stumbling block here and that was that, although I didn’t understand it, I was really just a statistic to Obo. Political attitudes being what they were in the house, no one was allowed to object or show they cared, but Obo slept with practically everyone who moved into the house. Shortly after we had slept together a girl called Mary moved in with her son Jasper. One night I walked into the kitchen when Mary was cooking and what do you know? There was Obo and his guitar. Mary was admiring his fingering and I felt like the biggest fool on earth. Due to my lack of a vagina I was slowly moved to the back of the sleeping rota until I finally faced facts and took myself off it.
The thing is, I don’t think Obo was ever gay or indeed even bisexual. He had grown up in a wealthy East-Coast school and attended an Ivy League university, but somehow it had all ended and now he was a mechanic with one failed group marriage behind him. He told me later that he had spent some time in therapy and that at one point the therapist had latched on to the idea that Obo was in love with his best friend from college and even made him phone him to tell him. I’m guessing that the guy really was a good friend, because the two are still close to this day.
At the time, though, I was upset. People in the house were very kind and concerned about me. They recognised that I was young, this was not my world, and while it meant almost nothing to Obo this was obviously a big deal for me. Of course the odd thing was that it didn’t make my sexual preferences any clearer for me. Yes, I had now had sex with a man, but I didn’t feel any different. I know now that that is the great lesson to be learnt – you don’t. What should be about who you are sleeping with isn’t necessarily so. Most of what defines being gay, whether we like it or not, is lifestyle – it is the bars we go to, the clothes we wear, the people we hang out with. All I knew was that I had enjoyed sex with Obo, but I was still a long way off understanding why men wore leather and hung around the Eagle.
Meanwhile, life went on. One day while we were in the middle of a busy lunchtime at Vie de France, I suddenly felt very peculiar. I turned to the rest of the people in the little service area between the kitchen and the dining room and was about to say something, but everyone else had reacted at exactly the same time. The floor was moving! An intense woman called Patty Paris who was training to be a biological illustrator behaved as if she had been reading some ‘what to do’ manual every day since her first birthday. She threw her arms up and pushed her whole body against the shelves of glassware to prevent them from falling. ‘Earthquake!’ she cried. The rest of us looked at her for a beat and then all screamed ‘Earthquake!’ and ran out into the restaurant.
All the customers were standing and silent, and then, defying all logic, a large rippling wave went through the wooden floor. Ignoring every bit of Patty’s advice to stay where we were we ran out into the street and looked up tosee the tops of the buildings swaying like trees by the side of the road. Just as the excitement was beginning to turn into the genuine fear that this wasn’t just a severe tremor, it stopped. The city shuddered back to its old self and we went back inside. Everyone was talking at once, and no one was really that interested in what the specials of the day were for the rest of the afternoon. In the service area, there was Patty still holding up the shelves waiting for the all-clear. We peeled her away and told her about the amazing buckling floor and how we had seen the buildings move. She gasped in horror, ‘What about falling glass?’ As it turned out, despite being the worst tremor the city had experienced for over twenty years there was only one casualty. A guy skateboarding down a hill had been thrown off course and had skated straight into a wall. Hard to feel that sorry for him
The thing is, I don’t think Obo was ever gay or indeed even bisexual. He had grown up in a wealthy East-Coast school and attended an Ivy League university, but somehow it had all ended and now he was a mechanic with one failed group marriage behind him. He told me later that he had spent some time in therapy and that at one point the therapist had latched on to the idea that Obo was in love with his best friend from college and even made him phone him to tell him. I’m guessing that the guy really was a good friend, because the two are still close to this day.
At the time, though, I was upset. People in the house were very kind and concerned about me. They recognised that I was young, this was not my world, and while it meant almost nothing to Obo this was obviously a big deal for me. Of course the odd thing was that it didn’t make my sexual preferences any clearer for me. Yes, I had now had sex with a man, but I didn’t feel any different. I know now that that is the great lesson to be learnt – you don’t. What should be about who you are sleeping with isn’t necessarily so. Most of what defines being gay, whether we like it or not, is lifestyle – it is the bars we go to, the clothes we wear, the people we hang out with. All I knew was that I had enjoyed sex with Obo, but I was still a long way off understanding why men wore leather and hung around the Eagle.
Meanwhile, life went on. One day while we were in the middle of a busy lunchtime at Vie de France, I suddenly felt very peculiar. I turned to the rest of the people in the little service area between the kitchen and the dining room and was about to say something, but everyone else had reacted at exactly the same time. The floor was moving! An intense woman called Patty Paris who was training to be a biological illustrator behaved as if she had been reading some ‘what to do’ manual every day since her first birthday. She threw her arms up and pushed her whole body against the shelves of glassware to prevent them from falling. ‘Earthquake!’ she cried. The rest of us looked at her for a beat and then all screamed ‘Earthquake!’ and ran out into the restaurant.
All the customers were standing and silent, and then, defying all logic, a large rippling wave went through the wooden floor. Ignoring every bit of Patty’s advice to stay where we were we ran out into the street and looked up tosee the tops of the buildings swaying like trees by the side of the road. Just as the excitement was beginning to turn into the genuine fear that this wasn’t just a severe tremor, it stopped. The city shuddered back to its old self and we went back inside. Everyone was talking at once, and no one was really that interested in what the specials of the day were for the rest of the afternoon. In the service area, there was Patty still holding up the shelves waiting for the all-clear. We peeled her away and told her about the amazing buckling floor and how we had seen the buildings move. She gasped in horror, ‘What about falling glass?’ As it turned out, despite being the worst tremor the city had experienced for over twenty years there was only one casualty. A guy skateboarding down a hill had been thrown off course and had skated straight into a wall. Hard to feel that sorry for him
Similar Books
