that Dale had originally been the boy/bottom in the relationship but as he had grown older he had turned into a top. Dale and Kenny no longer had sex with each other unless Dale bought home some young kid home for a three-way. Despite all of this I could tell that Kenny still loved Dale with a fierce intensity that would never die. It was a true love that burned brightly and I was a fool if I ever thought I could extinguish that flame.
The three of us began living together in this little house in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t drive so I had to be taken around everywhere by Dale unless I caught a cab. On top of that I had no job and I was very quickly running out of money. Dale wasn’t rich, so when we went out I invariably ended up paying for the two of us. The city was flooded with the drug Ecstasy from neighboring Texas. A tab cost twenty dollars and sometimes I would buy five tabs a night to share with Dale. It blissed us out, and I suppose kept the foolishness of what I had done with my life in the back of my mind . . . until mornings came around.
In no time I realized I couldn’t stay in New Orleans, as there was no work there for me. But I didn’t want to leave Dale, as I stupidly believed I was still madly in love with him. So together we conceived a plan. Dale and I would move to NYC, leaving poor Kenny behind. I would work as an escort and Dale would get a job doing . . . well, I am not quite sure what we thought Dale would do. I discovered that he had never been out of New Orleans in his life, but I figured I had earning potential for the two of us. And after all, I was MADLY . . . madly being the operative word . . . in love.
We covertly planned our departure for Manhattan. Dale didn’t want to tell Kenny he was leaving him until the very last moment. He was worried about what Kenny might try to do to stop him. I found it impossible to be around Kenny. I had started to really like him as a person and I could no longer even look him in the eyes knowing I was planning to “elope” with Dale, his boyfriend of many years.
A week before we were due to leave New Orleans Dale woke me up in a particularly horny mood. Kenny had gone to work and we fucked for an hour until the phone rang. It was one of Dale’s friends who knew we were leaving New Orleans. Dale began a long conversation on the phone—explaining all the details of how and when we were leaving—when suddenly the wardrobe door at the foot of the bed was kicked off its hinges from the inside and out sprang KENNY. He hadn’t gone to work, he had been hiding in the wardrobe for hours listening to Dale and I fuck. I knew Kenny was a voyeur and loved to watch and listen to others fuck, but I had not expected this. I was astonished he hadn’t suffocated in that stuffy wardrobe amongst all those flannel shirts. More importantly he had heard Dale on the phone telling his friend he was moving to New York with me. Kenny burst into tears, huge convulsing sobs, and he cried and cried. I looked at Dale then I looked at myself in the mirror hanging on the bedroom wall then turned to Kenny crying on the bed and suddenly I was furious. Not at poor Kenny who hadn’t hurt anybody in his life, not even for stupid, selfish Dale who cared only about himself, but at me. I was full of self-loathing. What the hell was I doing in New Orleans trying to split up this couple?
I was ashamed of myself. I walked downstairs and called Karen in London. I told her what had happened over the past couple of months.
She said, “Come home love . . . everybody misses you here.”
I packed my suitcases and walked out of that little house in the Ninth Ward and climbed into the cab.
“Where to?” Asked the driver.
“The airport.” I replied, “I’m going home.”
As the cab drove me to the airport in the early morning heat, I took out of my bag the two tickets I had purchased for Dale and I to go to New York. I wound down the window and threw them out into the street. I never saw Dale again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I CAME HOME TO LONDON FULL OF TALES of New Orleans and recipes for Gumbo. It was summer and everybody was in a good mood because London was our playground. Every night I was on Hampstead Heath wandering through the undergrowth looking for illicit sexual encounters.
One particularly balmy night, after an evening of wild abandon running from bush to bush, I came home to notice all my lights were on. My heart in my mouth, I ran up the stairs to discover my front door was wide open. My flat had been broken into and I had been robbed! Not just robbed, every single thing I owned had been stolen! The thief had even taken all of my clothes out of the wardrobes and wrapped them up in my quilt and carried them off. I felt like falling on the floor and wailing like a baby. I had recently been dating a guy named Kenneth. He was Hardy Amies’s design partner. Hardy had a store on Saville Row and was employed by Queen Elizabeth to design dresses.
Ken had met Princess Diana while he was making a dress for her, and being young, all Diana could talk about was meeting Simon Le Bon. Ken, bless him, had hardly even heard of Duran Duran, so he passed on following meetings with Diana to one of his twenty-year-old assistants. Years later Diana trained at Earl’s Court Gym. She trained for a while with a friend of mine who was possibly the best looking personal trainer on the planet. It’s strange now looking back that I worked out next to HRH Diana Spencer and yet at the time I never appreciated the fact that I was in the presence of one of the most beloved royals of my generation. Many years have passed and even after all the stars I have met she burnt the brightest. Even in a leotard she was absolutely luminescent. Was it her fame that made her shine so brightly or was it simply an inner radiance? Whatever the answer, she was spectacular.
After Ken was told about Duran Duran, he felt he was perhaps falling behind the times so he looked into pop culture for his next dress for the Queen. England at the time was obsessed with the television show “Dynasty.” Joan Collins was the queen of network television and whatever Nolan Miller could create Ken could top . . . for a real Queen no less. He set to work on a “Dynasty” inspired frock but when she finally saw it she took one look at the insanely huge shoulder pads and sniffed, “Ken . . . give it to Margaret . . . she will love it.”
I had met Ken years before through “Number One,” Andy’s escort agency. I was impressed that: he lived in a very grand flat just off High Street Kensington, always opened a bottle of champagne when I visited, and had a big cock. He was fifty, grey and distinguished. We flew around the world and he constantly gave me beautiful handmade suits that must’ve cost thousands of pounds. When my apartment got robbed the thief snatched them all. Stole my TV, my VCR . . . completely cleaned me out. All I had left were the clothes on my back and my dirty laundry. The police came round but proved useless. They told me that there was no sign of forced entry and I may have been robbed by someone I knew. I phoned a friend of mine, Melaine, an Israeli Madame who came round and picked me up and took me back to her place to stay the night with her sexy bi boyfriend. She gave me tea and sympathy.
“It’s time you moved out of that rat hole,” she said. “There isn’t even any furniture.”
“That’s because it was all stolen,” I sobbed.
“Have another jaffa cake,” she said. “And wipe your tears. This is a message from God. It’s time to buy your own place. You can afford it.” Melaine had an idea of how much money I made because she would book me when a client of hers wanted a girl and a guy. I had met her when we shared a client who wanted me to fuck him with a bottle of Heinz ketchup while Melaine pissed on him. We had been great friends ever since.