A Better Class of Blond Read online

  A Better Class of Blond is an absorbing account of a year spent in and around San Francisco. In his diary, the author records not only his impressions of cities and places, but of people and their way of life, and of falling in love —with a young Vietnamese man, with the landscape of California, and with San Francisco itself.

  “This diary should be one long hymn of praise to its beauty, the fascination of its streets, the diversity of its life-styles, the joys of its fleshly pleasures, the satisfactions of sex with its men.”

  A book that will be read with an increasing sense of wonder. The feel for detail never ceases to astonish and fascinate. David Rees makes full use of his enormous talent to evoke a personal California offering delights for all tastes.

  Peter Robbins

  A BETTER CLASS OF BLOND

  A Better Class of Blond

  A California Diary

  David Rees

  Olive Press

  First published in 1985 by The Olive Press,

  Flat 2,92 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1

  © David Rees 1985

  Text and cover design by David Williams

  Cover photo from “A Bigger Splash” by Jack Hazan, © Jack Hazan

  and Buzzy Enterprises, with kind permission by the film maker

  Typeset by Wayside Graphics, Clevedon, Avon

  Printed in Great Britain

  ISBN 0 946889 04 X(pbk)

  ISBN 0 946889 07 4 (hbk)

  For Tom Holt, with love

  The clouds are lifting from the high sierras,

  The Bay mists clearing;

  And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum,

  Dances like Italy, imagining red.

  —Louis Simpson, “Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain”

  Table of Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  I

  ICELAND. All mud it appears to be, though I know it is not. Mud scribbled on, incomprehensible hieroglyphics, Then Greenland: rock: a more solid chunk of Planet Earth. Icebergs! Scores of them. The Titanic is somewhere down there, under that turquoise glassy sea. Ice floes; from this height, soapflakes on water. Baffin Island. Flat, with pools that are perfectly round and ochre in colour, blobs of fresh paint dropped from the sky. We buck wildly over the Hudson Bay: a momentary turbulence, but I think of forced landings. On the blue unwrinkled sheet below that would not be delightful; the cold would kill as quickly as this aircraft on fire. I glimpse almost nothing of the North American mainland, for the steward orders me to pull down the blind; the other passengers want to see the film. Do they? No one’s opinion has been asked. Anyway, there’s cloud beneath, nothing of interest. But I decide to be annoyed.

  Two years ago the same destination, but another route, another me: another country, and, besides, the wench is dead … dry dazzle of the Great Salt Desert; snow-capped sierras— hands raised in supplication or benign gestures of blessing.

  San Francisco ahead in a sunset that after all these hours and time zones seems eternal; the Pacific beyond, and beyond that surely the edge, the end of the world.

  AT SF INTERNATIONAL a welcoming cavalcade. Dennis, Alan, Paul and Nils in a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham d’Élégance, vast as a hearse and with more dials and gadgets than a 747 cockpit. Alan, still a twinkling Khruschev, is in leather and chains. “Madam, your chauffeur,” he says, and bows.

  “He thinks he’s an English butler,” Nils informs me. Laughter and hugs and kisses, and how was the flight, and the weather this summer in the Peninsula has been just awful; the hetero crowd of families waiting for taxis and buses looks at us with mild disgust. Later, at Dennis and Paul’s eating dinner, two years are swapped, chewed over, laughed at, and it seems impossible I should ever have been away, finding lovers and moving house, meeting people and writing books, living and partly living. I’ve simply come out for an evening with old friends and I’ll drive home at midnight. But home is six thousand miles off, half the world away.

  It takes a long time to become acclimatized. I’ve brought summer with me, apparently, and—it’s never happened before—the heat bothers me. “The temperature in downtown San José is ninety-seven degrees…” I have a tummy bug. And my body clock, more obstinate than most, persists, a week later, in telling me it’s past midnight when it’s 4 p.m. So I sleep badly. And these dear good friends fill me with too much alcohol. I could say no, of course. There are always choices. Aren’t there?

  A crisis of confidence, too. Can I cope with a whole year in California? Teaching at an American university: what is expected of me? At home I know the corners to cut and not to cut. Not here. And will I find a lover? Or a year of bath-houses and tricks on Castro? Which do I want? For days I do nothing but sit on the deck at Dennis and Paul’s, and we talk and eat and drink and listen. Mothy velvet evenings: drifts of flower scents, a paper lantern moon, Oakland lights flickering on the Bay’s far shore. Talk and eat and drink and listen: we’re experts. I can’t rouse myself to find what’s on offer in Castro; two years back I couldn’t wait. When did I last have sex? A week ago, in London, with Ulrich. “You won’t have your reputation absolutely wrecked by missing out on a few days,” Paul observes. There’s truth in that.

  They’ve been together for twenty-six years. Retired from work now. Only in San Francisco have I met these stable relationships that span a quarter of a century: Sin City isn’t all a brief suck. The one aspect of their lives I do not envy is they don’t always know how to fill up the days.

  On the deck sipping gin. Below, two cats frolic in the garden; Humming-birds flutter at the flowers. Swallows wheel and swoop, dart at insects, wheel and swoop again or squat on the power lines. They’re practising; soon they’ll be flying south. In this heat it doesn’t seem probable, but already the globe is tilting towards fall.

  I DRIVE round San Francisco, revisiting old haunts. Yes, it is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, the most exciting place of all to work and play and live in. My memory hasn’t fooled me. The coloured Victorians bright as a child’s paint-box; the cable cars innocent adult toys. Fog pushes in from the ocean, huge waves of it rolling over the hills like Hawaiian surf, dissolving as the city’s heat touches. The Bay’s sheer sweep and size! So white boats at this distance are kids’ paper yachts, busy for no seeming purpose. Moments when there is a real lift of the spirits: on Hyde by the Crookedest Street in the World, gazing down a hill so perpendicular you’d think the car would take off like a gull and land on Alcatraz. Or driving over the Golden Gate, again awed by size and sweep: its majestic simplicity. The view back from Marin: miles of dancing blue water to downtown San Francisco all cubes and turrets of glittering white— Leggoville. The Bay Bridge—can it really be so long? Why doesn’t it sag or snap? I feel daft with enchantment, under a spell, in a sweet dream.

  Fresh clear air. But on Castro I once or twice sniff the unpleasant odour of drains. The Village looks much as it ever did: Someone for everyone, the department store to suit all tastes, all on parade where 18th crosses; or they loll against the window-sills of Hibernia Beach, stand at bus stops where few people are really waiting for a bus. The traffic sign, the yellow diamond, has the same significance as our red triangle, a warning: halt, or falling rocks, etcetera. On Castro is America’s only yellow diamond that says CLONES CROSSING. But the famous graffiti on Market has gone—a Moral Majority jerk sprayed in aerosol: IF GO
D INTENDED GAYS HE WOULD HAVE CREATED ADAM AND BRUCE. Underneath it someone wrote in a different hue: HE DID.

  The bars: the Pendulum, Badlands, the Village, the Elephant Walk, Twin Peaks, the Café San Marcos, Moby Dick, Castro Station, the Midnight Sun. Love for sale. And not for sale; but to be enjoyed, free, for an hour, or perhaps—there’s always a chance—for a life-time.

  Tour operators now send coaches of old ladies of both sexes from Pasadena or Pittsburg to see Castro as they would the Statue of Liberty or the Grand Canyon. There’s not much to see, of course—bars, restaurants, shops, dog turd on the sidewalks. But there are men looking and deciding, kissing and caressing on the street, in the open air, in full daylight. Not the same as a trip to Niagara.

  There’s more of it to observe than in any other ghetto, a gay this and a gay that which you don’t find elsewhere—a florist, a card shop, a bakery where you can have your birthday cake iced with pink cocks or black jock-straps. San Francisco, I’m told, has seventeen gay traditional jazz bands. And one of the matches a gay softball team has every year is with the police. Yes, it’s different from Earl’s Court, and it’s visible to the beady eye of the Pasadena lady.

  I go into the Elephant Walk and order an orange juice.

  WELL … THE TRICK is very, very me. I’ve not been in the Elephant Walk five minutes and I’m still absorbing the details of its remodelling when he comes up and says “Is that seat taken?”

  Oh yes, just how I want a man: male male; long curly blond hair whitened by summer sun; skin very brown; blue eyes— startlingly, piercingly blue; fit, muscly, physical. Blond all over? He’s from Santa Monica and missing the surf; no, he’s never been to England but hopes one day to take a vacation in Europe; his job is working in a bar and he has, well, maybe two or three hours to spare.

  To put it mildly, I’m not disappointed. The body is perfect. He is blond all over; the tan is all over. His cock is identical with mine in length, width and shape. My long-lost twin! And I’d thought no two were ever the same.

  Gentle slow exploration of another’s geography. He is much more interested in me than in his own immediate satisfaction, so I have all the time I want to please him. He’s enjoying that. I don’t know which way round it will be eventually, but it doesn’t matter. He’s lifting my legs over his shoulders, then he’s inside me, wild no-holds-barred screwing now, and he’s arched his back so he can suck me off. Our noise will bring in the neighbours! Nestling into his arms, trying to touch with the maximum of skin. Silence, except for our breath. A dry wind outside.

  I want to see him again; I want the phone number. But he’s not too keen; a live-in lover who can be unpleasantly jealous. So he says.

  SPEARFISH, SOUTH DAKOTA. Now this really is an odd story. Five years ago my ex-wife and I took part in a documentary for CBS Television about the problems of marriages in which one partner is homosexual. Three couples were involved. The first pair were so bitter they never met or spoke to each other; the second had stayed under the same roof but the man went off to trick on a Friday night and returned for Sunday brunch. We occupied the middle ground—divorced, in separate establishments, but keeping, by and large, on good terms. The film was not shown on British TV. Gary, a mixed-up unhappy boy of seventeen in Omaha, Nebraska, saw it and it changed his life: he wasn’t, he realized, alone, unique. And he fell in love with that screen image of me. He obtained a copy of the programme from CBS, played it through endlessly. All he could learn was my name, that I lived in Exeter, England, and that I was a teacher. He contacted the Devon Education Office and asked for prospectuses of all the city’s schools to try and find my address. So one morning years after the film, in my mail at the university, I found a letter from Spearfish, South Dakota. “You don’t know me, but I know you … ” Now twenty-one, he’d had affairs and slept around, but he always told the guys who came on too strong that his real lover was a British teacher he’d never met, and that if one day, by some utterly remote chance, he did meet this man, why, then there was no chance for anyone else.

  A neurotic nut? I answered, of course. It was too intriguing to let pass. Why not, I suggested, send me a picture if you write again? A second letter duly arrived, at home this time. I remember going sleepily downstairs to pick up the mail and feeling the envelopes yes, it seemed to contain a photograph. This is where my interest abruptly ends, I thought; he’s bound to be hideous. Never have I been more wrong! Blond, blond, blond, a gorgeously better class of blond, male and hunky with a beautiful face and well-developed body. On a bed, naked.

  The correspondence continued, needless to say. I thought him lonely, vulnerable, nice, and desperately wanting love. He’s a student now, at college in Spearfish, SD, training to teach handicapped children.

  My plans to spend a year in California were in no way influenced by all this, but I wrote to Gary to tell him that it was likely we’d meet at last. I gave him Dennis and Paul’s phone number, and a picture of me. I got no reply.

  “It’s for you,” Paul says, handing me the phone.

  “David? Guess who I am.”

  He’s working in a restaurant in Spearfish till term starts. We talk for a long while about nothing in particular, and produce no answer to the problem of how, or when, or where. Spearfish is a thousand miles east of San Francisco. But he likes the picture of me … yes, it’s kinda … definitely OK! He hadn’t answered because it arrived when he was on vacation in Colorado.

  Dennis and Paul are fascinated, not only by the plot so far, but by what should happen next. About which they vigorously disagree. Dennis, optimist, romantic, says I don’t start work for two weeks; why not fly up to Spearfish, or ask him down here? Paul looks Spearfish up in an atlas and tells us its population is three thousand and two, so it can’t possess an airport for sure. And maybe this kid is an axe murderer. And the picture he sent is of his lover or his cousin, or torn out of a wank mag. Dennis says to call Republic Airlines and find out the cost of a ticket to Rapid City, which, Paul’s atlas shows, is the nearest airport to Spearfish.

  “Rapid City!” Paul scoffs. “What goddam names they have up there! Primitive, with no bathrooms, and Indians stabbing fish in water-holes. And South Dakota is only wonderful if you’re deeply into wheatfields.”

  I disappear to telephone, and get several prices for San Francisco to Rapid City. You can’t fly direct, but have to change at Minneapolis or Salt Lake or Las Vegas, and even the cheapest figure quoted is more than I can reasonably afford.

  “Three hundred and twenty-five dollars!” Paul says. “The most expensive cocks on Castro, the most delectable buns on Castro, are much less than that!”

  Dennis tells him not to be so fucking cynical, and suggests I call the kid to ask will he split the fare with me.

  “I’m in the middle of writing you a letter!” Gary says. If I come up, he explains, he can’t spend too much time with me because of his work at the restaurant, and with me he wants all day, not just part of it. He’d rather come down to the Peninsula, for he’s never been to Sin City—indeed any big city. But we will meet, he says. After so long, he can put up with a little more delay: he’s learned he can’t have everything now. At least we’ve heard each other’s voices. “I’ve never spoken to a guy with an accent like yours,” he says. “I’ve never met anyone British!” Paul says it’s far too exciting, so to avoid a complete nervous breakdown, he will have to fix cocktails, though it’s only 10.30 in the morning. A bilious shade of bright green they are, strong, with lots of ice, and by noon we feel not paralytic but unfit for much else than drinking more of the stuff.

  I look at Paul’s atlas. Those South Dakota names aren’t primitive, but romantic, impossibly far off. Deadwood. Hot Springs. Camp Crook. Like Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Popocatépetl.

  II

  THE FIRST TIME I saw the Pacific Ocean I was, unlike stout Cortez, disappointed. It looked just like any other sea. Thinking, however, I should give it another chance, I drive down the Junipero Serra Freeway, and almost immediately o
utside the city limits the landscape becomes wild and beautiful. Earthquake country. On my right is the San Andreas Fault—a chain of lakes here, reservoirs containing most of San Francisco’s water supply. Should doomsday happen, the flooding could be terrible. But you learn to live with earth tremors in California, and become as sanguine as we in England are about woodworm and rising damp. I woke once at 5 a.m. to hear all the beams in the apartment creak, the windows shiver, and I thought “Oh, it’s an earthquake.” And went back to sleep. Then there was the nice lady librarian who told me the Hayward Fault ran under the cellar of her house. One really bad shudder had cracked the chimney-breast from floor to ceiling. Didn’t she know the danger, I asked, before she bought the place? Well, yes, she replied, but there were people living all along the street, and they seemed happy enough.

  Above the San Andreas the hills rise, their slopes dark with fir and eucalyptus, and late in the afternoon the fog can shroud the peaks, thick and so dazzling white that you imagine you’re gazing at Alpine snow. Today there is no fog: hot, a cloudless sky. On the left of the freeway is the huge ugly statue of Father Junipero Serra, one finger pointing, as if to warn, at the faultline; and a rest station, an a.y.o.r. cruising area. I’m told it’s now very risky—the police patrol it too often. I met a kid here once; he led me inside the statue (there is, appropriately—or was—a big hole at the base of its spine) and we kissed, took off each other’s clothes, and fucked, under Father Junipero’s concrete Franciscan skirts.

  I drive across the San Andreas into the hills, then wind slowly down to the sea. I’m looking for the gay nude beach at San Gregorio, but I’m not sure of its precise location: it could be anywhere along this dramatic empty coast of shattered cliffs. Every strand and cove looks deserted, despite the glorious weather; in this bit of California people seem as sparse as in the west of Ireland. I walk some way along the cliffs, fearful of rattlesnakes in the dry scrubby vegetation, and eventually scramble down to the sea. Where I stay till sunset. There are only six people on this great stretch of beach: two men, nude, obviously lovers; and three girls and a boy in swimming costumes. Is this the famous gay San Gregorio? I don’t know and I don’t much care, lying naked in the sand, my skin caressed by a soft warm wind. The sea is rough, great frothy surf waves that remind me of Devon or Cornwall, and as the sun moves across the sky the sheen on the water is pewter. It’s just like being at home, and I think of childhood years in the West Country or hot summer days only two weeks ago. Yes, one sea is much like another, and that’s not disappointing: it’s reassuring.