I'm Gay and an Alcoholic

Okay, yes, I must admit it:
I'm gay and I'm an alcoholic
There, it's over, done, I've said it
No need to cry, no need to panic
I know I've been a bit pathetic
To not see that it's true
But there, I've fucking done it,
Now what about you?

Coming down

A, I will address you directly, because that is one of the only ways I have of preventing your memory from vanishing for good. A - and I use your initial interchangeably with methylenedioxymethamphetamine here - because of you, my sober life is a nightmare. I twirled with you and your friend to the buzz of fiendish techno on the scummy concrete floor of a disused warehouse. I somehow found myself with you back at my flat in the early hours of New Year’s day – you and your fat-lipped friend. I don’t have any memory of seeing your face or of physical contact with you while levitating at that New Year's party, but I do, just about, remember your face and the feel of you from when the three of us were lying on my bed, coming down. Your hand in mind. My gob on yours. Your angular shoulders, one of which I tried to hold as we surrendered to sleep. I try hard to remember, A. I remember also sneaking looks at you while you dressed to leave as daylight crept up, all too abruptly, and thinking, she's tall. And gorgeous. And she dresses well. And her eyebrows are good. Don’t leave.

You were from the same place as me. I remember you saying more than once - as if reminding yourself of the silly situation you found yourself in, or the silly person you found yourself with - ‘Darren from Batley’. That lightly mocking tone. So natural to northern folk. To people like us. We didn’t even talk about our shared origins. You just said, now and then, ‘Darren from Batley’. What a privilege to know that I was a coherent concept to you.

Can I remember how many times we kissed and how good that felt? No. Between five and fifteen, I think. In the morning we lay half-dead on my worried mattress. Your friend writhed and murmured next to us. Time was running out. You held in your hand a tube of lip balm, which I felt jealous of and replaced with my own hand. I remember more than anything else your rich, low, perpetually unimpressed voice.       

I remember, as rumours of your leaving plucked the threads of this living dream, forgetting what you were called, and confessing as much in shame. You said something like, ‘I told you enough times when we were at the party.’ Time is a scythe - on that memory, the bluntest.

Now, A, between my unsteady hands, I hold your memory like Andalucian sand. At least I have your texts. If they were actually written by you and not, as the final one would suggest, by some mocking and infinitely cruel accomplice...

Me: Alex, my tongue is all bitten up and I look like a corpse. Are you going to be able to make it out later? I think you should. (Translation: Alex, I’ve lost every shred of confidence I had when I saw you, but please come and see me.)

Alex: That text was funny. Well, what’s your plan for tonight? I’d like to but I’m really not sure I’m capable!

Me: Me too. I’m fucking broken. I don’t have a plan yet. But would be good go meet you at some point. Any interest in coming over my way? (Translation: Please, fucking please, I want to see you again.)

Me, hours later: Come on Alex, let’s do something! (Translation: Alex, I love you!)

Alex: We’ve just ordered an enormous amount of Chinese takeaway! I’ll see how I feel after but I can’t promise anything as I am a shell of a person!

Me: Good. MSG good. I’m going to keep drinking wine until you get in touch. Ha, ha. Herm. Sigh. (Translation: Thank God you replied. I’m going to avoid the tiniest suggestion of sobriety until, unless, you get in touch.)

Me, hours later: Right. I wish you would get active. I’m totally prepared to come over where you are. Well, not totally prepared, but you know. Come on, I’ll be depressed otherwise. (Translation: Oh fuck, you’ve switched off. Why? WHY? Was it my last message? Oh God, I'm dying!)

Alex: Food took nearly two hours to come. The only thing left for me to do now is go to bed and end this day! I’m sorry, last night was fun though x.

Me: Ah that’s rubbish. You should come over and sleep with me. Just get in a taxi. I’ll cover it. (Translation: An 'x'?)

Alex, or someone using her phone: I’ll be round in ten. I do have gonorrhoea though, hope that’s okay.

Me: That’s my favourite STD. (Translation: She's gone.) 

You will say I’m an idiot and that it was just a night of fun. But you were tall, O A, O MDMA, without you I feel nothing. Nada. Nowt.

A Love So Strong

Have been up for 20 minutes and already have given myself away as being vain, shallow and dead of mind. I spend a lot of the time trying not to be a wanker. I mean, I make a conscious effort. But you can’t always be fully conscious of ‘what you’re about’, and at such times the ‘real you’ seeps through the cracks in your persona and ruins everything… besides which, there’s very little you can do to escape the need to evacuate your balls...

In the kitchen making a cup of tea with Flatmate Simon. He says he going to go to Goldsmiths College to hear a talk. I tell him I’d like to go – because I ‘have a thing’ about girls who’re artists. So much wrong with this statement. The undisguised lack of engagement with what Simon’s saying, the braggadocio, the automatic ‘what’s in it for me’.

I go to Pimlico to look at the Romantics’ paintings at Tate Britain. Fall in love-lust - on station platform, on tube train, in the gallery café, in the tranquil domed hall where strangers sit in dreamy reflection, and - especially - as I walk across Vauxhall Bridge Road. She is beautiful. But they all are, in that fleeting flurry, between the Turners and the Blakes, and that unmanageable urge towards love-lust, every fucking time I see an attractive girl.

Pale and black

Frantically drunk in Sainsbury's on a Friday night. I see a girl I can't help but be stupified by. She is murderously beautiful. Pale. Black. It can't be right to call her beautiful, or can it?. What does beautiful mean? Is it anything I can talk about with validity after two bottles of wine and two months without intercourse? But what chimeras the supermarket aisles can conjure.
Why not use the word, as impossibly vague as it is? Because I've never had an unsentimental conviction about anything, drunk or sober. I've also been to enough weddings to be familiar with that criminal misrepresentation of the woman as 'beauty'.  Don't tell me beauty is subjective. That doesn't get anyone anywhere. Give me instead a treatise on aesthetics. Give me Burke on the sublime and the beautiful. Give me beauty you can measure. Give me her beauty to measure.

Crimes against the English language

Crimes against the English language
And failures to play by the book
Repel the girls out of whom
I will ever fancy the fuck

Jeanette Winterson and Hilary Mantel as Keywords

I picture Jeanette Winterson, ruddy-faced, sat at her 200-year-old oak kitchen table, in front of her Aga, squinting in an expression of studied, strained optimism and saying: 'No, for me, I simply can't write if I can hear music playing. I really do need absolute silence. Music, or any sound really, would rob me of the concentration I need to coax the words out, to free the words from the dark prison of my mind, and bring them to the saving light of the page.'

I imagine Hilary Mantel sat bolt upright in her Chesterfield armchair staring at me with wild wide eyes that dim, almost imperceptibly, over a period of about a quarter of an hour, from fearful alertness to profound pity. Then she says:
'What is it you want?'
I say:
'What you have.'
She replies:
'You don't know anything about what I have or don't have. You're full of nonsense. And how did you get into my caaaastle anyway, my moooooated caaaastle in the Hiiiiighlands, whose doors and windows  are aaaaallllway firmly locked? Even the portcullis is down, and the croooocodiles are as hungry and alert as they have ever beeeeen...'

Weed and Wine

When I consider what I need        
While clamouring voices rise              
To see a bulging bag of weed    
And bottles full of wine            
Makes me feel rich                    
A fleet sensation which                  
Turns too quickly saturnine