“Strangely, his name was Jean, which he pronounced as the French do, and although just turned 17, he had already read Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, and believed he was reincarnated from someone who died of an o.d. in 1979 at Studio 54. He knew way too much about that infamous club, and about infamy in general.”
The ‘bicycle thief’ of Manhattan’s West 14th Street Pier/
Fred H. Berger/Propaganda Magazine/Winter 1999
I am in a barber’s shop. I tap on my phone. A few minutes to write something. Anything.
The door opens and mother and son walk in. She is miserable. Poker face. He is cheerful. About fourteen or fifteen.
I am more interested in writing a paragraph. The words are good, and I step into my creation.
When I look up, the boy is watching me, grinning. Poker face glares at nothing. I go back to my phone and write some more.
Five minutes pass. I look up and he is still looking at me. And I think, I am watching you, watching me.
I chat shit with the guy who cuts my hair. When he is finished, I make to leave.
The boy smiles and scrutinises me, but Poker Face scowls.
And just as I am about to walk out the door, cheeky grin crosses his legs, and now I am certain.
I want to say to his hideous mother that her son is gay. But if I do, she will probably cry.
Last night I had a dream.
I dreamt that I was a lonely old man living in a rundown flat in an unfamiliar city. I dozed in a battered old armchair, and the doorbell rang. I dragged my old bones and looked out of the window. Outside there were dozens of young men. All of them handsome and athletic. These boys looked vaguely familiar. I excitedly waved them up.
They walked through the door into the gloomy room. But wait. What’s this? These weren’t young boys. Instead, a procession of old men walked in. Unkempt old men. Fat and bald. Like me. I stared at them. Such disappointment.
And then I realised that these were people I had once loved, liked, and given into temptation.
But amongst them was a young man in his twenties, and I was quite taken with him. I asked him why he was with these old men.
“My name was Tom,” he said. “And you were someone I once loved. You were the only one I ever loved. But you ignored me because you said I wasn’t good enough. I vowed that when I died, and I died young, that one day I would come back and show you what you missed.”
All the old men laughed and jeered.
Archer wants to be a model and writer but will fail at both because he is too shy. Archer tells me he has completed a photo shoot where he had to dress as a 1920s lad. He asks me if I would like to see the photos. Back at his apartment I tell him the photos are good, and when he shows me his writing I am impressed. But I am struck by the fact that Archer sucks his thumb like a child and tells me he has an addiction for unrequited love and loves the pain of romantic rejection. He likens it to a craving for cocaine. There are always secrets that need to be discovered.
Alfie is back. He turns up in the most surprising places and wants to sit and talk and show you the photos on his phone. Young Alfie, smooth-skinned, suntanned, and who flaunts himself in front of you. Mysterious little Alfie who makes you feel warm and good. But Alfie is young, and no matter how much I think he is attractive, I also think that little Alfie is just wanting someone older and stable to talk with. He is wrong because I’ll never be that person.
There is a moment when you have spent hours talking to people, and they introduce you to friends, and you think that life can get no better. But then, they are all gone, and you are on your own feeling embarrassed and lonely, and that is when life can get no worse.
I see something written by somebody else, and like it. But I will forget the words, and they will be gone. I shall put them here. When I am old, and remember nothing, I will know that they didn’t get lost.
“When one is beyond love, where does pleasure lie? What does one do, seeing the lustful, disrespectful world going about its business, the young up one another’s arse? Was there ever an end to it, this irresistible, normal, subnormal craving for sex? Or did it go tauntingly on?”
Alan Hollinghurst/The Swimming Pool Library
You came from the council estate, and we respected one another. One summer, when we were kids, we played football and afterwards lay on the grass. I couldn’t take my eyes off your legs. You asked me if I was a faggot. I said no. You laughed, and rolled on top of me, and I remember that sticky body. You told me you’d give me what I wanted. You never did, and we grew apart. Years later, I met you in a bar, and we agreed to meet up for a drink, but you never turned up. Then I heard you were in prison after robbing a Post Office.
There is a boy in a wheelchair, and he’s dressed in a hospital gown and plays the guitar. There might be nothing underneath that flimsy gown, but he does wear black socks. I always associate black socks with black moods, and I recognise that I permanently wear black socks.
The surroundings are bleak. An abandoned room with plaster dropping from its walls, and there is a floor lamp, with a tassel shade, like the one our parents had in the living room.
This is going to be a serious music video, but I ignore it, as I do most social media posts. What somebody else likes, doesn’t mean that I will like it too.
But something had piqued my interest and I listened to the song on Spotify instead.
“Hi there Ren. It’s been a little while. Did you miss me? You thought you’d buried me, didn’t you? Risky… Because I always come back.” The voice is weird.
“Hi Ren. I’ve been taking some time to be distant. I’ve been taking some time to be still. I’ve been taking some time to be by myself. Since my therapist told me I’m ill.” This voice is that of boyish innocence.
Ren sings in two mind sets. A song between two people but always the same person. ‘Sick Ren’, the one that suffered illness, depression, and doubt, and ‘Now Ren’, who got better, writes, plays guitar, sings, raps, and makes videos. A lot of his work is about his nightmarish experience.
“When I was 17 years old, I shouted out into an empty room. Into a blank canvas, that I would defeat the forces of evil, and for the next 10 years of my life I suffered the consequences…”
Afterwards, I watch the video, in which Ren switches between alter egos, and there is that fine line between sickness and health, and a fear that never goes away. That one day it might come back.
Dig deeper and you find a teenager who got a record deal and lost it when he fell sick with a mystery illness that took away a dream. There is an old YouTube video where teenage Ren speaks from the prison of his bedroom, and the trepidation that he might have been about to give up.
The illness was diagnosed as Lyme disease and after a stem cell transplant, he returned to the ‘world of the living.’ But the damage was done, it played with his mind, and we see an insecure young man.
This is performance art, and grown-up Ren jumps from the screen and works his way into your conscience.
There is mental illness in all of us. I see it in myself, and I see it in other people.
I’ve since watched interviews with Ren, and I see misery and torment, and I see my friend Liam, who I first met when he threw his skateboard into a bush so that nobody would steal it while he slipped into a bar for a drink.
I soon recognised that alcohol was used to numb his troubled mind.
When he is sober, Liam talks good sense. When he is drunk, you struggle to understand his mind set. And he can never look you in the eye, because he might see you backing away.
All the time, you think that there might be a key to end this misery, but that key is lost behind another locked door.
But occasionally, there is a glimpse of what lay beneath.
“I should go to bed,” he says. “But I think I’ll have another drink before I go.”
“I think you should go now.”
“But I don’t have a bed I like.”
“Then you can share my bed.”
“Will there be lots of cuddles?”
“I always give lots of cuddles.”
“I like lots of cuddles.”
Liam never gets those cuddles because I won’t let him anywhere near me and then I feel guilty.
But one day, I would like to think that Liam, like Ren, will move into the light.
***
“I was walking down a pavement after jumping out my mum’s car in a crossroads in a moment of frustration and distress with my condition. I was trying to run from myself. What appeared to be a homeless man with a dark complexion approached me and asked me what was wrong. I explained that I had been sick most my life, and I wasn’t sure I had the strength to continue. He looked at me and smiled and told me ‘Everything is going to be okay in the end Ren.’ I had not told him my name. There was something so overpoweringly sincere about this simple message, which brought with it an overwhelming feeling of inner peace, and in a flash, he vanished.” – Ren
“Too much self-centred attitude, you see, brings, you see, isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centred attitude is the source of suffering.”
Somebody once said to me, “I bet you enjoy your privacy.” I didn’t reply.
Because there is a downside to being the person you are. It is only recently that I realised that people are in awe of me. They are afraid. They want to talk. But they daren’t.
And you end up being on your own wishing that somebody, anybody, will be brave enough to sit down beside you and hold a conversation.
But they never do.
“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain.”
I messaged bad boy Jamie and told him that I missed him. But he was probably asleep and never answered.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 