Where does anyone go after being kissed for the first time and they had been so diverted by it and had to wait that long for the experience that they never knew before what personal trust lie that felt like? Mentally they return to where they first received that first kiss.
That is what I did, though I was much diverted by my hoping I could recreate in my head the famous scene that had tested the Hayes Code for the official length permitted for a kiss on screen in Hitchcock's 1940 film 'Rebecca' where to prolong the length of the kiss between Joan Fontaine and Laurence Hitchcock superimposed between Laurence and Joan the image of a series of doors opening, one door behind another into some sort of infinity in the clouds before the camera returned to scene of the two lovers lips about to part. Maybe I was imagining closet doors opening, if so there were a a lot more of them than I had expected, and anyway those doors did not open for me as easily as I hoped they would.12
On Friday night the real life doors of The Admiral Duncan opened and in the moment I saw them they were the doors that mattered. There I presented myself in my best hand-me-down leather jacket, East German army shirt, tight jeans and my ex-post office air-wear cushion-sole shoes. Then I became aware that if I was aiming to fit in with my surroundings with how I dressed what I wore did only half the job I expected it to do. Before I owned the jacket it had belonged to my younger sister's punk boyfriend, Boggo, who had painted the back panel of it with gloss paint. He had achieved a uniquely stressed texture to it when he tried to remove the failed decoration, which when the texture was made to look black it looked 'interesting'.21
I can remember enough of the evening to say that the music was loud and stridently sexual, far more directly sexual with the volume it was played at than what I would seemed when listen to freely at home, or presented in performances of on 'Top Of The Pops'. The sights were what I took in most. In the red half-light I had probably not been amongst as many males in such a knowingly all male environment since the boarding school/care home. In the boarding school/care home I had found the faux asexuality and impressions of chasteness often excruciating in the covert dishonesty and lack humour of it. Beyond a mildly defensive light sarcasm The Admiral Duncan seemed rather light on humour, but that might be because of the effects of drink amid people's personal boundaries being tested with them being so close to each other. Russell met me, showed me off to a few people, let me just feel space till I felt as if I had joined in enough the seem like I actually fitted in there.33
'Lonely' would be the wrong description for what I felt in the pub that night. 'comfortably out of my depth' would tell how I felt better. I did not get drunk, the drunken atmosphere was woozy enough for me. The brevity of my introductions to Russell friends made sense with the music loud enough to inhibit conversation. There, an introduction was the limit. I was left to find my own space at times as well, being left to guess how much I might be seen as 'fresh meat' and how much this was a human meat market. The walls were red. I could not tell whether they were red because of the colour they were painted or because of the way the colour of the walls interacted with the lights lit the walls up. Films came to me again in this context. In the film 'The Cook, the thief his wife and Her Lover' there is a sex scene where two lovers hastily embark on intercourse in meat hanging room where the colours of the walls changes with different coloured lights, as if the sex were incidental to a lecture about how light changes the different colours of different surfaces. The music seemed far less 'magic roundabout-ish' with crowds of men reacting to it, moving but no particular sense of rhythm. I may have noticed how the Stock Aiken and Waterman tracks performed differently in the pub atmosphere than they did anywhere else-where when the pub's lights were synced to the percussion in the music then it was like finding the music was more immersive in the confines of the pub than it was hearing it on the radio or seeing a video or TOTP performance of it. Add the buzz of alcohol, or drugs, like E's. Not that I would not have recognises such distinct behaviour in that atmosphere, if they were being taken. That night was an education in itself, but of what it was much too soon to tell.55
The night did not end on the clear high note I imagined, so much as dissipate into the darkness as the effects of the drink slowed down how much more people drank and the end of the evening got closer. Russell choreographed the end between us. Stood outside he drew me closer to talk. I was going home, he was going home and I was to ring him next next week. To confirm this in sight of his friends he hugged me and with the same movement he put a piece of paper with his phone number into my back pocket, and gave my arse a playful squeeze into the bargain. With his friends watching he kissed me with a kiss that I wished had lasted longer. 'Goodnight' he said and we separated. I more haltingly replied with a quieter 'Goodbye' that he heard. Russell went over to his friends who were going his way whilst I went off in the opposite direction on my own, but with a strange sense of wonder within me at what I had seen that night. 68
Looking back at the openness of the evening, it amazed me. Even if the confidence of some of the men came from the drink emboldening them. I realised afresh that before that night for years I had lived some sort of underground experience, without knowing it. Not least because I was seeing the alcohol culture at its most sociable, where what there was hope and humour. Whereas the side of alcohol I knew best was me being in the living room when dad came home, drunk every night as if him being drunk was his 'normal'. Every night that he let himself into the house through the front door he was the tired bully that none of the family could openly label so. He asserted that as as the drunk person who had chosen, and paid for, the house that excused him from having to be sober when he came home at night. But when his drunkenness permeated the atmosphere of the small living room it was a form of slow torture to be sociable with him in that confined space. His ritual behaviours around the television were as predictable as they were dislikeable. Towards the end of life in Lincolnshire it was easier to turn the set off before he got home and avoid the conflict of pretend enjoyment.82
A few days later, feeling somewhere between quite raw, hopeful, and elated, I rang Russell. The conversation was formal, slightly distant. He set the tone where he chose how I would get to know him and how slowly I would come to understand the parameters of 'the gay life', which he knew better than I did was an outsiders life in which gay men passed through the majority culture more recognised now, but when they are talked about they are still more blamed than respected by straights who like to catastrophise about lives they dislike the idea of. E.g. for health crises like AIDS happening for instance. He had a front door of his own behind which he could live in the world of his choosing. I had a shared front door behind which I lived a shared christian life of some sort. I was living in a world he had gone beyond and left behind. 93
No sooner had I got it in my head the Russell was now part of my life, and I was gay than my mother rang. I don't know what news from home I had missed, but I knew that I had been 'kept out of the loop' about Grandad being in hospital, beyond that he was there and not going home. When mother said that he had died I was neither shocked nor surprised: six weeks is a long time in hospital for a widower of four years who was in his eighties. I made enquiries about the details of his treatment, mother made reassuring noises. As evasive telephone conversations go honour was maintained. Mother won on points by what she managed to avoid spelling out. 101
So I had to ring Russell back to postpone my first visit to his flat in the heights of 'fairy towers', the block of council flats for single people that were mostly occupied by gay men because they were the most consistently single in the 1990s. I had a funeral to attend and a family to be dutiful towards. I could not tell what duty might mean, beyond conflict with me owning that I was gay to a family who disowned anything that did not flatter their right to not have to think. A trait most exemplified by my dad and his drinking habits. 105
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