‘Come, then.’
She had a chauffeur, and she took me with her. I sat in the back of the car, being driven through the night to an unknown destination.
She was an American heiress with a partially collapsed villa outside Perugia. She hired an octogenarian pianist to play Mozart sonatas out of tune while she painted me nude looking out at the olive groves. Few portraits can have taken longer. I listened to her for days and strode about in shorts and workmen’s boots, pretending I could mend things, though everything seemed fine as it was. (Is it only in Italy that ruin itself can seem like art?)
There were always her eyes to return to. I still liked having people fall in love with me. There are moments of life you get addicted to, that you want over and over, but then you get frustrated when you can’t go any further, when the thing you’ve most wanted bores you.
My real labour was at night, in her room, where, after taking hours to prepare for me, she’d await my knock. I went at my employment seriously, limbering up, bathing, meditating, a proud professor of satisfaction. What internal trips I took, pretending to be a dancer or rock climber. It was dangerous work, sex, but, as always, it was the terrors and uncertainties which made it erotic. For her there had to be safety at the end, some hours of peace in her mind. I looked out for this on her face when she was asleep, like a blessing, and was pleased, waiting beside the bed to assess her temperature, her hand in mine. Then I would sleep well, alone. My pleasure was in her pleasure. After a few weeks, she wanted me to live with her in New York, if Italy got too slow for me. It did, but I didn’t. I could satisfy her, but only at the cost of disappointing her. I walked away in my boots through the olive trees. Her eyes were on my back; she did not know where her next love would come from, if at all.
I was glad to have the time to walk around the cities, listening to music, always my greatest passion, on my headphones, particularly as, in my previous body, I’d been suffering from some deafness. I went to clubs and made the acquaintance of DJs. I talked about music. But to be honest, in my former guise I could get to meet more interesting people.
However, I loved this multiplicity of lives; I was delighted with the compliments about my manner and appearance, loved being told I was handsome, beautiful, good-looking. I could see what Ralph meant by a new start with old equipment. I had intelligence, money, some maturity and physical energy. Wasn’t this human perfection? Why hadn’t anyone thought of putting them together before?
Like many straights, I’d been intrigued by some of my gay friends’ promiscuity, the hundreds or even thousands of partners. A gay actor I knew had once said to me, ‘Anywhere I go in the world, one glance and I can see the need. A citizen of nowhere, I inhabit the Land of Fuck.’ I’d long admired and coveted what I saw as the gays’ innovative and experimental lives, their capacity for pleasure. They were reinventing love, keeping it close to instinct. Meanwhile, at least for the time being – though it was changing – the straights were stuck with the old model. I had, of course, envied all that sex without a hurting human face, and in my new guise I had plenty of open bodies in close proximity. On one particular day and night I had sex with six – or was it seven? – different people. It’s not something you’d want to do often. Once in a lifetime might just do it.
In Switzerland, through a woman I’d been talking to in a bar, I became acquainted with a bunch of kids in their late twenties who were making a film about feckless young people like themselves. I helped the group move their equipment and was interested to see how they used the new lightweight cameras their parents had financed.
They began to shoot long scenes of banal, everyday dialogue. I was never one to believe that Andy Warhol’s films could be a fruitful model, but I encouraged them to keep the camera still and photograph only the faces of their subjects, letting them speak while I sat behind the camera, asking questions about their childhood. I took these away to a studio, cut some of them together, and put music on. The best version was one where I took the sound of the voices off altogether, but kept the music going. The unreachable, silent, moving mouths – someone trying to be heard, or not being attended to – were oddly affecting. When it was my turn in front of the camera I had myself painted white, with a black stripe down the middle, and called it ‘zebra piece’. One night, we showed the films in a club and the naked zebra danced on stage with a local thrash band.
Others in the group, operating from a collapsing warehouse, were curating shows of contemporary art. Some reasonable things did get done, though no one much noticed. It was irritating when I found myself interested in them as a teacher or parent – the extent of their minds; in how seriously they could take themselves. They didn’t read much; there was a lot of cultural knowledge I took for granted and they didn’t. My own son didn’t start to read or watch decent films until he was almost twenty. He wouldn’t allow us, but only a female teacher, to turn him on to these pleasures. Recently, on the radio I’d said I considered reading about as important as raising poodles. As intended, this had got me into wonderful trouble with the bookworms. The whispering, worshipful tones in which my parents referred to ‘literature’ and ‘scholarship’ had always made me wonder what more could be done with a body than pass information in and out of it.
I had been to a club once, in the early 1990s, to see Prince, with my son and the college lecturer who seemed to be educating him (in bed), Deedee Osgood. Despite the squalor and the fact that everyone but me was virtually naked and on drugs, I loved looking at everyone. Now, most evenings, my new pals took me to clubs. This soon bored me, so they gave me Ecstasy for the first time. Though I had smoked pot and taken LSD, and known people who’d become junkies or cocaine addicts, alcohol was the drug of my generation. It seemed the best drug. I’d never understood why anyone would want to waltz with mephitic alligators.
I doubted whether any of my new acquaintances went a day without a smoke or some other stimulant. As my friends knew, the ‘E’ hit me as a revelation and I wanted it served to the Prime Minister, and pumped into the water supply. I popped handfuls of it every day for a fortnight. It led me into my own body, and out into others’, in so far as there was anyone real there at all. I couldn’t tell. (I liked to call us E-trippers ‘a loose association of solipsists’.) My ardour made my new pals laugh. They had learned that E wasn’t the cure, and the last thing the world needed was another drug philosopher.
But after the purifications and substitutions of culture, I believed I was returning to something neglected: fundamental physical pleasure, the ecstasy of the body, of my skin, of movement, and of accelerated, spontaneous affection for others in the same state. I had been of puny build, not someone aware of his strength, and had always found it easier to speak of the most intimate things than to dance. As a Newbody, however, I began to like the pornographic circus of rough sex; the stuff that resembled some of the modern dance I had seen, animalistic, without talk. I begged to be turned into meat, held down, tied, blindfolded, slapped, pulled and strangled, entirely merged in the physical, all my swirling selves sucked into orgasm. ‘Insights from the edge of consciousness’, I’d have called it, had words come easily to me at that time. But they were the last thing on my mind.
By using others, I could get myself on to a sexual high for two or three days. It was indeed drug-like: a lucent, shivering pleasure not only in my own body but, I believed, in all existence at its most elemental. Narcissus singing into his own arse! Hello! I was also aware, as I danced naked on the balcony of a house overlooking Lake Como at daybreak after spending the night with a young couple who didn’t interest me, of how many addicts I’d known and how tedious any form of addiction could be. The one thing I didn’t want was to get stuck within.
For the group, there was sex of every variety, and the others’ drug-taking had moved to heroin. At least two of the boys were HIV-positive. Several of the others believed that that was their destiny. Because my contact with reality was, at the most, glancing, it took me a while to see how desperate the pleasures were, and how ridiculously romantic their sense of shared tragedy and doom was. My generation had been through it, with James Dean, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison and others. If I’d been a kid now, I’d have found poetic misery hard to resist. As it was, I knew I was not of them, because I couldn’t help wondering what their parents would have thought.
What we used to call ‘promiscuity’ had always bothered me. Impersonal love seemed a devaluation of social intercourse. I couldn’t help believing, no doubt pompously, that one of civilisation’s achievements was to give value to life, to conversation with others. Or was faithful love only an unnecessarily constraining bourgeois idiocy?
There would be a moment when the other, or ‘bit of the other’, as we used to say, would turn human. Some gesture, word or cry would indicate a bruised history or ailing mind. The bubble of fantasy was pricked (I came to understand fantasy as a fatal form of preconception and preoccupation). I saw another kind of opening then, which was also an opportunity for another kind of entry – into the real. I fled, not wanting my desire to take me too far into another person. Really, apart from with the woman who paid me, when it came to sex I was only interested in my own feeling.
It has, at least, become clear that it is our pleasures, rather than our addictions and vices, which are our greatest problems. Pleasure can change you in an instant; it can take you anywhere. If these gratifications were intoxicating and almost mystical in their intensity, I learned, when something stranger happened, that indulgence wasn’t a full-time job and reality was a shore where dreams broke. It turned out I was seducible.
One of the artists in my group had a four-year-old son. The others were only intermittently interested in him, as I was in them, and mostly the kid watched videos. His loneliness reflected mine. If I’d been up partying and couldn’t sleep the next day, I would, before I cured my come-down with another pill, take him to see the spiders in the zoo. Making him laugh was my greatest pleasure. We played football and drew and sang. I didn’t mind ambling about at his speed, and I made up stories in cafés. ‘Read another,’ he’d say. He helped me recall moments with my own children: my boy, at four, fetching me an old newspaper from the kitchen, as he was used to my perpetual reading.
With his stubborn refusals, the kid reduced me twice to fury. I found myself actually stamping my feet. This jarring engagement made me see that otherwise I was like a spy, concealed and wary. If my generation had been fascinated by what it was like to be Burgess, or Philby or Blunt – the emotional price of a double life, of hiding in your mind – the kid reminded me of how much of one’s useful self one locked away in the keeping of serious secrets.
The kid sent me into an unshareable spin. I wept alone, feeling guilty at how impatient I had been with my own children. I composed a lengthy email apologising for omissions years ago, but didn’t send it. Otherwise, I saw that most of my kids’ childhood was a blank. I had either been somewhere else, or wanted to be, doing something ‘important’ or ‘intellectually demanding’. Or I wanted the children to be more like adults – less passionate and infuriating, in other words. The division of labour between men and women had been more demarcated in my day: the men had the money and the women the children, a deprivation for both.
I came to like the kid more than the adults. One time, finding me puking on the floor, he was kind and tried to kiss me better. I didn’t want him to consider me a fool. The whole thing shook me. I hadn’t expected this Newbody experience to involve falling in love with a four-year-old whose narcissism far exceeded my own. When it came to youth and beauty, he had it all, as well as his emotional volume turned right up. It hadn’t occurred to me that if I wanted to begin again as a human being, it would be as a father, or that I would have more energy with which to miss my children living at home, their voices as I entered the house, their concerns and possessions scattered everywhere. Ralph had failed to warn me of feeling ‘broody’. I guessed such an idea would recommend ‘eternal life’ to no more than a few, just as you never hear anyone say that in heaven you have to do the washing-up while suffering from indigestion. I had to shut the possibility of fatherhood out of my mind, kiss the kid goodbye and remind myself of what I had to look forward to, of what I liked and still wanted in my old life.
In my straighter moments, despite everything, I wanted to be close to my wife. I liked to watch her walk about the house, to hear her undress, to touch her things. She would lie in bed reading and I would smell her, moving up and down her body like an old dog, nose twitching. I still hadn’t been all the way round her. Her flesh creased, folded and sagged, its colour altering, but I had never desired her because she was perfect, but because she was she.
After my journey through the cities and having to leave the kid, I decided to roam around the Greek islands. My own vanity bored even me and I craved warm sun, clear water and a fresh wind. I’d had two and a half months of ease and pleasure, and I wanted to prepare for my return – for illness and death, in fact. I began to think of what I’d tell my friends I’d been doing.
As the doctor had predicted, I wasn’t looking forward to reentering my old body. When I ate, would it still feel as though I were chewing nails and shitting screws? On some days, would I still only be able to swallow bananas and painkillers? But as my old body and its suffering stood for the life I had made, the sum total of my achievement made flesh, I believed I should reinhabit it. I was no fan of the more rigid pieties, but it did seem to be my duty. Would most deaths soon feel like suicides? It was almost funny: becoming a Newbody made living a quagmire of decision. In the meantime, I was looking forward to staying in the same place for a few weeks and finishing, or at least beginning again,
Under the Volcano
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