I’m a writer. Stories creep about inside me and I cast them out in fits of prose. I have strong opinions about curtains but that’s about as gay as I get these days. I take an intense interest in people which often gets mistaken for friendship. I’m never in the right place at the right time but who is? I demand authenticity in people and yet mock earnestness. I sometimes wonder if I fall in love with everyone I meet or I’ve never been in love. A famous writer told me once at a book signing “think of the thing you are most ashamed of and write about that”.
When I was a child my mother put me on the Pritikin Diet, a low-fat, high-fibre diet which forms part of the Pritikin programme for diet and exercise. A lifestyle regimen created by Nathan Pritikin. The book describing the diet became a best-seller while I wasted away. By the time I was 12 I looked like an Ethiopian supermodel. In the same year Bob Geldof launched Live Aid and pictures of starving Ethiopians were splashed all over our TV screens. I knew I wasn’t alone.
For years I had a recurring dream. My mother is handing out chocolate biscuits to a long line of children. By the time she gets to me the chocolate biscuit packet is empty. The dream then starts again and again it ends with an empty packet of chocolate biscuits. When I found my father’s secret jar of loose change the first thing I did was buy a packet of chocolate fucking biscuits. Oreo too, American biscuits wonder-filled with churro-flavored creme. I gobbled the lot in a carpark behind the Cole’s New World. Oreo are still my favorite biscuit not just because of the secret trans fat goodness but because they come without a plastic tray. You can rip open the packet with your teeth and scull. Wash down with milk. Oreo’s are best stored in the freezer. Discover them late at night, behind the frozen peas.
Family Hold Back or FHB is a code the adults in my family applied to kids when guests arrive unexpectedly and there was potentially not enough food to go round. FHB was whispered from family member to family member. I remember watching the guests pile food high on to their plates unaware of the holes I was drilling in the back of their heads and the sacrifice I was making in the shadows of FHB. I resented FHB with my whole being I began to devise sophisticated strategies for getting my dream foods into my mouth; chocolate biscuits with cream centers, soft coffee roles with pink icing and sherbet.
I’d been self harming with sherbet behind the school dunnies for months. While the other kids smoked cigarettes, I scooped packet after packet of sherbet into my mouth to make up for the lost years in the Pritikin wilderness. A handsome student dentist discovered a carnival of rot in my mouth at my 6 monthly check-up and set to work filling the cavities. He decided not to use anesthetic for reasons I’m still unaware of. Budget cuts, sadomasochism, whatever, it was my first memory of torture. My mouth kept closing and the dentist assistant kept saying “a little wider, a little wider, a little wider” finally my mouth flipped open doubling it’s capacity and astounding even the dentist. “Woah there tiger, don’t eat us” 10 years later when I had my impacted wisdom teeth removed under a general anaesthetic, the surgeon remarked how big my mouth was. “I was butchered by a dentist when I was 7″ I said. He laughed heartily, so much so it must have slipped his mind to prescribe me any pain killers. Once home I had to rely on ice packs to ease the pain. It was torturous. I remember my mother telling me while I lay in bed in excruciating pain that pain is relative and it couldn’t possibly be worse than child birth.
My polyamorous girlfriend Tracey told me about an older man she was seeing. He was 17, she was 15. He was cool and looked just like Morrissey from The Smiths. I was 14 and had never heard of The Smiths. Although I was old enough to get the punkness of a band naming themselves after the most popular surname in the English-speaking world. After school one day we caught a bus to West End where this guy lived. His flatmate let us in and we walked into a warehouse space with hessian sacks strewn across parched floors and cheesecloth throws over purple bean bags. Incense was billowing from a window ledge. Tie dyed pantaloons and rainbow knitted ponchos hung on big brass hooks sticking out of the wall. Empty bottles of red wine lay on their side. Tracey nodded at me with her eyes, relishing my excitement. I could hear a hollow crooning coming from the ceiling, I looked up. Sitting at the top of some narrow fold out stairs leading to a loft was a man with high quaffed hair and a strong jaw line singing to a song playing in the background. One foot dangled through the stairs, the other propped up to his chest. He was writing with a red pencil on to rice paper held together by string. Tracey called out to him “Hey you”
“Hey sweetie” he said but wholly distracted, saying hello it seemed had wasted a second of his valuable time.
“This is BJ” she yelled.
He glared at me and sung even louder.
“Now I know how Joan of Arc felt. Now I know how Joan of Arc felt”
He sounded out of tune to me but so did the singer he was imitating. Neither sounded happy. I wondered if he positioned himself like that for our arrival or if he was a cripple that had to crawl around the apartment and he was waiting for us to carry him down the stairs. The guy on the cassette started again “Now I know how Joan of Arc felt, now I know how Joan of Arc felt”. I thought “who the fuck is Joan of Arc?”
She grabbed me by the shoulder and whispered “Isn’t he fab?” I don’t think she knew who Joan of Arc was either.
I shrugged and asked loudly “What is this music?” He got up and disappeared into his loft. Tracey grabbed me and we followed him. I crawled into the loft and noticed the ceiling was covered with sheets of paper with lyrics or poetry scribbled all over them. He was waiting for us lying on his back across a low set Futon bed, one foot tapping the floor and the other extended out. The music was louder and the next song even more obnoxiously miserable than the last. I said again “What is this music?” Suddenly he sat up and pointed at me. “Haha look at the size of your mouth! You could suck 10 cocks with that!”
I laughed, I’d only contemplated one cock, maybe two. I asked again about the guy moaning in the background.
“It’s Morrissey from The Smiths, just the best band ever, they are so ironic. I would die for Morrissey”
Tracey jumped on the bed, pitched her back against the wall and sparked up a cigarette.
“Me too” she said.
I crawled on to the bed but balanced myself on the edge, anxious about the 10 cocks possibly coming my way.
Tracey started to sing with Morrissey, she whined with a strange melodic joy like she was in pain but happy about it. I sparked up a cigarette too.
The guitar jangled and wobbled like it had been thrown from a balcony, still plugged in. I wanted to take the cassette to my room and listen to every song carefully to discover the secrets this music held. It made good looking men open their legs and talk about cock. “This one’s called Bigmouth Strikes Again. He wrote it for you” The cool guy lent across Tracey who was now between us.
This cool guy put his lips on mine. The cold rush of wetness that came from his mouth repulsed me and turned me on. I didn’t know it was possible to experience opposing feelings simultaneously. I opened my mouth and almost swallowed his face. The cool guy screamed and recoiled “Eeek big mouth strikes again!” I was not hurt because in that moment, as I scraped my teeth along the top of my tongue to remove the taste of his aftershave and tobacco, I became a man.