Tag: New York

Categories
Hollywood

New Beginnings/Happy Endings

I sometimes wonder if it is me or the planets that determine my relationship with the world?

With Venus in retrograde (huh?) I have a lightened spirit today.

Actually, regardless of the orbiting planets, nothing has really changed other than the volume of the conspiring demons in my head.

Let’s do a little inventory.

Firstly, having Ashley living at the house makes everything more fun.  The truth is if she can get to me with coffee and fags before I write my blog the whole tenor of this blog changes significantly.  I tend not to dwell on Jake for instance….who ever that (Jake) is…so much time has passed since we communicated I am just left with a few shards of unresolved resentments and a few hundred pictures of him in various states of undress.

What the hell were we doing together?  Two desperate renegades or two men who had a genuine connection that I should learn to honor?  If I compare him to the men I meet now, have met..then the attraction is obvious!  I loved his pickled brain, his logic, I was even attracted to the shadow in which he lived as it heightened the emotional chiaroscuro.

I hope I get to the point when I can think about him fondly, not skip over the many, many pictures of him in my photo library, not endlessly relive the betrayal,  get some perspective….some forgiveness.  What am I writing?  Have I forgiven him?

Today I absolve you Mr. B.  Just for today.

So, what forced me out of the hideous funk?

Getting out of the house sure does help.

Yesterday,  JA arrived after the therapy group that we were meant to go to together but I haven’t been to for some time.  We drove to PC Greens and bought a delicious lunch.  I saw Sarah.  We hugged.  I cooked two steaks on the grill and tossed organic vine tomatoes and spinach together with a salty vinaigrette.  We sat on the terrace overlooking the sea and ate it.

I have this idea for a film.  The sort of idea that I know will end up on the screen.  I may not write it myself or even direct it but I sure am going to be its midwife.

I tentatively discussed the idea with JA.  He loved it!

So, after we talked it through I offered to write the treatment and finish it by the end of the week.  A little research..but mostly it’s there in my fingers waiting to be written.

I spent a little time on a gay hook up site and arranged to meet a particularly attractive young man in West H’wood.  We shall call him Manhunt date No. 8.  JA also invited friends.  One of his friends turned out to be a small, timid, New York Jew.   29-years-old.   Talent agent.  Very intelligent.  SOUND FAMILIAR?  I laughed at how God plays games with the heart.  I was very nice to the NYC Jewish guy and knew that had I not gone through what I had just so recently been through I might have gotten further involved.

After all..a good brain is worth a thousand abs.

No.

My hook-up arrived, tall, willowy, perfect face and body..lovely demeanor.   The attraction was mutual and before very long we were headed toward Malibu.  I invited him home on the understanding that I did not want to have sex but after a few hours asleep I woke up feeling like breaking that particular promise.  The problem is: the passion that Jake and I shared in the bedroom/forest/shower does not transfer easily to another.   Our passion was based on knowing each other.  A magnetic attraction.  A profound level of connection.

Sexually, I am very aggressive.  I am not interested in being taken.  Never have been.  I know what I wanted at dawn but I also knew what I was doing: bringing the passion I shared with Jake into another bedroom…it simply does not work.

By the time Ashley brewed the coffee this morning the beautiful stranger was gone.  Will I see him again?  No idea.  Up to him really.

Birthday party today.  I WILL go.  Eli Roth etc.  Maybe fun.

Of course I am thinking about the treacherously intelligent agent.  Funny little man.

I did not hear back from my old love yesterday.  He is in Vegas so probably very busy.  I would adore to see him but strangely just having a brief chat on the phone gave me confidence that there is always closure however long it takes.

Then, when the resentments have been laid to rest, only love remains.

I have a treatment to write.  Let’s see if I can write the diary of a film getting made with the same verve as I have Jake these past nine months?

A film getting made rather than a doomed love affair?  I don’t doubt that some of you will be interested in this process but not nearly so much as you were in my imploding relationship.

Everybody loves a train wreck..

Categories
Gay

East Village!

Veselka, 9th St.  East Village.  NYC

Leon drove me and the art to LAX.  The little dog loves his traveling bag and climbed into it willingly.

The flight arrived 55 minutes early at JFK.   5am.  I was knackered.  We dragged the art onto a trolley and into a cab then dropped it off at Phillips.  I stayed there for an hour drinking coffee and ate a pain au chocolat.   I sat on my own reading The Times waiting for Dan to wake up so I could drag my sorry ass over to the East Village.  Finally we just walked from 9th Ave.  It was so GOOD to be back in NYC…after the operation I will be here full-time.

The Little Dog was determined to explore Tompkins Square Park so I acquiesced and he got his wish and stared at squirrels for an hour until I just had to go home and rest.

By 10 I dropped off art at the auctioneer.  Very cute lighting man to gawp at prepping a fashion week party.  The whole area around Meat Packing ALIVE with fashion week events.  Bumped into my friend Liz who invited me to Mulberry party.

Took cab back home and slept until 3 when I met the first of my Manhunt dates.  Date 1.  Nice guy, did not misrepresented himself in any way.  Charming. If I had been JB I would have had sex with him but I am not JB so we had coffee and went for a long walk around the East Village.  Not much eye contact but I think that might have been my fault.

At 6ish I went home and took more of a nap.  Dan arrived at 7.30 and we had dinner at Westville where I saw you know who’s ex.  That was rather fascinating.  We were obviously aware of each other but were not going to swap war stories any time soon.

Walked to Mulberry party where I had a blast being told how good I looked by old friends.  I have lost a lot of weight..mainly because I have been so unhappy-but this seems to have paid off!

Saw Preston and snuggled with him.  He’s an ex of mine from LA.

Walked home, ate frozen yogurt.  Cute man stopped me in the street and made me feel even better about myself.

This morning I had manhunt date number 2 with very sweet Brazilian man who said that I come off as the sort of bloke who has a very active sex life. HAHAHAHA.  That’s FUNNY!  I told him my miserable fuck count (12 people) and he was shocked.

JB has probably had 12 fucks in one week.  More.

Anyway, everyone I am meeting could be a friend…maybe more but to tell you the truth I am just not feeling it.   After feeling so connected with JB and so loving and SO intellectually compatible…I don’t know if I will ever feel that again for anyone.

Busy day ahead.

Onward and Upward!

Categories
Auto Biography Fashion Film Gay Whitstable

Manifest Destiny

As I was stacking boxes for my move I found a whole heap of diaries from the 1980’s.   The first day to day diary I kept was in 1982 and that was primarily because life had become so exciting.

We open the first book on this day September 5th, 1982.  I am 22 years old.

I am in Greece, on the island of Spetses staying with Sir John and Lady Russell.   I am still, at this time, Lord Rendlesham and have flown from Paris to Athens with an older nobleman called Guy de la Bedoyere of whom I had tired.

It was Guy’s Turner that I had marveled in Paris a few days earlier and whose butler, much to my horror, had washed in a washing machine my new Crolla ties.

The magazine Harper’s Bazzar had published the pictures of my infamous birthday party thrown for me by Scott Crolla at the Almeida Theatre.  Word was just reaching me in Greece that people were not at all happy.  Not at all.

If you click on the diary pages you can read the original entries.

I am in love with a beautiful Swiss boy called Robert and it is he that I wave goodbye to at the beginning of the entry.

The following year September 1983 there is no diary entry until I am released from prison on the 18th November.

September 1984 I am in rehearsal for Pornography: a Spectacle at the ICA in London.   There are huge articles about us all in Time Out, The Face and a now defunct London mag called City Limits.  I am living in Balham with a girl called Victoria.  By day I am in a play about gay pornography and by night I sleep with what was effectively my girlfriend.   So was the complexity of my life.  “Every gesture must be full and complete.” says Neil.  Neil Bartlett, director of the show.   During these days he and I began to fall out.  Irrevocably as it turned out.  When we left each other in Toronto months later after our North American tour we would never speak again.

September 1985 I am writing whilst stuck in a tunnel under the alps on a train from Paris to Venice.  My and Ivan Cratwright’s great adventure to Venice.  Staying, en route with Fred Hughes in Paris.

The diary for 1986 was missing but now found.  I will transcribe the entry.  I am yet again in another heterosexual relationship with a woman called Louise.  Why?

“Oh dear, I am in The General Trading Company off Sloan Square – Louise by my side.  Firstly I did not expect the Bahamian bombshell to come back to Whitstable to see me.  I rather thought that she might have given me a miss.

Yesterday before Louise arrived my pinks from Kingstone (?) Cottage arrived, they came to me in a brown cardboard box wrapped in local newspaper.  I planted them carefully, laying a foundation of stones for good drainage and surrounded the root system with peat. Maria helped out the best she could but spent the best part of yesterday drawing on the beach.   The day before that too she had worked hard on minimalist drawings incorporating the seascape – noticeably the foreshore and the horizon, terribly witty references to dead fish – (?) a family with prawn.

Ivan (Cartwright), we collected him from Whitstable station – Korda (Marshall) and I, he was in such a good frame of mind .  He prattled on about being arrested for car thieving and told a remarkable story about having been picked up on Park Lane (London) dressed only in a full length pink, synthetic fur coat, cowboy boots and a micro polka dot bikini!  He was picked up by a vast black men in a Buick.

Korda was completely freaked out by Ivan and as soon as he had the opportunity – left.  However, Ivan enchanted both Rachel (Whiteread) and (?) with his wit and intelligence.  We left for the pub far too late.  Ivan was wearing a pair of black cotton stockings, a black tee-shirt and short black sweat pants all topped off with this platinum blond hair and that face which as you know contorts like nobodies business.

We all slept late and woke early, that’s why when big bertha arrived (Louise) I was knackered.  We took off for a long adventurous but utterly fruitless journey to a closed park.  We did go to Beech House (Hospital School in Chartham)  I remembered yet again the horror of being taken there when I was a child – I remember that it was in that place that my life changed direction and I began to fight, so it was rather apt that I went there – my life again on the edge of a potential nightmare.  India,  8th October 10.15 – 9 months.   It rings in my ears.

As we drove to London yesterday Louise and (?) wrote that evening’s narrative.  For she as an eye for the ironic.  Firstly we locked ourselves out of Louise’s car and house then we saw the corpse of a man freshly killed, his legs crossed at the ankles, in the road.  His clothing partially hidden under a green waterproof police modesty blanket.  All of us knew that ambulances take only the living to be mended as best they can.  Death has no care.  I wondered about his family.  The pulse stopped and the narrative ending for him.  We drove slowly.  Later the image of the corpse quietened me and made me listen.

Louise is my strength whom I do not deserve.  Late last night I felt truly happy and secure.  That’s enough isn’t it?  Enough for a man who rarely lives safely, who is destined to become a lonely old man with personality problems.”

September 1987 I am a patient in the Henderson Hospital in Sutton Surrey where I spent the majority of that year.   I had a breakdown after a particularly bad bout of Hep B.  The Jay who would be fetching me from hospital is, of course, Jay Jopling.

For some odd reason I did not keep a complete diary in 1988.   I am not fully well from my breakdown but have decided to go to New York to see Ana Corbero and Colin Cawdor.  Paul Benny the artist was also staying in the huge apartment.  An entire floor of a converted girls school just over the Williamsburg Bridge.

There is no entry for these dates in 1989.

1990, my thirtieth year.  Living in Chelsea with Phillipa having what looks like a rather glamorous time.

1991 Coppers Bottom has opened at Sadler’s Wells.  Karen, the lead actress is threatening to walk.  I am now living with Anthony H. in South London.

1992 Tim and I are laughing about Damien Hirst not winning the Turner Prize that he seemed so certain to win.  I rather cruelly called Jay and told him how sorry I was whilst sniggering with Tim.

Not long before I get sober.  Just another 5 years.

After 1992 I kept a journal less and less.  I began every year enthusiastically writing everyday like I do now in the blog but by July had lost interest or life was simply too overwhelming.

Anyway, that was fun?

Categories
Travel

Arizona

Stopping over in Phoenix.  The very best thing about this airport..free wi-fi.  Genuinely free.  Flight to Arizona on route to Burbank.    Excruciatingly early flight from Newark, but Newark seems so much closer to Manhattan than JFK.  It only took 15 mins. to get from the East Village to bag drop off in the rather elegantly designed 70’s terminal.

The flight promised to be bumpy but is anything but.  Smooth, calm, good coffee and cute neighbors.

Woke up early yesterday.  Too early.  Walked around Tompkin Square Park with the dog who just freezes when ever he sees a squirrel, transfixed by so many squirrels in the trees.  Once in the park he sits rather regally with me and refuses to run around with other dogs unless there is some sort of barking palava going on and then he’ll join in.

I met a very sweet man in the dog park yesterday, Greg.  He has a wire-haired puppy, incredibly good-looking with big brown eyes.   Greg or the dog?   New York is chock full of very sexy looking people and dogs.

On the walk home from the West Village to the East Village last night I was stopped by a very nice man who chatted with me and Dan and gave me his email address.  It is so very good for the soul to be noticed, looked at, validated – although I must keep that sort of behavior in check.  I imagine that the hunt for a bf is on again.

So, what of the mysterious travelling companion?   The one who loathes me writing about him?  Well, we are friends I suppose!   He is very supportive and helpful and encouraging.  He is off with his parents enjoying his family vacation.   That’s all there is to say.  We will see.  No plans to see each other any time soon.

I think that the little dog may just have farted..though I think it may be the humans in the row in front.  I spoke too soon about how comfortable this flight is.

Yesterday, after Greg and the dog park and coffee with Anna at Mud I had a busy day in the city.  I had morning meeting with auction house about selling the rest of my art, stopped in at Alexander McQueen and tried on a pair of terribly expensive trousers that I could not justify buying.   Dogs still interdit at Soho House so had lunch with Michael at the dog friendly Mercer, we bumped into Nadine Johnstone and her PR crew then randomly Meg Ryan who I had met at TED event last year.  That woman needs a job!  She looks great.

After lunch I had a quick nap, took dog for walk, had first of two dinners at the Hummus Place then met Dan over on West 4th for second dinner.

When I opened my email I found an offer to perform in another film!  Two in as many months.  I dare not think about acting as a late start career as it can be so painfully, miserably tough.  Actually, talked about just this issue with John Lyons last night.  He is off to London today to see Cary F’s director’s cut of Jane Eyre.  I would love to be a fly on the wall for that screening.

Anyway, let’s talk about me being an actor.  If I pull it off and make a career from it I would have come full circle as that, my dear readers, is how I started.    I am certainly unable to write at the moment.  I need to get out of my head and be a human doing rather than a human being.    Thinking too much causes me too much sadness and perhaps this writer’s block is just a sign!  Gods way of getting me out of the house and away from my laptop.

I really did speak too soon!  The flight is bumpy.  Yuk.

Categories
Dogs Gay Hollywood Malibu Travel

Little Dog? We eat those in our country..

Amelia (Lady Rizo)

Just spilled water all over my lap top which after a few shakes is now working again.  So clumsy today.  All over the place.

Firstly, I have to tell you THIS:  The NYC heat is frying my brain.

Now, I must tell you this:

I have been sitting on/keeping from you an insane and shocking moment the past couple of months.  I just didn’t know how or if I should even mention it.

One of my freaky Hollywood neighbors text me after we had dinner before I left California asking if I had ever ‘been intimate with the little dog?’ it was NOT a joke.

He intimated that he had ‘feelings’ for his kitten.

I really didn’t know what to do.

I urged him to get help.

This is just one of the many reasons I don’t want to go back to LA.  I missed my flight – overslept.  Had to buy another ticket.  It’s all the same.  There must be more insane/lonely/desperate people per square mile in LA than any other city in the USA.

I know that this might sound a bit racist but every time a Korean looks at the little dog I wonder if they are thinking what sauce they would eat him with.  Once, outside the Mud Cafe on 9th a Korean told me with a smug smile that she could not understand our absurd preoccupation with an animal that they grill.

Saw the Kids are Alright yesterday evening with Amelia.  We had a lovely lunch in Williamsburg.  We made plans after her genius performance at Joe’s Pub the previous night.  I had to walk over the boiling hot Williamsburg Bridge as it was unexpectedly closed to traffic.  Walking over the bridge made it all the more exciting adventure.

After our lovely lunch in Williamsburg– omelets and watermelon/mint juice we, Amelia and I hunted the shops for exciting sale items.  I bought socks and underwear at the 70% off Paul Smith Shop.

This is the performance from the night before:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtbfBrHH3KU]

 

Saw Amelia perform Lady Rizo with Jake.  He loved the show.

Afterwards we hung with Amelia and her husband at a small bar on Lafayette.

The following afternoon me and Jake bid our adieu.  I have absolutely no idea if or when we will see each other ever again.  We have not made plans.  We will see each other if it feels right I suppose.

Last night, the streets were boiling hot and humid.  At night the thunder, lightning and torrential rain cool everything down for a few glorious moments.

Anyway, The Kids are Alright: Annette Benning is marvelous in Lisa’s movie.  A totally convincing alcoholic dyke.   The other performances were wonderful too but Benning’s was by far my favorite..and there again was Mia Wasikowska!  Our Whitstable lunch condiment.  I assume she is well on her way to getting an Oscar, possibly next year?

Julianne Moore lacked control in A Single Man, her talent all over the place like a prolapsed labia.   Compare that asinine performance with the very genuine, tight..measured performance in the Kids Are Alright.  I would have preferred Olivia Williams of course but who the hell wouldn’t?

My ONLY gripe with the movie was the wholly unresolved issue of Ruffalo’s character who just vanished in a puff of metrosexual angst, ferociously seen off by Benning’s well observed impression of an alpha male.  Unfairly berating Ruffalo on her doorstep, telling him that he was an ‘interloper’.

He was the sperm donor.  After all they had been through, he should have been included in the family at the end of the movie.  The kids wanted a relationship with him.  It seemed unfair and churlish to jettison his character..although probably quite realistic.  After all, it was they that contacted him.  Moore who seduced him, Benning who suggested the ill-fated dinner at his house etc. etc.

I wish, when I had found my real dad he had been like Mark Ruffalo rather than the lying villain on offer.

Somebody suggested that if it had been a straight couple who had cheated with a surrogate mother..would the mother be part of the family?  Well,  if the kids wanted her..I suppose so.  It posed many interesting and complex questions about what family means.   What it could mean.

I loved everything about this exquisitely crafted movie but one thing above everything else totally blew me away:  all of the characters took turns being the persecutor/rescuer/victim.  Genius.  There was so much at stake for all of them.

Saturday after the movie met Ian at Soho House NYC, which was jammed with gays.  One particularly drunk, gay in swim short was making a total fool of himself.  He should have been chucked out but everyone was a bit scared of the repercussions I think.  Ate pork chops.  Took cab to The Phoenix, a gay bar in East Village.  Drank sickly diet coke.  Met 20-year-old Persian boy.  Nice for the ego.

This morning I saw Mike Z, a friend from LA, at the park whilst walking our dogs.  Now I am waiting on him to come pick me up for lunch.  He may forget.  I am really hungry.  Ravenous.

Ended up eating polish sausage on my own.  Never trust a drinker to do what they agree to do.

Busy week ahead.  No idea what’s in store.  All I know is that once I get home I am going directly to the new road to see it being built.  I can’t wait.

Categories
Dogs Fashion Gay Travel

St Tropez Redux/Cap d’Antibes

 

Understandably I totally erased from my memory the briefest of moments we spent in St Tropez.

There is something you should definitely know about St Tropez:  St Tropez is shit.

Two miserable hours in what could only he described as a hot Margate – the tackiest of British seaside towns.

Like Margate there were miserable old ladies with dyed, fluffy blond hair cut short over ruddy complexions eating styrene trays of limp French fries.

Crowds of hopeful ‘who wants to be a millionaire’ types sit silently looking over at the multimillion dollar yachts hoping, one assumes, that they will glimpse the filthy rich (with whom we were meant to stay) eating their three-leaf salads served by lithe flunkies.

In between the vulgar, plastic looking yachts and their brasserie bound spectators a torrent of fetid, badly dressed tourists divide the audience from their theatre.  Like an open sewer running through what once was paradise.

We drank coffee behind a defunct HSBC.  It was interesting that none of the ATM’s worked in a place that relies so profoundly on the buck, the yen, the mark and the pound.

Our original plan had included an extended stay in St Tropez but thankfully we did not.

Our final days on the Cote d’Azure were, at times, a little sad. Not only was our nearly month away together drawing to a close but after spending every single waking hour with one other person one becomes slightly worn by that other person..even if one really loves them.

In nearly three weeks we had traversed major cities in three countries and two continents with a little dog, far too much luggage (my fault) and my BIG BIRTHDAY.

Before we left Europe we had one final excursion to Cap d’Antibes.

As St Tropez is shit, Antibes is gorgeous.   We spent hours exploring this authentic little port.  This is what, I assume, St Tropez used to be like before Roger Vadim and Brigitte Bardot made it famous.  I wonder if this travesty will blight my darling Whitstable, made vile by it’s own success?  For that I feel partly responsible.

We happily wandered the tiny, cobbled streets until dusk then found a divine little restaurant called La Taverne du Safranier and ate St Pierre and Frito Musto.  The crowd: reassuringly posh.

On our drive back to Cannes we saw the tail end of the international firework festival exploding over the sea.  The beaches were crammed with half-naked young people grilling on makeshift bbq and playing unnamed ball games.

The train to the airport the following morning he fell asleep on my shoulder and when he woke up we chatted to a handsome, 18-year-old musician called Clovis.

The flight home was a little uncomfortable but once we landed we were swiftly processed through customs and immigration.

I watched four films on the plane:

Tom Ford’s A Single Man is without doubt one of the most indulgent movies ever made.  Tom should be an art director rather than a film director?   An exercise in style over substance.  The attention to detail (art direction and costume) was painful– though not quite as painful as the total lack of any human emotion throughout the entire movie.

Brokeback Mountain was also about gay men experiencing loss and stifled emotions.  The differance?  Brokeback is a wonderfully human film told with charm and compassion and a Single Man is not.  It’s odd isn’t it that two inarticulate cowboys made me cry buckets whilst an uptight English Professor with excellent taste could not.

Stephen Jones, the milliner, mentioned in an article for Vogue that Ford had lent heavily on Madonna during the making of the film and that is why it is perhaps so profoundly flawed.   There was some nice editing and camera work but it was like a huge fragrance commercial rather than a film about loss and love and yearning.

Irritatingly there is an unreasonable death..the protagonist: this SINGLE MAN could not grieve and make his partner’s death a part of his life…oh no..he had to die.

The boys he encountered remained unkissed and unfucked but in Ford’s world as long as your shirts are well pressed and you are drinking from a Lucy Rie mug…don’t get me started.  Even watching him take a shit..you just KNEW his shit didn’t smell of anything other than vetiver.

There was something chaste, restrained and totally chic about it all..and I use the word chic pejoratively, although I never, ever thought I would.

There were rather weak attempts at some polemic as Firth spars with Julianne Moore about the sanctity of gay love and his students about Aldous Huxley.

Firth’s performance is worth noting.  Unlike many others (I am not being deliberately contrary) who thought his performance ‘amazing’ it was Firth’s disregard, disconnect with/for the character he was playing that amazed me.  What a straight person thinks a gay person is.  The oft applauded and often awarded performance (as well-intentioned as it might have been) of a reserved gay English gentleman is in fact, like the rest of the film, totally heartless.

My guess is he actually had very little respect for Ford as a director who most certainly had no idea how to communicate with a classically trained genius like Firth.

After A Single Man I saw An Education again which is well worth seeing a second time and as it is so damned good.  Funny, well put together, brilliantly acted.

An Education followed by I love You Phillip Morris, which is definitely my kind of movie.  If you can…SEE IT!!!

He reminded me when I finished writing this that we also saw Polanski’s Ghost. What a load of old bollocks.

Disgorged at JFK.

10th street was lovely to come home to and Dan and I sat together as I debriefed him on the preceding three weeks.

Here I am back in New York.  The streets are hot and humid; the parks are jammed with sturdy men in silky shorts with huge smiles.   I am drawn to want to befriend all of them.

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Categories
Dogs Travel Whitstable

New York/Paris/London

I left LA last week (July 2nd) though it actually feels like months ago, so much has happened.   I flew into JFK with bags and dog and chaos.  He was waiting for me and whisked me off to a beautiful house set in perfect woodland and rolling lawns.

We ate and walked and talked.  I never tire of listening to him.   We have done our fair share of soul-searching these past few months and now it is time to have a few laughs.   I know that at the back of his mind he worries, that he is not truly free.

I loved the countryside and delightful clapboard houses on the border of New York and Connecticut.

In distant, very white upstate town Katonah there were two very black gay men from the Caribbean eating a light lunch.   They were the only black people for miles around.

 

Two days later we were in a taxi back to JFK and onto one of Air France’s spectacular Airbus A380.   The huge plane was almost empty!  Deciding to fly on July 4th was a great idea.  Taking off over a million 4th July firework parties.  Fireworks exploding all around us.

The first part of the journey was not without drama as we managed to get delayed for 3 hours by a bomb scare at JFK.  The entire airport emptied out just minutes before we were about to fly.    We were herded outside and sat around smoking cigarettes and drinking water.   After a couple of hours in the sun we stampeded back into the building directly onto our planes and landed in France 6 hours later.

It is delicious to be back in Europe.  Away from the tangled life I have left behind in the USA.   Once in Paris we checked into Mama Shelter in the 20th, seconds from the cemetery Pere Lachaise.  We loved it!

 

Although I smuggled the dog into the hotel-actually we had no need as dogs, we later found out, are allowed.   The food and service were excellent.  The only vaguely irritating thing was the Internet wi-fi connection which was linked to their rather modern but baffling Apple TV.  Apart from finding it impossible to get on-line their sophisticated interconnected system meant that the TV remote would also remotely control our lap tops..hmmm.

It is so easy to concentrate on what is wrong in life or in others without noticing how beautiful things are.  The staff at the hotel were gorgeous and we drooled over them everyday.

First day of Couture shows in Paris.  We had lunch with William Stoddart at Hotel d’Amour near Pigalle.  Gosh that area has changed so much!   When I lived there with Claire Sant it was ghastly.  Last week it was wonderful.   The weather has been gorgeous everywhere we have been.

The beautiful Edouard joined us afterwards for coffee.  We had dinner with him the night before and 6 others at Italian restaurant.   Very pretty German model who was obviously rooting for Germany in the World Cup..she was tall and womanly and intelligent.  We talked France’s ignominious exit from the competition and sneered at the British teams pathetic attempt to get into the last 8.

 

Three days in Paris followed by a train ride to Calais and a ferry to Dover after a short taxi ride home to Whitstable we were sitting on the beach eating venison burgers and the travelling companion couldn’t believe how beautiful it all was and complained that I had underplayed how Whitstable really is.

 

Today there are warnings that old people may overheat.  We are going to take a train to London.

I am sitting writing this from my room overlooking the sea in Georgina’s home in Whitstable.   It was my birthday yesterday.   The day started well enough with coffee at Dave’s deli catching up on gossip and drinking his perfect latte.   I left the companion in bed.  He is not really a morning person.  We met my mother for lunch at Wheelers where Mark Stubbs the chef there continues to surpass himself-this time with delicately spiced soft shell crab.

I really had no desire to see anyone other than who was at that table.  I am certainly not interested in tangoing in front of 500 people like an eastern European gypsy.    My mum and Georgina bonded over their hatred of Asylum Seekers.  My mother pointed out that some asylum seekers were pretending to be gay so that they could stay in the country.  If it’s not the Mexican’s it’s the Eastern Europeans..there always someone to blame for never having enough.

I thought that the fear of others getting something for nothing was an American phenomena but no!  It’s British too.

After lunch Adam took my picture as part of his photographic Whitstable project and his lovely mum cut my hair.  We sat in their lush garden drinking lemonade and lusting after his gorgeous, recently tattooed, diver brother.   After the pictures were taken we walked the couple of miles home up the beach.   I have never been so happy.

When we got home the companion had a drama unfold which he needed to deal with.  When he finally tore himself away from the Internet we sat in the garden and ate dinner with Georgina.  We ate huge organic pork chops that I managed to burn on the bbq.   After dinner we sat outside the Neptune pub with Barry and other drunksters.   The dog was tired and lay on the beach and fell asleep.  The night was balmy and the sea lapped lazily over the shingle.

This morning I woke at 6am and walked the dog up to the harbor.  He loves it here.   The Greens who own the Oyster Company scrawl unfortunate notes on black boards all over their property.  Don’t do this and don’t do that. Those black boards used to be charming now they just look vicious.

Some people like to get their own way..I am one of them.  When you finally meet your match, as I seem to, it can be less than comfortable.  I am trying to be sensitive to the needs of others but I am a stubborn old fool.

As for him..the traveling companion..he’s finding his feet and I am finding mine.

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Categories
Auto Biography Death Hollywood

Bastard

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?

Categories
Malibu Rant

Paris!!

8am Malibu.  Cleaning the house.  This is my true vocation.  House cleaner and rent collector.

I rearranged the downstairs apartment so it now looks rather chic.   Loved it.  Love it.  I wish I lived downstairs and out of this huge loft.  The greatest thing and the worst thing about living here is the view.  It is magnificent, consuming and exhausting.  There is no escape from the view.

The days pass uneventfully.  A humming-bird flew into the sitting room yesterday so I gently caught it and let it free.  Lunch with Andrew and the Little Dog in Santa Monica on the beach.   Long conversation with Jake which began as I pulled onto the 10 going west and ended a few meters from Las Flores.  30 miles of conversation.  We are going to have friendly fun in Europe.    Dinner with heavily pregnant Jen and Trevor at café Habana.  I ate a pork chop.  Am cutting out all white flour from my diet this month as a ways and means to look good for my arrival in Paris.  Trevor told me that he lost his temper at some lesbians and their three off leash dogs.

Spoke with Georgina in Whitstable whose daughter Sophie was having a good old laugh in the background.   This time next month I will see them all.  Get to join in on the joke.

I felt vulnerable after speaking with Georgina.

It is hard for me to show how vulnerable I can be to anyone.

I remember eves’ dropping on a conversation my stepfather was having with my mother when I was a small boy.  He was explaining to her that he was finding the written component of some work related conference he was attending very challenging.  It was the first and only time I acknowledged that he was capable of vulnerability.   His slight, whiney voice proof that this monster of a man was anything other than granite tough.

This day next month I will be in NYC.  The following day we will be in Paris.  July in Paris.   Perfect.

What a fucking disaster LA has been for me.  A total waste of time and money.  Against nature in every way possible.  Intellectually bereft.  Creatively barren.  No hope of happiness in this monstrous place.  The only thing going for it:  the weather.  The fucking weather.  Another beautiful fucking day in paradise.

I suppose it would help if I went out more.  Like I used to? Hang out at the Chateau, Soho House etc. or simply called people I know would want to hear from me but I am winding down, getting ready to leave.    Everything is in order.  Bills paid.  Off I go.  Time to leave.  Time to pack my bag and dog.

Categories
Dogs Gay Love

i Can’t Help You

Stone

All day the Little Dog has been sick.   He is listless and miserable, his little black nose hot and dry.   I checked his gums but they seem ok.  I get scared that he might die.   The past few months would have been utterly unbearable without him.

At about 7.30 he perked up and has been right as rain ever since.  Leaping all over Eric when he arrived for hastily put together dinner.

He is snuggling in my lap as I write.

I think about the darling big dog.  My darling big dog, I miss her more than I ever did.   I still have daily, violent memories of her broken, bloody body.  Searing into my mind.    Replaying the last few moments of her life before that evil truck scraped her across the road.

My fingers angrily bang the letters of those words onto the page.

I CAN’T HELP YOU.

I blame the man driving the truck.  He did it on purpose.  He didn’t stop.  Bastard.

At moments like this I soothe myself with memories of home.  I think a great deal of England-green and pleasant land.  The Kent countryside, the buses to Canterbury, Georgina, The Goods Shed, etc. etc., I nightly drive through Clowes Wood in my semi conscious state..naked..shameless.

I remember a recurring nightmare:  I am a young boy naked in the schoolyard.  I have no idea where my clothes are or where I lost them.   I hide behind the half door in the toilets as the other children are called to class.  I stand naked in the schoolyard covering myself, the cold wind whipping grit into my eyes.  The other children sitting warm inside at their desks.

Last night as he was with me in my bed I lay thinking of how I might get home safely.  How can I get back home?  For all that raucous, interminable thinking we slept soundly.

I’ve not written a word these past few days.  Full moon blues I call it.   I lost interest in my blog as things calmed down with my (ex?) and my new friend holidayed in Italy.

I had to deal with a moving traffic violation issue that meant going to the Superior Court twice this week.  The judge was very fair and funny but going through a stop sign still cost me $550.  I have opted for community service.  The art auction last Sunday seemed to vindicate my ability to pick the winners.  Things sold mostly at the upper end of the estimate.  I bought a beautiful candle stick by a potter whose name I have forgotten.

Prevaricating.  Stifled.  Tongue-tied.

The point is:  I can’t really write down any of my true feelings.  I am in shut down mode.  I can’t do anything, move anywhere, release myself..rant or rave.  The malaise seems to affect every area of my life.

After the headiness of New York I’ve fallen into a sharp decline, my confidence at an all time low.    Dinner with friends last weekend I simply couldn’t hold my head up, my libido, my enthusiasm, my recall deserting me.  She was a very cool next generation producer.  CAA agents greeting her at our table.  Hugs and kisses.  Fast track.

I say to myself, “I am on my own with no one to focus on, no one to say that I love.”    It feels like a terrible waste.   I had some real hope!  Hope that I could travel the world with a man I was excited by.  How those dreams crumble into dust.  I am fractured by time and distance.  I am in the wrong city, in the wrong country, on the wrong fucking planet.  I am desperate for a change of circumstance.

The road that leads to the Malibu house is weeks from being repaired.  It maybe the very metaphor I am looking for.  The road to the house is being repaired so I can escape my verdant prison.   Yet every day I do my best to make it more like paradise.

I want to write about The Great BP Catastrophe but I can’t.  I want to write about anything other than me but each time I begin I am stopped by something inescapable.  I just don’t care. I don’t care about anything.  I am exhausted..spent.

Beaten by the sheer force of inequity:

BP, miserable pictures of delicate Pelican eggs smeared with crude oil.  The watered down banking regulations that caused Wall Street a collective sigh of relief. Congress about to pass an additional $32 billion to pay for war in Afghanistan yet it struggling to justify a $23 billion bill to forestall the layoff of nearly 300,000 teachers next year.

What kind of country are we?