Now I had to remember that this was a complicated young guy. He didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t sniff. He didn’t eat. He didn’t gamble. He didn’t swear. He didn’t screw. He didn’t even do handjobs. He did handstands. He did push-ups. He did meditation and mind control. Born again, a true believer, he did charity work: he cared about the poor and the disadvantaged … Yes, all my man-management skills would be needed here. I looked into his clenched face and said, ‘Spunk? It’s about your name.’
‘Yeah? What about it?’
‘You’re probably going to hate me for this.’
‘I hate you already.’
‘The thing is, Spunk,’ I said, ‘in England —’
‘I know what you’re going to say. I know what you’re going to say.’
I waited.
‘You want me to put an e in Davis. Well forget it, Self. Go get a whole new idea. I ain’t doing it. No chance.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘the Davis bit is fine. Spunk, you can keep Davis exactly as it is. Davis is fine. It’s the other bit we have the problem with.’
‘The other bit?’
‘Is the problem, yeah.’
‘You mean Spunk?’
‘That’s the bit I mean.’
He looked surprised, wrong-footed. I ordered another scotch and lit another cigarette.
‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘in England, it means something else.’
‘Sure. It means grit, pluck, courage.’
True. But it also means something else.’
‘Sure. It means fight. Guts. Balls.’
‘True. But it also means something else.’
‘What?’
I told him. He was devastated.
‘I’m sorry, Spunk, but that’s the way it is.’
His young face dipped and trembled, with toothache creasing in the corners of the eyes. Why hadn’t anybody told him this before? They probably never dared, I thought, and shrugged, and drank my drink.
‘I mean,’ I went on, ‘if you were working with an English actor called, I don’t know, Jizz Jenkins or something, you’d have to —’
To hell with England. What do I care about England?’
‘It’s a problem, you admit… You could just change it a little. How about Spank?’
‘Spank? Give me a break. What kind of a name is Spank?’
‘There are quite a few American names like that. Skip. Flip. Rip. Trip. Hank. Hunk. Hunk Davis,’ I said experimentally. ‘Or Bunk, or Dunk, or Funk, or … Junk, or Lunk, or —’
‘You say one more word and I’ll rip my ears off.’
‘Or Punk,’ I said. ‘Or Unk.’ I considered. When you come to think about it, it doesn’t seem to be a very popular noise, that unk sound.
Suddenly Spunk slid to his feet. Holding my tie as if for balance, he let me have his actor’s stare, right between the eyes. This went on for a long time. I think he was trying out his thought-control on me, though I couldn’t be sure. Then with the chunky knuckles of his right hand he sent his full tumbler of water surfing Western-style up the skiddy steel bar. The glass wobbled to a halt, inches from the edge of the cliff.
‘Spunk —?’ I said.
But Spunk just walked away.
Coolly I ordered another drink, and swivelled on my stool. If Spunk had been hoping to rattle me by picking this place for a venue, then Spunk was out of luck. I’m used to all that by now. What with the diesels, bull faggots, strippers, cross-dressers and money-lovers I have to work around, I can’t get worked up about abnormality any more. The world wavers. Who’s straight? Are you? Is Martina Twain ?… I looked this way and that—the faces, the shoulders, the hands. Me, I have no faggot history whatever. I have no faggot past. But who knows these days? Maybe I have a big faggot future. As a faggot, I might be a roaring success.
Hey, you guys, you gays who made the break. I mean you out there, not you in here. So you decided to go it alone. You decided to butch it out. What’s it like, without them? Just think: no weather. No lunar wind or rain, no biology. A temperate zone. Full of blokes. Humanity having been halved like that, is it reassuring, the sameness of it all? Isn’t it strange? Yeah and tell me something I’ve always wanted to know. Are there times when you both can’t raise it? Do you get those me-neither nights? Well, it’s been your century, you guys, I’ll give you that. I heard recently that Australia has come whooping out of the closet. Australia! All those pumpkin-faced hicks and tripledecker beach hugies — they’re all bumboys now. What’s happening, God damn it? Some people blame the women. I blame the men. The first sign of bother, after a carefree fifty million years, and we throw up our hands and go gay? Now is this any way to behave? I mean, how faggy can you get? Come on, you guys, don’t run out on me like this. Where’s the old cave spirit? Don’t surrender. Don’t desert. What’s the problem. They’re only women, after all.