So Me (6 page)

Slightly hung-over but still wildly excited, we arrived at JFK. We were all huddled on to a bus which was to take us to the YMCA for our first night in America. Like children outside a toyshop at Christmas we pushed our faces against the windows of the bus. ‘The cars! Will you look at the size of the cars.’ When we came out of the mid-town tunnel into Manhattan, the driver announced over the microphone in a deep New York growl, ‘Welcome to the Big Apple!’ We cheered and clapped. Glittering skyscrapers, yellow taxis, Walk/Don’t walk, it was everything we had dreamt it would be.

The next morning we were gathered in a big room and some nice man gave us a talk which might as well have been called ‘How to not get killed in New York’. I listened intently
and to this day follow his advice. Don’t look up, walk next to the kerb not the buildings, and if you have to look at a map go into a store. Thank you and goodnight. He wished us a pleasant stay. We stepped out into the canyons of New York like Stepford Wives with backpacks, staring into the middle distance, walking in a straight line and expecting to be attacked by a gang of gun-wielding thugs at any moment.

I spent the day in New York, and then made my way to the Port Authority bus station for my journey to California. I knew that travelling across America by bus would take about four days and my unlimited rambler ticket lasted for seven, so my journey could be quite leisurely – at least that was the plan. Because I was heading off on an adventure I didn’t want to organise a route or an itinerary. I would be spontaneous. Looking back, I realise now that a map would have been pretty useful. My guidebook didn’t have one so I found myself planning a journey of thousands of miles using the little diagrammatic routes that the bus company had on their leaflets. I knew I was looking for ones that ran right to left across the page and not top to bottom. This slightly simplistic approach to orienteering meant that I ended up in places I never would have visited in other circumstances. I decided to take in a visit to Kansas City because my guidebook told me it had more fountains than Rome. I have never found out if the guidebook was joking or if I just hit a very dry part of town, but unless you count a tramp pissing I don’t think I saw one public fountain. I do remember that it was hot, really hot – over 100°F, but for a boy from Bandon that might as well have been Centigrade. I went for a walk around the city streets that seemed to be deserted. The only things I remember were turning a corner and finding a gospel
choir singing and sweating for a small crowd, and then on the way back to my flea-farm hotel a man stopped me and asked me if I wanted to go to the movies with him. ‘It’s air-conditioned,’ he promised. I politely declined.

When I arrived in Salt Lake City, the place was
en fête
. A jazz festival combined with a celebration of foods from around the world was taking place. Sounded good, but the reality was a crowd of couples with prams listening to tuneless saxophones wailing slightly louder than the babies, and eating bowls of rice from planet bland.

I could tell my plan to get to LA was going wrong given that by late on day five I had yet to see a bus leaflet that had LA marked on it. Late on day six I saw one that said San Francisco. That was in California, and a woman who had given a guest lecture at college had given me some numbers there. The City of Angels would have to wait.

The bus pulled into San Francisco early on a crisp and cloudless Sunday morning. My first port of call was the youth hostel. Now that I know how far it is from the bus station I can’t believe I walked all the way, but walk I did. I tramped off in what I hoped was the right direction. Suddenly, screaming split the air and from around a corner came a truck full of drag queens. I stood and stared as it disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. As I walked on I reflected that everything I had heard about this city must be true.

What I didn’t know until later was that I had stumbled into the rainbow city on the very day of Gay Pride. After I found the youth hostel I went back into the city in time to see some of the parade. Lesbian grandmothers, Native American drag queens, Grace Jones singing on the back of a truck, it all rolled by. People were also handing out leaflets about something
called AIDS. Looking back we were like those people in historical dramas who say things about a spot of bother in Germany and how it will all be over by Christmas.

My first priority was to find somewhere more permanent than the youth hostel to stay. I rang the numbers the visiting lecturer had given me. Most of them led to answerphones or people awkwardly stuttering their apologies and silently cursing the stupid bitch who had given me their number. I had one more number to call. What had seemed so simple – ‘Just call any of these people. They’ll be more than happy to help’ – now seemed like a joke. Unless I stepped out of this phone booth dressed as Superman I couldn’t see myself succeeding. Trying not to panic I dialled the last number and waited. A woman called Gail answered the phone. I calmly explained who I was and who had given me her number. She began to tell me why she couldn’t help (yeah, yeah) but – What was that? Did she say ‘But’? – but she did have a number for a place called Stardance. It was a hippy commune near the Haight-Ashbury district of town and they had a hostel room they rented out by the night. This didn’t help me very much, but at least it was cheaper than the youth hostel.

After further phone calls I went to dinner at Stardance so that they could vet me. I felt like such a fraud as I sat cross-legged eating grilled tofu listening to the commune members tell me about their vision of utopian housing. I replied with a harrowing tale of Irish poverty and incredibly evil landlords. They lapped it up. I could have kissed the dead rat on the stairs. The next night I moved in for a week. I left over a year later.

The patriarch of the commune was Geoph. He was in his
late thirties, calm and kind of handsome in a boyish way. He had founded the house with Erica. Originally they had been a couple, but now no longer shared a bed. In fact Geoph tended to sleep in an odd loft that he had built in the ceiling of the hallway. This was so he never referred to any room as ‘his’ and also because with his hidden view of the comings and goings at the front door, he was always first with the gossip.

Erica was forty and not to be messed with. She was all for the concept of communal living, she just loathed living with actual people. She was back at college studying nursing and was raising her young daughter Mindy. At nine years old Mindy was oddly subversive. She attended a regular school and spent her time with normal middle-class children. It was Mindy who smuggled the plastic perfection of Barbie into the house, it was she who put Coca-Cola in the fridge. It was a bit like
Alien
with an enemy egg growing up on the inside of Stardance.

The other permanent residents were Obo and Jem Help and their three-year-old daughter Faith Shines Help. Obo and Jem had been in a group marriage but had eloped when she became pregnant. It was only after Faith was born and turned out to be black that Jem realised she had eloped with the wrong member of the group marriage.

Slowly over the year I became extraordinarily fond of these people. I quite liked the whole communal living thing. There was always someone to talk to, it was cheap and you shared all the dull household chores. Most of these I didn’t mind. The one that I dreaded, though not as much as the rest of the housemates dreaded me doing it, was cooking. I had come from the great student tradition of Pot Noodle, and
suddenly I was expected to prepare a vegetarian feast for around eleven people. What do vegetarians eat? Salad. Well, I knew how to make that, I’d seen my mother make it. You take a couple of leaves of lettuce, a quarter of a tomato, two slices of cucumber, egg and beetroot and then you pour salad cream all over it. If I had squatted on the table and carefully coiled my own turd in front of them, I don’t think eleven vegetarians could have looked less impressed.

To make money I returned to the restaurant business. Down in the financial district was Vie de France, a brand new themed bakery/café/restaurant. I got a job working there as a lunchtime waiter. I began living a very schizophrenic existence. At home a vegetarian recycling utopian, and at work a camp, bleach-haired party boy.

This was also the time when I began to drink in earnest. Now, don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into one of those stories of alcohol problems followed by reform. My only problem with drinking at the time was that I didn’t have the stamina and I would end up vomiting quite often. One night I came home and as I lay on the floor of my room (even getting on to the bed seemed life-threatening) I had the wheelies. The room was spinning around and I knew it wouldn’t stop until I satisfied its lust for vomit. I obliged, and then I didn’t move – I just lay there in my own mess. Finally I came to some time during the night, took off my clothes and went to bed. In the morning as I sat eating my Cheerios (God, how the young can bounce back!) everyone who came into the room looked at me in a slightly quizzical way and asked me if I was all right. Weird. I was fine. However, the mystery was solved when I went to brush my teeth and looked in a mirror. I had dried vomit all down one
side of my face where I had smeared it taking my jumper off in the middle of the night.

On St Patrick’s Day a film crew was in the bar we were in near Vie de France. The people I was with brought the camera over because I was Irish. They asked me how I was planning to celebrate the saint’s day. Full of lager and confidence I replied, ‘I’m going to drink and drink and then go home and get sick!’ Well, I learnt a valuable lesson about programme making. When it was broadcast on the news it turned out the piece wasn’t about St Patrick’s Day, it was about new tougher drink-driving legislation and by the time they had edited my comments into the piece I looked like some sort of crazed killer. Thankfully, I don’t vomit any more.

The year I spent in San Francisco was by far the most formative in my life. I was already twenty years old, but in rural Irish years that made me a sort of international fourteen. Yes, I had travelled a bit already, but somehow I’d always had an invisible umbilical cord to home. Here on the west coast of America I was unconnected to anyone or anything. I suppose that is why it was quite easy for me to live my strange double life. I wasn’t being untrue to myself, I was simply inventing new versions of ‘me’ and keeping the parts that felt comfortable. To this day I’m a borderline alcoholic that recycles his bottles.

Being somewhere where nobody knows you and there isn’t anyone to judge you means that all normal constraints on your behaviour are removed. I know the following story did happen to me, but I have no idea why.

Given that my only sexual experiences up to this point were a fumble in a French tent and a short-lived affair with a woman nearly twice my age, it seemed a teeny-weeny bit
sexually ambitious of me to apply for a job as a rent boy, but that is what I did. I saw the ad in some free newspaper, called the number and was given a rendezvous. I was to go to an apartment for an interview after my lunch shift the next day. Perhaps I thought it would be a sort of
Reader’s
Digest
course in sexuality, so that I could make up for all my lost time growing up in Ireland, perhaps I wanted the money, perhaps I just wanted people to want me and in my clumsy, emotionally stunted way I thought this was how I could make that happen. Perhaps I just wanted to have sex with a man. I didn’t tell a soul what I was planning to do, but if I had and they’d asked me why, I’m pretty sure that even back then I couldn’t have told them.

The next day I left work as normal in my black trousers and white shirt. However, even I knew that really wasn’t a great look for a hustler, so I went into the toilets of a McDonald’s on Market Street and changed into some ‘casual’ clothes. I can’t imagine what I had in my wardrobe that I thought fitted into hooker wear, but, the makeover complete, I headed to the address I’d been given. It turned out to be an enormous apartment complex, almost like an hotel. Numb with fear I went in, got in the elevator and headed up. When the elevator doors opened I was in a very long, dimly lit corridor with what seemed like dozens of identical dark wooden doors. I was hyperaware of everything: the sound of my shoes on the carpet, the dull reflections of the lights on the fake wood panelling, the drums in my head telling me that this was a big, a really big, mistake. I knew I could stop, turn around and take the elevator back to the bright sunny street – no one would have thought any less of me, no one knew I was here – and yet I kept walking
towards the door. I promised myself that I wouldn’t have sex or take off my clothes.

I paused, and then watched my hand knock on the door. Several centuries went by and then I heard a voice. Footsteps and then the door was opened. The man was in his late forties, I would guess, with grey hair. The hair on his body was also grey. I could tell this because he was only wearing a pair of wet shorts. He apologised, he’d been in the pool. Come in, sit down, would you like a drink? No? OK, what’s your name? We chatted. He was English and seemed charming. No mention was made of why I was there. This might have been a job interview for anything, it could have been a tutorial, I could have been in a waiting room.

He stood up. Would I like to come into the other room? I followed. The other room was a large bedroom with a wall of mirrors at the far end. I noticed that both pillows had been slept on. For some reason I found that disgusting. He asked me to take off my clothes and told me he’d be back in a minute. I stood there and like some stooge in a hypnotist’s show slowly unbuttoned my clothes. I left them in a small pile on the floor and stood there naked. The situation was spiralling way out of control. I had promised myself that this wouldn’t happen and yet it had and I was the one making it happen.

The English man came back in. He looked me up and down.

‘Turn around.’

I turned around.

‘Now, treat me like you’d treat one of your clients.’

I walked over to him and put my hands on his hips and kissed him. I pulled down his wet shorts. He had a hard-on.
This was as far as I’d ever gotten with a man. I hesitated. In that moment the English man lifted me up and carried me to the bed. The sudden appalling reality of being naked on a bed with some older man who had a raging hard-on finally jolted me back to my senses. Like some convent schoolgirl lying in a field after the village dance, I looked up at him and asked, ‘Are you going to go all the way?’