Still Standing: The Savage Years (33 page)

‘They may appear icy, the Finns,’ I informed Adrella and Ebony, ‘but sexually they’re very liberated and extremely friendly, or so I believe.’

‘Really,’ Adrella said flatly. ‘You just keep believing that then.’

The first sight that greeted us as we piled off the train at Tampere station with mountains of luggage were posters stating ‘AIDS TRAVELS ON TOURISTS!’

‘Charming,’ I said to Adrella. ‘Talk about a warm welcome.’

There were further cheery welcomes awaiting us. The manager of the Black Emmanuel club we were working in was a surly bastard who insisted on searching our luggage for booze. Alcohol was illegal backstage in Finland, as were drugs, dogs, breathing and laughing.

The walls of the filthy cellar dressing room we found ourselves in were plastered with abusive graffiti: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’ some wag from a rock band called Stiff Lightning had written over the door, while acts who’d
worked there previously had devoted an entire wall to describing the demerits of the club. It was hardly an encouraging sign, that and the hostile attitude from the staff in the kitchen adjoining our slum, and I wasn’t relishing spending a fortnight here.

‘Never mind,’ Ebony said, forever the optimist, ‘they might like us.’

They didn’t. They hated us and sat glaring and silent throughout our half-hour spot. Ebony was black and when we walked through the city centre on our way to work with him people literally stopped in their tracks, blatantly staring open-mouthed, as if the African Queen was parading down the high street on the back of an elephant with a retinue of dancing girls in attendance.

‘What are you bloody looking at?’ I’d ask, somewhat childishly. ‘You wanna photo?’

Ebony rose above it majestically, sailing up the high street to the club in Chanel sunglasses and trailing scarves.

We’d been told that Finland was a country of heavy drinkers. This was evident from the number of dead drunks sprawled across the pavement every Saturday night, far more than in the pedestrian zone of Copenhagen, which was like a Temperance Society meeting compared to this lot. Surprisingly, considering they drank alcohol like water, there were hardly any off-licences, and the few that there were only opened at certain times during the week.

I was delegated to go and buy some booze and when I finally managed to find an off-licence, located in a quiet street some distance from the flat, I had to join the end of a very long queue.

‘A bottle of vodka, a bottle of gin and three bottles of
whisky, please,’ I asked the formidable matron in the chemist’s white overall behind the counter.

‘Three whisky?’ she questioned, looking at me pityingly as if I were a raging alcoholic lying face down on the floor of the shop in my own vomit. ‘Three?’

‘That’s right, three.’ I battled on bravely, refusing to be intimidated by this dragon.

‘Are you sure three’s enough?’ she sneered.

‘Actually no,’ I replied, seizing my chance to wipe the smug look off her gob. ‘Make it four.’

It was a pyrrhic victory, for as well as having to carry six bottles of booze home in a paper bag I’d had to spend an outrageous amount for them.

We had the booze, now to root out the local gay scene. What did gay people do in this one-horse town apart from either move or drink themselves to death? To find out, Peter asked one of the kitchen staff who seemed less unfriendly than the rest if he knew where the gay bar was.

From the response he received, he might as well have asked the whereabouts of the nearest paedophile ring. In the end I rang Murphy, who, consulting his copy of
Spartacus
, the frequently out-of-date guide for gay travellers, came up with a telephone number for the local gay group. Adrella rang them up and we were told that the group met every other Tuesday over a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town. We dutifully arranged to meet on the appointed day and shuffled over to this restaurant. Instead of the hotbed of sin I was hoping for, I found myself nursing a warm whisky and Coke, the price of which would’ve been enough to pay the weekly grocery bill for a family of four, listening to a rather earnest but deadly boring young man droning on about gay rights above the Oriental soundtrack being played through
the muzak system. The rest of the group comprised an angry young girl and a clinically obese man who propositioned Adrella in the toilet, receiving a flea in his ear for his trouble.

One night I got chatting to a bloke in a hotel bar that had a reputation for being popular with Tampere’s seemingly nonexistent gay community. He asked me if we’d care to come back and visit his family’s summer house. It really was beautiful, situated on the side of a lake and painted in a soft duck-egg blue and white. We had a few drinks, fighting off his amorous advances since he was under the misapprehension that in the three of us he had a smorgasbord he could sample as the mood took him. Eventually he tired of chasing us around and suggested instead that we all take a sauna.

I didn’t fancy this one iota, but Adrella and Ebony were instantly full of enthusiasm so I reluctantly agreed to join them in the sweat box. Once I’d become accustomed to the dry heat it was really very pleasant, especially as I got to beat our host with a bunch of birch twigs – hard.

The normal procedure after taking a sauna was to jump in the freezing cold lake, we were told, and after a large tot of whisky I took the plunge and leapt in. After the initial shock of the water temperature wore off, bobbing around in the still, cool waters of the lake just as the dawn was rising was a remarkable experience and the only one, apart from dropping condoms filled with water from the roof of the apartment on gangs of noisy drunks below, I can say I really enjoyed during my entire stay in Tampere.

I once met the late Eric Sykes on the branch line from York to Green Hammerton. He was off to play golf and I was on my way to the Hammerton Hotel for another three-night stint.
My wig, in its usual mode of transport – a black bin-liner – sat next to me on the seat where I could keep an eye on it, until the train came to a sudden halt and sent it flying from the bin-bag and rolling down the aisle.

‘What the …’ Eric Sykes exclaimed at the sight of the Savage locks wedged under a seat. ‘Is that a human head?’

We got talking and I was able to explain what I was doing with a huge white wig in a bin-bag.

‘You know something?’ he said. ‘Comedy really is a funny thing. It’s not a job, it’s a vocation. You never stop, do you, looking for material to make a gag out of.’

I knew exactly what he meant. From that very first time I’d got a laugh from a gag I’d made up I was obsessed, constantly searching for the minutiae of life that would inspire me to come up with something funny.

I’d recently acquired two Persian kittens from a friend of ours, another act on the circuit named Billy St James, known to her chums as Madame Betty. Betty bred Persian cats and, unable to resist, I bought two beautiful kittens whom I called Lucy and Dolly. Lucy grew into a big blowsy moggy who I swore was the reincarnation of a prominent Nazi general as she had the habit of swaggering into a room and raising her right paw and growling something that sounded very like ‘Heil Hitler!’ I got a lot of material out of those cats, as I did from Vera, who had temporarily moved in with me, having left the Black Cap in a hurry.

‘I’ll only be here for the weekend, Lily,’ he said. Famous last words – he ended up staying six years.

As 81 Vicky Mansions was only a one-bedroom flat he had to sleep on the sofa cushions on the floor. Not that he minded as he was usually half pissed by the time his head hit the deck, as was I, as was everyone, it seemed.

When the hurricane of October ’87 hit and great metal council bins took off down the South Lambeth Road and bounced off parked cars, and the hoarding next to the library was ripped apart by the sheer force of the wind and sent flying towards Victoria Mansions, breaking windows on its way, Vera slept soundly. Throughout the noise and the alarms and the gale-force wind blowing through the old sash windows that sent the Habitat blinds flying upwards and sticking to the ceiling, still he slept. He lay on his back on the sofa cushions with his mouth open, snoring at a volume that could compete with the raging storm outside. His face was jet black from a large soot fall in the fireplace next to him, like one of the Black and White Minstrels.

CHAPTER 10

I’VE GOT LOTS
of diaries, all of them empty apart from a few jottings here and there and the occasional rant against Murphy after we’d had another argument and I needed somewhere to vent my spleen. One entry states that if Edward Albee had really written
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
with two gay men in mind then Murphy and I would be ideal casting. All of my diaries start off the new year in the same way, with me getting up extremely late in the afternoon as a result of the previous night’s celebrations.

Each and every year I open the pages of a brand new diary with good intentions, determined that this year I’m going to keep a comprehensive record of every day’s events. I rarely get past January. The entry for 8 January 1988 states that after getting up late in the day following an evening in the Vauxhall that went on until 6 a.m. I had to go to work at Silks, a club in a shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush. Silks belonged to Tricky Dicky, a promoter and DJ who ran a lot of onenighters and gave me a lot of work.

I normally didn’t mind Silks that much and on this night I was working with Hush as the Playgirls, which meant I didn’t have to yak for half on hour on the mike, a blessing when I felt that I didn’t have anything new to say. The diary records
that on this night we ‘had a fight with a couple of lairy queens’. Hush ended up punching one and I hit the other one, and the entire incident was captured on film by a BBC crew who were recording a documentary about life in Shepherd’s Bush. Thankfully, to the best of my knowledge it has never seen the light of day.

There seems to be a lot of rough-housing in public houses throughout the pages of this book but I’m afraid that’s how it was, and when the going got rough the rough got going. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve been involved in a punch-up in the Vauxhall or the times I’ve leapt from the stage to deal with those who I considered had stepped over the line, always safe in the knowledge that if it got out of hand Vera and Pat would be across that bar with the speed of a couple of Olympic pole-vaulters while Murphy, usually to be found at the other end of the room chatting someone up, would somehow be across the pub in seconds.

Paul, a friend of mine in Manchester who worked on a gay paper, introduced me to Bernard Jay, Divine’s manager and friend. I’d been a devotee of the films of John Waters and of Divine since Doris Dale had first shown me the video and I got to meet Divine in the dressing room of the Hippodrome after the show. As was to be expected, he was nothing like his foul-mouthed alter ego who sat in a playpen at the end of his act and bit the heads off fish. Glenn Milstead, the man behind Divine, was a charming, friendly, smartly dressed gentleman whom I liked very much. He had a passion for marijuana, a substance he was experiencing trouble getting hold of in London. Chrissie soon remedied this problem by going back to the Mansions, returning with a bag of grass courtesy of our budgie-loving friendly neighbourhood dealer.

Bernard came to see me and Adrella work at the Black Cap and rang the next day to offer me a few dates in Fort Lauderdale. Murphy, who had been booking the acts into the Vauxhall for some time now, had also taken over the unenviable position as my manager as I hated having to deal with agents and pub landlords over the phone. Hopeless when it came to naming a fee, I often undercharged, but with Murphy now at the helm that burden was taken off my shoulders, leaving me free to deal with the job in hand.

Vera was now working behind the bar of the Vauxhall, thanks to me putting a word in for him with Pat. What with me appearing three times a week, Murphy booking the acts and Vera behind the bar, it was quite a family affair. ‘I’ll only stick it out for a month or so till I sort meself out,’ Vera said, another case of famous last words as he ended up being a regular fixture. He stayed for over seven years as one of the team that
Time Out
magazine a little unfairly if not downright cruelly described as ‘the ugliest bar staff in London’.

Bernard Jay told Murphy that he wanted to take just me on my own to work in the States, a suggestion that I was totally opposed to as I wanted to go with either Adrella or Sandra and Doris. Despite my protestations, a deal was struck and so on a chilly March morning Paul, Murphy and I set off for sunny Florida. We stayed at the Marlin Inn Hotel, an old ’50s beach hotel extremely popular with the gay crowd for its daily tea dances on the poop deck during the six weeks of spring break.

‘Why don’t you go down and join them?’ Murphy asked as we watched the crowd of screaming, dancing, scantily clad tanned bodies below from the balcony.

‘Cos I’d sooner join the Ku Klux Klan, that’s why,’ I answered. ‘You know I hate anything like that.’ I’d have felt
like a grubby English sparrow among those birds of paradise cavorting around the pool and nothing would induce me to strip off among all that tanned American flesh to reveal my own blue-grey pallor. They all looked so healthy, sexy and glamorous and I was keeping well away.