After a day of resting my poor foot Andrew and I decided to go to Hollywood. Not particularly searching for a party but interested by the prospect. We met my friend Samantha and her super cute actor friend for dinner.
Hollywood seemed unreasonably quiet after the VMA’s last night. The Chateau looked busy, Sunset Tower was rockin’. The SHLA just right. I have no idea where everyone was…but where ever they were I wasn’t with them.
We did, however, bump into Adele with whom I was uncharacteristically star struck.
She was surrounded by burly security men and has a booming, luxurious speaking voice, a huge presence. Like a tiny field mouse I told her how wonderful she was and she in turn asked if I had any Marlborough Lights.
My briefest brush with Adele.
Now, I am kinda sick of being told that I am name-dropping every time I tell you who I meet or bump into. It’s Hollywood! The town is packed with names. I am a small town British boy who, at those moments, wonders how he ever gets to have so much fun.
Whenever I tell you about who I meet it’s not to self aggrandize. I thought you might be interested? No?
I saw this: a very drunk woman wearing Christian Louboutin shoes being hauled into a limousine by her uniformed driver.
Vomiting over the very same shoes that would have paid most of my utilities for a whole month.
The driver looked understandably perplexed.
There seems to be some confusion about my state of mind at present. Just to clear things up: Despite my imminent trip to NYC to see Jake in court I am actually very content, happy even. Part of that happiness comes from being at peace with the idea that…I am unlikely to ever have another relationship. Ever.
Why? Because I am impossible…that’s why.
That doesn’t mean I want to have a million hook ups…I don’t. Let’s face it..I have always loved the fantasy more than the reality. A real person by my side? I can’t do it.
I know lots of straight batchelors my age.
As I said the last time I wrote my blog, having a boy friend would be like working in an office. Do you know what I mean? I am not that guy. Unemployable maybe? Probably. Unloveable? Well, probably not…but incapable of having a relationship. Incapable of accepting love.
I am listening to Adele. Remembering what it felt to be in love. Thank God that’s over. Like sticking your hand in the fire.
When I was a kid my Grandmother and I found a diamond brooch. She handed it to the police. All my life I couldn’t understand why she did that. Now I do.
Meeting Jake was like finding that diamond brooch in the street. It wasn’t mine to have yet I did not want to give it up. It was beautiful and sparkled in the night. But what’s a man to do with such a thing? I couldn’t wear it. I had to give it back. Unwillingly.
So, I am happy. Can you understand that? I don’t think you can.
50 years ago this month my Mother, eight months pregnant, was scrubbing floors for nuns at a catholic ‘Mother and Baby’ home in the depths of rural Kent. For 6 months, this teenage girl, had undergone an emotionally disfiguring baptism of shame.
The young girls in this Catholic facility were persuaded that for their acts of fornication and subsequent pregnancies they should be punished before God and their unborn, bastard children maligned.
This penance would not edify my Mother. She would not repent. She had already glimpsed the burgeoning freedoms of post-war Britain. She had met a rich, well-dressed, exotic, Persian boy who drove a sports car and had given herself to him. She was aspirational, a teenage girl with an appetite for the modern world. She wanted what he had, the freedom he had but he wanted less from her than she from him and after moments of unbridled passion she was pregnant and abandoned. One can only imagine how dreadful she felt telling her Edwardian parents that she was carrying me, knowing that her life would never be the same again.
My grandmother, disgusted by her willful daughter’s precocious ambition, spoke to a priest who organized seven long months of incarceration at the Mother and Baby home where she would be forced to abandon her dreams in exchange for shame, resentment and fear.
My grandparents abandoned her to her fate. During the 7 months she was sent away they did not visit her once. After I was born they accepted her home begrudgingly.
Most of the girls would give up their babies. Some of them willingly some, like my mother, unwillingly.
She could not breastfeed me. I refused to suckle. Perhaps I already knew that life was not worth living? The nuns insisted and forced me onto her nipple. My mother left me behind at the Mother and Baby home to be adopted but fate or circumstance or racism intervened. I could not be adopted. My skin was olive toned, my hair curly, my eyes jet black. It was obvious to all the prospective parents who viewed me during the time I was offered up for adoption that I would not fit invisibly into any nice, white family.
By July the 8th 1960 the day of my birth the door had well and truly shut on the promises of the age.
Remember, during the first few months of the 1960’s my mother was unaware that this decade in the United Kingdom would be described variously as ‘swinging’, ‘progressive’ and ‘free’.
What of these nuns now? These Brides of Christ? Where was Jesus when all of this was going on? Where was the love of God?
My Mother was neither free to keep me even though she begged to do so and the home I would eventually end up in, although loving, was certainly not progressive nor swinging.
My Grandmother, in a rare moment of charity, decided to go fetch me and I ended up, once again, with my teenage mother and her mother and her mother in a small, semi-detached house in a genteel seaside town. Besides these three women I lived with my two aunts and my sickly grandfather. Victorian Herne Bay was, was at that time, still enjoying the benefit of the second longest pier in England, a bandstand and the cavernous Kings Hall where polite tea dances were held.
mother
There are photographs of me ensconced in the bosom of this dysfunctional family. I was the son my grandfather never let my grandmother have. She doted on me, walked me through the streets come rain or shine. Then, she let me go.
During the darkest days of my childhood I would try to get back to that house. A house I knew and loved but when I got there it was never the house I remembered. She sent me back again and again.
I lived there for two years until my mother married a local lad and we moved to Whitstable. My Grandmother was thrilled to have her sullied daughter married. It was, in fact, against all the odds. She was ‘taken off my hands’ my Grandmother later told me.
50 years ago. 50 years. I have lied about my age for so long that I am in shock when I type those words. The number has come too soon. I am not prepared to be this old nor was I ever expecting it. Shocking! Why did I never expect to live? On many occasions during my childhood I expected to die at the hands of my angry step-father.
When I finally escaped that man I sought out equally destructive situations.
I have been hankering after the long sleep since I was born.
As I sit at my desk in Los Angeles my greatest triumph, if at all my only triumph, has been to survive. To avoid the catastrophic blow that I expected every day. I may not have fulfilled my potential but I have certainly achieved more than I ever expected, more than I was told to expect. In spite of my temper, my addictions, my desire to take up where my murderous step-father left off I am alive!
It is only recently that I tentatively acknowledged that life must be lived.
For as long as I can remember I have imagined and reimagined my death. For long as I have flown in aeroplanes I have reveled in turbulence. As often as I have picked up strange, beautiful and dangerous men I have wished death come to me.
Shame has cast such a deep shadow over me that all I ever managed to do is struggle blindly down life’s treacherous path. Stumbling into people along the way who could see. Many of those people realizing that I was blind did not help without benefit to themselves. Many of those people, when I understood what monsters they were, were shocked when I ferociously bit their hand off up to the elbow.
Perhaps this is why I stayed close to my family home, a family that did not want me. Even to this day I hanker after Whitstable. There are still elderly parents of friends my age who remember the small boy who escaped his home whenever he could and seek refuge in theirs.
My Father 1960
During the next month I am going to write an abridged memoir. We know the beginning and most of you know where I am right now. So, as I make my way East through New York and Paris back to my old hometown of Whitstable I will let you know what I remember, what I care to remember from the last 50 years.
Today, the little dog is on my bed waiting to walk through the Californian sun to our local coffee shop. There are people there who know me from the television. People who might wave a tentative hello. Tonight I may hear from the man I love and tell him so without shame or expectation. It’s not much to ask is it? To be loved, to love. To be loved..to love?
