Others in the group, operating from a collapsing warehouse, were curating shows of contemporary art. Some reasonable things did get done, though no one much noticed. It was irritating when I found myself interested in them as a teacher or parent — the extent of their minds; in how seriously they could take themselves. They didn’t read much; there was a lot of cultural knowledge I took for granted and they didn’t. My own son didn’t start to read or watch decent films until he was almost twenty. He wouldn’t allow us, but only a female teacher, to turn him on to these pleasures. Recently, on the radio I’d said I considered reading about as important as raising poodles. As intended, this had got me into wonderful trouble with the bookworms. The whispering, worshipful tones in which my parents referred to ‘literature’ and ‘scholarship’ had always made me wonder what more could be done with a body than pass information in and out of it.
I had been to a club once, in the early 1990s, to see Prince, with my son and the college lecturer who seemed to be educating him (in bed), Deedee Osgood. Despite the squalor and the fact that everyone but me was virtually naked and on drugs, I loved looking at everyone. Now, most evenings, my new pals took me to clubs. This soon bored me, so they gave me Ecstasy for the first time. Though I had smoked pot and taken LSD, and known people who’d become junkies or cocaine addicts, alcohol was the drug of my generation. It seemed the best drug. I’d never understood why anyone would want to waltz with mephitic alligators.
I doubted whether any of my new acquaintances went a day without a smoke or some other stimulant. As my friends knew, the ‘E’ hit me as a revelation and I wanted it served to the Prime Minister, and pumped into the water supply. I popped handfuls of it every day for a fortnight. It led me into my own body, and out into others’, in so far as there was anyone real there at all. I couldn’t tell. (I liked to call us E-trippers ‘a loose association of solipsists’.) My ardour made my new pals laugh. They had learned that E wasn’t the cure, and the last thing the world needed was another drug philosopher.
But after the purifications and substitutions of culture, I believed I was returning to something neglected: fundamental physical pleasure, the ecstasy of the body, of my skin, of movement, and of accelerated, spontaneous affection for others in the same state. I had been of puny build, not someone aware of his strength, and had always found it easier to speak of the most intimate things than to dance. As a Newbody, however, I began to like the pornographic circus of rough sex; the stuff that resembled some of the modern dance I had seen, animalistic, without talk. I begged to be turned into meat, held down, tied, blindfolded, slapped, pulled and strangled, entirely merged in the physical, all my swirling selves sucked into orgasm. ‘Insights from the edge of consciousness’, I’d have called it, had words come easily to me at that time. But they were the last thing on my mind.
By using others, I could get myself on to a sexual high for two or three days. It was indeed drug-like: a lucent, shivering pleasure not only in my own body but, I believed, in all existence at its most elemental. Narcissus singing into his own arse! Hello! I was also aware, as I danced naked on the balcony of a house overlooking Lake Como at daybreak after spending the night with a young couple who didn’t interest me, of how many addicts I’d known and how tedious any form of addiction could be. The one thing I didn’t want was to get stuck within.
For the group, there was sex of every variety, and the others’ drug-taking had moved to heroin. At least two of the boys were HIV-positive. Several of the others believed that that was their destiny. Because my contact with reality was, at the most, glancing, it took me a while to see how desperate the pleasures were, and how ridiculously romantic their sense of shared tragedy and doom was. My generation had been through it, with James Dean, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison and others. If I’d been a kid now, I’d have found poetic misery hard to resist. As it was, I knew I was not of them, because I couldn’t help wondering what their parents would have thought.
What we used to call ‘promiscuity’ had always bothered me. Impersonal love seemed a devaluation of social intercourse. I couldn’t help believing, no doubt pompously, that one of civilisation’s achievements was to give value to life, to conversation with others. Or was faithful love only an unnecessarily constraining bourgeois idiocy?
There would be a moment when the other, or ‘bit of the other’, as we used to say, would turn human. Some gesture, word or cry would indicate a bruised history or ailing mind. The bubble of fantasy was pricked (I came to understand fantasy as a fatal form of preconception and preoccupation). I saw another kind of opening then, which was also an opportunity for another kind of entry — into the real. I fled, not wanting my desire to take me too far into another person. Really, apart from with the woman who paid me, when it came to sex I was only interested in my own feeling.
It has, at least, become clear that it is our pleasures, rather than our addictions and vices, which are our greatest problems. Pleasure can change you in an instant; it can take you anywhere. If these gratifications were intoxicating and almost mystical in their intensity, I learned, when something stranger happened, that indulgence wasn’t a full-time job and reality was a shore where dreams broke. It turned out I was seducible.
One of the artists in my group had a four-year-old son. The others were only intermittently interested in him, as I was in them, and mostly the kid watched videos. His loneliness reflected mine. If I’d been up partying and couldn’t sleep the next day, I would, before I cured my come-down with another pill, take him to see the spiders in the zoo. Making him laugh was my greatest pleasure. We played football and drew and sang. I didn’t mind ambling about at his speed, and I made up stories in cafés. ‘Read another,’ he’d say. He helped me recall moments with my own children: my boy, at four, fetching me an old newspaper from the kitchen, as he was used to my perpetual reading.
With his stubborn refusals, the kid reduced me twice to fury. I found myself actually stamping my feet. This jarring engagement made me see that otherwise I was like a spy, concealed and wary. If my generation had been fascinated by what it was like to be Burgess, or Philby or Blunt — the emotional price of a double life, of hiding in your mind — the kid reminded me of how much of one’s useful self one locked away in the keeping of serious secrets.
The kid sent me into an unshareable spin. I wept alone, feeling guilty at how impatient I had been with my own children. I composed a lengthy email apologising for omissions years ago, but didn’t send it. Otherwise, I saw that most of my kids’ childhood was a blank. I had either been somewhere else, or wanted to be, doing something ‘important’ or ‘intellectually demanding’. Or I wanted the children to be more like adults — less passionate and infuriating, in other words. The division of labour between men and women had been more demarcated in my day: the men had the money and the women the children, a deprivation for both.