Colum McCann - Dancer

Transcribed from interview with David Furlong on May 23rd, 1987, in Holborn, London. Interview by Shane F. Harrington, student of ethnography from Edinburgh University. Due to technical difficulties with recording device/microphone the interviewer’s questions were inaudible:

Well, yeah, he wasn’t a diamond cutter or nothing but he knew what he wanted and took all he could get. So he pretty much got his money’s worth, yeah. You charged him more because of who he was, seventy-five quid was a good kill in those days.

You’d have to keep your mouth shut, no Daily Mirror, Sun, no News of the fucking World.

He was always doing this exam, like, checking out your arms and taking a look at your fucking neck, even between your toes, he was scared of junkies I s’pose.

You had to be fresh-faced, you know, with sleeveless shirts and tight trousers. But he didn’t mind the smell of cigarettes, some of the trade didn’t like cigarettes, but he wasn’t like that, at least you were allowed a smoke afterwards.

He’d pick you up on Kings Road or around Picadilly. Sometimes you’d go to the clubs with him if his mood was right.

Heaven over there in Charing Cross. Or the Colherne. But most of the time he’d go to the normal places, you know. The Roxy, the Perennial, Tramps, Annabel’s, the Palais.

Everybody was right fucked up on coke and booze. People were shagging in the leather booths.

He was fucking weird, he’d take you to his table and he’d sit you down with his mates, all fancy pants and groupies. But then he wouldn’t take you home, didn’t want to be seen walking with you out the club.

Couldn’t fucking figure him out. But he was Russian and I s’pose if you shag your cousins for a hundred thousand years that’s what happens, ain’t it?

Sometimes he got his manager to drive you back, or a friend of his, or he’d get you a taxi through the club owner, they’d do anything for him they would. So you’d be waiting outside his place, right? By the gate, just waiting. And all the neighbors could see if they wanted. But he didn’t care about that. Figure that one out, then.

I was only there four times, he never remembered me or even asked my name.

I think I told him Damian or something. You never give your real name. Besides, I had a girlfriend and she had no fucking idea. She liked the money but.

I heard him on the telly one night. He was tossing on about dancing, some shit like, I don’t know, like ruining your body for the pleasure of strangers, some shit like that. And what the fuck did he think I was up to? Christ. For the pleasure of strangers.

He had his pleasure yeah, and then he had it again, and then he just rolled over and went to sleep and you’d think, fuck me, I should case this fucking place, I should nick all his weird fucking paintings, with lords and hounds and bugles and shit, just fucking skive out of there.

But five minutes down the road you’d be nicked.

One time I crawled out of bed and the housekeeper was awake, she made breakfast, scones and fruit, she kept looking over her shoulder at me.

Eerie little froggie chick, checking me out, making sure I wasn’t running off with the silver. She’d rather put her head in the oven than talk to me.

I sat there quiet as could be and then she called a taxi.

The next night I was out in the Roxy again and he passed me in the club without a glance. I’d already spent fifty of the seventy-five quid on a new shirt. It turned everyone else’s head, but not his. He had someone else in his booth all serious and close. And then he got up and walked past me. He didn’t even say a word. Cocksucker.

He’s still performing with all his power. His genius is that he can bring out the child in all of us, just by watching him. He’s heroic, he’s dancing against the clock. Here is a man who will dance as long as he can, to the end, to the last drop of blood.

What? Is that boy still dragging his bone all over town?

More than anything else he’s a homebody. People don’t realize that about him, but he is. When he comes to our French château the first thing he always asks for is a glass of wine and a little silence so he can sit by the fire and contemplate. And at our brownstone on Sixty-third and Madison he sits and looks at the art for hours on end, literally hours! His real passion is the Medievals. Not a lot of people are aware of that.

Las Mercedes, Caracas

May 1984

Rudi!—

It is the beginning of the rainy season and I am stuck indoors having ingested some wonderful painkillers and I am sending this letter to my five thousand most intimate friends, ha ha, so please forgive the handwriting. I am practicing yoga, sitting on the floor in lotus position, my ass has never known such discomfort. Imagine what it must be like to be from New Delhi! I have changed humble abodes as you can see and now have a house here in the center of Caracas with flowers and vines and red tiles, which is slightly better than the Lower West Side, especially on Sundays after brunch when all the amateurs were lining Ninth Avenue, throwing up in the gutters. The jazz is worse, however. I used to think I missed Venezuelan music but there’s a band that plays on the paseo every night, they sound like eight drowning rats, and the fact is there are only three of them. I came here with a friend who was in the buddy program, he took sympathy on me for a few months, he also happened to have a degree in Oriental medicine, but I brought a secret stash with me just in case, used up all my blank prescriptions, also sold my Warhol cock paintings, et voilà! here I am to spend all my money and die. Maybe they’ll carry me up to the hills and cover me in cardboard. I am now alone since Aaron, my paramour, left with his Oriental medicines in tow, that’s life I suppose, easy come easy go.

The city is not the place I knew, but who cares you won’t exactly hear my heart breaking under the noise of the traffic. There’s at least twelve hundred billion people in Caracas and highways and ramps and skyscrapers. They wear flared jeans and thigh-length boots (some of them I think must have raided your old closets!) and there’s a boatload of rich gringos flushing out our oil. So, yes, the place has changed. I could not even find the hill where I grew up, if that’s the word.

In the taxi from Simon Bolivar the driver made a detour to the Catia barrio to relieve us of the burden of our luggage. I somehow remembered the local slang for: If you don’t turn this taxi around I’ll eat your dick for breakfast, you ugly cocksucker. Such eloquence. He almost crashed into a light pole. He gave us the ride for free and then I tipped him outrageously so I now have a reputation, if my youth was not enough. Don’t fuck with Victor he’d much prefer to fuck (with) you! Aaron did something terrible the first night. He threw all my Lucky Strikes out the balcony window and the young boys down on the paseo (all from the tin sheds in the ranchos) went wild. They tucked them under the sleeves of their T-shirts, a la Brando. Oh their brown arms, how it took me back. Be happy, go Lucky. One of the pretty little things (how pretty I used to be!) is an expert pickpocket, I got to know him the next day when he came around for the cigarette ends. We struck a deal. He goes to the Hilton Caracas on Avenida Libertador, where all the businessmen stay, or the new art museum, where the tourists hang out, and he steals cigarettes for me. He gets an extra dollar if they’re the right brand. He doesn’t even need a knife to slice open pockets, his fingernails are so long and sharp that they cut any cloth, clever little thing. Sometimes I wonder what would I have been, apart from dead, if I had stayed here. Excuse me while I drag my carcass over to the table and ingest yet another tablet. We only live once.