Stolid, Solid: Interviewing the Famous: Anthony Burgess

Picture courtesy Burning Man

He had a blinding hangover the morning he met Anthony Burgess.

He was yet to work out that only the lowest of the low in terms of the pecking order of journalists got slotted in at 9am, so the interview with Anthony Burgess was slotted in for that un-Godly hour.

And thus it was that the famous author, in the midst of blinding pain, appeared before him in the foyer of one of London's many upmarket hotels.

Before Dubai, the Arabs were already transformed London into one of the world's money centrals. In the spiraling eighties it was generally assumed that anybody who was anybody ended up spending time in London. New York, with all its crassness, might claim to be the centre of the world, but that historic city by the Thames had class, class, class.

Burgess had just penned his book Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939; along with another in his Shakespearean series, the latest being Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End of Enderby.

Indeed, after he had waded through the Enderby series, there did indeed seem to be no end of Enderby.

At the time he shared the disdain towards Burgess held by some of the slower, less prolific writers in the English canon such as Al Alvarez, with whom he had taken to having long walks with on Hampstead Heath. He had gone out of his way to befriend the author of The Savage God, a contemplation on suicide and Sylvia Plath, ever since he had interviewed and got a very good run in the Australian Financial Review with Alvarez's 1983 book on the lure of gambling, The Biggest Game In Town.

It was just up "the Fin's" alley; and they ran it if memory served him correctly across a rare double page spread in their Friday review section.

The Savage God had been one of the bible's of his youth.

Back in the 1970s in the crowd with which he used to run, Sylvia Plath one of their genuine demi-gods.

Her early death at the hands of an oven simply made her all that more appealing.

We could quote lines from Plath's Daddy by wrote; and we weren't even at school:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.....

I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

"You do not do, you do not do, black shoe...you bastard I'm through" was some of our favourite lines.

"Slyvia Platitude" we had scrawled across the lounge room wall of that terrace in Sydney's inner-city suburb of Paddington which had seemed for a while to be the centre of everything.

Burgess's publication of Ninety-nine novels had predictably created a furore in literary circles, even promoting the publication of counter lists.


As quickly became evident when he asked Burgess about the sometimes excoriating commentary accompanying its publication, Burgess was hugely enjoying the controversy over which books should and shouldn't belong in a list of the 20th century's best fiction.

The criticism was water off a ducks back. He was already a multi-millionaire. Nothing could touch him but time itself. Critics were just mosquitoes as far as he was concerned; and he held what some would call a very healthy disdain for them.

Who would want to be a critic? he asked. Do these people sit in school and dream about their futures and think, yes, that's what I want to be, a critic. Is that all their dreams are made of?

As for the controversy, you have to start somewhere, Burgess shrugged. The book's promoted debate and that is what it was intended to do. And hopefully it's got people reading more books.

Although he hadn't enjoyed the Enderby books, wading through them dutifully in his preparation for the interview, he asked Burgess about hopefully what was to be the last of them, as No End of Enderby and the list were the two books then being promoted.

Burgess had already had breakfast in his room so unfortunately for him the famous author had no desire for any more repast.

While he could have done with a free coffee and some breakfast, the alcohol sweat making his clothes cling to his thin body even in the air conditioning of the hotel, the interview ended up being conducted on a couch in the foyer.

The PR bird sat perkily next to him throughout, occasionally trying to facilitate the conversation.

When the interview wound up after an hour which had seemed like an eternity he made his way across the football field of a foyer and out into the London streets.

He hadn't bothered to dress up for the interview, and didn't possess the clothes anyway, but the dank sweat coating him and his sick pallor from the city's nightclubs, made him look even worse than usual.

The sight of himself in the foyer's many mirrors did nothing to reassure him.

As he stepped down from the mezzanine level and headed towards the hotel's revolving doors, he saw Anthony Burgess and the public relations woman staring after him quizzically, and then burying their heads together.

Not that Burgess could talk. In the late 1950s he was dismissed from a position as a teacher in Brunei, and as an excuse claimed to have had a brain tumor; a tumor that was never found.

Burgess's story telling abilities were well known to extend to himself and as Wikipedia observers:

"Burgess' biographers attribute the incident to the author's notorious mythomania."

And as biographer Geoffrey Grigson wrote, Anthony Burgess was suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking and associated poor nutrition...of overwork and professional disappointment.

There was no air of disappointment about Burgess at the time he met him.

Indeed, Burgess could hardly have appeared wealthier, more solid, more stolid, more assured of himself.

And as he entered the over white light of the street, he had a stab not just of disorienting pain, but of envy for the workers in the street, the shop keepers behind their counters, the bus driver passing by, the legal secretaries with bundles of documents rushing to their offices, for everyone else but himself. He envied their solidity, stolidity, normality singleness of purpose. For their certainty in who they were and why they were. While Burgess prepared for another interview before heading back home to Monaco, he headed back to his life in the London squats, with his increasingly frustrated lover, to another night of pointless carousing and implausible excuses.

Traces In The Past

Sketches Moving Men by Rosaka Chan

His friend was dying of AIDS.

That much was obvious.

He had run into Paul, who he hadn't seen for several years, at St Vincent's Hospital, which he was attending for another matter unrelated to AIDS.

But he was amazed at the number of people he encountered who he had known from the past, each attending their various treatments for the disease which had ravished so many of his contemporaries and brought them, diminished from their illnesses, to these broad steps and its large, muffled foyer.

Each of them was a long way from the individuals he had first met. Back then, in the 1980s, they had been full of life and flirtations, lovers and intrigue.

Now they were simply sick. Aging and dying in a way none of them had planned or wish; a feeble outcome from the dynamic people they once had been.

And thus it was he met Paul, again.

Paul had been an artist, back then, always sketching the people he knew, the young men who had frequented his various apartments, almost as if in secret. Whatever went on behind those doors was not for everyone to know.

All these years later, away from the intriguing paradises of inner Sydney, Paul was living with his long term lover in a Randwick apartment above a Thai restaurant, which he had helped set up his lover in.

Downstairs was all the bustle of a popular Thai restaurant, of which Sydney was increasingly full.

Customers sometimes queued out the door. It was always busy.

Following the instructions Paul had given him on the steps of the hospital, he had dropped by one day when he was driving past; having completed another mission from the Goddess.

It was night time and he was a little lost; wanting to ignite the flames of old. The warmth, the camaraderie, all the people they had known together.

Downstairs the boyfriend, now restaurant manager, pointed him to the stairs which led to the apartment upstairs; and then accompanied him to the door.

Paul was frail, and could not sustain the pressure of unwanted guests. Like so many, Paul had become increasingly isolated as his illness progressed. He didn't want people to see him the way he was now. He wanted people to remember him the way he used to be.

The boyfriend seemed relieved when Paul greeted him warmly and allowed him into the inner sanctum of his apartment, a humble place littered with memories, ghosts, suffering.

Paul was smoking a lot of marijuana to offset the nausea of the AIDS treatments that he was enduring; the prolonging of life for life's purpose, for a reason nobody quite new, perhaps in the forlorn hope that a cure was just around the corner.

For so many years nobody had known what the peculiar American illness now decimating the ranks of Sydney's gay population actually was.

The fear campaigns initially adopted by the Australian government, the grim reaper advertisements which while doing little to stop the spread of the disease had done much to instill fear of gay people in the general population, had now given way to more progressive and targeted campaigns.

But even so; AIDS held a stigma of the lost and the marginalised. It was the ultimate price to pay for once having been at the forefront of social change and sexual experimentation, for the wild parties, the Mardi Gras, the legal and political campaigns which had found sympathetic ears at the highest level of government.

And so they settled down to talk and reminisce, in that apartment above the bustle of the restaurant, the aura of long term love, the delicacy of discretion and illness, the concern of his healthy Thai boyfriend.

Paul told him all the stories about how he had spent years in India; as a gay man the object of great curiosity and attention from the local Indian men, who used to virtually queue at the door of his house, their own women, mistresses of their own domain, well under wraps.

And rolled joint after joint as the evenings settled into nights; and the throbbing tumult of the bars and clubs only a few suburbs away distant now in time and space; an unfocused longing from a different past.

A time they thought would never end.

Or at least end in a more glorious place than this.

Paul had destroyed almost all the paintings and drawings he had so painstakingly done all those years ago.

He couldn't understand why; and Paul tried to explain. He wanted to be rid of everything, all that had been, all that had made him sick, that had betrayed him so totally.

He showed him the fragments of sketches that he had kept; including pictures of himself and his then lover Martin, and he was particularly taken by the fine lines of Martin's then feline form.

And each drawing, or scrap of a drawing, spoke of the obsessions with men he had known and loved. There wasn't any laughter to be had in the rediscoveries.

He didn't hear of Paul's death immediately, the old social networks having been so thoroughly destroyed by the wasting disease, and therefore didn't attend the funeral.

He didn't try to talk to the restaurant manager boyfriend after he learnt of Paul's death.

He just continued to drive past the restaurant and think of him each time he passed.

He assumed the boyfriend would eventually sell up the restaurant at a considerable profit and return to his homeland.

And the memory of Paul continue to drift into nothingness, as he had wished. Just as he had destroyed his own sketches and paintings; in themselves a record of a bygone era. The suffering wiped clean. Only the memory of his laughing, devious, talented face and long intimate evenings lingering in the minds of some until they, too, were gone.

Hunting the Famous - Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal in 1948, two years after he published his first novel City and the Pillar at the age of 21.

Gore Vidal with one of his many literary enemies Norman Mailer during a speech in 1985 against the American political landscape of the day. Pictures courtesy of The UK Guardian.

By the time he got to Gore Vidal he was a little blase about interviewing famous people.

He had long ago worked out that offering interviews of the famous to Australian newspapers was a sure route to publication - and therefore money.

Would you like an interview with Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22, went down a treat with the now defunct then historic news magazine The Bulletin, which back in the early part of the 20th century had published famous Australian authors, including that most lyrical of poet-alcoholics, Henry Lawson.

Once they hit the stratosphere of multi-million dollar sales, world wide fame and armies of public relations hacks, living legends tend to become unavailable to all but the most prestigious newspapers and magazines.

Except when they're flogging product. 

Well we were crippled by the side of the mountain, away from the beach, as if we had been walking towards the desert but failed. For across the mountain lay another mountain, and no one from our village had ventured further. In stories, that was all, there were men on horseback and privileged fights, carousing in sophisticated taverns, away from the quiet, incestuous village life. We released the dog and gazed after it lovingly, our substitute child we had loved so much. Everything to us in the cold London winters. A long way from the outpost from whence we came. 

The speed they scored down Chelsea Road kept them all awake, the toxicity of their pleasures raising no doubts, for there was no tomorrow, only the dawn, the embrace, the inappropriate randiness, the knives drawn if you threatened to leave. It was so vivid and yet so shameful. So many had promised to cure him; and failed. He could see the whack whack whack of the crystal light in the turgid dark of the London suburbs; densely populated, aching with history. He was always the emissary, the one sent out to score. Out in the streets when no one else wanted to be out; haunting Vauxhall when the snow piled in the corners of the streets and the pubs, which they rarely had money to venture into, churned out a foreign world of which he would never be a part.

Richard was always there, at two am, when everybody else was asleep, downing shots of Drambuie or Tia Maria or some exotic cocktail he had lifted from his place of work, speeding of his head, always happy to see you, his old mate from Australia, his dark mentor, the one that had introduced him to William Burroughs and the merry dance; the plain sacrifice, the glass raised; his handsome face, his dark limpid eyes, always part of our fantasy and our lives. He was beautiful, simply beautiful, in his unadorned way, and we all adored him. He would embrace us, not knowing what he did to our hearts, and that would be the end of it, as they shuffled into the crippled dawn.

Richard is dead now because they're all dead now. If it wasn't AIDS it was overdoses, and in his fragmented self, in the shadows where he had once lived, that face resonated as the spirit of adventure, as a beloved man, as everything we held dear. Him and Stephen drinking in the bar at the London School of Economics, drinking the afternoon away and laughing in delight at their shared jokes. And he flitted past, even then not able to drink in the same quantity. They laughed and share their jokes, and greeted him as the writer, sure that one day he would write their story too, the silent observer, the court poet. 

They could see from the bar windows into their backyards, the Hollyhocks in astonishing bloom, here in the centre of London, ten minutes from Trafalgar Square. He was shadowed in his own guilt and felt as if he was being followed, always, about to be exposed for the criminal he was, a fraud more interested in being plastered than in producing the lines of lyricism they all expected. Every now and then something was published, as he interviewed famous author after famous author, lunching with Joseph Heller, wrinkling their foreheads at the antics of Norman Mailer, being welcomed into Gore Vidal's room at Claridges. Please don't be overwhelmed, he said in his sweeping way, welcoming them in.

And yet they sat on the balcony of that bar and pissed the afternoons away. And everything they thought they were going to achieve never happened. The book he had laboured so hard over fell flat on a spike of rejection slips. Stephen worked as a nurse and all his various enterprises, playing the harp, becoming an osteopath, creating a home for wealthy queens, none of them were happening yet; the days when he was to become a doctor far off. And as for Richard himself, the centre of our entrancement, he drank and he drank in those days when he could still be fabulous, in those days before the alcohol ate his body and the pills left him a mumbling wreck, and those affectionate embraces he reserved for his loyal circle of friends; they became the embraces of a dying man, a tragedy within themselves. He excused himself and wenwt back to the typewriter; something had to work sometime.



  He had interviewed Salman Rushdie in the room the same room where he had written Midnight's Children. It was before the Fatwah and his fame had spiralled out of all control. Serious breaches were breaking through the fabric of things. He had walked with Al Alvarez on Hampstead Heath, he had used his new found status as a freelance journalist to pursue all his literary idols, and had been successful to quite some degree. He met Anthony Burgess, Dirk Bogarde, Joseph Heller, all gone now, he interviewed Gore Vidal and hunted down Paul Bowles in Tangiers, he had dinner in Madrid with Ian Gibson, who had just written a biography of the Spanish poet Lorca, and he climbed and he twisted here about, the lonely voice from far off Australia.

The British, of course, treat Australians with something between amusement and contempt, or at least they did in those days, and it was relatively easy to inveigle his way into all sorts of situations. Salman was a special case. In those days, before time and age and numerous life pressures crowded out the days, he would always read the books before interviewing the author. He had particularly loved Midnight's Children, as had millions of other readers, and had read it in Bombay, or Mumbai as it is now known, even chasing down some of the locations in the book, the sprawling, chaotic, wealthy areas of Bombay with its fading glamour and crumbling old temples.

The book had resonated with the chaos of India, and with his friend Martin they had embraced these days of chaos and charm. The house where Rushdie lived at that time, in Kent Town he remembered, was a large hushed house which would have required substantial wealth to have bought, even back then. He was living in squats at the time, and the wealth struck him as much as anything. Rushdie had come from a well off merchant Indian family, and this surprising wealth, here in London, at the centre of things, was impressive to an antipodean. Oh how he had valued that walk with Al Alvarez on Hampstead Heath, as they talked of Sylvia Plath and The Savage God. Oh how it all seemed to point to a glorious literary career, if only he kept writing, if only he kept on moving.

The house was hushed. A maid had opened the door. It soon became apparent that all four floors of the house were the Rushdie family; an astonishing thing to him. A wife appeared briefly, very briefly, before disappearing into the bowels of the house. He was taken up to Rushdie's study. In those days, before his short hand and personal hieroglyphics were anything to write home about, he used a tape recorder, which he set up duly. His own life had been riddled with failure and dereliction, excessive drinking and bohemian friends, and he was quietly overawed, although he tried not to show it, at all that was being shown him, the windows that were opening up, this different world of wealth and influence and success.

Rushdie told him of his first science fiction novel - Grimus - which he utterly related to because his own first novels had been science fiction. And then Rushdie showed him a black and white photograph of the house that features in Midnight's Children, a big, rambling, Indian house where he had grown up. Outside, before he knocked on the door, he had frantically read the last pages of Shame, the book he was ostensibly interviewing him about, a sprawling, black work set in Pakistan, where few of the characters are admirable, the plot confusing and the politics dark. Rushdie seemed impressed that he had actually read the novel.

The interview went well. He spoke disarmingly of the fame that had been thrust upon him with the phenomenal success of Midnight's Children. He showed him the desk where he had written it; and asked, if you had written a book like that, just sitting here, not really talking to anybody, without any orthodox plot, with multiple voices inside it, the voices of India, sitting here, could you have possible imagined it would be a success? No, he answered, as if they were equals, as if he, too, would ultimately go on to have a famed career, for the beauty of the young is there is always hope, the disasters, the failures, the bites of reality, none of it has set in yet.

Afterwards, Rushdie had seen him graciously to the door, all the charm and magnificent courtesy of the wealthy Indian, all the vast diversity of their wealth and the complex, accepted wisdoms of their culture, and he walked back down the road into his own contrasting life in that overwhelming city. And he always followed, after that intimate hour with one of the world's greatest authors, his career with interest, the extravagances of Satanic Verses, the fatwah, the security, the changed wives, his increasing status into the literary stratosphere. While he went back to Australia and all his own books failed, and ultimately he became a journalist. The public relations person for Jonathan Cape told him Rushdie had told her it was the best interview he had ever done. That was a source of pride in a disintegrating life, as chaos after chaos proceeded to mount upon him.

Hunting The Famous - Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller. Picture courtesy St Catherine's College Oxford.

Living in London in the early 1980s, he quickly worked out that offering interviews of the famous to Australian newspapers and magazines was a sure route to publication - and therefore money.

Would you like an interview with Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22, went down a treat with the now defunct then historic news magazine The Bulletin, which back in the early part of the 20th century had published famous Australian authors, including that most lyrical of Australia's poet-alcoholics, Henry Lawson:

"For the Southern Land is the Poet’s Home, and over the world’s wide roam,
There was never till now a binjied bard that lived in a poet’s home, old man;
For the poet’s home was a hell on earth, and I want you to understand,
That it isn’t exactly a paradise down here in the Southern Land,
Old chap,
Down here in the Southern Land."

Once they hit the stratosphere of multi-million dollar sales, world-wide fame and flanks of public relations "experts" - otherwise known as hacks - most living legends become unavailable to all except the most prestigious newspapers and magazines.

Except when they're flogging product.

And they all passed through London to do just that.

Australia, like most countries, likes to think of itself as the centre of the earth, as a world leader - with the phrase "this is the best country on earth" often repeated.

In fact Australia is a vast and sparsely populated country on the edge of infinity, some of the harshest deserts on the planet for a centre and the threatening southern ocean spread out beneath.

The only time it ever feels like the centre of anything is at odd places in the ancient spiritual heart, where the rocks and the sand turn pastel and the sky becomes a swirling bowl above the yellow desert melons. And the landscape, millions of years old, is so powerful the Aboriginal stories of the Dreamtime become real.

For its peoples to become separated from this country, to be imprisoned within four walls, is a heart breaking loss. 

But for those with European ancestry, a sense of loneliness pervades the Australian consciousness.

And for very good reason.

An outcrop of western civilisation; Australia has no real neighbours.

And most of the world knows very little about it. Except for the fact that there are kangaroos there.

"Jin-Joey!" as the locals in Thailand, where he was presently living, would say, delighted that they could demonstrate their rarely extensive knowledge of his country of origin.

Back in the London of the 1980s, he soon worked out that plead as he might for an interview with one of his heroes, British author Doris Lessing, she wasn't going to make herself available just like that to some enterprising young journalist from a remote island on the other side of the world unless she had a book to sell. She was off writing a novel somewhere in the north, Scotland, if his memory served correctly, and always gracious, transmitted her good will without obliging. His preparedness to travel was dismissed.

Australians weren't great readers. The ability to act like a moron was keystone of survival in a country where chameleon like abilities were essential. Any sign of intellect was regarded with suspicion amongst much of the populace. Topping the class, as he had done consistently throughout his school years, was a death knell to popularity. As a consequence of this entrenched anti-intellectual climate, the Australian market for books was limited. But if you were selling a new book and were in interview mode, it was easy enough to slot in an aspirant from nowhere's ville.

As he was doing many of the interviews for the Friday review section of Australia's well regarded Financial Review, the best selling national finance paper in the country and known at the time for its rigorous style of journalism, he soon worked out the trick words to get the public relations person onside.

His standard line was: "It's for the Financial Review, the Australian equivalent of the Financial Times."

The Financial Times, then published distinctively on pale pink newsprint, was one of England's most prestigious newspapers and an organ any PR flack would like their subject to be showcased in. The readers were guaranteed to have enough money to buy a mere book.

He sometimes heard the almost invariably young women repeating his phraseology word for word as they explained to the bewildered author who had just conducted an interview with more familiar organs such as The London Times Review of Books or The Guardian exactly who he was.

Despite having crossed the first bridge and joined the queue of journalists lining up to interview whatever living legend was in town that week, there were other obstacles to overcome. 

He soon worked out why he was being slotted in at 9am to interview people like Anthony Burgess. 

He was low down the pecking order and in a busy day of scheduled interviews the morning spots were just about the least prestigious spot possible.

In those days, going through another phase of drinking and partying in the London clubs half the night, he wasn't always at his best at 9am. But then neither were the authors.

So when it came to Joseph Heller he reacted with mock horror when the public relations woman tried to slot him in at the allotted hour.

"Who wants to be interviewed at 9am in the morning?" he snapped back. "Not me. Don't be ridiculous."

"But he's got interviews slotted for every hour of the day," the PR woman protested. "There's nothing I can do."

He held his ground.

And thus it was that he came to have lunch with Joesph Heller, the author of Catch 22, one of the most famous novels of the twentieth century.

Joseph never repeated the success of the book whose title entered the English language as meaning a double trap.

In fact many of his books were rather long and rather dull.

But Heller in person was charm itself.

He arrived at the trendy little French restaurant near Covent Garden nominated by the public relations professional - it got their backs up if you called them girls - ahead of time and sat a little uncomfortably amongst the starched white linen tablecloths, the restaurant yet to fill with the lunchtime crowd.

Nothing to be frightened of.

Interviewing one of the 20th centuries most famous authors was just another strange event in an already crowded life.

Finally, a little later than the appointed hour, the PR woman with Joseph Heller in toe arrived, and he rose from the table to greet them.

They were full of the news that they had just passed an employment agency called Catch 22,

Which of course provoked the obvious question of what it was like to have written a novel whose title had literally entered the English language, the expression now being accepted into modern dictionaries.

Babylon

Almond blossoms in Spain

The Babylon in Bangkok is said to be the best gay sauna in the world.

He wasn't in a position to judge.

"I haven't been to a gay sauna in 20 years," he commented to a man lingering outside the steam room.

"Same," the man replied. "That's why I'm on the outskirts."

They grinned in a flash of recognition.

"Looks like you're about to get lucky," the man continued, nodding in the direction of an Asian man standing nearby.

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," he responded.

But there was at least a brief and optimistic communication between him and the man from Laos. The suggestion that they might consummate the introduction was met with a "I look around first".

It was a kind of gay sexuality he had never been drawn to; the ceaseless touching of numerous men; before the finale with some virtually random pick.

He liked to think the people he was sleeping with were good people, or interesting, or had the pathos of doomed destinies.

He was still sad from the departure of Nick that morning and wanted to distract himself one way or another. Prior to the Babylon he had had lunch with a mutli-award winning writer for teenagers, a social worker until getting sober and embarking on an enterprise to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer. Boyfriends with boyfriends with girlfriends had been the theme of his last book. Designed to sell by the bucket load to teenage girls, who were the principal purchasers of such books.

"You're starting to feel things," the American writer had commented. "You've got the typical response of the abused child, 'I never wanted to feel anything'."

"No, I didn't," he responded, gazing out the restaurant window of the Malaysia Hotel.

"From what you tell me it's no wonder," the writer said.

He shrugged and continued to stare at the car park fronting the hotel.

The Malaysia had been marooned in a nondescript part of what had then been the sprawling shantytown of Bangkok when he had first stayed there 40 years ago.

Back then it had been a citadel for backpackers, one of the most famous stops on the Coca Cola trail. The corridors were filled with stoned westerners from all over the world, diving in and out of each other's rooms, retelling tales from Afghanistan, India, what was then called Ceylon, wherever it was they had been. 

The bellboy who carried your bags to your room would take the opportunity to become your provider: "You want hash, heroin, Thai sticks, lady?"

As in so many similar hotels, the bellboy invariably warned of the dangers of the city outside, of how they would be ripped off for sure and it was much safer, quicker and cheaper to buy through him. They were usually right.

While The Malaysia was now surrounded by increasingly upscale condominiums filled with westerners eking out comfortable retirements on their western derived pensions, the hotel itself had barely changed in appearance in that 40 years. If there had ever been a renovation, which he doubted, it was a very long  time ago. 

But while The Malaysia had changed little in appearance in half a century, it had changed greatly in the clientele it attracted. Not only were the present generation of backpackers far less debauched than they had been, it was now seen as something of a gay hotel. The grey hairs hanging around the lobby and lounging in the armchairs made it look like an old age home for elderly queens.

It had been several long decades since he had stood outside the front of this same hotel and an Arab man had pulled up in his black BMW. He had reluctantly stooped down to the window to negotiate. He didn't like Arabs. They always expected value for money. A value he was extremely disinclined to provide. The negotiation complete, he had climbed into the comfortable smells of the brand new car and the less comfortable smell of the waves of cologne coming off the randy Arab.

It was all a long time ago, as he brought his attention back to the author of Boyfriends with Girlfriends.

Lunch complete, he wandered off to The Babylon. It might have been a citadel of gay Bangkok, but he had never been there. Within a second or so of having paid his 230 baht he ran into someone he knew. The upper crust Englishman grinned cheerfully, showed him around and advised him to relax and enjoy himself, there were some true uglies wandering around and there was no need to be shy. 

He might have passed his physical prime some decades before, but indeed there were some beached whales blocking the corridors.

And by the sound of it some of them were having fun. He wasn't. He sat in the heat of the sauna and sweated out the toxins before finally calling it a day; running, just as he thought he would in a moment of precognition, into a young man outside who was much more his cup of tea. When the working "boy" let slip that he only slept every other day and wouldn't mind sleeping at his place; all was revealed. There was a reason why the young man didn't have enough money to get inside the sauna and was happy to go with him for a discount rate of 500 baht. Just the sort of errant soul he would have once been happy to party with for days, weeks or months. No longer. 

Instead he slushed through the bucketing rain and flooding streets of Bangkok during the wet season; kundioh, kundioh, alone, alone, and grinned or grimaced ruthfully to himself. It was time to join the dots.

In This Part of the World

Silom Road, Central Bangkok 

There were rivers flowing underground and rivers flowing in the sky, and plates of glass piercing his eyes as he walked down the crowded streets.

Which was exactly why the inevitable happened.

In a place like Bangkok.

"Karma comes back quickly in this part of the world," someone had observed to him; and it was true enough.

As the remnant mourners threaded their way in a line through the crowded soils backing on to the Chao Phraya river an American friend of the deceased, Chris, whose memorial service they had just attended, complained: "Why is it so crowded? Why do they have to live on top of each other? Thailand's a big country. There's lots of empty space."

"They're very superstitious," he replied. "They're frightened of ghosts. They like each others company. They like it this way."

The whippet slim man who had had trouble with the Buddhist ceremonies throughout because of his staunch Christian beliefs mumbled further Americanisms, as if everyone should live like them.

So the Buddhists can accept Christ as a spiritual leader, but the Christians can't accept Buddha, he had felt like commenting at some of the balking behaviour, but he kept his views to himself.

And the inevitable did happen one Sunday morning.

He ran into the go-go boy Aek who he had once been so fond of and who had stolen so much money from him. And who had been at the origin of the series of books he was in the throws of completing under the mantle of The Twilight Soi.

The burning down of his house, the constant propaganda and lying about him, the relentless pursuits by the front-women of some of Bangkok's criminal and pedophile networks, had led to a chaotic and frightening time. And the "boy" himself, he was 26 now, had been spiteful throughout.

But there was no use confronting him with the "Kuhn kamoy mak mak" - you steal very much - rave he had once done.

All that had ever achieved was to make him look sadder and stoke the fires of spite even further.

So he smiled and embraced him as if nothing had happened, as if they had been friends forever.

"Kuhn maw," you drunk he observed.

Aek shrugged. "I everything now, whiskey, cigarettes, yabba. Many problems now."

His English had improved to the point where he now knew the pronoun "I" and had stopped talking about himself in the third person.

Aek might have been a duplicitous little bastard, but he had always taken good care of himself. Pretty like a coral snake, he had always thought, beautiful and dangerous.

Aek wasn't beautiful anymore. There was barely a shred left of the happy, handsome, popular young man he had first met.

He looked more like a bloated southern US senator in the making. Sadness, but not regret, seemed to ooze out of him.

And as he had once done when they were living together, in some sort of self-confirmation, he related how many falang, foreigners, had made a pass at him at DJ Station, the gay disco at the bottom of Silom where he had been drinking away the night.  

"But me no want to take care," he shuddered. 

Damaged goods. There had been too many customers, too much trouble, too many thefts, too much shame.

The remnants of the go-go boy he had known declined the offer a coffee; "I go home now, want sleep," painstakingly, drunk to the point where he had little idea what he was doing, Aek too his number and promised to call the next day. He never did. It was just as well. He would have been tempted to answer the call; and the last thing he needed was another raft of lies and thefts.

He saw him into a taxi and said goodbye.

It was a better ending than the last one, when they had run into a club down the road and to Aek's repeated declarations that he wanted to visit him in the "condo" to talk about old times, he had replied: "Fuck off".

But it wasn't a happy ending. The relentless pursuit of someone who had dared to write about what was in front of his face had not been expensive, it had hurt a considerable number of people along the way, not just himself. They said they did it for Thailand. They did it because they were paid; and they did it to discredit him and protect the criminal networks they represented. Sad, sick and obsessive, they had hurt the young man they protested to love so much; and what was left of him, in a land where life is cheap, wasn't worth squabbling over. Good work, he thought to himself in a shrugging ruthfully sad way as he lapped the block; the streets damp in the wet season and the rats scuttling through the garbage. 

Preternatural Configurations

Silom Soi 4 Courtesy of  http://www.virtualtourist.com/

There wasn't anything left that hadn't reared its ugly head. In the fetid damp of Bangkok's rainy season the rats multiplied. The garbage left in street corners was alive with them; sometimes they scuttled away as he passed, sometimes they ignored him. And with the rats came the cats, who, too, were breeding up in large numbers with the ample food source now available. The locals seemed indifferent. The plagues of London were faraway. "I must have been a traveler in time and space, to be here now," the logo of his Paypal consultant had declared, or something to that effect, as if even business operatives were allowed a little cosmic tilt, here in 2012 when according to the Mayan calender the world had been meant to end.

"I angry lady," an uncharacteristically moody Nick had said as they came through the door to his small apartment.
"Why?" he asked, "What she say?"
The response, he thought, was: "She say, how's your husband? What he think. Secret. He die tomorrow. You not Thai. You not understand."
But what Nick actually said he did not know.
Despite the considerable amount of time he had now spent in Bangkok, his brain was still trying to rewrite the babble of Thai around him into English, and the operation was only confused by the phrases of English which did drift down the corridor or across the ether.

And Nick, suddenly flush with cash and determined to celebrate, lapsed into in-coherency, alternating between a kind of playful aggression and affection, as he had done for the past hour or two.

They had sat in Soi 4 off Silom for several hours, watching the comings and goings of another flock of queens. It had been almost 40 years since he had written his thesis The Glamour and the Grot: Towards an Ethnography of the Gay Bars of Adelaide. How excited his supervisor had been. "It's almost like being there," he declared jubilantly one day after reading a draft.

Trapped in a marriage with two children and Bowie just having declared his bisexuality, Professor Alan Patience was more than champing to explore a new world.

He had been happy to show him around.

But that was another place and another time, perched on the edge of a vast desert and an infinite sea in a the bubble of churches and Anglophilia that was Adelaide.

Back there, back then, the homelands had always been calling.

One thread of his ancestors, surviving in the harsh desert landscapes of outback Australia, had been experts at detecting patterns in complex landscapes, they had to be in order to survive, but in this place the same ability to scan and detect could be both a plus and a minus, feeding paranoia along with justified safety concerns.

"My God that man is hard to kill," he had heard one of his pursuers, the pedophile Tong, had declared in frustration one day.

The go-go boy Aek's mentor, Tong, who had been so determined to off him, was nowhere to be seen, presumed dead. The Cambodians, who did not like people like him and certainly did not like the undue attention he had brought on them and the inter-linkages between Bangkok and Phnom Penh, their blood lust already up, may well have killed him. There was no explanation forthcoming from those who might have known.

Nothing had changed and everything had changed. The sparkling modernity, cash and television lifestyles which had swept across other parts of Bangkok were only now lapping at the shores of Pat Pong, Bangkok's oldest red light district.

It had the air of a sea resort out of season, of Brighton during the recession of the 1980s, of a place that had seen better days.

While all around tower after tower, cranes perched upon their ceilings, sprang up towards the sky.

In a babble of contradictions Nick had declared through the evening: "I supastar here. Everybody love me. I work here one year. I so cute! I butterfly, I not want hurt you. I want you understand me. Sometime customer like me very much. You good luck for me. I wait you all my life. You tell me go make money and customer tip me 1,000 baht. You good luck for me."  


As Nick bought a bottle of whiskey and shouted his friends drink it was obvious more than 1,000 baht had come his way.

In the muffled density of the damp streets and narrow sois his own spirit vaulted above the buildings stained dark with mold.

They would all be skyscrapers soon enough, and the crowded markets swept away.

Nick caught him admiring one of the waiters at The Balcony.

"You not worry about that," Nick declared with a funny little torrent of expressions. "I looking every day, three four times. But I take care you."

He laughed, if that's what it was. Life took many an odd turn.