In March 1913, the destitute Frederick Rolfe left his small room at the Albergo Cavaletto in Venice and moved into the Palazzo Marcello where he shared a flat with another poverty-stricken Englishman named Thomas Pennefather Wade Brown. On the evening of October 25, they dined and each went to his bedroom. The next day Wade Brown found Rolfe lying fully dressed on his bed where he had fallen with a final heart seizure. On September 25, 1968, a 64-year old man, one-legged and wheelchair-bound and looking almost ninety, died of a stroke in his shabby room at Manhattan’s Sheraton Russell Hotel. His name was Cornell Woolrich. One day, when I am old, and have fallen on hard times, I shall seek out a seedy room in an insalubrious part of Rome where I will live on Peroni Nastro Azzurro and canned sardines, and try to recreate the deaths of these homosexual writers.
Why do people want me to write for free? If I want to do it for free, it’s because I’m doing it for myself. And don’t give me the ‘it’s good exposure’ bullshit. It’s because you don’t want to pay anything.
Why is it that when Charlie does the washing his whites come out white, and my whites come out pink?
Whose pair of black Calvin Klein boxer briefs are in the drawer? Not Charlie’s. Nor mine.
Do I believe the neighbour who says that her grandson, Owen, is doing fantastic? I thought he was worth a shot until I found out that he was a bit of a psycho. But there again, I have a weakness for bad boys. That answer might come another day.
I listened to a Beatles album and concluded that they are still boring.
Why does Sky Arts think that we are obsessed with Andre Rieu?
What was the attraction of Barbara Hepworth, and why are people obsessed with her work?
After a one-night stand, why do things always turn out different when sunrise comes?
Why is it that you think you are so bloody handsome, and believe that everyone wants a piece of you, and then someone takes a photo, and you realise that you look a bit of a dork?
Flup, flup, flup, flup. That’s the only way to describe it. Flup, flup, flup, flup. It dawned on me that the flup, flup, flup, flup had a regularity about it. Maybe every thirty minutes, never more than forty five, but the sound can be heard from early morning to late evening. When does a sound become a sign? I suppose it is when you want it to be. That flupping noise is made by Kieran, the farm boy who I’ve known since he was fourteen. That was five years ago, and now he’s grown into a handsome young man of nineteen. He works in nothing but a pair of filthy old denim jeans and a pair of wellington boots that flup along the road so that you are never in any doubt as to where he might be. I thought that farmers would be busy milking cows or ploughing fields, but Kieran spends his days flupping along. I end up waiting for flups and hide behind a wall to watch him stroll by. His bare chest will be covered in cow shit, and hay, or any other agricultural detritus, and it becomes fantastically homoerotic.
Sometimes, you have nothing to do except watch and think. It’s Tuesday afternoon, it’s overcast, and I’m sitting on a beach… I tap random thoughts into my phone… and later, it reads like a diary, but also conjures up memories of being a child when we had ‘news books’ in which we wrote any drivel that might have happened.
This is my drivel…
Megan tells me a story about Peran of Polruan, with his salty brown legs, who lives alone in an old fisherman’s cottage called The Buoy. Never a visitor. Not a word to anyone. The girls think he’s a Cornish Saint and want to have sex with him. Every morning he catches the river ferry and returns at teatime. Where does he go? What does he do? On summer evenings he reads on the doorstep. I’m intrigued, but I want to know more about the books that he reads.
***
I’m looking for a bit of phwoar on the beach. I want a handsome young guy who strips to his shorts and goes swimming. But on this cloudy Tuesday afternoon I’m blessed with old ladies in one-piece costumes who do sedate breast-strokes to the pontoon and back. Shortly after four o’clock, a blonde schoolboy appears and parks himself close by. His shirt is untucked and the school tie hangs loose around his neck. From his bag, he pulls out a copy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and starts reading. He seems happy being with Ralph and Jack, and I wonder which one of them he’s sympathetic to.
***
It’s been a month since I had a cigarette. I realise this whilst standing on the quayside. Instead, I’ve been using my Pro Max Double Apple – 10K puffs. What might you get up to with ten thousand puffs? Behind me, a sour-faced woman moans to her husband that I’m vaping. I turn around and give her a deadly look and she tuts. There wouldn’t have been any remorse if I’d pushed her into the sea.
***
“The Tesco delivery is coming tomorrow morning,” says Megan. She makes it sound like this is the highlight of the week. It might well be. She’s changed a lot since moving down here. Where is the Megan I once knew? The girl who drank Aperol Spritz by the dozen and got her tits out afterwards. “That’s exciting, I look forward to it,” I reply. She gives me a wicked look. “I was hoping that you might stay in and wait for him. I think that you’ll be less sarcastic after you’ve seen the Tesco guy.”
***
I write at the kitchen table with the door open and ignore the wasps that fly in and buzz above my head. I’ve realised that they soon get bored and leave the same way that they came. Megan appreciates my eclectic music tastes and has recommended an album called Senza Estate by My Friend Dario. It plays on my laptop while the wasps gather around the Corn Flakes. One of the tracks is called Keep on Cruising which is calming and innocent, and far removed from the cruising that I’m used to.
The angel didn’t come, not that I expected it to, but it didn’t, nevertheless. Angels are undeniably unreliable. Instead, I got an alcoholic Irishman who kept offering me drinks. I told him that I’d have a double gin and prune juice, and the silly paddy asked for one at the bar. They told him that they had prune juice but no gin. Every few minutes somebody came by to chat and I told them to go away because an angel might appear at any moment. They gave condescending looks as if to say, ‘angels never come out on Tuesdays’ which fucked me off because that explained why it hadn’t turned up. I scrolled my phone and Mail Online said that all angels were benefit scroungers anyway. I realised that I’d got my priorities wrong and hoped that the devil might come in its place, but it seemed that even the devil didn’t come out on a Tuesday night. I ordered a taxi and, on the way home, the driver played Bob Dylan songs which must have gone down well with the youngsters. I couldn’t help thinking of a guy I once slept with. ‘Lay, Brady, lay… lay across my big brass bed,’ but then I remembered that it was just a mattress on the floor.
A fat girl in a prom dress sings Club Tropicana on karaoke. She has quite a good voice but looks like an elephant dressed as a ballerina. I think of an oversized Miss Haversham with an unhealthy obsession for Wham.
If I need inspiration, I need a bar, a handsome bartender, and lots of drinks. And then I can write like I’ve never written before. I nurse drink after drink, seduced less by the taste and more by the bartender – who looks like sin and pours drinks like he wants secrets.
Hold on to every minute. Even when it is late and you should go home. What difference will 45 minutes make? Will love succeed in 45 minutes? The chances are incredibly slim but you count each minute with hope. When those 45 minutes are gone, and you go out into the morning sun, then you know that it was 45 minutes wasted.
An angel with black latex gloves. He tells me that he suffers from eczema and that it is flaring up everywhere. He shows me his hands, arms and chest, but I can’t see anything. He says he even has it on his arse cheeks but isn’t brave enough to show me something that isn’t there.
He’s from Wythenshawe which means that he has five sisters, five younger brothers and an incestuous pit bull. His grey sweatpants keep disappearing up the crack of his arse and he keeps rubbing his dick. Every few minutes he flirts with girls and that pisses me off. A cock tease. Then he starts chatting with a lowlife lad next to me and I see that there is more to this than I like.
But he returns and says that I have beautiful blue eyes, and when he smiles, I notice that he’s wearing braces on his teeth, which is kinda cute. He turns his back and the tee-shirt says ‘authorised personnel only’.
This is where I used to play football in Adidas shorts, with sexy legs and a six-pack. I was fourteen and showed off to the girls. I wasn’t great but that didn’t matter because they thought I was the best footballer in the world. When it was dark, we came here to smoke cigarettes and drink beer because this was our secret place.
A few years later I ended up in London and played for an amateur team which thought that I had a brilliant attitude and a bit of skill. And the girls still thought that I was a catch. But my attention had wandered. When I met an Italian boy called Nico, he persuaded me to move to Perugia with him.
I played for a small local team with black curly-haired boys who wore Kappa shorts, and they were the ones who had tanned legs and six-packs. I was a carthorse, and they were young stallions who flirted mischievously and called me ‘ragazzo gay’ – ‘gay boy’.
Now I have come back to see where the adventure began.
There are no younger versions of me anymore, no adoring girls, only long grass and trees. I sit alone on a bench, and a young guy walks by before heading into the undergrowth. He looks back and I know he wants me to follow so I decide that I will.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 