“Is this your first time in London,” people would ask him, and he would say no. The conversation usually moved away from the need to supply details of that visit. It was something to say, usually, a way of gauging whether the questioner might supply recommendations, though soon enough he had been covered in them, with too many to follow through on.
Still, he dutifully wrote the offered tips down into his Google maps Want To Go and along the edge of the calendar he and Dustin kept out on the dining room table. Just in case. He almost never had to say he couldn’t really remember that first trip.
As the months passed and the season changed he still couldn’t remember much about that visit, which soon came to seem odd to him. He first came to London in 1990, a part of a trip he’d taken to see if there was anywhere else he wanted to live in the world besides America. He had traveled as a boy and a teenager in Seoul, Mexico City and Quebec, lived in Guam, Seoul and Truk, Kauai also, but never Britain, and never any of the countries in Europe. He had traveled so much and yet so little for a decision like this.
He didn’t have the funds for more than a few places that fall, and decided to go to Berlin first, then travel by train down to take a ferry over to London, eventually taking a train to Edinburgh. A week in each place was the idea, roughly. He would see three people he loved living abroad: a school friend in Berlin, a San Francisco friend in London, and his brother, in Edinburgh. He would ask them how they liked it and try to imagine himself in each place.
To this day he can still recall moments from the visits to the other two cities. He can recall even the deck of the ferry, and staying awake all night with his arms through the straps of his backpack but worn in front, so he wouldn’t be robbed easily while he slept. But all he really could remember of the visit to London was buying a copy of Neil Bartlett’s novel Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall at Gay Is The Word, the LGBTQ bookstore that was still where it was when he visited. A block from his apartment there.
It was like a portal in a way. But one that didn’t somehow allow any other memories through, for him. He would stop in, browse the store, buy a book or a magazine, or chat with the booksellers. But he remained firmly in the present otherwise, almost stranded there.
He wrote to the now-old friend he’d visited then, Steve.
Hi Steve,
Do you remember any details from when I came to see you in London back in 1990? I am here again and trying to remember specifics. I recall a trip to Gay Is The Word, and I remember enthusiastic you greeting me when I arrived. Something about baked potatoes too. But I wondered if you remembered me from then?
Steve, a playwright now, did not reply right away due to a busy rehearsals schedule but then he did:
Hi – yes I do remember that visit of course. I’m not sure if all my memories are real. I don’t remember anything about baked potatoes, but that doesn’t mean that potatoes were not significant.
You stayed at my house in deep SE London – Peckham. I lived with 3 lovely gay dudes (ok 2 really, 1 of them I didn’t like).
I remember you being kind of appalled at my daily commute. The tube doesn’t reach Peckham, so you have to take a bus to Elephant & Castle and then get the tube there. I think it took 45 mins to an hour… which is funny because in NYC now that is considered a totally normal commute time for people who live in NYC.
And the one bar I remember – we went to The Bell and danced. And I went home with some dude.
This was a hearteningly ordinary account. And how often things that shock you when you are young become ordinary.
*
He also remembers the 1990 trip hadn’t yielded any insights, in that he didn’t move. He stayed in San Francisco, in America, moving through a series of cities and towns where he felt relatively safe but never really at home, not for years.
Berlin, he fell in love with. The wall had just come down and he arrived on the day of the reunification ceremonies. His friend Libby had found an East Berlin apartment for cheaper than he’d ever imagined possible. The receptionist at the LGBTQ center had asked him what he liked to do and then gave him a printout of clubs he could visit and it included directions and a packet of condoms—it felt futuristic but a future he wanted. He met a man who took him home and made him breakfast with his grandmother’s gooseberry jam.
Edinburgh was a magical haunted castle with a mountain in the middle. He stayed in a hostel near his brother’s study abroad dorm, and still remembers the courtyard he passed that first night, full of tuxedo cats with glowing eyes. A Tory MP and his journalist friend he met at a gay cafe—The Blue Moon—took him on a car tour of the city, pointing out various sights like where the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was set and filmed and the underground neighborhood that would eventually end up inspiring the title of his first novel. They respectfully ended the tour and took him out to a gay speakeasy bar, The Laughing Duck. He remembers everything they told him except their names.
He and his brother had taken off for Inverness for a weekend. Another youth hostel, this time run by a handsome blond former Air Force pilot who’d been paralyzed in an accident and discharged and had then gradually regained the use of his legs. He had the most dashing leather jacket and as he climbed onto his motorcycle and took off he seemed to fly again. Down by Loch Ness they rode rented bicycles and watched windsurfers on the Loch. The wind was full of leaves and it lifted the manes of the horses they passed. They saw four rainbows that day.
But perhaps, given how things turned out, it is fitting that all he remembers of London is the novel he bought and the store where he bought it. An omen of a kind of days spent wandering bookshops. Maybe he could leave it at that. That there was no sign of the eventual way he’d come to love London was a lesson there too if he wanted it. Given what he was looking for.