It was fun to wrangle about our divergent tastes. We had strong opinions and stubbornness in common, though they were expressed in different styles. Scorsese was someone we both admired, though Mike had a mental block about his name (and quite a few others) so that it always came out as ‘Sacuzzi’. Mike was the first person I had met who cared about the Oscars and the first to use the phrase ‘the economy’ in casual conversation.
In architecture, naturally enough, his tastes were adventurous. He admired Peter Eisenman’s House VI, with the upside-down staircase formally balancing the functional one, and the obstruction preventing the occupants (the mere clients) from installing a double bed. In fact there were multiple reasons for sleepless nights. House VI bankrupted the couple who commissioned it, so that the boot of debt was on the other foot for once.
Mike also knew every lyric from A Chorus Line, but that didn’t come high on the list of qualities that would appeal to Dad. Military service to his country, crew cut, combat experience, aspiring professional status — a warm light should be played on these attributes to bring out all their sparkle. Love of show tunes was a different story, to be kept in the dark as much as possible. Easier to imagine Dad and Frank Zappa singing doo-wop on the back step than Dad and Mike duetting on ‘One Hand, One Heart’ from West Side Story.
If Dad knew what part Mike played in my life, a thousand individual blind spots would join up into a single massive refusal to acknowledge his merits. It made sense to introduce the person first and add the label afterwards. A good first impression might stand up to the revision required by his ideology. So I had asked Mike to stay in the Anglesey house earlier in the holiday.
I had no way of judging our viability as a couple, never having been part of one before. I could measure the success of one day against another, but not the vitality of the whole. We didn’t seem to be a very vibrant combination, but how was I to know?
Just as his hesitation in speech took the edge off what might otherwise have been an over-insistent manner, so there were little complications in his world view which saved him from dismissing other people’s altogether. He was a thoroughgoing atheist, for instance, who had had a mystical experience. It hadn’t overturned his assumptions, but he was too honest to pretend it hadn’t happened.
It was when he was seventeen, doing farm work one summer. The job involved fetching water from a well, and one day the water in the bucket mysteriously became alive as he carried it. He became aware, gradually at first, then overwhelmingly, of the water in its entangled essence. This was a drug experience without benefit of drugs. It lasted less than a full hour but more than half of one, and all that time he was aware of the water as an activity rather than a substance. He was carrying a bucket of particles in motion. He wasn’t just a spectator of the molecular traffic, he was fully involved in its tingle. And after that, he couldn’t in all honesty rule out the possibility of a transcendent reality, though he was no keener on the idea than he had been before.
Mike didn’t seem to want to touch me or sleep with me, but still there was some strong connection. He told me that if I wanted sex I should just say so. It was no big deal. He used the phrase ‘goodnight handshake’ for such friendly helping out. He was always telling me that I had a moral backbone, that I was a person of integrity. These rather alienating compliments seemed to confirm that I was someone who would not be asking for a goodnight handshake any time soon.
It made sense that we started from different assumptions. Mike came from a strongly sexualized milieu. At a time when the Castro area of San Francisco was many gay men’s spiritual home, it was actually his normal address. He worked out in a ‘clothing-optional’ gym — a nude gym. His normal place to see films was the Castro Cinema, where straight people fell into the category of tourists, sightseers as much as moviegoers. It was routine for him to start the day at a breakfast place called Welcome Home, where the coffee-pot was toted and the order for steak and eggs taken by a slightly sulky cowboy, whose reflex of raunchy backchat was only the local dialect of waitstaff banter worldwide. Mike was either past the stage of wanting a boyfriend, or not yet ready for it.
Our relationship meant different things to us, which usually means that the relationship doesn’t actually exist. If two people have divergent ideas about the part they play in each other’s lives then they are in two asymmetrical relationships rather than a single one. They overlap in a space they don’t share. The axioms of an emotional logic are not held in common.
There was plenty of goodwill involved, though, and I hope Mike didn’t regard the responsibility of presenting himself to the family as my partner to be oppressive. There was a Christmas meal planned by his Cambridge housemates, but perhaps he enjoyed having made other connections and being in demand. They might be insular but he was not.
I was helping him out financially, too, till he could get money matters arranged, since at that time it wasn’t easy for non-citizens to set up bank accounts. Obviously he was good for his debts, but he may have felt that he was in some way defraying the imaginary interest on my little loans by accepting the role of designated boyfriend in the family drama. A walk-on who might well be booed, but with luck only after he had left the stage. Mike would be back in Cambridge by the time Dad read the small print in the programme (‘and introducing Mike Larson as the surprise love interest …’).
This was the man in my corner when I entered the ring to slug it out with Dad. Positive images and role models, though, didn’t really do the trick in his case. When liberal commentators set out to break the link between homosexuality and degradation the laugh was on them, really. The link was too strong in his mind, not to be casually broken. When Penelope Gilliatt, John Schlesinger and Peter Finch (with help from Glenda Jackson, Murray Head and let’s not forget Bessie Love as the answering service lady) got together to make Sunday Bloody Sunday in 1971, showing how ordinary, not to mention unthreatening and pitiable, the life of a gay doctor in London really was — and this was years after Ronald Waterhouse had tried to tell Dad that he had a bee in his bonnet on precisely this subject — well, really they might just as well not have bothered. Dad missed the point without even trying. He was shocked by the film (as he told me while we were driving round the equestrian statue by Holborn Viaduct) and its sordid load of prejudice. The nastiness he detected lay in the film’s suggestion that a Jewish doctor could be a homosexual. This was plain anti-Semitism, as he saw it, possibly also a libel on the standing of the medical profession, though it was the religious slur that preoccupied him.
Well-meaning cultural intervention could not raise the status of homosexuality in his eyes any more than an anvil could take to the air with the help of a few party balloons.
Mike had obvious merits as a house guest, from Mum and Dad’s point of view. He didn’t stammer noticeably more or less in their company than he did in mine. It was natural to his generation of Americans to address their seniors as ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am’, forms of speech that would have seemed self-abasing or actively satirical on the lips of their British equivalents.
That suited Dad, who didn’t at all mind being truckled to. He was even indulgent towards over-truckling, seeing it as a fault in the right direction, a badge of good-heartedness, not to be penalized. It was under-truckling he didn’t care for, any sort of reverence shortfall.