So Me (7 page)

Without missing a beat he said, ‘Well, if you apply for a job as a secretary, you’re expected to write a letter.’

It was such a slick prepared line that I thought of all the other boys he had said it to, all the other boys he had had sex with.

‘Hey, if you’d like to stop, we can.’

Another line, but this one was the brake I’d been looking for. It was like a verbal version of those little red boxes that say, ‘In case of emergency break glass.’ I broke it.

‘Yes! Yes, I would like to stop!’

As I got dressed I felt fantastic. At the time I thought I felt great because I had said ‘No’ to this man and was somehow empowered. I think the more likely truth is that it was because I had got away with doing such an incredibly stupid, risky thing. I did not deserve to be leaving this apartment not screaming and crying, but that says everything about what is brilliant and terrible about being twenty. As I left, the English man was washing his hands. You could almost hear the cry of ‘Next!’ hanging in the air.

When I got back to Stardance there was a letter waiting from my mother. Seeing the small blue sheets of Basildon Bond paper with the familiar writing was strangely reassuring – I hadn’t abandoned all normality, it was still going on and there if I needed it. My mother was concerned because
she had received phone calls from someone called David Villapando who was very worried about me! I had forgotten all about him because I no longer needed him and I suppose I thought he would somehow be feeling the same.

Of course he wasn’t. I phoned his number and waited for him to pick up the phone. It was odd because despite our lengthy correspondence I had never heard his voice.

‘Hi, Graham! I’m so glad you called.’

I nearly blurted out ‘Eugh!’ David Villapando was a queen! His voice was a stereotypical high-pitched whine and suddenly all the letters meant nothing. I recoiled and immediately just wanted to get off the phone. I know this sounds awful, but in my defence it was all to do with how I was feeling about myself at that moment. Of course I’m sure I sounded exactly the same on my end of the phone, but I didn’t know, or want to know, that.

Promising to come and see him, I hung up, determined that I would do no such thing. I felt tainted by just speaking to him. I ignored his future letters and calls and soon they stopped. As I’ve got older and come to terms with being a big sissy queen myself, I have felt very guilty about David and on several occasions have tried to track him down, but Internet searches and phone books have never turned him up. I’d just like to apologise for being such a dick. As this story unfolds I think you’ll find that I have very few regrets in my life, but the way I treated David Villapando is one of them.

Life settled down into a routine of work and communal living. Of all my housemates I was becoming very close to Obo Help. When I was cooking he’d come and chat to me and sometimes play his guitar, singing lilting ballads about
the Revolution. One night he asked me if I wanted to go and see a movie. Sure. I remember we went to see Woody Allen’s
Zelig
. The cinema was packed and we ended up sitting in the front row. I remember it was a warm night and Obo took off his sweater and just sat there in his undershirt. I was sort of proud to have this ‘proper’ man as a friend, just as I had been of Jerry.

Because it was such a beautiful night we decided to walk home after the film. We talked about this and that, about people from the house, people from his past. Then, as we were coming down the hill towards Stardance, he asked me if he could ask me a question. Well, I knew what was coming next. I’d heard that tone of voice before: he was going to ask me if I was gay. I said, ‘Of course you can,’ and geared myself up to give my standard reply about how I wasn’t sure and I thought people fell in love with people not gender and all the other crap that I hear young guys not ready to come to terms with their gayness still spout now. He paused and said, ‘Would you like to spend the night with me?’

If he had literally taken a large wet fish out of his pocket and hit me around the face with it I couldn’t have been more surprised. He had missed out all the conventional stages. This was the first time that someone had not asked any questions but simply presumed I was gay. Just then a car full of lads drove by and out the window one of them shouted ‘Faggot!’ God, the heterosexual bush telegraph was effective. I was only just finding out the news myself, and already they knew. I asked Obo about Jem and how she would feel, but he explained that they had an open relationship and it would be fine. I was unsure. I found Obo sexy but I didn’t want things to be weird in the house, and besides
this was a big step. We went inside the front door. I told him I’d think about it and we kissed. Somewhere high above us God and Geoph were watching.

Unlike my brush with prostitution, this was an experience I discussed with everyone and anyone who would listen. At the Vie de France I think there were probably customers I told about my quandary in between listing the
soupe du jour
and our vegetarian special. Obviously most people didn’t care, but one woman at work I was very close to called Elizabeth took it all very seriously. She thought I would be making a big mistake – she thought Obo was too old, there were all the messy complications of the other relationships in the house, and besides, maybe I should give heterosexual sex another chance, she said. In theory I agreed. I wouldn’t have minded sleeping with more women, but frankly they weren’t asking, and as for me approaching them, the situation could be summed up by one of those novelty badges I’d just bought that said, ‘So many women, so little nerve’.

I argued that Obo was a good choice because I did fancy him but felt fairly confident that I wouldn’t fall in love with him, and on top of that he was older so he’d know what he was doing. I decided that Obo was the one for me. It makes me laugh that I thought I was in control or was listening to anyone else’s advice. Obo had shone his light on me and I was thrilled and blinded by it.

We chose an evening and went out for a date. I climbed into Obo’s VW van, which I worked out was the same age as me. The other slightly worrying bit of maths I did was to work out that the age gap between me and Obo was greater than the age gap between me and his toddler daughter. Oh well! I remember we went to a couple of gay bars. I can’t imagine
what the rest of the clientele made of us – some bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kid dancing with a shaggy ageing hippy. Maybe it was San Francisco, maybe it was Obo, maybe it was being with a man, but despite everything I didn’t feel as awkward or embarrassed as I had done with Esther.

That night I slept with Obo. He had tidied up his room specially and lit candles. He was so sweet to me and, of course, breaking the very first promise I had made to myself, I began to fall in love with him. There was one major stumbling block here and that was that, although I didn’t understand it, I was really just a statistic to Obo. Political attitudes being what they were in the house, no one was allowed to object or show they cared, but Obo slept with practically everyone who moved into the house. Shortly after we had slept together a girl called Mary moved in with her son Jasper. One night I walked into the kitchen when Mary was cooking and what do you know? There was Obo and his guitar. Mary was admiring his fingering and I felt like the biggest fool on earth. Due to my lack of a vagina I was slowly moved to the back of the sleeping rota until I finally faced facts and took myself off it.

The thing is, I don’t think Obo was ever gay or indeed even bisexual. He had grown up in a wealthy East-Coast school and attended an Ivy League university, but somehow it had all ended and now he was a mechanic with one failed group marriage behind him. He told me later that he had spent some time in therapy and that at one point the therapist had latched on to the idea that Obo was in love with his best friend from college and even made him phone him to tell him. I’m guessing that the guy really was a good friend, because the two are still close to this day.

At the time, though, I was upset. People in the house were very kind and concerned about me. They recognised that I was young, this was not my world, and while it meant almost nothing to Obo this was obviously a big deal for me. Of course the odd thing was that it didn’t make my sexual preferences any clearer for me. Yes, I had now had sex with a man, but I didn’t feel any different. I know now that that is the great lesson to be learnt – you don’t. What should be about who you are sleeping with isn’t necessarily so. Most of what defines being gay, whether we like it or not, is lifestyle – it is the bars we go to, the clothes we wear, the people we hang out with. All I knew was that I had enjoyed sex with Obo, but I was still a long way off understanding why men wore leather and hung around the Eagle.

Meanwhile, life went on. One day while we were in the middle of a busy lunchtime at Vie de France, I suddenly felt very peculiar. I turned to the rest of the people in the little service area between the kitchen and the dining room and was about to say something, but everyone else had reacted at exactly the same time. The floor was moving! An intense woman called Patty Paris who was training to be a biological illustrator behaved as if she had been reading some ‘what to do’ manual every day since her first birthday. She threw her arms up and pushed her whole body against the shelves of glassware to prevent them from falling. ‘Earthquake!’ she cried. The rest of us looked at her for a beat and then all screamed ‘Earthquake!’ and ran out into the restaurant.

All the customers were standing and silent, and then, defying all logic, a large rippling wave went through the wooden floor. Ignoring every bit of Patty’s advice to stay where we were we ran out into the street and looked up to
see the tops of the buildings swaying like trees by the side of the road. Just as the excitement was beginning to turn into the genuine fear that this wasn’t just a severe tremor, it stopped. The city shuddered back to its old self and we went back inside. Everyone was talking at once, and no one was really that interested in what the specials of the day were for the rest of the afternoon. In the service area, there was Patty still holding up the shelves waiting for the all-clear. We peeled her away and told her about the amazing buckling floor and how we had seen the buildings move. She gasped in horror, ‘What about falling glass?’ As it turned out, despite being the worst tremor the city had experienced for over twenty years there was only one casualty. A guy skateboarding down a hill had been thrown off course and had skated straight into a wall. Hard to feel that sorry for him really.

San Francisco has an odd way of making you feel like it is the centre of the universe, and I can remember how shocked I was, when I phoned my mother to reassure her that I wasn’t dead, to discover that our earth-moving experience hadn’t even made it on to the news there. Back at work when I told my new best friend Elizabeth about our global snub, she too gasped in disbelief. It must have been especially hard for her to understand because her family were firmly entrenched in the ‘old money’ part of the city. They were involved with the opera and ballet, and if what went on in San Francisco didn’t matter then their lives were meaningless.

Perhaps it was because of my experience with Obo that I was so drawn to this woman who inhabited such a different world from Stardance. Blonde and beautiful in that waspish
American way, Elizabeth lived with her grandparents in a huge house near the Presidio, an area that was effortlessly tasteful – the sort of place that families in TV movies live in until someone kills the babysitter.

Elizabeth, too, was effortlessly tasteful. Although only in her early twenties, she had strict rules for life. At nineteen, a young woman should choose a hairstyle that would serve her for life – she had opted for a short bob. One should never order a drink that had a name – the one exception being a Bloody Mary. These are just the ones I remember, but there were many more. I don’t want to give the wrong impression about her because she was also very bright and funny and fiercely independent. She had been doing a degree in English at Berkeley for what seemed to me a very long time and supporting herself by doing various restaurant jobs.

I can’t quite explain what happened with Elizabeth. What began as simple meetings as friends – a picnic in the park, an art house movie, coffee and cake in some trendy café – slowly became dates. I think some of it stemmed from the stupid badge I had bought that had the slogan about too little nerve. Elizabeth seemed to see it as some sort of challenge, a way of me asking her to make the first move, and so late one night I found myself standing outside her house kissing her. I’m sure a few curtains twitched, but they only saw a nice young white couple making out before the gentleman headed home. Given that this was San Francisco, it is extraordinary that no one looked out of their window and saw the reality of the situation: a young gay man in denial clinging to the deluded desires of a love-hungry girl.

It seems incredible to me now that not only did I have a relationship with this woman, but also that it lasted for a little
over a year. The Esther affair can be explained or understood because I’d loved the drama of it all, and although it hadn’t involved hairy chests and cocks at least it had had the frisson of forbidden love attached to it. This was entirely different. A young woman my own age, a perfectly pleasant, pretty woman going out with me – me! If the gay world gave out prizes I was in with a very good shot of getting ‘Most promising newcomer’. For me I suppose it was my last-chance dance with acceptability and a simple straightforward life with the Sunday papers, corduroy trousers and a dog.

More than that, though, I did love her. Of course we should have just remained very close friends, but my cock was not the brightest beast on the block and, as I’ve discovered many times since, it sometimes finds it hard to get a grasp on the concept of friendship when it can stick itself into people. The real question is what was going through Elizabeth’s head? Why did she do this? Well, as my friend Carrie Fisher explains when people ask her why she didn’t spot that she had married a gay man, we were having sex, lots of sex.