Part 1
I was up on the Heath, Hampstead Heath, one early February. It was a few years after the infamous ‘Great Storm’ of 1987 but the Heath still bore its scars. Trees half uprooted, some leaning at drunken angles, where the wind that night, clocked at 100mph even right in central London, had torn at them and toppled many. Nature was getting to work on old twisted boughs, some half alive and half dead. Surviving against the odds. Trees are amazing things we know now, with complex mycellullar connections to all the other trees in the woods. Helping each other out when needed, pumping nutrients into the ones that are in need of assistance. The ultimate community network. Another community above ground was using them too, also in some very creative ways.
Eating my Heart Out
You first stood me up against that bare old oak,
Smiling, said ‘I had something to offer’
And, hauled up around your waist,
(Ever the gymnast)
I, responding with a grin said ‘What’?
Later. In your arms, we were entwined,
Your body taut, spat back at me: direct,
I tensed, said ‘I could conjure up
(Your True Nature)’
But you flashed those hazel eyes: just laughed.
Confiding in my knotted brow,
eating, my face revealed
Your taste for adventures,
I had no qualms, merely reflected
(state of the art) simple desire, to
Explore more fully your latex collection.
White board, magazines, tv screen:
Images, past to present, filtering through.
So enticed by your freeze frame and snapshot images.
(Fill in the gaps);
Imagination in flight again.
Then led along a path, hand in hands, in hand
A vision- and the cue is given;
Revealing such intimacy had never been easy
(But no sinners’ absolution was needed)
Yet the open door led to unfamiliar galleries.
As you rang my body tensed, clutching
A paper handkerchief; confirmed
The essence of our suspicions:
The nature of the beast was cruel.
(No surprise) A curtailed ending
In the second act.
Now I stand alone, Fragile
As that old lone oak in the face of great storm.
Waiting for that final gust to release me
With baited breath; as the curtain closes
To obscure the players, the stage (and our vision)
And kill the pain.
Mike; Hampstead Heath, March 1990
Been thinking about ya: I just couldn’t wait to see
Fling my arms around ya, as we fall in ecstasy
Ooh, sometimes
The truth is harder than the pain inside,
Ooh, sometimes
It’s the broken heart that decides..
Lyrics (part) ‘Sometimes’, Clark/Bell 1986
It’s savage and it’s cruel and it shines like destruction
Comes in like the flood and it seems like religion
It’s noble and it’s brutal, it distorts and deranges
And it wrenches you up and you’re left like a…. zommmmbie
Lyrics (part) Love is a Stranger, Lennox/Stewart 1982
‘Eating my Heart Out’ is a prose poem I wrote, just after I had broken up with a man I had met on Hampstead’s West Heath, one unusually warm late February day in 1990. I had gone up on a whim, as I didn’t normally bother there in the wintertime, far too bare (no cover) and too cold for my liking. I had no great expectations. After wandering around a little, I noticed a guy giving me the eye and after circling a few times and being sure, I had gone up to him. Sexually, we hit it off immediately: there was a certain cockiness to him that I appreciate in men, and that he used sexually. We were doing things there on the Heath (safe things obviously) that I’d hardly have done with someone I’d known quite a while, that I was with at home, indoors. It pretty much blew my mind at the time; he was handsome in a low key way, quietly intelligent but not intensely so. I knew I had to have more. Oh, and did I say he was cocky too?
I want to say that we were on the same wavelength but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. As ever it was complicated: we were both in open relationships at the time but he was a very busy doctor, committed (perhaps too committed) to his patients. His time was very limited. I wanted to spend more time with him than was really possible and these limitations all served to intensify my feelings. He’d say he was coming round to see me at 6 and not turn up till 9, as he’d been so busy. I’d have been hanging round the window since 6.15 looking to see if he was coming. I had ‘it’ bad. We went for a walk in Kew with our partners.. talked about making it all work; we held hands. We went to the coast at Rottingdean; fabulously, he stripped off and went swimming in mid March. My heart raced then ached. We remember these things very selectively of course, as they fade into time.
In my mind now, I have the sequence of events over the month of March 1990 and onwards simplified. However, one look at my diary entries at the time, shows I veered from one emotional extreme to another in the matter of days. The day we met, which now sticks in my mind (February 25th) actually carries a pretty short and very factual entry there. ‘Went to the Heath quite late, met a lovely guy called Mike, who is a doctor working on experimental trials. We had a great night after he came here and then onto his house in the East End. I’d like to see him again but he has a boyfriend (who’s away at present). 19C today, so very warm for February!’ And that’s it.
I went up to Newcastle for MESMAC meetings for a few days and came back. But by the 28th February, I was already writing ‘last night felt quite harrowing. Mike and I went for dinner at Pasta Underground in Camden. Things went quite well but I felt nervous. He’s dyed his hair blond, which took some getting used to. He’d come straight from the sauna too, which I wasn’t so enraptured about ( I knew what went on in saunas from visiting too many myself). We came back and went to bed quite quickly. I don’t know why but after about twenty minutes he started crying, it seemed to change his mood. I started as well, but possibly not for the same reason. After that we had good sex but he seemed more distant. I didn’t know why. He said he had a problem: ‘I’m falling in love with you’ but he couldn’t leave his eight year old relationship with his boyfriend. Which was all very reasonable but it made me feel very ‘flat’. I don’t know where it leaves us’ I wrote, ‘probably I should forget him and be realistic. But the more I think of him, the more I want him; right now. Beside me’.
By Friday though, a few days later I had changed my tune. I wrote ‘Renaissance! I feel radiant. So happy and full of life, full of warmth and affection for those close to me. And it shows! After another night spent with Mike, I know it may not continue for long and yet the spark has given me the confidence to do so much now, and I’m full of life, energy and happiness. I’m back in love, not necessarily with Mike but with life itself’. (Yes, retrospectively clearly I was in love with Mike). Two days later and by Sunday: ‘it’s an evolving situation’. We went to the LA, my partner ‘Joe met Mark, Mike’s partner but Mike wasn’t there with him and Joe has the hots for him. and vice versa. I have the hots and then some for Mike, and vice versa. Strange’.
‘After an afternoon spent at Kew Gardens with them both on Saturday, my feelings for Mike are stronger. I’m in love with him and how long it’ll last I don’t know but it certainly hurts. He’s off to Brussels for a conference from next Wednesday-Sunday, so a long gap to wait to see him again, which feels hard to cope with.
On the Monday though, according to my diary ‘I rang Mike and told him I had to see him before he went away. He agreed to come round. He had thought I was going to tell him I wanted to end it. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He could only stay an hour: a brief hour of chat, cuddles and tears. He’s in love with me, as I am with him. Where do we go from here? He wants to meet Joe but I don’t want to combine these two elements of my life for fear of losing them both. I think my infatuation will fade, wont it?’
Then, the following day, Tuesday: ‘Scared shitless of what might happen and what I’m heading towards. It’s either incredibly exciting or a disaster. I’m confused, excited, concerned but very, very scared above all. It’s like coming out, all over again. I want a four way relationship with all of us. That’s what I want .. but. It’s the only way forward for us. Could we all cope with it? As I’m writing this I realise I feel there’s no other option but to try it. I’d never forgive myself If I didn’t try to make this all work’.
And later in that same diary entry: ‘I don’t want Mike to change the way he feels about me: his looks at me, his caresses, his outrageous kisses in public. Nobody, nobody has ever done that before in my seventeen years of adulthood and it’s so liberating.. It’s why I’m turned inside out and upside down, I’m idolising him almost. So scared, so excited, so scared’.
‘And Joe: suddenly all these warm tender feelings are surfacing for him. Mike has somehow opened that up again. My ability to feel, to let myself be hurt and to feel ok about being hurt because it’s about being real again. In this climate, with the work, I’d drawn a protective barrier around myself, so the things people might say, would bounce off me’.
Sunday March 11th: ‘the last four days have been so eventful that it’s difficult to recall them accurately now. Mike is back from Brussels tomorrow, he rang on Friday, sounding a bit flat I thought. We (Joe and I) went to the London Apprentice (LA ) on Friday and I got drunk. We got a taxi home and I felt very down; later blurting all my feelings out for Mike, pretty much unfiltered. Insensitive. I said I didn’t want to continue seeing him (Joe). He was in tears. I was a bastard, it was such a cruel thing to do, The following morning I regretted it bitterly and- luckily for me- we made up again.
Monday March 12th ‘Oh Christ: angst returns again. Mike phoned and he only wants to see me on Tuesday (yes, I know dear reader.. but bear with me). He’d been out on the town in Paris all night on an E and feels blitzed out of his mind. I laugh and joke and secretly hate him for it. Then I put the phone down and want him desperately. Then I decide I never want to see him again. Is love always so full of confusion and misery? I was reduced to pleading for ‘half an hour with him’, soon. Don’t get all angsty he says. Christ! What does he expect , he is nourishing a love/hate complex in me, with added paranoia too. I haven’t slept with Mike for 12 days now, that’s not the action of someone who’s in love, He playing with me like I’m like his dog Buster. Bastard’.
Then in my diary a little later on Monday: ‘He rang and said he loves me still, I told him I loved him and I couldn’t give him up, however hard I tried. Sickening isn’t it??! We talked for a long time about the future, basically it doesn’t look very bright one way or another. He says he doesn’t want to sleep with me alone for fear of getting more involved and more hurt. Or rather, he wants too but won’t let himself’.
Tuesday 14th March had the following: ‘That’s it, I’ve decided to stop progressing my relationship with Mike, to save my relationship with Joe. There’s no room for manoeuvring anymore. It’s 16 days into this thing now.
Thursday 15th March: ‘All change again, feelings are coming flooding back at me, washing over me.. so he’s not an angel but what we have is still there, nevertheless. He’s coming round tonight to see me. He says he could cope if I said I never wanted to see him again though. How do I relate to that? Midnight: I’ve been waiting hours and hours, he hasn’t turned up yet. What’s he doing? I’m in such a vulnerable position, I don’t know how much more I can cope with this’.
I had a busy Thursday-Saturday period planned for work at the HEA, at a MESMAC meeting in Manchester and so I didn’t write anymore until the following Monday,19th March: ‘Back from Manchester MESMAC meeting, which wasn’t too bad. I contained my emotions quite well and even got engaged enough to forget them completely, for a while. Mike DID come round on Thursday (Friday morning) eventually, at around 12.30am’.
‘On Sunday, Joe and I went down to Brighton, meeting Mike and Mark there. I don’t know why but after a while it all seemed like a bit of nightmare. Mike suddenly seemed to become very aloof after a while. For the journey back, in their car, I just wanted alternately to cry and scream. Mike’s touched some raw part of me, I want to be close to him, feel so strongly about him, that it’s almost unbearable when I’m with him, with other people, I want to do all the things that lovers do, walk along the beach holding hands, laugh, talk, smile, kiss. All these things are being denied to me and it’s making me quite mad with hurt, desire, fear, love and hate. I would seriously contemplate killing for him. The things he does to me are things no one has ever done before to me or that I’ve wanted from anybody. Yet now I realise that despite all his promises, he’ll have to draw himself away- is drawing himself away- from me; the greatest love of my life is drawing himself away from me, disentangling himself from me and the magic he weaves around me: for me he will cease to be’.
‘It feels like I’m garbling on paper but I have to get it out of me somehow, put it down on paper to preserve my emotions as they are now. So I can look back, years, maybe even decades on and marvel that this is how I felt about another man once. For poor Joe, it is simply becoming all too much. He is having to cope with me, living in this seriously fucked head space and it must be hard. My problem though, is that like real love, my feelings are growing stronger each time I see Mike, not weaker. On the beach in Rottingdean, he suddenly decided to swim in the water, stripped off and went in. I felt rapturously in awe of him; he represented at that moment everything I’d always wanted in a man and looked so beautiful. Yet in some ways, he paid me so little attention, except to be a tease. ‘I want to go into a little cove with you and have you’, he confided quietly to me on the beach afterwards. I was thrilled to the core that this hero of mine, was being so suggestive with me. I thought of Bowies song ‘Heroes’: ‘we can be heroes just for one day’. So much so, that I could hardly respond with more than a feeble joke. I was weak in the presence of beauty. It may have been one of the most erotic moments of my life. I knew it was impossible, I knew it was the most fabulous suggestion he could possibly have made to me, I was stunned by the concept of such intimacy, in that situation’.
Yet, as I write this, I recall the correspondence and intimacy I once had with a man, who sent me a postcard that simply said ‘Wow’ on the back. I can’t even recall his name now but it was the greatest, most passionate night I’d had up until that time. The next time we met at his house, it just didn’t work between us at all. Why? I remember how Mike had recalled our first meeting up on the Heath, how special it seemed to us both. I can’t write anymore. I’m so scared that I am going to lose everything on this but I don’t think I can stop myself. I don’t think I’m ever going to feel so strongly again towards anyone. But it’s like that Great Storm we had back in October 1987: I watched the huge trees outside shift and creak and bend and it seemed almost unimaginable that they could take so much. And then that one almighty gust that pulled them down, with a huge crack of branches splitting, splintering, a rumble that shook the ground. They had seemed ready: waiting for the gust to release them. I want, I need that gust’.
Waiting for that gust to release me, with baited breath.
The curtain to slide back again,
to obscure the stage, our vision and the pain.
Oh that pain!’
Little by little I was rationalising the situation to myself though. On Tuesday March 20th I wrote: ‘as the situation becomes intractable, to survive I must master these feelings, control them, I must finally pull away without hurting myself and others around me too deeply (the first cut is the deepest..). Sometimes I feel he (Mike) still feels something strongly for me but my way of coping with this is to believe that he is a bastard and doesn’t feel anything. That he led me on. The weird thing about it is that I met Mike on the Heath. Weird because it throws into confusion my thoughts about what that situation provides. It’s not just a place where people grab extra casual sex necessarily. I went up to the Heath over the weekend just to walk, to remember that spot where we had met. To marvel at what had occurred there’. It struck me that the place must be full of memories of those who had fallen in love there, every inch of the ground saturated with emotions. I wondered if the trees had picked up on it at all. I was just having idling thoughts: don’t judge me too much for it.
‘There were two guys together up there who had looked interested as I’d walked about. I had, for the first time in a month, Iooked at them and felt an attraction for someone else. Nothing major, just simple casual attraction. Something had changed, I was letting go of Mike. When I asked how long had they met they said jokingly ‘oh a few weeks’. In fact it was years but they got off on imagining that they had only just met, that their sex was as fresh and uninformed as that first voyage. Something about that seems such a good idea. it’s a brilliant concept and turns upside down all notions of how a long relationship is best or better. It makes me want to explore the idea further, perhaps write a script about these ideas. Now I understand why I like love pains so much, it’s an angst I thrive upon, what I live for, what really make me tick. The angst and intensity of such internal strife.’
Saturday 24th March. ‘Haven’t spoke to Mike now since last Wednesday, it appears to be finally all over. It leaves me feeling sad but happy in a way, the pain is growing a little less as well, day on day’.
Friday 30th March. ‘Now a month since we met. So sick of it all I’ve decided to finally finish it all with Mike. I can’t see him without wanting to sleep with him but it’s not on the cards, so the alternative can only be to stop seeing him at all. So tonight was a depressing night out with him, with a very depressing final kiss. That evening he had said he could not see me more than maybe once in two weeks. I knew I couldn’t cope with waiting that long, without going crazy. So, on Farringdon tube station I said ‘I can’t Mike. This is the end .. I’m saying goodbye’. ‘Brief Encounter’ eat your heart out but It at least felt like taking back some control. He got in the train and was gone. I sat on the platform for an hour stunned at what I had done and the huge empty hole that had opened up inside of me. And that was it. I carried on and covered the hole over. I don’t intend to ever see him again’ I wrote.
Except, it’s not quite the end of the story. I got on with things, I too had plenty of other stuff happening in my life. Slowly, in a few months the hole filled up, and I healed. Or so I thought. I heard through a friend, that he had gone away to teach medicine in Africa for quite a while. I stopped thinking about him. Then, almost exactly a year later I was in the London Apprentice (the LA). It was an odd time. We were coming to the end of the Gulf War against Iraq, Tony Blair’s war, his one fatal mistake. We had thought we could trust him. We were wrong. If you couldn’t trust a Labour PM anymore who could you trust? But those thoughts were far from my head that night, I was in a good mood, it was a good night, busy as ever, and I was getting around the place, like you did.
Then a friend came up to me. Hey, I’ve just seen your Mike, he’s back. He’s dressed as an Iraqi soldier, you can’t miss him. My heart stopped. It didn’t just miss a beat. I thought: I won’t go and search him out, if I see him well.. I see him. So, for the next hour, I didn’t see him. And then, just as I was wondering if he really was there, in a corner by the fire door, there he was. Dressed as an Iraqi soldier.
He saw me, as I saw him. ‘Hey Dave, how’ve you been, it’s been a long time?’ Suddenly my heart was there again, beating wildly, racing. In front of everybody, somewhat to my surprise and shock, I burst into huge sobs: gut wrenching, body racking sobs. There was no question of stopping them, I’d lost that control. He held me. Slowly, they subsided. He looked at me, said quietly: ‘Wow, you had it really bad, didn’t you’? I could only nod dumbly.
There is a kind of ‘happy ending’ to this story. He said ‘let’s go home and talk’-we walked back to my place in Kings Cross (with him still dressed as an Iraqi soldier but by this time I was like, ‘what the hell’..). We talked a lot; we had sex again together, and eventually exhausted at 6 or 7 in the morning we slept. When I woke he was looking at me. ‘Dave.. you know this could never work don’t you?’ I nodded, I did, I really did. He left and I felt fine, no hole but (and yes, it’s a cliche I know) maybe ‘whole’ again. That was my closure on Mike. I never met him again. I wonder if he went home dressed as an Iraqi soldier still? It’s only just occurred to me, thirty years later. Boy: did that man eat my heart out. So that’s what comes from going up to the Heath, with ‘low expectations’, late on a February afternoon. Watch out.
2.26 Love Out on its Own, the trials, tribulations and magic of Hampstead Heath, part 2
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