Cocksure (7 page)

Fade in:

EXT. DAY. VATICAN CITY. ST. PETER’S SQUARE
.

As the POPE is carried out among the faithful we see thousands upon thousands of them falling on their knees.

EXT. DAY. A FIELD

Working-class wheat bending obsequiously in the middle-class wind.

RESUME ST. PETER’S SQUARE. LONG SHOT
.

In the far, far distance, a black-suited figure stands erect, the only one in thousands not on his knees.

ZOOM IN ON STANDING FIGURE
.

A greasy, bearded Jew with a hooked nose looms over the faithful, chewing a sour pickle, the juice trickling down his chin.

Now faces were flashed on the screen.
OSCAR WILDE. ISADORA DUNCAN. JOHN PROFUMO. HIMMLER. DYLAN. SAMMY DAVIS WEARING A SKULL CAP AND EATING GEFÜLLTE FISH. STEPHEN WARD. TROTSKY. MARILYN MONROE. RASPUTIN. DUKE OF WINDSOR. JUDAS. CATHERINE THE GREAT. LEE OSWALD. GIRODIAS. CASTRO. SENATOR JOSEPH MCCARTHY. BERTRAND RUSSELL. JAMES DEAN
.

Then, inexplicably, the film cut to:

CU WALL-CAN OPENER

Hand opening an unlabeled can. As the can, ostensibly empty, is inverted over a bowl,
LAUGHTER
pours out. Mad, zany laughter fills the screen.
SUPERIMPOSE
laughter over a barefoot
NEGRO BOY
walking down a country road. Pursued by laughter he begins to run, run and run. But as the
NEGRO BOY
runs forward, the reactionary American landscape moves backward, leaving him in the same place.

As the swingers around Mortimer burst into applause, the screen went blank.

Silence. Nothing.

Finally Ziggy Spicehandler himself appeared on screen and wrote on a blackboard:

Presenting

A LIFE IN THE DAY OF JOHN JOHN JOHN

EXT. DAY.HAMPSTEAD GARDEN SUBURB. LONG TERRACE OF HOUSES
.

Pan down a row of similar doors as they open and similar-looking husbands emerge, kiss similar-looking pretty wives goodbye and walk away whistling similar tunes to their similar cars …
HOLD
last door, last house.

EXT. DAY. HAMPSTEAD GARDEN SUBURB. LAST HOUSE. LAST GARDEN
.

A DOG
frolics on the grass.

ZOOM
in on
DOG’S EYE

Reflected in
PUPIL
is last door, last house, as

JOHN JOHN JOHN
kisses his pretty wife.

The film then stayed with John John John as he went about his humdrum tasks in an office building that was clearly impersonal. Finally, his work done, John John John phoned to say he would be working late, and then off he drove.

SLOW DISSOLVE TO:

CU LOUIS XV CHANDELIER

MUSIC:
Adam Faith sings “I Could Have Danced All Night.”

TRACKING
down to reveal

we are at a Drag Ball.
PANNING
over liberated, merrymaking couples, finally

TRACKING IN
on

CU JOHN JOHN JOHN

Dancing cheek to cheek with another
MAN

FREEZE FRAME

COMMENTATOR
(Voice Over)

Yes. John John John is different. He is a square peg in a round hole, an outsider, and in this square society … that’s asking for trouble.

ENORMOUS CU JOHN JOHN JOHN

Rocking his head in his hands. Terror-struck. Sweaty.

The film then flash-cut to and fro from John John John to abusive, twisted faces shouting, “Fag!”

“Pouf!”

“Homo!”

“Queer!”

“Brown-noser!”

“Ladybird!”

“Sodomist!”

Mortimer sat cringing guiltily in his seat because the abusive, twisted faces were all nice clean-cut faces. Protestant faces. Handsome faces. Faces like his own.

ZOOMING IN ON JOHN JOHN JOHN’S EYEBALLS

Bloodshot. Trapped. As abusive voices quicken, become gibberish.

COMMENTATIOR
(Voice Over)

In a time of ticky-tacky conformists, there is a price to pay for being different.

EXT. DAY. DACHAU

The crematoria chimneys seen through a fog.

APPLAUDING HANDS

H-BOMB EXPLOSION

MORE APPLAUDING HANDS

NAPALM BOMBS FALLING ON VIET CONG

STILL MORE APPLAUDING HANDS

TWO MEN FRENCH-KISSING

CU POLICE WHISTLE

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. DAY. BLACKBOARD

A moving hand
(ZIGGY SPICEHANDLER
’s) writes:

“MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR.”

After Make Love, Not War had been flashed at the audience in fourteen different languages,
Different
continued with still more episodes from homosexual life, alarming statistics, and examples of heterosexual atrocities. Then, suddenly, the scene shifted to Canada, Mortimer’s native land, at the end of a National League hockey game at the Forum. A famous
ALL-STAR DEFENSEMAN
, one who was never without his helmet, was named first star of the game and skated round the rink to resounding cheers.

INT. FORUM. GANGWAY

As the
PLAYERS
make their way to the dressing room, rabid fans are still shouting the
DEFENSEMAN’S
name.
FATHERS
hold up their
SONS
to see him,
GIRLS
blow kisses.

INT. TEAM DRESSING ROOM

The
ALL-STAR DEFENSEMAN
slumps exhausted on the bench before his locker, drinking beer out of a can. As other players enter they slap him on the back or give him the thumbs-up sign.

ANOTHER ANGLE

ALL-STAR DEFENSEMAN
kicks his locker open, revealing
Playboy
magazine pin-ups and a mirror on inside of door.

TRACK IN ON MOTTLED MIRROR

Broken, not of a piece, as is the case in the lives of some human beings.

MIRROR (POV ALL-STAR DEFENSEMAN)

His boisterous teammates light cigars, indulge in horseplay, spit, guzzle beer, pick their toes, scratch their groins … as they undress, removing pad after protective pad, strap after strap … gradually dispersing to showers.

ANOTHER ANGLE

ALL-STAR DEFENSEMAN
now sits alone in dimly lit dressing room. Slowly, wearily, he rises and begins to get out of his pads and straps. As he sits down again, we are bound to notice that
one set of straps remains
.

ZOOM IN ON ALL-STAR DEFENSEMAN

They would appear to be brassiere straps!

ANOTHER ANGLE

As
ALL-STAR DEFENSEMAN
stands up and removes his helmet, we see a lovely sweep of golden hair, now inadequately concealed. This is the head of a
YOUNG WOMAN
in her prime.

PANNING
down.

Her
BODY
, that of a fabulously vital animal, is one of those which clothes cover without hiding. The
ALL-STAR DEFENSEMAN
sighs … sighs again … her lovely body seemingly flooded with sudden longing …

Still smiling, blinking his eyes

Over the pure white ice steps the driven figure of the Still smiling, blinking his eyes her sensuality seemingly bound in a conformist’s gray flannel suit and Presbyterian fedora. But is it?

Still smiling, blinking his eyes Soft strains of “Swan Lake.”

And here (suddenly, miraculously), where only an hour ago the Still smiling, blinking his eyes handed out murderous bodychecks, giving as good as she got … Still smiling, blinking his eyes now glides with balletic grace over the pure disinterested white ice, when:

FLASH-CUT TO LOUDSPEAKERS OVERHEAD

(in thick Protestant accents)

“DIFFERENT! DIFFERENT! DIFFERENT!”

RESUME LONG OVERHEAD SHOT

As
ALL-STAR DEFENSEWOMAN
flees.

Mortimer had hardly recovered from this shock when much of what he had seen earlier was now rerun at frantic speed, but intercut with a shot of a nice, well-adjusted man frolicking about his house and garden. So, from the beautiful but agonized young man mainlining heroin into his arm, the scene now shifted directly to the well-adjusted fellow mowing his lawn, singing. From the chimneys of Dachau the film cut to the same man pulling funny faces, crossing his eyes, as he washed his car. Next the camera zoomed in on two men french-kissing and zoomed out again on the well-adjusted man peeling a banana.

That well-adjusted man, that villain, was Mortimer.

Finally Mortimer was held in a frozen frame, winking, licking an ice cream. This frame was superimposed over an H-Bomb explosion, and scrawled in blood over Mortimer’s face was one word:

WASP

As the audience rose to give
Different a
standing ovation, as all around Mortimer there were cries of “Bravo,” he seized Joyce by the arm and fled the cinema, just making it outside before the lights came up. “That ungrateful son of a bitch,” he said.

Joyce had to laugh. “Why, Mortimer, you amaze me. I thought Ziggy could do no wrong in your eyes.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Joyce, he sensed, was pleased, enormously pleased. Mortimer took a deep breath and explained that had he been used so badly by anyone else but Ziggy, he would sue.

“But,” Joyce said, delighted to finish what he had left unsaid, “as you have explained so many times before, this sort of dirty trick coming from Ziggy cannot be interpreted as an outrage. It –”

“Oh, shettup, will you?”

“It is but another of Ziggy’s sardonic, but meaningful, jokes. Or is that not the case when the joke is so obviously directed at you?”

“I said I don’t wish to discuss it.”

“He’s made a fool out of you.”

“He has not. He most certainly has not. He has merely used my face for his own artistic purposes.”

Ziggy had not even attended his own world premiere; he had had his name removed from the credits. In a statement distributed by students in the cinema foyer he explained that his film had been emasculated by the producers for commercial reasons. Some of his most finely wrought scenes had been excised from the finished print.

“All the same,” a reporter asked, telephoning Ziggy the next morning, “don’t you feel you’re better off here than in Russia?”

“Not bloody likely,” Ziggy said.

At least, the reporter went on to say, he was not being put on trial for his artistic beliefs. Unlike Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, he had not been sentenced to hard labor.

Mortimer’s indignation was not mollified, but Joyce was more than somewhat pleased by Ziggy’s astute retort to this typical bit of red-baiting.

“While I do not approve the recent sentences imposed on Sinyavsky and Daniel, it is a measure of just how seriously art and artists are taken in the Soviet Union.”

Then Ziggy returned to the censorship question in the so-called freedom-loving West, where artists were considered jokers. He summed up the problem succinctly by saying so long as you couldn’t pull your cock on
TV
his artistic freedom was impaired.

11

M
ORTIMER LAY NUDE IN BED EXCEPT FOR A SCENTED
black silken blindfold. Hands and heated tongue caressed him, rousing him, then a loving mouth came down on him, sucking, sucking. Gorgeous, he thought. Exquisite. Don’t stop … Until a bass voice said, “You’re yummy, baby. Real soul food,” and he leaped up from the sheets, revealed to the world as a queer.

Different
.

“No, no,” he shouted, wakening.

Migod. Ziggy
Spicehandler’s film had left Mortimer with plenty of food for thought and with Joyce asleep beside him, he lit one cigarette off another. Am I a homosexual? he wondered. If, as Ziggy’s film claimed, invoking the loftiest authorities, the type is
not
recognizable (limp wrists, fruity voice), then I can no longer be assured that I’m not one simply because I don’t appear to be one. On the contrary. I may be one of the most noxious kind – the repressed homo. Even, he thought, my ostensible enjoyment of conjugal rights may be nothing more than overcompensation; a clever front.

What concerned Mortimer most deeply was that unlike Ziggy Spicehandler he had never had a homosexual trauma. Ziggy, possibly, was a bad example, if only because he would have had a homosexual experience, he had had all the advantages, famous public school,
etc., etc. But Ziggy … Ziggy had tasted and rejected homosexual experience. Not Mortimer, however. Why, he thought, I find the very thought of a physical relationship with another man vomit-making. A dead giveaway, that.

Queers were an abomination to Mortimer. Waiting for Joyce in a pub unnerved him, especially West End pubs, which were thick with them. Naturally he always took a newspaper or magazine with him (if it was the
New Statesman
, he never had it open at the book pages) and made a point of glancing meaningfully at his watch again and again, so that no unattached man in the pub could possibly get the wrong idea and embarrass himself. Even so, single men had occasionally smiled at Mortimer or even tried to start up a conversation. Once, in the Yorkminster, a man standing beside him had said, the ploy pathetic, “Got a light, mate?”