Adam Mars-Jones - Kid Gloves - A Voyage Round My Father

Then he moved back to San Francisco. Mike had spent plenty of time in a metropolitan sexual culture, and it can’t have occurred to him, as he checked out a meeting at a pub on Rose Crescent, still jet-lagged, that he was more or less exhausting the gay scene in Cambridge with a single swig of warm beer. If it wasn’t the A to Z of gay life in the town it was certainly the A to E. I don’t imagine that he would have hooked up with me, which he did not quite on a whim but more out of curiosity and good nature than anything else, if he had known it would be hard to avoid me thereafter without rudeness, in such a small world.

Was he good-looking? I think so, though he wasn’t so fiercely beautiful that I couldn’t make the first move. He had a slight stammer that prevented him from being intimidating. When a word wouldn’t come his head bobbed up and down. Did he look like a film star? Not quite, though if he had a vague likeness to anyone in that category it would have to be Harrison Ford, clean-cut and a little grumpy.

He had a trick of starting a sentence with ‘You see …’, but dropping the first word, so that a mild presentation of opinion became insistent, even abrasive, without him seeming to notice. ‘It turns out’ (or ‘Turns out …’) was another typical opening, slightly less dogmatic.

He spent the night in my tiny room on Trinity Street, but it was hardly big enough for one. Caius had housed him on Grange Road, in a house of American students, something that irritated him since he didn’t want to be insulated from the locals. If he’d wanted an American social life he would have stayed in America — though this was one of the few premises with effective central heating. I stayed there once or twice, but mainly we slept in our own beds. Somehow he conned me into being part of his fitness regime, which meant that I would jog over to his place at seven in the morning and then we would run round Grantchester before breakfast. Often he wasn’t ready when I arrived (he couldn’t be expected to take exercise without the first cigarette of the day) so fairly often I would do the Grantchester circuit on my own. I was slow to realize that Mike’s fitness regime, which I took so much more seriously than he did, was in itself a mild Adam-repellent, a shared activity that we didn’t do together.

One thing Mike owed to his Marine training was the efficiency of his mornings, and the ability to ‘shit, shower and shave’ in ten minutes. We would meet later for breakfast in Caius and dawdle over coffee afterwards in a café called, winsomely, the Whim. During the first term of his year in Cambridge Mike hardly attended a lecture, and we spent most of the day together talking. Sometimes in the afternoons he would work out at Fenners on Gresham Road, the University sports facility that included a weight room, though I felt he attended more for the view than the health benefits.

He was a reader, of Isherwood, of Vidal, of John Fowles and Henry James. His copies of Down There on a Visit and Burr were copiously annotated in his architect’s energized small capitals. Only with his signature did he let out a little swooping expressiveness. This script with its implication of load-bearing capacity, compressive strength, was part of his overwhelming difference from anyone I’d met before.

In the evenings we often saw films. It may be that I make the connection with Harrison Ford partly because Mike had seen the first showing of Star Wars in San Francisco, unaffected by the gathering storm of hype, and had loved it. He couldn’t wait for it to arrive in Cambridge (which took a few months) so he could hear what I made of it. Hmm. Not all that much. It was my first inkling that there was a big-kid side to this travelled, lightly traumatized man. I had seen George Lucas’s first film, the rather formalist dystopia THX 1138 , which I much admired, and then in due course American Graffiti , which seemed likeable pap. This was pap again, but glossier and not so likeable.

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.