Secrets

Secrets; these things that I never tell anybody, thoughts that should be free and easy but never are. Such an easy going guy, they say, and all the time the brain is itching and scrastching in troubled places, dying for a drink, waking up under the table at a party, syringe in arm; someone holding me down and pouring whisky down my throat, sticking a joint in my mouth. None, in these strange places in the outback were no one will ever know, where the thoughts run wild and really, really, no one will ever know. Unless you tell them. That was always the policy. Plausible deniability. Not that it matters anymore; the creaking framework on the bones, the creaking pretences; they're strung like x-rays in the falling light; when they smoked and drank champagne and wondered where; and why; we had become so different. I've reads a couple of gay books lately and I've put them down; saddened and horrified and wondering where it all went wrong. I read The Beauty of Men by the author of Dancer from the Dance; which was a big book back in the 70s when we were all up till dawn and bi-sexuality in the days of Bowie was almost compulsory. Everyone was pushing the boundaries, or what we thought were the boundaries. Pretty tame now, tell you what. Now, with the reading light and the back garden and the sound of our colleagues down The Block, late at night screaming abuse at God knows what; I'm reading My Lives by Edmund White. He wrote a book I liked years back and I interviewed him in London in the 1980s for some magazine or other. All the reviewers at the time commented on his soulful, large brown eyes and the impact they had; and I felt, in whatever room it was I interviewed him in; that we connected somehow. He was living in Paris then, his Paris phase, and I was just a freelance journalist from the provinces patching together a living. I thought, the way he acted, he was going to ask me out afterwards; there would be some altercation; another event with another famous man; who, in the end, were no different to any other man. Maybe even more insecure. But he hesitated and I hesistated and all these years later I'm reading his biography; about him in his sixties and his sado-masochistic slave practices, pushing the boundaries, every boundary, boundaries I never ever wanted to cross. The truth is I always liked something else far more than sex; male or female; and if it wasn't so personally, so life and career and reputation destroying, I'd probably still be at it. Instead, restless, irritable, discontent, the default position of the untreated alcoholic, we keep secrets we should never have kept, look out on sunsets we should never have seen, jerk around instead of entering the slipstream of the spirit, and wonder, still, naively, what it was all about. The Dancer from the Dance became the old man on the beat, horrified by his own unattractiveness, sucking knobs through glory holes and worryiong about his weight, wondering whether to dye his hair. While Edmund, HIV, provides TMF, too much information, about sex practices I don't even want to think about in the most removed of fashions. Instead, there's cigarettes and sunsets and a longing for beauty. And we get up and go to work. And others just retreated, not just from the dance but the gay world altogether, rewriting the script inside the head like a million other married men, and tonight I don a white shirt and tie and go to my daughter's Awards night. And we know that one path obviates another; and there was never any true path, or true loyalty, anyway.