Tag: whitstable

Categories
Love Rant

Robert Evans

Spent yesterday feeling very spirited and positive.  Things just got better and better.

Getting out of the house helps tremendously.

My Palisades 7am AA meeting set the tone for the rest of the day.  This, coupled with my no longer wearing the CLOAK OF RESENTMENT! cast off a couple of days earlier had the effect of opening my ears to the nourishing effects of a good AA meeting.

It was like taking a psychic shower.

Cleansing and salubrious.

The Bad Baby sleeps.

When I got home after my meeting I had totally forgotten that I was meant to be meeting another Manhunt man in Venice.  I dashed down the hill.  Manhunt Date No.11:  Chubby and sweet but not my cup of tea.

Whilst at breakfast I received a call from a member of my Wednesday meeting who said that my particularly violent share this past Wednesday morning had upset him and others.  Well, if we can’t talk honestly about our feelings in therapy where can we?

The ongoing effects of early abuse continues.  Wretched feelings of powerlessness.  The furies.  I talked about it graphically.   John pointed out correctly that part of why JB and I had such a connection was our master and servant…S&M…me firery…him timid arrangement.   There were indeed elements of abusive behavior carried on in our relationship that I had learned from my step-father.

I become him when the other demands it.

My hand on the back of his neck when we were driving is all at once erotic and controlling.  A man who needs a firm hand.   I attract this often into my life.

I can feel his soft skin on my fingers.  The soft hair on the back of his neck.  Let me remember these perfect moments.  There are plenty more but it’s still hard to remember them.   His birthday in NYC.  Jane Hotel.  Watching him walk.  Catching his hand in mine.  Let me remember what was good.  Thank you.

Last night!

Met J & J at SHLA for the Robert Evans screening of The Kid Stays in The Picture.  I sat with Robert DuPont at the back of the plush new Soho House screening room.  Ms DuPont was dressed as Warhol for Nikki Haskell’s Halloween party held at Truesdale.  It was all a great deal of fun.  Ashley introduced Evans and the film.  After the credits rolled Larry King asked Robert Evans the kind of questions he is famous for.  Evans reminisced about Larry Olivier, Dustin Hoffman and his wife Ali McGraw.  He talked movingly about how she was still his friend even though she was a ‘bohemian’.  We were all in awe.  He described in the film and in the room how he lost the only woman he had ever truly loved.  It brought a tear to my wrinkled eye.

A passionate, wonderful man.

Bold Facers in attendance.   Lots of them.  Bumped into Michel Comte who, even though I really like him and his wife, can be a vapid contrarian.   He owns the most beautiful house in LA by far.

There was a huge buzz in the club after the screening.

What a life!

I came away feeling energized, inspired, heady.  Nobody is going to stop me from making this next film.  Nobody.

For those of us who have had wonder, delight and great triumphs early in life nothing can be bettered or compared.

I am listening to sad songs.

I can listen to a sad song one of two ways.   I can feel miserable about the past or accepting of the past.  As I listen to moody music this morning I have a smile on my ugly mug.   Remembering all that was good.

Let’s remember the scene in our romantic movie.  A huge wide shot of the sea, panning toward 4 men and a little dog.  Let’s remember walking from Adam’s Mother’s house after he took the picture I now use as my blog Gravatar.  Walking from Seasalter to Whitstable along the shingle beach with JB, Barry, Adam and The Little Dog.  The sun shining, taking a route I had taken for half a century.  With a man I loved.  One of the men looks back at the other and they exchange a glance that only lovers know…

Screening tonight and Halloween parties all weekend.  Then…London.

Categories
Health Rant

closer and closer

The days between me and the operation dwindle.

The rain has fallen steadily over Malibu these past weeks.  As unseasonal as it may be it comes as a great relief to those of us who live up here during what is normally described as Fire Season.   One can only hope that it remains damp rather than tinder dry.

An encouraging weekend of old and new friends.  New friends include a charming Pepperdine student who came for tea on Sunday evening and another internet date who was almost perfect…but not.   He was intelligent, handsome and age appropriate.  Our unusual date started at Intelligensia on Abbott Kinney, a trip to Home Depo to buy chlorine tablets and  lunch at Sauce.

I replaced the cap that I lost at Stronghold.

I have no idea if we will ever see each other again but he made the possibility of meeting someone appropriate in the future very real and that in itself was a great diversion from my crazy head.

At lunch we both discussed our recent relationship issues and rather amazingly he became quite emotional:  he had been the Jake half of his relationship.  Eager to hold onto someone who loved him but wanted to sleep with other men.

Why?

Today there is another house viewing and I must make a start on my script.

Saturday therapy went well.  Today I went to an early session in the Palisades.   I emerge from these groups feeling stronger and more complete.  All in all it has been a very gratifying weekend.  I am somehow not prone to the great fear.  Perhaps this has something to do with the full moon or maybe I am just not taking any notice of the demons.

The house is so beautiful today.  The spa is working.  Ashley pays her rent on time.  The work on the road to the PCH has resumed.   The dogs are well behaved.  Why go and ruin it with invasive surgery?

I am making a huge oxtail stew for our dinner.  The sort of recipe that takes two days to do properly.  Every day I must do something creative in some sort of way.

Life is serving up a great and perfect opportunity.  I can feel it.  After the heavy rain, the plants are convinced it is springtime.  New growth, budding cacti and the great orchid trees in the garden are suddenly covered in succulent pink flowers.

Barry from Whitstable is on his way here to stay en route to his new life in Australia.  It will be fun to have him here.

Categories
Rehab

Elsie de Witt and the Bad Baby

One of the unseen moments in Sex Rehab included our crafting in clay what our sex addiction looked like.   The monster inside.  Mine was a fragile baby.  So fragile in fact that it’s head fell off the day after we made them.

The baby is somewhere in the house but I can’t find it.  When I find it I will take a picture of it and post it here.

The idea of the bad baby stems from something my step-father once said to me, that I was a ‘bad baby’.  Of course that’s absurd isn’t it?  A distressed baby maybe but not bad?

One of my performance pieces was called Bad Baby.  The mother in the performance lived in the fridge.

As for Elsie de Witt?  Well, she’s a character that I invented with Lady Rizo during one of our epic two-hour putting the world to rights telephone calls.  Elsie is the great chantreuse, the over stuffed opera singer who resides within..as well as the bad baby who also inhabits my currently very thin frame.   The dramatic and dynamic Elsie and the screaming baby.

Finally received some of the money that JB owes me so in a gesture of good will I took down his full name in my blog.   His spidery, fragile hand writing all over the cheque softened my heart.  Now all he has to do is send the rest.  I wrote to him offering to reduce the amount of money he owes me if he would just show willing and send it.

 

Bad Baby made in Sex Rehab

As JB fulfills his obligation to me I feel myself detaching from him in a positive way.  He has held on for too long by owing me this cash.

I wrote him a conciliatory note urging him to send the rest of the money.   I imagine that he wants to go to court and fight and that is his prerogative but all this will achieve is yet another cataclysmic collision.  I imagine that he is being urged on by his new gay friends who never like to take any responsibility for anything.  His new cheerleading team after I was dismissed.

Occasionally they write to me.  His new friends.  It’s funny.

So much more is happening in my life than you can imagine but I cannot write it.   I don’t want to jinx potential job opportunities, burgeoning romances.  I am loathed to write even the silly things..like the spa in my garden that I have renovated and is now operational.  It’s the oddest contraption.  Heated by an ingenious wood burning stove which almost boils the water like a huge kettle.  A friend and I sat in it last night under the stars, looking out over the ocean lit by the full moon.

Willie, as he is predisposed, stole my friend’s sock.

Do I at moments like this wish that it was JB in the spa?  Well, less so.   Those are indeed moments that should be shared with a lover.  He had ceased to be my lover, to be my one and only long before we ever left for France.  He was just pretending to my lover.  I felt the disconnection.  Knowing that he probably already had someone else to fixate on.

I realize now that he had already met somebody else and simply came to France because he could.

Yesterday I went to therapy for the first time in ages.  The theme was integrity and the others mused upon the lies they had told to wives and co-workers..yet to me a lie is subjective and we live in lying times.   The truth is subjective.  As I have said before,  exponentially the more honest one becomes the more isolated you feel.  One can only hope to do the right thing by those we share our time.  That’s all.  If we can’t or don’t?  Well, we make our amends.

JB was incensed that I lied to the Ferry people in Calais to get us all on board without incident after they told me that Lil’ Dog’s carrying case was made of the wrong material.  If I had told the truth at that moment it would have meant taking a cab into Calais Ville buying the correct carrying case.  This exercise in honesty would have cost a fortune and we would have missed endless ferries and dinner with Georgina in Whitstable.

He used that as an example of how I always told lies.

Lying about a dog’s carrying case and cheating on someone for years seem like two very different kinds of lie.  One expedites an unnessessary situation the other steals a soul.  Perhaps he couldn’t see the difference?

Naturally there is a philosophical conundrum for a man who says, “I always tell lies.”

I learned so much from JB about myself and others.  I learned a great deal about gay men.  Their attitude toward him for instance.  That he had no option but to behave as he did.

At the beginning, when I met him and he came out to me, we started flirting, sex camming etc.  I knew immediately that it was wrong to do what he was doing to her and as I reread emails within a few days of his coming out to me I was urging him to get honest.

I was conflicted about his coming out as we became closer.

It suited me that he was with her because I knew where he was at night.  I knew that he was mine.  I knew that the moment he was free of her he would be just like all the rest.

Everyday this JB stuff gets better in my head.  As I sift through every detail.  As I attempt falteringly to detatch with love rather than hate.

Categories
Auto Biography

Bully For You

Woke up at 4am.  Bugger.  Spent a little time online then went back to bed.  Fell into deep sleep.

A knock at the door at 9am.  I had meeting with a writer from a popular TV show who had read my blog and wanted to meet to talk about her new TV show.  Kathy.

A charming and funny woman who is currently dating a very beautiful ‘A’ gay director friend of mine.   What a gorgeous couple!   The meeting was meant to last an hour but ended up lasting 3 hours.  Ashley joined us at the end.

Whilst we were talking I remembered one of the fabulous Whitstable gays I met as a child who totally shaped my idea of what it was to be gay.

Firstly, he taught me that being gay could be WONDERFUL.  That man, an antique dealer from Thanet, was called Christopher Stocking.  He drove into Whitstable weekly to search for antiques and that’s where he found me, sitting at the back of Zoe’s antique shop one cold winter’s afternoon playing with her kittens by the fire.

The shop used to be on Harbour Street opposite the harbour entrance which was rather sadly demolished in the 1970’s when all that grubby Georgian architecture seemed to bore town planners.  Thankfully, Whitstable was largely ignored by Canterbury Council so there was little to no ‘urban regeneration’.   No wholesale destruction of our old homes and shops.  Whitstable was left to decay.   Thank God.

Jake and I went to Whitstable…he loved it…that was a nice moment.

Anyway, Christopher Stocking found me in the back of the shop and realized IMMEDIATELY that I was a trainee homo and took me for a spin in his pink Jaguar.  I remember his sweet and unusual smell.  He asked a bunch of questions and I remember being so ashamed of where I came from that I think I lied every answer.

I really looked forward to Christopher’s weekly visits.  He taught me what was what without ever mentioning the word gay.

He’d say, “He’s gorgeous isn’t he?”

And I would get all red-faced and nod my head.

He was a perfect role model…consequently I never had any difficulty being a gay.

It all seemed perfectly natural.

A couple of years after we met Christopher told me that he wanted to tell me something.  Seriously.  We sat in the Tudor Tea Rooms, he held my hand and told me very gravely that if I was going to have a good life, any life..he stressed the word life..I would have to leave Whitstable.  That this small seaside town wasn’t going to be big enough for me.

He told me urgently,

“You have to get out of here and make something of yourself.”

I knew that he was right but I didn’t think it was possible, plausible…mine to have.

Heroes are never quite who you expect them to be.

A man and a boy holding hands in an English Tea Room talking about the future.  About the future. He was saving my life..and he knew it.   He knew that there was no one else in that place who could possibly tell me what I needed to know.

That my life could be assured if I left Whitstable.  That I would be valued, validated, loved.   Sadly, his dream and my dream for enduring happiness diverged as I grew older.

The disease of more.  Who could have foreseen that outcome?

For those of you who think bad thoughts..no..we never did anything inappropriate.  He was a very appropriate man.  I was 10 when I met him and 14 when he vanished.  If he had made a move would I have let him?  You betcha.

That afternoon in The Tudor Tea Room I saw my future reflected in his face and knew instinctively that it was essential for me to listen very carefully and remember every word he said.

Amongst the shop owners there were other gays.  There were the gay twins who ran the antique shop on the corner of Albert Street and Harbour Street which is now an elegant tapas bar.  Johnny and Jimmy.  Clones:  checked shirts, full moustaches and tight denim jeans.  They scared me a bit but they were kind to me.

Everyone was.

They guessed, they knew, they never made mention, they saw the bruises, they held out their hands just in case I needed to hold on.

The years passed.

For a few weeks I moved in with Michael the gay tax man.

Our local gay bar: The Guinea on Island Wall.  Florence, the very grand landlady, was always throwing people out for no good reason.  She had thick red lipstick on her lips and teeth…a crow black bouffant.

When the boys got too hot and bothered in the snug she snarled,  “Darlin’ you’re barred.”

The kissing boys would feign outrage, throw their scarves over their shoulders, theatrically deliver a particularly vicious bon mot from the threshold of the pub, slam the door and scamper out into the night..until tomorrow of course when they would sit in exactly the same spot nursing pints of thick, warm beer and kiss each other as Florence was serving out of sight.

I remember when you could be thrown out of a bar, a gay bar, for kissing another man.

So, this morning, Kathy and I talked about gay men and the community.  Our community that existed around the bar.  Every community has a bar.  THE BAR.

When the Guinea closed we headed to The New Inn, Margate.  I didn’t drive and God knows how I did it but I got there and back 30 miles every Saturday night.   Compelled by the need to meet other gay men.

I rarely went home with anyone.  They were all so pig ugly.  When the pub closed at 11.30 my very camp friend Mark and I went to a  ghastly Margate club which was always half empty..called Skids.  Ew.

The men there knew I was different from them.  Somehow.  They urged me, like Christopher had years before, to take my big ideas elsewhere.  In their own way they let me know how much more of a world there was than the one I had chanced upon in Margate.

We talked about being bullied and I told her that I was bullied at school and life was pretty miserable for a few years but I just knew that high school was not the sum of my life.   I knew that Christopher and men like him were out there somewhere.  That I could and would be like them.

I knew that my time at boarding school would eventually come to an end.  Anyway, as I mentioned before..bullied by day, blowing by night.  Usually the same boys.

All these bullied kids killing themselves.  I know it’s hard to be singled out to be gay by your peers, but you can’t be so sensitive.   Get tough!  Fight back.  Ask for help!  The sad fact is, when I was being bullied I rather enjoyed the attention.  I learned to fight back.  Ruthlessly.  I knew the people who bullied me were simply appalled by my difference.  It scared the shit out of them.  I learned that to be different you had to seek out your own kind.

I have searched and searched.

So…I went to Paris and New York and I ended up here.

Thank you Christopher Stocking..wherever you are.

I owe you my wonderful life…when I can remember that it is wonderful.  I owe you my Malibu view.  I owe you my aspirations.  Thank you Christopher, thank you the boys..thank you the girls..where ever you are…thank you for reading…thank you and good night.

Categories
art Malibu Rant

Sweet Thing

The rain has finally stopped pouring over the house and into the view.  The skies have cleared. The sun is shining.  The sea is glistening…etc.

Confined to my room with painfully torn ligaments.

Ashley has been running around fetching and carrying.

Sweet thing.

Paying gardeners, buying logs, feeding me pain pills.

This evening she and her friend Aaron Rose sat by the roaring fire whilst my blue eyed friend Bowdy entertained us with unusually funny impressions. When he started his ‘performance’ I was dreading that he was going to be terrible.  He was GREAT!

It’s incredibly unusual in LA to meet a young actor who can actually act.

Aaron is curating a street art show at MOCA.  Next week he is in Paris working with young artists.  A commercials director..apparently they make a ton of money.  Do I wish that I had the ability to make commercials?  Just talking about it, the prospect of it…made the inside of my mouth dry up.

With Ashley making busy around the house life is filling up again with unusual and interesting people.  She is such a doll.

We discussed these three words:  Nigger.  Cunt.  Faggot.  The impact each word has and the power we invest in them.  It was a fascinating conversation.  We felt really naughty talking about each of them…as if overheard we might be arrested or torn from our lives.  It felt subversive.

We were talking about the concentration camps and Aaron revealed that he didn’t know that the pink triangle, symbol of gay pride, originated there.  The pink triangle (German: Rosa Winkel) was one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, used to identify homosexual men, as well as those imprisoned for sexual offenses such as rape, bestiality, and pedophilia. Originally intended as a badge of shame, the pink triangle (often inverted from its Nazi usage)  is second in popularity within the gay community only to the rainbow flag.

Alan Davies the British comedian and I had a fight in the Neptune Pub, Whitstable twenty-five years ago when he started wearing the Pink Triangle to prove his solidarity with gays and lesbians.  The problem was,  he was homophobic towards me.  After a huge shouting match and a bitchy struggle he removed the pink triangle.

I have been reading my old blogs.  The ones written when I first arrived here in the USA.   Not only are they a very good read but life sure was full up with people places and things.  Of late (and more contemplative) the written journey has been internal rather than external.

Every day I get closer to my goal of exorcising the ghosts of past love.  Things are getting so much better.  Not so very long ago I didn’t think I could go anywhere that we had been together..not Paris nor New York or Whitstable.   I feared that just walking down the same street we had strolled would ruin it for me.  But, you know, that was the voice of shame whispering seductively in my ear.  The shame I felt about failing to keep him.  The shame of making bad choices in love.

I am better than that.  Paris is a big city.  I am a bigger man.

I sometimes wonder in whose arms he rests now?  Placating him.  Telling him the lies he needs to hear.  Is he happy?  I know in my heart, I know that he will never truly be happy.  He has made terrible mistakes and those mistakes may never be forgiven.  He will try to put it right but not for her.  He wants her to forgive him so he can feel better about himself.

He will be in perpetual torment until he truly understands a selfless apology. Equally, she needs to fully embrace the act of forgiveness.  Can she forgive him?  Eventually she will.  She has no option.

Living with hate or resentment in one’s heart can ruin your life.

Forgive him for being frail and flawed and weak and cowardly and for telling inexcusable lies?  Yes, we can do that.  Eventually.

We are connected forever.  A dance with death.  A marriage with the Devil.  There is something oddly Gothic about it.

I called the small claims court to have the date moved so I can go to London and deal with this bollocks stuff.  Directly to London.

Sooner or later Jake and I will face each other.  Whether it is in the court room or on the street he will pay what he owes me.  He would be such a fool not to.

We will bump into each other.  I know that scenario.  If he has worked properly on himself he will have undergone the change he so badly wanted.  He will be gay.  Not like when I first met him:  A gay man sheltering in the husk of a straight man’s life.  He will be true to his own nature, to the mannerisms and voice that he was so scared to reveal.  I began to see the occasional gay moment when we were in France, the twist of the mouth, the limp wrist, the effeminate draw on the cigarette.  All quite normal for a delicate, passive homosexual.  Endearing.

Like so many ‘straight acting’ gay men he is petrified of being seen to be gay.

He will be revealed.  He will find happiness.  I pray for it.

Categories
Malibu

He Deserved It

Sunday, forgot to tell you,  chatted with Lady Rizo.  I love her so much.  The call lasted all the way from West Hollywood to the PCH…giggling and analysing.

Spent the larger part of this morning in bed skyping with Tim Willis whose book about Nigel Dempster hits the shelves today in the UK.

Dempster was an old-fashioned gossip columnist who worked for the Daily Mail and the satirical rag Private Eye.

When I was a small boy living in Stanley Road, Whitstable I used to just love reading his column.  A window into another altogether more exciting world.  A world with which my Mother was very familiar from her days working as a waitress in the Carlton Club.

I was secretly shocked and delighted by his salacious Royal gossip.  Dempster’s code name for the Queen when he wrote about her in Private Eye: Brenda.

I think more than anyone it was he who inspired prepubescent me to search out the fun-loving aristocrat and the demi-monde.  I alluded to him at the beginning of my film AKA.

Years later he wrote about me unfavourably after I was caught pretending to be ‘one of them’.

Nigel Dempster and the Death of Discretion published by Short Books.  Buy it.

Today I am strangely at peace with myself.  It’s been this way more often than not these past few days.  I have no idea why.  I guess because I am no longer in love.  No longer pining.  No longer focused on another.  I am listening to Copeland, majestic strings elevating the view, the moment..this life!

Two good friends called for advice.  Isn’t that strange?  I can help others when I tend not to be able to help myself.

Now that my fantasy of loving another has been safely stowed in the overhead compartment or under the seat in front of me I can concentrate on what I do best.  Dreaming.  The dream of love is so much better than the reality.  Good God it is so exhausting being in love.  So consuming.  Being in hate can be just as tiring.  Thankfully I am neither.

I have named the lil maggot on my ball.  A pain in the balls.  I have a picture of my tumor.  I will put it up when I can.

Categories
Dogs Love Malibu

Willie

Yesterday Hilary brought Willie to live with us.  He’s a small, wire-haired pup with big brown eyes.   He is incredibly intelligent.  Desperate to be loved, immediately loyal.

The Lil’ Dog is a bit suspicious and requisitioned both his own bone and Willie’s and guarded them both jealously all day.

The Lil’ Dog knows the deal.  He looks PISSED OFF as I try making Willie feel at home by having him on my lap, calling his name.  The Lil Dog is and will be always my most adored dog but Willie very quickly carved a place in my heart.  Within hours.

The Lil’ Dog, however, will never have the sort of relationship with Willie that he had with our Darling Big Dog.

Willie is without doubt my dog.  As much as Luna was not my dog and now lives in a huge mansion in Beverly Hills with a butler and her own dog walker Willie is happy to chase around after me all day.  He is watching the garden as I write.  You can see how happy he is.

It is delightful how I immediately loved himand he loves me.   It is wonderful to aim my unconditional love at this little dog.  He accepts it without question.

I wish humans could be like this.  Fucking humans.

Yesterday, a few hours before Willie arrived, I woke up in Hollywood and packed the car with more bits and pieces.  I am determined not to bring everything from that place back here.  More than I anticipated will be going to auction.

Anyway, I picked up with the beautiful Brazilian I met yesterday at Solar and we drove to Malibu via the 101 and up through the magnificent mountains.  We had to take the back route as there was a house fire on the PCH so it was closed.  Ricki Lake‘s house burned to the ground.

When we got home Ashley was pottering around, making coffee and already the house seems full again.  This is how I remember Whitstable (No 13 Island Wall)  when I first lived there.  You see!  I can reclaim the essence of what I loved about living.

As Ashley and Frank (the Brazilian) made friends I sat quietly on the back terrace and just enjoyed my home. I have not done that for a long time.  There has been so much drama.  So much to distract me from simple pleasures.

I spent a little time on Manhunt and made a couple of appointments for next week.  Perhaps I will meet someone? Someone like Willie who is kind and loyal and intelligent?  Hahhahaha.

Willie has a great deal to learn about this household.  Who and what and where.  We live a very active life, most days we walk four or so miles around the mountains.  Everything is very new for him.

I have to get him to the vet on Monday and begin the passport process so he can come to England with me.

Left a message on MySpace for Jake.  There was nothing much to say other than we were now strangers.  I know that in time I will forget him entirely because I never really knew him.  He was a refugee, all I had to do was help him on his way.  I fell in love with an idea.

As I was sitting quietly on the terrace overlooking the ocean I wanted to counjour up a beautiful moment from our time together that I could hold onto.  Just one.   Something we had shared that would have made the last few months worthwhile.  I could not.  Every one was marred with something or other that made it feel incomplete.  My spastic love affair with an idea was over long before I ever dealt the death blow.

As I look over the past months of blog entries there were times when I would go to bed happy because he was in the world.

I was kidding myself.

There ain’t no fool like an old fool.  When am I going to get wise?  Probably never.

Willie sort of reminds me of when I first met Jake.  Adoring eyes, keeping close, shaggy hair, a clumsy gait.  The difference is?  I have a chance of maintaining a relationship with Willie because he will never lie to me, he won’t be looking over my shoulder for someone richer, younger, better looking etc….

Thank GOD for Willie.

Categories
art Malibu

Room Mate

Marine Layer at Night

My friend Ashley moved in last night.  She arrived with Thai food and a pillow.

Almost immediately felt a trillion times better about everything.  Being on my own is not good for me.  Just me and my head.  We lit a huge fire, watched interesting film clips on my computer and life felt a great deal better.

The marine layer shrouded the house all night so everything this morning is wet and sparkling.  The gray light, as I have said a million times, suits all the colours here in the house.

I get my watch back today, the big gold one I broke last year but forgot to pick up.  I should fetch my grandfather’s ring that is still in repair.

I bought a family box of food from my friend Jennifer’s company Out of the Box Collective which arrives Saturday week.  She has sourced the best of what is available from local farms including organic meats, vegetables and raw milk/yogurt etc.  I am really excited about this!

Three of us living up here cooking great food, making art and doing what humans do..supporting one another..and I don’t mean through bad times but supporting one another to do the best of what we can possibly do.

The great thing about Ashley is her connection to everything happening in the new arts here in LA.  Performance, film etc.  We watched clips of things on YouTube that inspire us.  She showed me a really interesting animation/performance that I loved.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPWjA8nAmuo]

I understood that I had not just isolated myself from people but from my life blood..art.  I simply stopped going to anything.  I stopped turning up.  To have a life in the arts you have to be present.  For nine long months I have been a dead man.  Jake became my life and the poor lamb head just couldn’t be my life.

Manhunt date number 4 was a funny latino boy. 27 years old and HIV positive.  Hmmm.  We didn’t have much to say so he left. He was a bit pissed that he had driven all this way and didn’t get any.

I feel so much better about everything.

Suddenly all of my anxiety, obsession and resentment has slipped away…at least for the time being.

This morning I thought about writing which I have not thought about for a long, long time.  Just having someone around keeps me focused.

Let him have his life and I will have mine.  I wish we could have had a kind goodbye.

You see, I went from having a dear, dear friend to having nothing…whilst he was surrounded by his family.  Never on his own.  A family to fall back on.  I had nothing.  When I lived in Whitstable the people there, they were my family for good and for bad.  I just had to step outside of my front door and I would engage with people who had known me all my life.

Lily

I saw a property for sale today in England that I can’t stop thinking about.  Hastings is a small British seaside town.  I have always really loved it.  There’s a house there that looks amazing.  Huge.  Lots of space.

You see!  Already my head is in a different, more positive place.  Just wait until Anna arrives and we will be cooking, as they say, with gas.

At 8 this morning Jason popped by with Lily (my god-daughter) and her brother Max for breakfast.  Hot chocolate.  I think this maybe a regular event as they have an hour to kill most mornings between dropping the kids off at their various schools.

Somebody asked me what I seek in a man.  I think he wanted to know about sex but I replied:  intelligence, wit, kindness, fortitude, patience.

Have a great day everybody!

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
Dogs Rant

Malibu

The house by day is magical.

Jason and Hillary, quite separately, popped by and both brought lunch.  Hillary arrived with a friend’s dog called Willy who decided to pee on everything the moment he came indoors.

Hillary made a delicious gazpacho and Jason brough chevre and smoked salmon.  Three mad brits eating an Enid Blyton lunch in our tree house over looking the ocean.

I ate bread which I bitterly regret having eaten today.  I am bloated and my tummy aches.

The house after dark can be a little noisy.  I lay in the dark listening to the raccoons squabble, the coyote’s howl and the owls hoot.   The little dog had a restless night, so, of course did I.   He was up and down the stairs shouting at anything that disturbed him.  After an hour of this nonsense I closed the windows and he slept peacefully.

It was meant to be in the 100’s all week but by last night in Malibu it was colder than Whitstable.  I am sure the firemen are very happy as there have been so few wild-fire warnings.  Everything is very damp in the morning from the thick mist that rolls off the sea.

Jason left and Hillary and I decided to take the dogs for a long walk along the length of the new road (Rambla Pacifico) that leads to the PCH.  The house is now walkable from the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) and since they started building the Rambla Pacifico extension empty lots are now for sale, lot owners who abandoned their lots 26 years ago are on the mountain with contractors discussing driveways and bedrooms with ocean views.  There is a certain excitement up here which cannot be ignored.

I applaud myself for paying so little for this house.  I just KNEW that one day the road would be built..who knew that it would be so soon?

Apparently I am not the only resident who regularly walks the muddy track which will one day be our new road/life line.  We saw a man armed with shopping bags marching over the hillocks.  Everyone is so impatient to feel less isolated.

It is only a few weeks until the rainy season starts so they must get a move on and finish this project.  The worst that could happen is that heavy rains come before it is finished and all their hard work is washed away.

If only Malibu would buy the road so it can be used by everyone rather than a select few.

Watched TV until midnight…yes there is a TV here and fell into bed.  I watch home improvement shows and laugh gently at how cheap and ill-conceived the ‘improvements’ are.

The Lil Dog was exhausted from running after Willy all day and his long walk but not, apparently,  exhausted enough.

P.S.  The despicable Glenn Beck is holding his reclaim America from anyone who isn’t white rally today in Washington.  For those of you who underestimate the ambition of people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin I urge you to take notice of their message.  They are determined to undermine the goodwill and inclusive character of this great country and, my friends, they will succeed just like their right-wing predecessors.  They will use all the usual tactics:  fear mongering, false patriotism and the invocation of their malevolent God.  These men and women are not clowns, we cannot afford to grandly sneer at their absurd antics.  For as the liberal elite laugh in their grotesque faces they are gathering speed.  If we are not very careful it will be soon too late for those of us who believe in freedom to stop them for we were too busy laughing.

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