I couldn’t believe it when spring term ended. I had to leave my room at uni, and I had no money. I hung around with Neil in London and Annie in Manchester, but they were broke, too. We knew I’d have to leave. Neil and Annie were going back to university in the fall, and my student visa had run out. I wanted to finish school at Exeter but wasn’t allowed to work and didn’t have the funding to continue there, even if Annie hid me in her room.
I couldn’t quite picture myself without a place to live and working sporadically in pubs for a pittance under the table while my mates, who got government grants to go to school, went on with their lives. If only I had found the women inside my head, I thought. I was sure I could have stayed with them, and my life would have made sense. But now I had no plan and felt like I would be left behind by my friends. Not on purpose, but they were busy. Already I could tell how different our lives would become as they returned to their families and got ready to continue their studies and get jobs.
My goals were vague and centered around meeting the women in my head. It seemed safest if I returned to the States and finished school. I could feel the symptoms of my OCD coming back as I suddenly had no place to be and nothing to do. I didn’t think I would survive as a hanger-on in my friends’ lives without a life of my own. I felt myself growing weaker as a cloud of depression hung over me and my insomnia reappeared. I hated myself for choosing the safer way out, but I could tell my reprieve from mental illness was ending.
For a while, I continued to bounce between Annie and Neil. The three of us met in London in June. Annie and I went to the first-ever Lesbian Strength march. It was 1981. The march was women only, and the men stood along the route and hung out of windows cheering us on. I remember the line of women resplendent with multicolored punk hair. Blue, orange, pink, green, red, purple—we must have looked like exotic birds to anyone flying over. Afterward we went to a women-only disco in Chelsea and a punk club in Brixton with a front window full of broken TV sets.
When the club closed at two in the morning, Annie asked a policeman for directions to the motorway. When he bent down to talk to her, I got out of the car we’d borrowed from her parents, took the conical blue-and-silver constable hat off his head, put it on, stepped out into the street and directed traffic until he snatched it back. Sinking back into my seat in the car, I turned to Annie and said with satisfaction, “I was a big tit.”
“That look suited you, mate,” Annie said. Then we stared at each other while I wondered how I was ever going to survive in my native, alien land without her physical presence.
Before I left the country, Annie and I went on one last mission. To commemorate the impending royal wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, one night we actually drove out to Althorp, the Spencer family’s ancestral estate, and spray-painted “The Gays Were Here” on some pillars to protest the unfair age of consent laws for gay men. Then we ran through a dark, Northamptonshire field of tall, rain-soaked grass to dispose of the spray cans. Years later, I cried my heart out when Princess Diana was murdered.
We drove through Northampton and noticed billboards advertising a new salad dressing with the slogan “Are You Daring Enough To Try It?” We had an extra can of spray-paint in the back of the car and decided to “gay” the town. We went to every billboard we could find and wrote “Go Gay” in big, red letters under the picture of a large bottle of salad dressing pouring onto a salad. Most of the billboards sat in areas that were easy to reach and fairly deserted in the middle of the night, except for one. It was bathed in bright, scrutinizing lights in the city center. We had to climb over a railing and scramble through some bushes to reach it. It was pointless to wait for the constant traffic to die down, so we just graffitied it in front of everybody.
Annie and I arranged to meet Neil in London the night before she took me to the airport. I ate a last doner kebab. Annie said, “I can see you if you ever have a baby. It’d be sat there in its pram with you shoving greasy, repulsive pieces of kebab meat down its throat.” I started crying. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, mate. I still love ya.”
“It isn’t that, you silly git.”
Under the arches on Villiers Street, Charing Cross, we went to Heaven, the huge gay nightclub with beautiful neon inside and different kinds of music on each floor. Annie and I had heard that sometimes Joan Armatrading, a musician we were quite keen on, hung out there. We hit a few more pubs then walked aimlessly around London all night. At dawn, I said a tearful goodbye to Neil. I couldn’t believe I was leaving him. As Annie and I pulled out in her mum and dad’s car, the sky was streaked with orange, and the small milk lorries were making their deliveries. “Goodbye, milk floats.” I waved sadly out my window.
We got to Heathrow, and I grabbed my gear from the back seat. I picked up Annie’s bag, which was suspiciously heavy. “Give it me,” Annie said. “It’s just some things you might need.” She unzipped my book bag and crammed in a bottle of Ribena, jelly babies, Marmite, a Mars chocolate bar because I’d said the English ones were different, a can of Newcastle Brown Ale, two packages of Chocolate Digestives, and a box of Typhoo tea bags.
“I’m really made up,” I said. Annie hugged me and kissed my cheek. I smelled the rain in her hair one more time. As I made my way to International Departures, I already knew that getting on the plane would be the worst mistake I’d ever make in my life.