Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Three - Unknown Territory

Going to see The Grateful Dead in the October was definitely not 'a long strange trip' though it held a fair number of small surprises for me. I had grown up into unemployment in the midlands, a region that discouraged social mobility and belief in other places. I had been taught that London was another country. But a train journey is a train journey. Nottingham to London St Pancras was a surprisingly short journey time, otherwise it was predictable. I had checked in advance for where to go on the underground when I got off the train. I need not have worried. The deadheads were everywhere on the underground when I got there. They were distinctly casually dressed and untidily coiffed in a vast variety of styles. They stood out from the commuters who were the usual customers.

My journey became a matter of following them through the underground. The nearer we got, stop by stop, to going above ground the more we formed the majority of passengers in the carriages. Until the minority of other passengers shrank to nearly nobody else. The last stop was Wembley Park Station, where buzz of expectation could not be denied. The smell of the cannabis that was being smoked wafted the expectation further. The Grateful Dead were known for returning to venues for repeat visits when they toured America. They had last played Wembley in April 1972. Then it was called The Empire Pool, Wembley and every deadhead knew how good that was from the performances from performances captured on the live album 'Europe '72'.

I was one of over 12,000 fans of the band present that night. From the distance of my seat, middle distance, high up to the right of the band playing at one end of the venue I was a long way off from from the band. If my ticket cost me nearly £20 then it still seemed a good price to view what were effectively well lit matchstick figures from the distance. The sound  in the venue was what mattered more, partly because it had to cut clear through the cheers and requests for different songs that the audience did not realise that it was useless for them to ask for. They simply got off on shouting the name of the song they wanted the band to play. The sound was good, it was rich in detail, particularly the keyboard playing of Bruce Hornsby. Jerry Garcia had in one interview described the seventies sound of the band had as 'a ball of blue light travelling through the air', and actually in the sound I heard the band play, the music did seem to be sculpted like a search light, and there was a blue light above us that depicted what the sound sounded like. The blue energy description made real. As for the fans, they were there partly to shout. and still the sound cut through their shouting. I shouted 'Terrapin Station' until I was hoarse. They did not play it. If you have ever seen the footage of Beatlemania, where the audience are too busy screaming to hear themselves or the band, then that night was my experience of the same thing, but with a much better sound system than The Beatles ever had. 

Would I have appreciated the music more if I had listened more attentively, if I had shouted less? Probably. But that night I embraced being part of that audience and that is what we did, for most of three hours. In the midst of a major cathartic event on the scale that was, the last thing attendees do is evaluate the catharsis when it is in full flow. I bought some merchandise, the European tour programme which obliquely excoriated the now deceased Brent Mydland for his absence on the tour whilst celebrating his contributions to the band and two T shirts. One of them from the official stall, the other was unofficial and from a seller somewhere down one of the many corridors connecting stations of the tube, to St Pancras after I left. I was still very much caught up in the buzz from the gig on the train home, It would not be the last time I would hear their music live and catch that buzz again. I was not into buying merchandise and could have bought more T shirts, of different designs. They were cheap enough and would have lasted years. But I was surprised how quickly the excitement of the gig wore off, as we left the venue on different underground routes. I was happy with what I had, and had taken part in. 

There was a pay off after the event. In the queue to get in I talked to the people next to me and we exchanged addresses so that I could send them the tapes of the recordings I had of the Eric Clapton concerts that the BBC had broadcast earlier that year, and they would send me a tape of the concert I was about to attend. I was faithful and sent off my tape, and they were reliable and sent me the promised recording of the night I saw the band. Maybe it was listening to the tape in my room that, well, the sense of an epiphany shrank. But as an epiphany it had been much more reliable than that summer's funny highs from earlier in the year, watching Joan Crawford displaying all the variants of suffering that she could muster up from herself, and the scripts given to her to perform in the season of films shown on BBC television.

If a similar set of variations in my feelings had come about from an encounter that had happened in church then I doubt I would have understood it more-in church the language that accompanied change was not meant to be made rational sense of. But it would been part of feelings I could trust. I made the appointment with my doctor to ask him about this sense I had of a gap opening up between me and the people I had previously assumed I had been sociable with. He listened, and asked me a few questions. He commended me for getting the best I could out of the first lot of therapy that had ended in January of that year. Then he put me on a list for for a consultation for another round of therapy, but group therapy this time. 

The phrase 'Baker days' was common in England between 1986-90, particularly among teachers. 'Training days' was their official title. They were mini-conferences for the teachers in individual schools, and were part of the new managerial culture embarked on by the UK government. Kenneth Baker was the Tory education secretary 1986-89. He changed how schools ran, to the point where he felt he needed to explain the changes at a macro level with mini-conferences in the places where his changes were to be implemented. The conferences were usually one or two days long. There was even an enduringly funny Radio 4 sketch about them, listen it it here. Many of the members of the Lady Bay church were teachers. So it was natural that autumn for them to suggest that as a congregation we have a mini-conference, a church weekend. An event where as many of us who were willing to try stayed in each other's company in a large house for one night and most of two days and do different creative exercises to get know each other better.

I attended the November church weekend and enjoyed the event when I was not half hiding from and half exposing my personal sense of discomfort. The labour market might have cured me of wanting to be a trained nurse. I had learned enough to know what felt safe and what was unsafe with regard to employment. To be continuously useful to an employer required having a better family than I had.  But my inner 'do-gooder' had been in no way subdued by my awareness of knowing to leave employers on mutual approved terms before I disappointed then enough to ask me to leave. When in a visualisation workshop I was asked to visualise my ideal job/world. The first words that came into my mouth were that 'I wanted to be a social worker.', with me ever slightly linking such an ambition with the profession of my landlady.

There was an equal sense of  being out of my depth in a workshop where we were asked to make masks. I already had my mask, well developed over years of pretence. I was pretending to be a heterosexual in plain sight, whilst nobody thought that I was was anything other than they incuriously thought me to be. But the worst part was the 'cabaret' at the end of the weekend where many put on some nice, genuinely entertaining acts, but my main thought was that I wanted to be 'the straight man' who was a feed to the church member who was genuinely and intelligently funny. There was not a chance of that happening. At another level my mind turned at complete right angles to the event going on in front of me. I wanted to be with the other two gay men I knew in church and in front of the Lady Bay congregation the three of us got up in spangled full length evening dresses lip-syncing  to 'Stop in the Name of Love' whilst doing the traffic direction hand signals that The Supremes were famous for performing during the chorus. That what I imagined was an outright fantasy and would have been very much against the spirit of feather-light entertainment was obvious enough to me. But my wanting it was as if I wanted to be an entirely different event. where imagining that different event is something I will never shake off. But in partial justification I will add that such fantasies are more common for young, partially closeted, gay men than the heterosexual world can admit, as this video for 'I Say a Little Prayer' shows.

After a weekend my sinuses were the worst they had ever been, in company and for any length of time at least, you might think that after than much church with such bad sinuses I'd had enough of church for one weekend. But I went to the evening service and tried to join in with the sincere enthusiasm to the service in the central building when all the congregations met and mingled. I was in pain, desperation was why I went. The service ended, as every service did, with an altar call.118I was in need, I heeded the call. I sat on the stage in one of half a dozen chairs. Two men stood, one either side, of me, and asked me what I wanted prayer for. I said 'My sinuses, I want them to be clear.'. Soft Hands were laid on my head. Prayers were said and the sinuses cleared instantly. That felt wonderful. Prompted by who knew what, further prayers were said over me. I was given a phrase to take away, and 'remember God's promise' by. The phrase I was given was 'The Lord will restore the years the locusts have eaten.'. The phrase is from the minor prophet, Joel Chapter 2 Verse 25. I did not know what to make of being given that phrase. My sense of  camp remained quite strong. When I spoke from the stage, though to others it was a platform, I said 'Thank you I feel like I have won a beauty contest.'.128

The evening ended with me meeting one person who would be a part of my life for a long time after, far longer than I dare imagine. Jerry is his name, and he was jubilant at being healed of crippling back pain that night, like my sinuses, instantly. He was the first person in church that I confided to that I was gay. I had chosen better than I could have guessed. He could  have been openly distant from me in that moment. He was positive and accepting. I doubt either of us knew what it was that he was accepting.134

Please left click here for Chapter Twenty Four.